Hi folks, hope everyone is having a good summer so far! It's been a while since I've posted to my blog, so I wanted to take a moment to check in with you all about what I've been up to.

• I finished my initial Skyrim build at 618 mods and 479 plugins. It runs great! There are a few lingering large reference-related visual glitches which I'll be cleaning up as time permits, but otherwise I've had something like 2 CTDs in 20 levels of play. Fantastic! I'm generally getting above 60 FPS in all areas except for one or two spots that will dip into the 50s under certain circumstances (mostly during misty weather where the GPU load is higher).
• I'm loving the Patrician ENB and clearly chose the right time to install it, since it's now out of print  hopefully it'll return in the future. 
• I'm actually about to pull the plug on this current build and install a bunch of Legacy of the Dragonborn stuff to it in order to bulk out the world. Assuming no issues with this update, this'll probably be the configuration I stick with for quite a while, notwithstanding minor tweaks here and there. 
• While I'm not currently planning to blog my Skyrim game at the moment, that may change in the future, especially if Proteus' character swapping feature proves effective for letting me roll an "alt" without starting a whole new game. 
• I haven't forgotten about Fallout 4 or about Charlie. She'll be returning towards the end of Summer/early Autumn with more adventures.

I also wanted to share a couple of "lessons learned" from this build:

• The Curator's Companion is really essential. Sunhelm lowers your character's base carrying capacity, which forces you to be more selective about what loot you take with you. This, in turn, means that having a visual indicator of what items you've already collected will save a lot of wasted time and opportunity.
• My "less is more" approach to gear seems to be working well. Even though most alternate versions of armor, weapons, etc. are no longer in the game, I haven't really noticed a big issue with this. Consequently, I'm going to be generally sticking with the approach I described in my earlier blogs, where I was very picky about what I added to the game, only adding stuff with LOTD support (where appropriate) and with full bodyslide support for armor. 
• My kitchen sink approach to bodyslide XML files, on the other hand, had only so-so results. Especially with HIMBO, I had issues with "exploding clothing" which I believe are from invalid slider settings. I'll be paring back the presets considerably in this build to narrow it down to a smaller selection of ones that I know I like. 

Let me leave you for a moment with a look at my soon-to-be restarted character, Denskar. I'll probably keep using his face in the next build as I'm pretty happy with it. 

There might be a long gap before my next blog, but if I come across something that I feel an urge to share, I'll be in touch soon! Otherwise, see you in a few months when we continue with Charley's story