Organica

I've done NaNoWriMo several times before, mostly to add chapters to a very long involved and unending Ranma 1/2 fan fiction story I started years ago. This year I decided to do something different -- I had about 8 stories written about a character named Grandpa Anarchy that I first created in City of Heroes. For NaNoWriMo, my goal was both to write 50,000 words and to start and complete 1 new Grandpa Anarchy story a day. They tend to be very short and usually are just a setup, scene, funny characters and lines and a punchline of some sort -- not an actual plot. Just scenes from the life of an old man who's been fighting crime for many many years, and who seems to have a different sidekick for every mission.

As of today I'm at 45,361 words (still need to finish the story I'm working on today) and have started 27 stories and completed 20 of them. Quality varies but my plan is to eventually edit them and self-publish a book. Even if I only publish one copy for myself it's not that expensive to do these days, just takes work. ^_^

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 87


I spent about 1 1/2 hours on Monday just documenting old characters. I have just a few left to do now -- Freedom on my main account, and then a few scattered characters, mostly on Virtue. I need to document my 1st Zero to Awesome thread next.

In-game I logged in long enough to say hello to people and to run Mouse Police through five tip missions and confirm hero alignment. I thought this would lead to a badge I didn't already have, but it didn't. After that it was past 8 PM, and I wanted to get some writing done as well so I called it a night and logged off. So I didn't get very much done last night... well, technically documenting about 40-50 characters was getting something done. ^_^

I think Big Picture is the best name suggested so far. ^_^

I have Pocket D transporter, so that's guaranteed to work.

Otherwise I could also get someone to team and set a mission and teleport to that. Or ask to join a SG and use my SG teleporter.

I don't think there's any other ways out for these characters. Not that I actually care. If they had missions in zone, I could actually get people in there with me, but they don't.

One of the things I'm going to do on Friday... is log into Fidel From Hell (Champion) and Union Girl (Infinity)...

...for the first time in 3120 days.

What happens if you log out in Galaxy City... for eight years?

It turns out that it gets destroyed, everyone gets teleported to Atlas Park, Ouro gets an Echo of Galaxy City... and then...

You log in eight years later, still in Galaxy City, with nobody around and no train service. ^_^

I never had a character stuck in the Paragon Dance Party or The Rikti Crash Site, and I always sort of wished I had. I *DO* have multiple characters stuck in Outbreak and Breakout still. But I hadn't realized that I had any characters stuck in Galaxy City... or that I could log into Galaxy City without getting booted to AP immediately. But you can!

My first thoughts would be Balance Sheet or In the Black. Or Balanced Ledger. (Balanced Ledger Man?)

Also, it sounds like the kind of character that should be in one of my stories, and I wish I'd thought of it.

Also, I might still steal it.

Possibly a mostly black costume with balance scales on the chest. I'd have to think about it a bit more, but that's my first ideas.

Also, his catch phrase should be "Justice hangs in the balance!" After which he pauses to calculate exact costs pro and con for his actions.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-86.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 86


I had plans yesterday to try and PL One Divine Hammer closer to 50 and to actually get Eternal Sweeper to 50, but those didn't materialize.

Thwe first thing I did was to check on my main account to see who I had left to document. It turns out I have a bunch of servers full of characters that I haven't documented still --Liberty, Champion, Protector, Infinity, Guardian, Justice, and Freedom. I did a couple of the others Sunday morning just to narrow the list to the above. I'm going to have to do at least one server a day every evening to make sure everyone is done.

Then I logged in and started setting up to PL, but Freaky was running a Sarah Moore and couldn't find an 8th, even someone to fill so they could start. So I switched to One Divine Hammer and joined, since it's only 40+. I didn't really take any pictures, but there's not that much to see about a Sara More. I'm surprised I didn't get the AV though.

Later in the day was the final Cathedral of Pain runs by Feaky and Pyro's Total PWNAGE super group and Jane and CA's villain group Stars Haven. Both runs went off perfectly! And it was photo day on Virtue, so we paused for a photo after each CoP, and in between we had a Brickhouse Chat photo session in Rikti War Zone organized by Maressa.



(Blue Side CoP)



(Brickhouse Chat photo. I used Sparks Fly, one of my most-played characters.)





(Redside CoP photo)

Afterwards CA and Jane ran a Numina and I joined, again on One Divine Hammer, who finished the evening at level 43.5. CA was using Jungle Kitteh, who I'd PL'd a bit last week and who earned Task Force Commander. I'd promised to help them out today since they had wanted to run this Saturday. We had a pretty good run, but were interrupted by rikti raids of course.

The last thing I did that evening was run Mouse through five hero tips including the "Unstable Trigger" one in which you face off with Maelstrom. This earned me another badge. Surprising really that I'd never got that one before, but that puts me at 1249.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...-day-8485.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 84/85

I didn't actually play on Friday, at all. I was still at my parent's house and the laptop experience is pretty lackluster.

Saturday I headed home early so that I could participate in the final Saturday Hami raid on Virtue. Got home about 2:40, logged in, people were already in the Hive. By the time 3:00 PM rolled around the Hive was nearly full -- then it was full, and we had a Hive 2 with people waiting for a second raid. That hasn't happened in... well, maybe not in all of 2012, I can't remember.

I joined on Nina Ballerina. We were really melee heavy so I considered switching, but I've done most of my Hami raids with Nina and I wanted to use her. Zombie picked Zombie Fryer for the same reasons. In any case, once the zone filled it would have been difficult to switch without missing out on the first raid completely.

Mr. Trilby missed out on the first raid... he and several others were waiting in Hive 2. Our full-zne raid went so well that we did a 75% push, only clearing once after the initial clear. Or is that a 50% push? We killed hami through the 50% and 25% mito spawns anyway, and did it very easily. Then we gathered in Hive 2, and with fewer people -- about 35 or 40 this time -- we did it all again, and again did the push through two mito spawns. We rocked! ^_^

Afterwards people wanted to take group photos, and Zombie stayed behind drumming. Hami is one of his favorite things and this was probably the last one on Virtue... Exxxcalibur said he'd try to run one on Friday though.





After, I switched to Storm Girl Ten. Two of my remaining goals are to get Storm Girl Ten and Eternal Sweeper to 50... and maybe One Divine Hammer as well. Storm Girl was 49 but needed a respec since I'd misplaced one of my slots. I headed to AP33 and started my respec. Halfway through, I lost connection to the server. I logged back in -- luckily it remembered where I'd been, and finished. Then I clicked "all done" and the game crashed on me. :/

I logged back in and did the whole thing again, this time successfully. I was thinking, 'Do I really need afterburner? it's mostly good for running shard TFs, and I'll never run another of those." But of course, does not taking it make a difference? Nope. So I just stuck with my build. And as soon as I was done, I saw Freaky advertising for a Faathim the Kind TF, so I joined. ^_^



Since Megajoule is a forum poster, I have to mention that we were on the same team again. I took a picture of V E R B to prove it!

It was a good thing I brought my fender too. The entire team was melee -- three tanks, a brute or two, a scrapper -- no stalker though. I was the only non-melee until our last member joined, a corr, but they quit after just a few missions. I spent a lot of time healing with my little O2 boost!



As it happens, Faathim is one of the best TFs to have afterburner, because near the end you do a tour of Storm Palace touching stones to prove you were there. Or something. In any case, I was useful!

Oh, Storm Girl Ten hit 50 too. Pretty early on in fact. I was able to slot the full set of Ragnarok that I was carrying around. ^_^



Right after this I joined a group of friends who wanted to run Halloween tip missions. I had one saved up on Mouse -- I didn't need the badge, but I was happy to help others. Sunlover and Grimrose wanted all of the badges, and Evi too I think. She had the mission on one character, and Ragey Cat had it saved on several. We ran four straight Halloween tips and got all of those badges for a couple of people.

Following this we decided to get some of the arena PvP badges for those who needed it -- and Mouse needed those. This was a lot of work, but it was a very impressive collection of characters we had doing this. There was Whisper X's Diana X, Colbolt Avenger, Jane's Lamera Lang, Ragey Cat, Evi, Grimrose, and Skippylabs. I think nearly every character had over 1000 badges already, and some -- most notably Skippy's Screamrr -- had nearly every badge possible. Screamrr had only two badges left to get -- Pentad Victor and Tournament Victor. We got those, and Screamrr had 1390 badges and was officially done forever!



I hadn't been down where the monkey pit fighting is in Pocket D in years. It's actually a very cool looking place, with windows on all sides open to the void, kind of like the carriage portion at the bottom of a zeppelin or something.



For Pentad Victor you need 10 people in a two-team match. We overbalanced things, 7 people on one team, 3 on the other, and let the 3 die. Then we did it again making sure that the three who died were on the large team this time. That gave everyone the badge.

For Tournament Victor, you need a swiss draw match of 8 people that pits 4 matches of one on one, then two matches of one on one, then a final match of one on one. We'd do that with a designated winner, so everyone who fought that person would die, and everyone who wasn't fighting that person would quit. Then after three rounds the designaated winner got the badge, and we'd set it all up again for the next person. This took a very long time, but eventually everyone had their badge.





Colbolt was very ruthless and killed a defenseless Mouse Police! I yelled help, police brutality! and I'm being suppressed! Now we see the violence inherent in the system!"

I got my revenge on some of the people that killed me... but I didn't get to kill CA. :/

The last badge we did was Arena Survivalist, which is a 3 person free-for-all, and the one that survives gets the badge. That was easier to set up. Once I got that badge, I also had Arena All-Star, so that's 4 badges for Mouse Police, which put me at 1248. Only two from my goal!



At the end of the night we ran a quick Eden. I used One Divine Hammer for this. Not a lot of experience in it, but it's a fun trial with some of the coolest maps in the game, and there were a couple of people on the team that still weren't very familiar with it so we had fun.

That wasn't actually the end of the night for some people, they were planning to run something else, but it was late for me so I logged for the night.


I'm extremely grateful for all of the people on Virtue who have stuck with the game these past three months. Exxxcalibur with his hami raids, Mr. Trilby, Zombie Fryer, Colbolt Avenger, Sapphire Jane, Ragey Cat, Melissa, Skippylabs, Dale-Man, Megajoule, Freakyliciousss, Whisper X, more people than I can possibly name. I had a lot of friends who quit either immediately or within the first two weeks after the announcement, but I've had lifetime's worth of fun in these last three months. I have no idea what I plan to do next -- really, I'm going to try and write more and exercise more and not immediately start playing another MMO. I still have a Second Life account, which is the absolute opposite of an MMO really, and I've barely logged in more than six times in the last two years but I still have friends there, so I may hang out there a bit. But I don't regret anything, and I'm very glad I've continued to play for the last three months that this game has existed.

Also of note: I finished "Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom" last night. In the end it doesn't really have anything to do with Sister Flame or the Sibling Rivalry arc, but it has a disco troll named Four Door and a disco dance competition!

Love from all my level 50 scrappers:

Mouse Police (Virtue)
Mouse Police (Victory)
Nina Ballerina
Tiffany Blackheart
Jalia
Shinobu
Trinkets
Sparks Fly
Valkyrie of Atlantis
Sister Kate
Maiden Knight
Swift Sky

and of course, Organica

Maybe One Divine Hammer by next Friday who knows. But that's 13 at level 50... that's a good number I suppose. ^_^

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-83.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 83


I didn't get to play much on Turkey Day. I wrote in the morning, then drove 2 1/2 hours to my parent's house. Here I'm stuck on my laptop and my Dad's crappy modem so gameplay isn't so great, and I'm busy doing other things as well (I did more writing in the evening, finished two short Grandpa Anarchy stories yesterday).

But I did get time to log in in the evening. I played Eternal Sweeper solo, and I ran through Sister Flame's "Sibling Rivalry" AE arc. I wanted to run through that one more time. It's fun. The story itself is not especially compelling, it involves a couple of side missions that don't directly relate to the main story, but actually the villains in the two side missions are what I love about the arc. You get to fight Fudor the disco-loving troll, and his band of disco trolls, with names like "Smooth Operator", "Raging Fro" and "Boogie Buster". Clicking on them to read the descriptions is half the fun.

I want to write a Grandpa Anarchy story that does homage to them, so today's story is titled "Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom". I'm not really going to use any of the plot or anything else from her AE arc though, or even CoH-style trolls, but they're going to be trolls that love disco, and their leader is going to be named Four Door, and they're going to invade a dance club called Under the Bridge, and there's going to be a disco dance-off competition, because I remember that Sister Flame wanted a dance competition to decide the outcome of the fight with the trolls, if only the game had allowed for that sort of thing.

One thing that was kind of depressing was that some of my friends were forming an Ice Mistral SF when I logged on (which I wanted to get on Mouse Police, too late now since she's a hero) and they even tried to spawn Caleb while they were waiting for everyone to join for the strike force (and Caleb was the other thing I had wanted to do on Mouse Police). I didn't hear if they actually spawned and defeated Caleb though, and I wouldn't have been able to join them on my laptop and be at all able to contribute anyway. It was just bugging me because those were t he two things I really wanted to do that I'd failed to do, and a day after turning hero, there's friends of mine doing both of them.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-82.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 82


So last night I wasted more than two hours trying to get Caleb to spawn.

I did this solo, and it turned out that I wasn't able to do that, even when I switched from Mouse Police to AE Baby. I figured at the very least that a fire/kin corr with massive damage and massive recharge and incarnate powers could pull it off solo, and I would swear that I killed many more than the hundred needed during the day to get him to spawn, but I gt no message that he ever spawned. I suppose I should have formed a league to do it, but my friends were all busy running TFs and I thought that if I could spawn him first and find him, I could get people to join quick enough to kill him. Which probably wouldn't have worked either.

Anyway all of this kind of depressed me. I pretty much ran out of time to get the few redside badges that I didn't already have. I went and exercised, then came back and ran Mouse through five hero tip missions and the morality mission, and turned hero. This netted me three badges immediately, pushing my total to 1244. I still haven't killed Maelstrom either, so another round of hero tips with the "Destroy the Bomb Triggers" mission is in order. I think there's a badge for confirming hero status that I never got too. And then a badge for remaining hero for a week.

Other than that, I need to run the Twinshot arcs and maybe a couple of the newer hero arcs, and then all of First Ward/Night Ward/Dark Astoria. There are still a bunch of incarnate trial badges I don't have too.

And I want to run Sister Flame's Disco Troll AE arc again, one last time. ^_^ I need to get Storm Girl Ten and Eternal Sweeper to 50... 3 levels between them. I don't think I'll get anyone else to 50 in the next week.

I might be on late tonight, not sure. Travelling to my parents in an hour or so.

I didn't complete any stories in the last two days but I spent Thursday morning finishing up a story called "Dig My Grave" which is partially inspired by Doctor Vahzilok.

I like Dectective Nance's arc if you haven't done that. I consider that "newer" content, and it's soloable.

I also like the SSA's. SSA 1.7 has some incredible maps, and SSA 2 is fun, it really makes you feel like you're one of the world's more important heroes.

Task Forces... well the revamped Yin is ok but I don't consider it a "must see", it's not got any unique maps or anything really. But Positron 1 & especially 2 are a lot of fun. Most of the task forces are old, so... for epic I guess Lady Grey works for me, or Statesman of course, or ITF (which I just naturally assume everyone has tried once -- if you haven't, you should).

Redside, Mortimer Kal is a lot of fun.

http://postalvalhalla.blogspot.com/2...se-day-91.html

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 81


I played too much last night. I stayed up too late, I skipped exercising, I didn't do very much writing for NaNoWriMo. I think I'm coming down with a cold, so I really felt the effects of all of that in the morning.

But what I did do was earn two badges on Mouse Police -- two of the last I need to get redside. These were badges 1240 and 1241. Time is running out for me to return to hero status and earn the badge for remaining a hero for seven days. Also, there are a few heroside arcs and things I've yet to run (I think). So last night was redside arc night for Mouse.

I started off with five newspaper missions, and then the mayhem. I did the arson right away and then tried to reset the mission a couple of times -- and while it was possible to reset the mission, it would reset everything *except* the arson. Sigh. Anyway, I completed the robbery and got Efficiency Expert Pither as a contact. Although Badge Hunter is down and this makes it difficult for me to know which badges I'm missing, I remembered that I still didn't have one of the mission badges. This, it turns out, is because you have to run all of Pither's missions to get the badge, and you can't run them through Ouro. But they're 45-50 missions so it just meant getting the contact.

The missions are short but there's quite a few -- 6 missions and also a 3 mission arc that isn't needed for the badge, but you have to do things in whatever order he gives them to you. When I was done I had my Efficiency Expert badge, and wanted to work on the arson badge. After that firsts mayhem I was still only 3 out of 10 arsons for the badge.

Let me just say, these badges are especially nasty. Not because doing the arson is hard, but because you need to do it ten times, and it only counts for one person on a team. If a team of six friends all wanted the badge, that's 60 mayhems they'd have to run. That's a really stupid, mean, vindictive way to set up a badge.

The good news, of course, is that your hypothetical team of six need only run five newspaper missions to have six mayhems lined up. And it finally occurred to me that if I really wanted the badge, then I needed to log in my 2nd account and double the number of mayhems I could run every five newspapers. So, Sqiddy Kitty to the rescue! I just had to make sure Squiddy was in every mission beore I did anything -- and I was only running "kill boss" and "steal object" missions, since I could stealth to the end of those. But it was still an awful lot of work.

I got my Firebug badge around 10 PM, by which point I was tired and should have gone to bed. But I also want to be ready to turn hero, and I don't want to count on getting the chance to do that on Thanksgiving, or trying to do it Friday when my window of time needed to earn the week-long badge is very narrow. So I travelled to Peregrine Island -- where I'd robbed the bank 8 times already the same night -- and I ran five hero tip missions.

And THEN I parked Mouse back at the hospital in First Ward, where if I'm lucky I'll be at about 90% or 95% of the day job badge when the servers shut down.

I still need Caleb... and Ice Mistral... and the heroes in RV. If I'm lucky, I can spawn Caleb Wednesday, and just forget about the other badges and turn hero. Oh, and I don't have MoLRSF, but I never count on getting Mo badges, so that doesn't bother me. But I wish I'd run Ice Mistral at some point.

I also documented all the characters on my last "extra" account... which took less time than you might think, since it's currently not a VIP account so a lot of them are locked. I just took pictures from the login screen -- no bio.

90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 80


Last night I documented all charactes on 6 of my 7 "extra" accounts (I have 9 total -- yeah, I know, why?). This isn't as hard as it might sound... none of those accounts have characters anywhere other than Virtue, and several of them are freebie accounts with only 2 character slots. And one of the ones that *does* have 14 or so characters on it has a bunch of identical filler characters that I used to fill out a couple of my solo super groups... I have an entire SG populated by Sonic Girl One, Sonic Girl Two, Sonic Girl Three, Sonic Girl Four, etc. I did not document these characters (who are all locked at the moment in any case).

That said, I still have three accounts (aside from my two main accounts) with 14-16 characters each to document. I left one of them for Tuesday, and then I need to double-check my main account to see that I've done all of the characters on all of the servers there. So far I've documented about 300 different characters, so it's a lot of work.

I logged in late. Someone in the Robokitty channel that I didn't really know well had just returned to the game after basically not playing for a year and a half (he'd been back a few times to run some AE farms, but hadn't really played much). He was upset that his IOs weren't working, but he had nearly 2500 points saved so an IO license was easy to purchase. Of course, he can't do any incarnate trials, and he was very upset to know he'd just come back and only had two weeks to play -- but that's what we're all dealing with.

He decided he wanted to run a speed ITF "for old time's sake" so I joined on Megami Hime. We finished in about 30 minutes, so not a bad run but not a super-speed run, especially since we ran at +2 for the first mission and +1 the rest of the way. I prefer a steamroll ITF, but it's fun to zerg it as long as everyone knows that's the plan ahead of time.

That was pretty much all I did last night. Jane wanted to hunt heroes in Recluse's Victory -- like me with Mouse Police, she wants to turn hero again in the next few days -- but nobody else was interested. Instead we joined a MoDD that Whisper was running, but we were among the first to join and it was 30 or 40 minutes later when they were still trying to fill the last two slots that I decided I needed to log off and get some exercise in and writing done before I went to bed.

On the NaNoWriMo front, I completed two Grandpa Anarchy stories on Sunday and two on Monday. ^_^

The dogs should spit bees.

I haven't played the set... pretty much only reason to play it is if you really want to have animal pets. But I bought it and I finally PL'd my little beast MM to 16 yesterday... gonna try to get to 22 and then play a few times just to get a feel for it and justify buying it. Mostly, though, I was never a fan of MMs anyway, and with a level 50 bots/dark I feel like I've got a good feel for what one of the better MMs can accomplish. Probably should have played one with gang war though, that's one thing I've never had the chance to play with in the game, but it's hard to do everything and I really tried. ^_^

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90 Days to the Apocalypse -- Day 79


I had a lot of plans for what I was going to do this weekend. I was going to get three characters to 50. I was going to work on badging for Mouse. I was going to do several other things. What I managed on Saturday was to finish up what I wanted to do with hero-side SSA story arcs, and to work on leveling a bit.

Sunday I started out by working on the leveling thing again. I spent the whole morning powerleveling. I got Storm Girl Ten to level 49, then took Eternal Sweeper to 48. At that point I switched tactics and leveled my never-before-played beast master mind Dog Aggro up to 16 (one run of the Council map). I would have really liked to get Eternal Sweeper to 49 and Dog Aggro to 22, and maybe even get another character up in levels, but there's only so much farming I can stand.

Afterwards I took the time to document every character on my 2nd account that I hadn't already documented. So now I can be assured that my @shinobu valentine account is finished, I have pictures with bios of every character on the account, save for a few seriously throwaway characters only created to hold onto a name here or there. Next step is to do the same for my primary account, and then make sure all of my extra accounts are documented -- which is much easier, all of the extra accounts only have characters on Virtue.

I found this character with a full bio that I'd forgotten all about:



I'd also forgotten about the weird solo super group that he's in: Meat on the Moon - Ranch on Mars. It still makes me laugh. Meat on the Moon was a weird song by acapella group The Bobs, while Ranch on Mars was a goofy metal song by the Galactic Cowboys.

After this I joined a Numina Task Force that Kali was forming. I brought Sonic Girl Seven in the hopes that I could get those last seven bubbles of experience and hit 50. Alas, there's not really a lot of experience to be had on a Numi, so I wound up with only four bubbles.



We formed a Katie Hannon right after that though. Zombie showed up for this one. I hit 50 on about Mary #8 I think. We had a great team, no problems at all.



I spent some time writing after that. I had other things I meant to do, but I didn't get most of them done. Instead I was back by 4:30 PM my time, just in time to join the blue CoP. I was on Storm Girl Ten for this, but things went badly -- we didn't have enough damage and/or enough -regen and/or weren't fast enough taking down the cubes, and the AV would regen in between nearly to full health every time. I had an Envenomed Dagger and I was using it, but it's hard to substitute for serious -regen. We tried to pull back but kept aggroing wave after wave of rularuu. And then several people had to leave for work or just outright quit, and it looked like we were going to fail.

We put out a plea for more people to come help, and three of us switched to /rads... I switched to Jennie Nova, my beam/rad corruptor. .We were down to about 15 minutes to go before we were ready to head back in and try once more -- but this time the AV went down very quickly, in just two rounds. Never underestimate the power of radiation debuffing!

Redside CoP followed, and as is somewhat typical, we had a hard time forming, took a long time to coax enough people to join so that we could make the attempt... and then we destroyed it in just a few minutes. Redside just seems to attract more powerful characters, especially we had a lot of corruptors on the team. (I used AE Baby as usual of course -- very powerful fire/kin corruptor.)

Most of my friends logged after that so I called it an early evening. No badging on Mouse, and no getting a second or third character to 50 today.

I regret nothing. Well... small things. Not getting some badges on Mouse sooner. Not getting a crab or bane or PB to 50, I was working on that, just not one of my major goals when crunch time came.

I would have regretted a lot more if I'd stopped playing on September 1st as so many people did, but I've managed to accomplish a lot of goals in the last 2 1/2 months. Got a staff fighter to 50, got a nature/water blast defender to 50, did a lot of badging, managed to do most of the things I hadn't previously done, which were few and far between anyway.

So... no regrets, save that I wish I had another year or two to play, and that the devs were still producing cool stuff for the game.