Chelfie Rambles

classics series:

Carrie Fisher reciting the “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi” speech through the years

It’s called Draconia and it’s an open-world survival sandbox RPG game where you play as a dragon.

If you’re like me you probably love video games and such that feature dragons BUT get frustrated that often the focus is on slaying dragons, or on human political intrigue, or some other non-dragon nonsense.  Have no fear.  Draconia is going to give us everything we crave.

It looks SUPER pretty 

Choose one of several dragons, hunt to feed yourself, find water sources to drink from and develop your character through various tasks and events.

Draconia features: 

Character Customization: Give your character a custom name, change its pattern, colors and body parts, such as horns or tail tips or choose from pre-made textures.

Character Leveling: Complete tasks, quests and events to level your character and make it stronger. Spend talent points to increase your dragon’s traits.​

Optional PvP: Play on servers without being afraid of being attacked by other players. Simply disable PvP in your character profile and enable it if you want to have a battle with someone else. 

Group and Clan System: Go on your journey and bring your friends with you by inviting them to your group or creating your own clan, which allows you to announce events and keep track of your members progress. 

Create useful items:  Build a hoard to hide all your treasures in, create objects which improve your dragons stats or add temporary buffs.

Nesting: Build and defend a nest and raise your own dragon hatchling.

Questing: Find and complete several one-time and repeatable quests.

​Interactive Environment:  Interact with several objects in your environment to gain useful buffs or uncover more parts of the story.

Dragon Dens: Earn yourself a place you can call home. Unlock and upgrade your own den to live a more comfortable dragon life.

It will have a single-player offline mode and an online mode where you can interact with others, either with or without PVP.

Your character is customizeable and if they meet their stretch goals, new players could even start out as hatchlings.  If you pledge enough money on their crowdfunding campaign, you can get custom decorations, items, even another species!

You will be able to play as many different species, 6 species of dragon and various smaller wildlife.  Another stretch goal is to build a humanoid species that has mechanics for farming and dragon breeding and riding.

Draconia is currently trying to fund its project through Indiegogo. (Link)   They are not offering exclusive content as a play-to-win system and nothing will be behind a paywall.

This game looks extremely beautiful, well thought out, and fun to play.  The creators clearly care a lot about this and have put their heart and souls into it.  I want to see this happen.  It will be released on Steam.  If this seems like something you would like to play or exist, please consider contributing to their Indiegogo or Patreon, or reblogging this to get the word out!  Thanks :)

Link to Indiegogo (the main campaign)

Link to their Patreon

Link to their website

Link to their Discord Server

Link to their Reddit page

It’s perfectly well known that people can only really “work” (in that they can only consistently and effectively perform tasks and create products) 3-6 hours a day, for 1 hour to 2 hours at a time. Generally speaking, the broad consensus among actual researchers is to aim for about 4 hours a day.

The rest of these work hours, and the associated sunken time necessary to get to and from these work hours, serves one purpose:

It exhausts people.

People who don’t have leisure time are stressed. People who are stressed need conveniences. People who need conveniences will pay for them.

People who are stressed also don’t have the energy to fight for their rights, having expended all that energy in just staying alive.

1. The WTF reaction by the ref

2. The dude who escapes looks like an Irish boxer from the 1800′s

3. Who’s also gay sassy (I mean those trunks and that hand flick)

Okay, these photographs pissed me off a bit, because they don’t show off how much of a genius Dr. Harold Gillies, the father of modern plastic surgery, was.  Rhinoplasty, skin grafts, and facial reconstructions have been practised for centuries.  However, it was this New Zealander surgeon who standardized these techniques and established the discipline of “plastic surgery.”

The introduction of more destructive weapons of WWI and WWII resulted in devastating injuries. In addition, in trench warfare, the head was more exposed than the rest of the body, and soldiers’ faces were often shattered or burnt beyond recognition. Despite the best efforts of surgeons, many soldiers were left hideously disfigured. Traditionally, the edges of facial wounds were simply stitched together, but when scar tissue contracted faces were left twisted and disfigured, so a new type of surgery was needed.

Gillies rebuilt faces using tissue from elsewhere in the body. Antibiotics had not yet been invented, meaning it was very hard to graft tissue from one part of the body to another because infection often developed, so Gillies invented the tubed pedicle,” where he used a flap of skin from the chest or forehead and “swung” it into place over the face. The flap remained attached but was stitched into a tube. This kept the original blood supply intact and dramatically reduced the infection rate.  After many surgical construction, grafting, and healing, which could take months to years, the tentacle-like tubing would be removed, and (volia!) a new face!

He was also the first to do sex reassignment surgery from female to male in 1946, then male to female using a flap technique in 1951, which became the standard for 40 years.

“Kitty practicing the lion dance for the Chinese New Year”

 They look at ther future and see global warming, wwIII, unemployement, political unstability, poison in everything  they eat, the earth and animals dying all around them. 

I saw this video where someone was asking french teens in the 50s how they imagine the future would be. The war hadn’t been over for long and yet it was all positive with like peace and flying cars and such. Then they went and ask the same questions to nowadays teens and hell that was depressing. Some still had hope, but it was just that “well I hope I’ll have a nice house and maybe some kid” but there was such a hesitancy to it, like they didn’t dare to hope too much. 

People mock Greta Thunberg but what they don’t get is that when she said “you stole my dreams”, it was the truth. 

There’s an odd thing happening where the younger generation seems forced to mature by being faced with their own mortality so early on in life.  So on one hand, this can manifest in a form of hopelessness: “Why should I bother when I am helpless to do anything about what’s going on? Why should I try when the world is going to die, and I’m going to die anyway?” Being forced to constantly see what we are losing keeps you focused externally and lose touch with yourself. 

However there is another side to what acknowledging mortality can do: “If I am going to die anyway, then what is it that is truly important to me?”   I mean there’s nothing like coming face to face with death to rearrange your priorities.

 Here I’m just gonna add a disclaimer, I’m not trying to give any sort of advice or answer.  I’m just choosing to share how I’ve decided to look at this for myself and maybe if someone out there can relate and find some comfort in it, then there’s that hope they can find some comfort.

But yeah  So, what IS important to you? This then turns the focus from outwards in the world, to inwards inside yourself. It grounds you from getting lost in the onslaught of tragedies. 

And the thing is, what I thought was important to me has changed over the years (as what happens when you go through life experiences and mature). When I was younger, I wanted to be known for my aspirations, be famous for being a great comic artist or whatnot.  Now, while that is still something I am striving for, I can’t really say is the most important thing to me.  Not in this sense that I’m talking about right now.

Right now, I think the most important thing to me is actually really simple.  Being my most genuine and authentic self, and to be loving and compassionate to myself and all I come across in my life.  That’s it. I want to know, that if I die at any given moment, that I will die without regrets, and that at every moment I have breathed on this earth, I have always tried my best to be the best person I could be.  It’s a simple directive that can allow room for change and growth, whatever it needs to be at that time. But it is also something I think, that starts with you yourself, and expands to those around you, to those whom you touch and affect.  People feel helpless because it seems what we wish for, our voice and say, doesn’t matter in the face of those in power.  And while you hear this in the context of voting and such (and PLEASE do go out to vote), I’m talking more at it’s basic personal level.  It starts with who you are as a person.  Who you are uniquely.  Learning to truly love yourself opens that door to discovering who you are as an individual.  And it’s in this self-discovery, that begins a chain reaction to your outward expression, your outward expression affects others around you. And then those around you add on to it.  What starts off small can grow to become something very powerful.