Alexander Ready

Assorted Updates

TardisShowerCurtain First up I want to thank everyone for checking in on me after my Saturday post.  I am doing largely okay myself, but I wanted to talk about my own struggles in the hopes that it might bring someone out of the woodwork and let them know that they really aren’t as alone as they might think.  I am still processing the information about my friend, but again I am more concerned about another one of my friends for whom the news is much closer.  I was absolutely overwhelmed by the support you all gave me though, and I am consistently amazed at just how loving a community the twitter and blogosphere communities can be.  Sure there are people out there that make these places toxic environments, but I seem to have filtered out any possible negative elements from my own feed so that all I really see is positive people who have always been willing to embrace me when I needed it.  In part I am hoping that if someone is struggling…  they also see the overwhelming response I got… and maybe it convinces them that it is worth reaching out and talking to someone.

This weekend was very much the “last call” for the dumpster, as it should get picked up today.  The weekend before we tackled both of our offices, and Saturday we tore into the upstairs bathroom.  For several years now it had gone neglected, and the upstairs shower room was essentially a catch all of big things that we “intended” to take to good will but never actually got there.  As a result that room had probably not been opened for roughly a decade.  We fixed that… and did a bunch of little things throughout the weekend as well.  This is also seemingly the weekend of finally taking care of things we intended to do.  Over the course of Saturday I took three full loads to goodwill, and at the end of the day we were finally able to deploy this amazing Tardis shower curtain that I have had for a few years, with the intention of going in that bathroom.  The cats are confused as hell with the constant changes in their world.  The upstairs bathroom also serves as the littlebox room… and our eldest cat just sat in there Saturday evening confusedly meowing… because she didn’t recognize the place.

Office Improvements

mynewsetup A week ago I posted an “in progress” shot of my office and this weekend I continued to refine it.  One of the side benefits of Saturday was getting a cabinet that would fit under the printer table, that now serves as my toolbox.  This allowed me to sort the various tools that I found while cleaning and organize them in one place.  Sunday however became the day I tackled hooking up the consoles again.  Below the television that is proudly displaying Street Fighter Alpha 3 (we will get to that in a bit) is a cabinet that contains my PS3, PS4 and Xbox 360.  I had to cut holes in the backing board of the cabinet to fish the cords through but in the end in works pretty well.  While I had my PS4 torn apart I also performed the upgrade from the stock 500 GB hard drive to a new Samsung 2 TB one…  and the nice thing about this setup is that it is close enough to the router that I can actually hard wire the network instead of relying on wireless for everything.  My hope is that this improves the performance of remote play through both the Vita and the PSTV.

All of these are hooked into an HDMI switch box that then goes through my Elgato capture card into my PC, allowing me to capture video from any of the devices.  The new device that is playing SF Alpha 3 however is a side project that I started a couple of years ago.  I had purchased a Foxconn Netbox PC some time ago for the purpose of turning it into an emulator machine.  Problem being in my old setup there was never really a good place to hook it up, and while I managed to get an operating system loaded on it…  I never did the required fiddling to make it all work.  In the meantime I had been searching for a more turnkey solution and finally landed upon Lakka, which is a custom Linux distribution designed entirely around running the RetroArch emulator platform.  The awesome thing about it is that it also has Samba set up so it mounts each of the required directories as windows shares so you can simply copy files to it over the network.  So as of yesterday I got it up and running and have NES, SNES, GB, GBA, DS, Genesis, Master System, Game Gear and a few Arcade games running on it.  Really happy with the way it is working, the only negative is that apparently the N64 emulator will not run at all on 32 bit hardware…  so I can live without that.

Alexander Ready

ffxiv_dx11 2015-07-12 14-55-34-01 From a gaming perspective my world has revolved around getting to item level 170 in Final Fantasy XIV.  This is the magical breaking point that allows you access to the new Alexander raid, and can be attained through a combination of law gear and clan hunt based upgrades.  As of last night I am sitting at 173 with every item upgraded to 170 or better except for one of my rings.  Yesterday afternoon I managed to get into turn one of Alexander with Wulf and Grace and on our second attempted pushed through the encounter.  It was a really fun fight to tank along side Wulf, and while he continued on into the progression… I dropped out to help folks with dungeons.  My hope is that maybe tonight I can get in some more of Alexander because supposedly at the end of the quest chain, you end up getting a “Bolt” the item that can be exchanged for an accessory slot.  This would ultimately make it so that I didn’t need to somehow purchase a second tomestone of law ring, but instead jump straight to the 190 equivalent.

ffxiv_dx11 2015-07-12 21-45-55-08 I am really happy that in theory my gear grind is coming to a close at least on the Warrior.  This is largely because I really want to start pushing my focus to the Dragoon so I can get it up to level as well.  Right now I am roughly half way to 55, and honestly a few more dungeon runs would get me there quickly.  Right now however every waking moment in game has been spent making sure I do all of my duty roulettes so that I can get all the bonus law I can manage.  Even with a shift in focus to the Dragoon I will still probably end up getting a bunch of law, simply because I get called on by my friends in the free company to tank random stuff.  I quite literally could be happy if I did nothing but run dungeons, because this set of dungeons is freaking amazing.  The last few days I have managed to get The Vault as my low level roulette, and I am perfectly fine with this because that place is so much more enjoyable than doing another Brayflox or god forbid Aurum Vale.  While I am still struggling inside with the news I got on Friday, the weekend as a whole was pretty successful in at least taking my mind off of it for large blocks of time.

4 thoughts on “Alexander Ready”

  1. Man Street Fighter Alpha 3, now that brings back memories! I wrecked everyone at that game. Probably single handedly responsible for making me love the human confrontation in PvP!

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