The Flood

Good morning all you people out in digital land…  I am trying to wake up enough to string cognitive words together.  I did not sleep much last night, and I will go into reasons later… but suffice to say I am exhausted.  In addition I have a royal mess to deal with today, so I likely will be staying home.  Hopefully once I have a schedule for the day I can catch a cat nap.  Here is hoping that my old friend coffee will be enough to keep me going until then.

The Flood

Today is the first day back to school with kids for my wife, and as a result the weekend was fairly stressful with her trying to prepare for everything.  During the summer I pretty much get a break from doing a lot of the household chores, but with the school year starting back up it is once again my job to take care of those things as she stresses out over lesson planning and grading on the weekends.  Previously there was a load of clothing that we had started but not finished… so I started that up again.

Once finished I noticed that a pet bed had come apart in the wash.  So I picked up the pieces and started a second load… this time of darks… since that tends to be the load we absolutely must do each weekend.  I went along about my business and an hour or so later I went in there to check on the progress… expecting to swap it into the dryer.  As I was walking towards the washer I noticed that the whites were wet… but it didn’t dawn on me until I was further down the hall what was happening.  Essentially the laundry room, parts of the closet, the hall, and our bedroom were soaked in water as apparently instead of draining out the water drained all over everything.

The Aftermath

So I hollered up at my wife, but while she surveyed the scene she was still in “I am freaking out because of too much school work” mode… and simply could not take in additional information at the time.  One of the positive side effects of owning a pool, is that we have a ridiculous number of beach towels for when people come swimming.  So I got into the closet, pulled out all of the beach towels and started sopping up the water.  This got up the bulk of the water, and I gathered those up in a trash bag and took them out into the back yard to hang up.

One of our neighbors brought down his wet/dry vacuum and got up the rest of the water as well as much from the carpet and pad as he could in the bedroom and closet.  Finally I brought down my big fan from my office upstairs and set it up pointing at the floor and turned it on high, hoping that the air circulation would dry the carpet the rest of the way.  After that it was pretty much just up to time to see if it would dry out.  My jeans were in the washer load when it blew… and it apparently did not make it all the way through the rinse cycle…  so since drying them out over night was not really an option I ran to the store and picked up another pair so I would actually have something to wear today.

The Denouement

The big air mover fan… made an odd kind of white noise… and all night long I kept waking up thinking I heard something strange.  I am fairly resistant to change, especially in my personal space.  The addition of a really loud fan on the floor beside my side of the bed was a rather disturbing change, and I ended up waking up every thirty minutes to an hour as the night went on.  As a result this morning I am feeling completely sapped.  The good news however is that the carpet is dry to the touch…  there is still a dark spot which tells me it is not completely dry.  We will leave the giant fan running for the next few days hopefully drying everything the rest of the way.

I emailed my boss to let him know what had happened… so my day today is pretty malleable.  One of several conclusions will happen.  We have the phone number of a reputable repair service, and I plan on calling them at 8 am.  Either after explaining what happened they tell me that they think it is easily fixable… like a clogged drainpipe or they tell me that I most likely have a dead washing machine.  So we either have the repair woman out…  or I go to Lowes and buy a new one that is on sale… and hopefully am able to do so early enough to arrange for same day delivery.  I believe Lowes will deliver, install and haul away the old unit… and we also have a line of credit there for such situations.

The Subligar

So since everyone on Mumble was playing Final Fantasy XIV… I continued on yesterday.  The above picture is the result of questing around level 10.  Essentially I had picked up all of the pieces… thinking they looked odd but not really noticing it much… until I finally picked up the pants.  This is in fact a matched set of the level 10 quest gear in the “Lemon Lozenge” area of the game…  yes that is what I called Lima Lominsa.  The leather harness thing was a bit sketchy… but it looked okay-ish with my poofy red pants… that and I had gotten used to the occasional “nipple chest” from Rift and GW2.  The pants… well I wasn’t paying much attention and I picked them up…  despite warnings from my friends about the existence of the “Subligar”.

Turns out this is a running joke since FFXI but having to wear it… it doesn’t feel terribly funny.  Personally I find this kind of armor completely bullshit.  I am sure this is some dev’s odd kink at work, but too often this is what women have to wear ALL the time.  At least when I started my next set of quests I was able to upgrade to something that covered me.  Maybe I am an odd duck but I feel like armor should you know… be protective.  There is nothing heroic feeling about having to wear a pair of underwear while fighting monsters with a big axe.  If people want this crap in game… that is fine… just don’t make it a quest reward.

Ultimately after playing for about 10 minutes… I downgraded all my gear to my level 8 set… which realistically was only a few points of defense difference.   What was so disturbing about it was… that my previous set was this really amazing “leather plate” appearance, with a unique chest piece graphic apparently for marauders… then in the course of a few quests go to lemon yellow panties.  I posted a picture on G+ bitching about it… and was essentially met with a chorus of “QQ More” from the women… since this is pretty much every game experience for them.  I totally get that…  but no one should have to wear armor like this period.

It used to frustrated the shit out of me when I would find a nifty looking pair of plate pants… only to hand it to a female character and see it turned into a shiny metal bikini.  I am completely fine with the irony of having the tables turned… but remember I am one of the guys supporting you.  Make the assholes that dressed their companions in SWTOR in the Slave Girl outfit wear this… not someone who farmed for days to try and get proper Jedi robes for Kira.  Once I could solo it… I literally ran “The Esseles” a good 50 times until I got the orange moddable robes to drop so she could have something decent to wear as I leveled up.  Anyways rant about skimpy clothing over.

The Game

I am in a really odd place about Final Fantasy XIV in general.  There is a lot about the game I am enjoying greatly.  Then there are other things that bug the hell out of me.  I honestly do not know at this point if I will be playing once it releases or not.  I have not had this much trouble deciding if I actually like a game or not since I played Guild Wars 2.  There are many aspects that I really dig like the whole jobs system… but so much of the game is just messaged really poorly.  Essentially you have to have some ancestral knowledge from other players to keep you from screwing your character up.

For example…  DO NOT SELL ANY ARMOR EVER!  I did… I regret it.  So something I did not realize… when you switch classes later you go back to level 1… and a ramification of this is that you will not be able to wear any of your armor period… other than the starter gear.  I sold mine long ago… thinking I would not need it.  As a result I had to run around buck naked in the Gridania starter zone until I could hit 5 and actually equip some gear.  Luckily I pretty much have every set of gear from that point on, but to the best of my knowledge based on what I am seeing from the vendors… there appears to be no way to rebuy that level 1 equip-able gear.

So much of the game feels deeply foreign to me… as though they set out to purposefully buck the western MMO traditions.  The game is at its core exactly the same as a World of Warcraft type MMO… just nothing is called by the right names, and nothing actually works in the same ways.  Essentially most of my time playing has been building this translation matrix of figuring out what a thing is called… and what it means to me.  I guess to some extent… that intrigues me… that the game can be so similar at the same time as it is completely foreign.

Like I said… at this point I seriously do not know if I will be playing this at launch.  If I do it will likely be a weekend thing.  My friends were wanting me to rush through the content… so I could get to some point where they needed a tank.  Really though I was far more happy to piddle aimlessly than to try and push through the quests to reach a point that they were already at.  I tend to out-level my quests by a large margin.  I am still afflicted by my desire to kill everything in sight… and that seems to be a super effective means of leveling.  The only mission type that seems to piss me off are the ones that involve using some emote on a target.

I guess at this point I have to say that I begrudgingly enjoy this game.  There is something about it that is charming, and despite all the jacked up characteristics… like the Subligar… there is enough here that I find enjoyable that I could see playing it.  I just am not sure if I could ever play the game seriously.  I definitely do not have the same admiration of all things Final Fantasy that it seems to take to really be 100% committed to this.  I guess I will see how I feel about things after the head start weekend next week.  That will ultimately determine if I play or not.

Wrapping Up

Well I need to prepare to call the repair woman and see if I can get an assessment of the situation.  If not… I will go to Lowes and see if I can get a washer delivered today.  I hope you had a much better Sunday than I did, and that you have a great start of the work week.  I am going to try and take a nap after I deal with these phone calls so that hopefully I stay fully functional.  Hopefully the carpet finishes drying as do the towels out in the back yard.