Sixteen Years

Blaugust Begins

At this point the first few blaugust posts are starting to trickle into the nook and I am super pumped that this apparently is going to be a “real” thing.  I have to admit at this point that the inspiration here is from my wife.  During the month of May she decided to try and follow my posting every day tradition, and in the process she gathered up a bunch of math bloggers that also wanted to try it.  While not everyone succeeded in posting something every day, including my wife… it did stir up a lot of new and interesting content in their blogosphere.  Since August is such a dead time normally, my hope was that an event like this would get people moving again and a bunch of interesting stuff would flow as a result.

I had hoped that maybe I would get a couple daring bloggers to take up the challenge, but instead this seems to have developed a life of its own and right now we have over 25 bloggers committing to the daily routine.  If nothing else this is going to be another awesome opportunity for networking and community building.  Some of the best friendships are forged in the fires of shared struggle.  Since the process has begun I now have to device the best possible way to track progress.  Right now I am thinking a google doc spreadsheet, that way I can share out the link to the bloggers.  If I happen to miss giving credit for a post they can correct me, because they can actually look at my tracking mechanism.  I want to thank everyone so far for also posting their posts on the nooks blog.  This is going to make the entire process significantly easier for me.

Sixteen Years

August first has way more significance for me than just the beginning of Blaugust.  Sixteen years ago today my wife and I were married.  If you want to check out the tales of us getting married at the house of vacuums you can see that here, as I talked about it during my factoid february initiative.  There is not a day that goes by that I don’t realize how lucky I am, in that I have found someone compatible with me.  Together we live a pretty damned charmed life if I do say so myself.  As many folks commented during the math conference, we really do make an awesome team and both of us seem to be capable of focusing on the task at hand without getting bogged down in the minutia of it.  We often bicker as we work through problems, but I cannot remember the last time we had an actual “fight” which I guess says a lot for the success of our marriage.

There is also not a morning that goes by where we do not say “I love you” more than a few times.  Granted a good chunk of the time it is simply our single line of text that says “loves”, but inside of that simple word encompasses so much.  Another hallmark of our relationship is that we support each other in pretty much any endeavor.  She is completely supportive of my blogging and podcasting and gaming and streaming… and while she has spent more time than she can probably recall waiting on me to finish something up.  She also totally gets why my guild and my community are so important to me.  She has her own completely separate community, and since I get the importance too, that is why I took time off from work to help with the math conference she organized.  At the end of the day we “get” each other, and that is more than you could ask for in a relationship.  I am truly lucky.  I included a picture of Kenzi conked out on my wife’s lap yesterday because really… is there a reason not to?  My god this kitten is adorable.

Want to Try FFXIV?

Over the last couple of days there have been a few really cool developments in Final Fantasy XIV.  First off they just announced yesterday that you can now get a free 14 day trial of the game.  If you’ve always wondered what it is like to play, but did not want to plunk down the money to do so…  now is your chance.  I know my friend Calamity Jess had been kicking around the notion of playing and lamented the other day that there was no way to try it out without coughing up the full price.  Now folks have an excellent way to do just that.  Granted there are some severe restrictions on what you can and cannot do.  You can’t join a guild, or pretty much use any of the social communication channels.  I do believe you can join a linkshell however, which I am guessing is precisely what we would do for the various folks trying out the game so that they can have some means of communication.

For those wondered I am located on the Cactuar server, which is one of the most highly populated servers in the game on the Aether Data Center.  For World of Warcraft players, the data center is like the Battlegroup in that when you do the duty finder it pulls from players in that grouping of servers.  If you are a member of the Alliance of Awesome community, a former House Stalwart member, or just a reader of this blog I would be more than happy to have you hanging out on Cactuar.  One thing of note, sometimes Square decides to bar new character creation on Cactuar, so it is best to try and create your characters in the morning or during the day.  During primetime most of the high population servers reach a locked down state.

Lets Be Friends!

In addition to offering free trials of the game, they have now opened up a recruit a friend program.  You are seeing this right, that is in fact a two seater Chocobo… and I want one really badly.  If you end up liking the game and sticking around I would love it if I could recruit you.  The system works similar to most of the other recruit a friend programs and you can read the full details here.  After 30 days of paid subscription both the recruiter and the recruit get a nifty item that increases all experience gain by 20% below the level of 25.  This is kinda huge in that a lot of the rough spots leveling wise happen before 25 when you don’t really have all the bells and whistles for your class.  For example Gladiator is a bit of a slog until level 26 when you pick up the 3rd step in your primary combo Rage of Halone.  Anything to help speed that process up is a massive boon.  Additionally it also increases your craft experience, which in itself is a slog to level.

After 90 days of paid subscription the recruiter gets the spiffy two seater Chocobo mount.  The person being recruited of course gets the normal “veteran” benefits from a paid subscription which in themselves are pretty cool.  As you can see here for 90 days subscription you get 3 pets, a swimsuit, a appearance change potion, and a flying eyeball mount.  They have one of the better veteran rewards programs, because really at each step there is something really cool there.  Right now I have gotten the 180 day step which gives me an awesome pet that summons a warrior of light from final fantasy 1.  I tend to cycle it until I get the black mage, because the FF1 black mage is adorable.  Anyways if you try out the game and want to stick around I would appreciate being given the opportunity to make you a recruit!

Writing Prompts

The first posts are rolling in and folks seem to have plenty of inspiration behind them.  That said I plan on still posting a series of daily prompts to help out those folks who need a little bit of inspiration.

• What is your proudest gaming accomplishment?  What think took you the longest to complete or required the most skill.  What thing makes you the happiest that you have accomplished.
• What is your favorite game biome?  Games often have the same kinds of generic climates spread through the zones and levels.  What is your favorite type of climate and why?
• What is your favorite grouping experience?  Even the most staunch solo artist eventually groups up, what is the best thing that has happened while grouped with other players?