Lalafellication

Blaugust is About Blogging

Earlier I had most of a blog post finished when my system took a dive on me.  Nothing appears to be recoverable so you are going to get my rapid fire version.  It seems that too many people are getting hung up on the notion of daily blogging.  Yes I am having a contest and giving away prizes, and yes this entire thing started as me challenging people to take the daily blogging routine I do.  That said more importantly, Blaugust is about Blogging and doing so regularly.  If you normally post once a week and you begin posting three times a week thanks to this initiative, then I consider it more than successful.

If you don’t feel you can do the daily blogging thing, then alter it to fit your needs.  There are a few people who have ramped up their posting in the spirit of Blaugust, and that is awesome.  I feel like posting on a schedule is a valuable thing, and if you can’t make seven days a week… try five and if that is even too much then try three.  The hope is that you will develop a routine that becomes far harder to break than individual one off postings.  I went through huge lapses in my blog before I adopted the daily stance, and I pretty much started this without much ramp up.  It was a struggle at first but over time it became significantly easier and now I can crank out a post about almost anything.  Find what works for you, and stick with it.

I plan on editing back in a list of the day four blogs.

Hitbox Sorta Fixed

A few days ago I posted railing about the various shortcomings of the hitbox live streaming service, and since then they have attempted to fix a few things.  Previously I had used twitch to back up my live stream to youtube, making it significantly easier to share and embed in blog posts.  When I switched over too hitbox I thought things were going to work similarly.  Unfortunately the entire time I have used hitbox the export to youtube process has been broken.  This week they seem to have fixed it with a few limitations that make it damned near useless to me.  Yesterday I tried to export all of the videos that were hanging out on my hitbox page in limbo and out of the whole batch only two made it there.  The two videos were in the 20 to 30 minute range, and anything longer failed.

I guess this means that unlike twitch that can export up to two hours of video to youtube, hitbox is going to limit the users to only 30 minutes at a time?  For me at least this makes the feature meaningless, and since I still cannot download the videos I have already recorded it means my various series on youtube have glaring holes as I number things sequentially.  The only positive is that you can apparently embed video directly in your posts now, so here is hoping that actually works.  I am wondering if trying to embed it in live writer is what ultimately crashed my system earlier, so I am going to not test the waters until I have finished today’s blog post.  In any case I still like hitbox for the fact that there is no stream delay, and it makes having a conversation much easier.  The problem is with the fact that I now have to record the video locally and manually upload to youtube, it has severely soured my streaming of late.

Lalafellication

Last night I took the plunge and did something I had been considering for a few weeks.  As part of the preorder process I had a vial of Fantasia sitting in my inventory.  This allows you to re-edit your appearance, and in practice change your race and even gender in the process.  While I liked the look of Belghast the Highlander, I had long wished I had embraced the adorable and went Lalafell.  I think I only made it as far as I did in Wildstar because I thought the Chua I was playing was adorable.  So last night I took the plunge and you can now see the end results.  So far I have no regrets.

I ran a few instances last night and everything about combat is now cute.  It did take some getting used to the difference in perspective, and it may have caused me to step in some bad stuff that I thought I was well clear of.  All things considered I really like the decision I made because now I can take adorable pictures everywhere I go, and participate in the ever popular “if I fits, I sits” meme.  Everything I do seems cute and harmless, even when I do a dragoon jump into things.  I am a fan and I am sure it will make my adventures far more memorable.

Completely Broke But Happy

The other big thing that happened last night is that all of us pooled our money together and bought a small house in The Mists, the housing zone for Limsa Lominsa.  Basically it was a zone of compromise in that a few of us preferred Gridania and others preferred Uldah, but everyone was pretty amiable too the notion of the Limsa housing.  The other huge benefit is that we found absolute prime real estate in the third housing ward.  We are guessing that the house must have been repossessed because it is smack dab in the middle of the zone with a Market Board and Summoning Bell steps outside of our front lawn.  We don’t have a lot in the house but we did manage to pick up a Chocobo Stable, Aetherite Shard and a Mailbox allowing us to cheaply port from anywhere in the world to our house.  Now I will have to begin the grind to try and get the 300k gil needed to buy my personal room.

This whole experience highlights what I have been saying about the server community on Cactuar.  Within moments of purchasing the house and getting the basics configured we were swarmed by our neighbors welcoming us to the neighborhood.  It seems they were super happy to see the house occupied and we now have a few friends in the houses surrounding us.  The guild that was visiting in the picture lived in a huge house above us, and apparently since this house went dormant they were no longer able to jump down through our plot, because they were blocked by the building bounding box.  They were extremely appreciate of once again having a fast route to the market boards.  Later in the night we had some other neighbors welcome us, and it is this sort of interaction that I am valuing the most about the server.  This is the first time in a long time I have felt like I was part of a larger community.  Final Fantasy truly is a special game, and I hope especially as more people return to it we can set down some permanent roots here.

#FinalFantasyXIV #HitBox #Blaugust