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About this blog

Greetings everyone! This page contains my various Bethesda blogs. At the time of this update, it contains my troubleshooting playthrough series, my Skyrim modding diary, my mod cleanup case study series, and my Shout Like a Virgin beta test blog. You can access all the entries from the sidebar on the right side of your screen.

 

Playthroughs

I've recently exceeded the 1000 mod threshold, and it's time to start periodically doing brief playthroughs to ferret out hidden conflicts and other bugs. In this series, we'll do shorter, more focused adventures where we try to tell an interesting story and also talk about what problems we ran into them and how we addressed them.

 

  • Charley's Story: Charlotte Ellison survived a nuclear war by spending more than two hundred years in stasis. Now she has to survive in a very new world, facing very new threats. A Fallout 4 playthrough.
  • The Spider's Web: Kirstia's search for answers has taken her to the island of Solstheim. Now she must uncover the secret of The Teacher - also known as Mephala - and continue the journey to master her powerful magical heritage. But can she survive as her enemies, new and old, close in? 
  • The Curious Case of Forrien Hlaalu: A year after she returned to Northpoint, Kirstia is back in Skyrim and looking for answers. The strange events that occured during her search for Sybil Fjotra continue to trouble her, as does the ongoing influence of the strange gods of the Forsworn. After a chance encounter over drinks, a wizard from the College of Winterhold sets her on the trail of a scholar who may have the answers she needs...
  • The Search for the Sybil: Exiled from Skyrim to the remote land of Northpoint, Kirstia Bjissen has fallen on hard times. Just as she hits rock bottom, a voice speaks to her and charges her with a sacred quest that will take her back to her native land - and likely into danger. Can Kirstia find the new Sybil of Dibella before her past catches up with her?
  • Shout Like a Virgin: Miraculously saved from death, Monilee of High Rock finds herself in Skyrim, a land riven by civil war and harboring dark secrets. While she tries to build a new life in this foreign land, she's haunted by half-remembered dreams, and in chasing them she discovers her role in the turning of the ages. However, Monilee has not gone unnoticed by powers outside the mortal realm. Used as a pawn in the struggle between Nocturnal and Dibella, it will take all her wits, endurance, bravery, and stubbornness to reclaim sovereignty over her body and her soul.

 

Modding Diary

This series tracks my modding projects in-between playthroughs and case studies. The main focus will be on the technical processes of cleaning, editing, and integrating mods into a large load order configuration, including managing emergent multi-mod interactions. 

 

Modding Case Studies

This blog reviews the tools and techniques that authors and end users can apply to make their mods as stable and compatible as possible, as well as how end users can integrate complicated mods into a large load order setup. In addition to coverage of well known techniques such as automatic mod cleaning, this blog delves into more complicated issues such as navmesh repair. 

 

Entries in this blog

Charley's Story III

Troubling Thoughts (Charley's Story, Chapter 58)

"I figured it was just performance anxiety," I told Piper as we walked down the hill away from Ridge, "so I leaned in and helped him. And the thing that upsets me so much is that the person who I was before the war would never have done something like that. I mean, I wouldn't have cajoled him into a sex act he was uncomfortable with either, but especially putting my hands on him when he was so reluctant and uncomfortable."   "Did he tell you to stop?" She asked me.   I shook
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Charley's Story III

Performance Anxiety (Charley's Story, Chapter 57)

After spending the night at Abernathy Farm, Piper and I got ready to make the trip up to Ridge. One final detail Winter showed me, before leaving for her own journey down to Concord, was one of the improvements she'd made to the plumbing on the water tanks. There were enough farmhands at that point that Blake and Connie's bathtub really wasn't enough for everyone, and so she'd installed showerheads on the water tanks when she refitted all the plumbing lines. The shower was cold, but if nothing e
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Charley's Story III

Royal Progress (Charley's Story, Chapter 56)

"Nice day," Piper commented as we stepped outside the following morning. "Where are we going first?"   I chuckled at that, "same plan as yesterday. We'll start with Abernathy Farm, then on to Ridge. We'll visit the quarry on the way back if we have enough daylight. First though, let's check in on Nick and Doctor Cain."   We found the two of them taking a coffee break outside Jake's workshop. I nodded in approval, noting that Cain had obediently left her work smock back inside
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Charley's Story III

Mysterious Stranger (Charley's Story, Chapter 55)

"Found another one!" Piper called out from a side room as I considered the woman in the power suit.    "Can you hear me?" I asked her.   The suited woman nodded, but remained silent.   "OK, I'm going to take you down now. Try and keep still while I untie you."   Once more, she nodded, and I set about getting her off the cross.     She took a moment to recover before standing shakily and shuffling over to a nearby workbench. Looking at
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Charley's Story III

Radio Dispatch (Charley's Story, Chapter 54)

"Urghhh," I groaned as Winter pushed the last thick bulb of the rectal connector past my anus. While I caught my breath, she stepped past me, tossing the vaginal plug onto the bed beside me.   "Give me a second," she said, "I need to get a fresh bottle of lube."   "Fuck that hurt," I said, "did you make that this bigger?"     Winter wiggled her ass at me as she walked away. "Same 65 millimeters as before. Sounds like you haven't had enough things in your
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Charley's Story III

Hostage Exchange (Charley's Story, Chapter 53)

"Alright," I said, "let's go. Jake, you take Piper to the security post and draw vests and helmets. As much as I like your outfit, you need some more protection. Paul, find Preston and tell him we need backup."   "What about you?" he asked.   "I need to get into my power suit. I have it stored in my office downtown. We'll all meet up in front of the plutonium well once we've got our gear."   Jake cocked his head a little, "don't you need help to get into the power s
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Charley's Story III

Cultural Differences (Charley's Story, Chapter 52)

The next morning, we spent a little time at the Drumlin Diner before heading on to Concord. I introduced Piper to the regulars; first Wolfgang and then Trudy. Wolfgang obligingly retold the story of how I defused the fight between him and Trudy, and then liberally embellished it, giving me credit for turning his life around and turning him into a legitimate health care worker. Now, Wolfgang was about as legitimate - at best - as the drug pusher at Chem-i-Care, and I don't think he fooled Piper o
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Charley's Story III

Going Home (Charley's Story, Chapter 51)

Piper and I didn't stick around at Vault 81 for breakfast. Instead, as soon as we dragged ourselves out of bed, we headed for the surface and started making our way back towards Boston. In a vacuum, I would have liked to head back to Concord and brief Preston on the situation with Vault 81, but Nick was waiting for me and hopefully, in my absence, he'd acquired the search warrant we needed to break into Kellogg's house.   Since the route we'd taken from Diamond City to Vault 81 had pro
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Charley's Story II

Vault 81 (Charley's Story, Chapter 50)

After a nice long nap, I started getting ready for the trip to Vault 81. The vault was buried under what was once the campus of Boston College. Of course, the college had been gone for years before the war, but a lot of the excavation work for the vault happened when they tore down the last remnant of the school - the old Alumni Stadium. The original plan had been to turn the whole campus into a state park, but Vault-Tec dollars quickly drowned out the opinions of local conservationists. Apparen
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Charley's Story II

Private Eye (Charley's Story, Chapter 49)

"Nick Valentine, I presume?"   The synth grinned lopsidedly at me. "The one and only. But you didn't answer my question. What brought you all the way here - and I assume through Skinny Malone's goons - to find me?"     "Your assistant Ellie, mainly. She's worried about you."   "Christ, kid, I wouldn't be much of a private eye if I couldn't tell when someone was dodging my question. What's the real reason you came looking for me?"   "Stop teasing
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Charley's Story II

Park Street (Charley's Story, Chapter 48)

We set off for Park Street Station early the next morning. The rain seemed to have moved on, but Diamond City was wreathed in fog; I considered waiting until the sun burned it off, but after a quick discussion with Piper we decided not to wait. We figured it was better to deal with the poor visibility now than risk getting caught out after dark during our return trip. I waved to Danny Sullivan as we passed out of the park proper and into the service area facing Jersey Street.   "You tw
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Charley's Story II

Rainy Afternoon (Charley's Story, Chapter 47)

It was still raining hard outside, and we quickly scrapped the idea of making our plans at Takahashi's lunch counter. Instead, we made our way back to Piper's house where we could get under a more or less solid roof. Nat was out front, hawking papers under the awning, and she waved to us in greeting when we came close.    "Damn, Piper, you look good," she commented. "How come you get a new coat and I don't?"      I think Piper might still have been feeling a lack o
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One Mod A Day - January

One Mod A Day: Using Bodyslide to Install a Clothing Mod

Welcome back, everyone! Yesterday we covered the basic tools for installing a mod, and talked about the layout of the Mod Organizer 2 program. Today, let's dive into a little more detail into the process of making sure a mod fits cleanly into our game.    ...   Haha, "yesterday." So just as I was starting to write this entry, the Nexus went down and stayed down for about an hour. Probably just routine maintenance, but when it was done my free time for writing had also evapora
One Mod A Day - January

One Mod A Day: Introduction

Hi folks, hope you all had a good holiday season and New Year. During my time off I've been thinking about my hobby plans for 2023 and how I want to incorporate blogging into it. In the days ahead I'd like to continue with my Fallout 4 story and also do some new Skyrim writing, but in the short run I'll be doing hobby blogging. After talking with a few of my readers, I've realized that the Mod Diary series started out as a somewhat advanced series and only got more esoteric as time went on. The
Miscellaneous

You're probably noticed my absence...

Hi folks, if you're a regular reader of my blog, you've probably noticed that I haven't been active for the last couple weeks. Part of that is just the normal holiday season workload, but I've also had some challenging family developments recently that have diverted a lot of my hobby time onto filial responsibilities. I'm not going to say that I won't be posting anything - writing is a good outlet for stress relief after all - but I wouldn't expect any regular tempo of content until after the ne
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Miscellaneous

Interlude - A Patch On The Nexus

Hi folks, today was originally going to have a short blog post for the 1900 Mods Shakedown project (I had pretty limited time because of work commitments) but I got side tracked answering a question on one of my old blog posts which ended up sending me down a rabbit hole of the good kind. The end result was me publishing a "new" mod on the Nexus. I use quotes on 'new' because this is a cleaned up version of some of the work I did for the mod diary back in June.   Still, if you like tre
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Modding Case Study: 1900 Mods

1900 Mods Build Part 7: The Good Kind of Wrench

Hi folks, hope you had a relaxing last week! Between being stressed about the upcoming U.S. elections and then getting some unpleasant side effects from my COVID booster, I took the week off from modding and blogging. Now I'm back and I discover...   THIS   Fun fact, Patrician ENB was actually what this build was supposed to use when I started it ages ago, but at that time it wasn't available for SSE and couldn't be readily ported. This is a huge monkey wrench that is going t
Modding Case Study: 1900 Mods

1900 Mods Built Part 6: Sanitizing Scripts

Today's going to be another quick one. I started out by removing SV Mods Menu, which on further analysis didn't appear to be working correctly and which was contributing to papyrus load disproportionate to its benefits. Next, I reviewed the log from yesterday's playthrough and noticed an immediate issue:     There's a lot of this, and almost all of it is coming from Immersive Decay. It looks like when the author ported the scripts from the original mod, they retired some fun
Modding Case Study: 1900 Mods

1900 Mods Build Part 5: Small Improvements

This one and maybe the next couple after are going to be shorter entries, as I've got a bunch of things on my schedule for the rest of this week, but I wanted to make sure I put at least a little time into this project.    Yesterday we trimmed out some mods that were using up a lot of resources in exchange for relatively light contributions to the build. Later, I did some experiments with multithreading and made some significant progress in reducing FPS instability during combat. 
Modding Case Study: 1900 Mods

1900 Mods Build Part 4: Bye Bye Birds

So I slept on the conclusions from yesterday and I think I'm going to go ahead with all three of the major targets I saw in the stack dump. For now what we are going to do is:   Fix the two specific NPC related issues we observed Remove SkyBirds Remove Immersive Decompose Remove Torch Remover Update Meat Farm   At first I was tempted to just pull out Sky Birds and see how that impacted things, but on recollection I realized that both of the ot
Modding Case Study: 1900 Mods

1900 Mods Build Part 3: Streamlining and a Diagnostic Hike

Hi folks, hope you all had a nice weekend! Mine ended up a little "special" because after two years of keeping it on life support, the dishwasher that came with my house finally "died the death"  and left us in a situation where we either had to fork out multiple hundreds of $$$ to fix a many years old appliance or knuckle down and buy a new one.     After some research, I ended up picking up a new "adult toy" and finally got it installed right before bed yesterday. Now I ge
Modding Case Study: 1900 Mods

1900 Mods Build Part 2: Diagnosing Crashes With Limited Data

So yesterday our shakedown run of 1900 mod Skyrim ran into a snag when we started to encounter mysterious crashes in the vicinity of Riften. Initially we weren't getting crash logs at all, but after very carefully approaching the site we were able to get some crash logs suggesting an animation or AI-related crash that seemed to be linked with combat events. At the end of yesterday's session, I regenerated the LOD as well as the animation register, and this morning I tried loading into the area i
Modding Case Study: 1900 Mods

1900 Mods Build Part 1: Starting the Shakedown

Hi folks! I just wrapped up an 85 hour Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough and now I'm refreshed and ready to get back to modding. After a bit of work on my Skyrim backlog, I looked up and saw...     That's right, I've finally broken 1900 mods in my load order! I don't know if I'm exactly in the mood for a totally new playthrough, but I'm definitely overdue for a shakedown run. I want to make sure everything is running the way I intended, and if that fails I want to localize the issu
Long-Form Gundam Lore

Sci-Fi Lore Special Edition: The Monkey In The Middle, or: Gundam Wing happens in UC 0094?? (Part 1 of 2)

So in our last long-form lore post, we talked about the implications of Ɐ Gundam for the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, and in particular how it moves the "alternate universe" shows back into the main chronology. We explored the clues contained in the various series about their positioning and built a tentative chronological viewing list. For the most part, the alternate universe shows appear to necessarily exist in discrete periods of time. Two programs, however, coexist to a degree with the mai
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Long-Form Gundam Lore

Sci-Fi Lore Special Edition: The Historical Revelations of Ɐ

Hi folks, it's been a while since I've done a long form lore post, and with the impending release of The Witch From Mercury this weekend, I thought the convoluted world of the Gundam franchise might be a good place to start. While not as widely viewed in the west as Star Trek or Star Wars, I suspect that most sci-fi fans are at least aware of the existence of Gundam, and many people in my generation were exposed to some degree to its 1990s entries (especially the very successful Gundam Wing) dur
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