The Rising and Leveling Updates

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Good morning friends. It has been a minute since I have actually sat down and brought you a proper blog post update about what I have been doing over in Final Fantasy XIV. With Monday being dedicated to Mixtapes, Tuesday brought us the sad news of losses, and yesterday being the wrap-up for Blaugust… more time has passed than is usually the case and in that time I guess I have done a bunch of different things. Firstly if you have not already done so, I highly suggest swinging by Uldah and starting The Rising event that is running through September 9th. Of all of the excellent in-game holidays, this is probably the most personal. It celebrates the birthday of A Realm Reborn, and with it the rebirth of this game from the ashes of the previous. As is often the case we as players get a very special message directly from Naoki Yoshida aka our beloved Yoshi P. Some tears may or may not have happened.

Another thing that happened over the weekend is that I buckled down and finally finished the Main Story Quest for Shadowbringers and got my second credit roll. The problem with talking about this is that I don’t really have a great screenshot to show other than my mug… because effectively everything else I took pictures of contains massive spoilers. I am very much looking forward to when the full trailer for Endwalker releases in October and we see the rest of that sequence. For the sprouts among us that might be reading this blog… something really cool to do is upon completing an expansion… go back and watch the final trailer for that expansion. You will start to notice bits and pieces of the story that you didn’t quite understand that more or less foretold the direction things were going to go. This is especially true with the Shadowbringers trailer for me at least, and I am intrigued where things are going with Endwalker.

I’ve also become terribly distracted of late by The Diadem that is accessible through the restored Firmament crafting area in Ishgard. Essentially this is a turbo button for leveling gatherers, and I made a fair amount of coin in the process of doing so as well. First, you have to have gotten a job to 60, which will unlock access to the “Towards the Firmament” questline. Once you unlock this area you can talk to Augebert at x 11 / y 14 in order to unlock access to the Diadem. From there you will be able to bring level 10 gatherers in and run around picking up nodes at what seems to be an extremely fast experience gain rate. The items that you gather can then be appraised and either stockpiled for leveling crafters through the Ishgard Restoration recipes or sold on the market for a pretty decent profit. I devoted myself to trying to gain a level of Mining and Botany every day, and in the thirty minutes or so that I spent doing this… I would usually gather up enough materials to turn around and flip for around 200,000 gil. Soon I am going to start exploring what I need to start using the Firmament to push up my crafters as well.

Since we last talked I have finished off the Scholar and Summoner, and then started pushing up the Dark Knight and Monk in earnest. Dragoon is still very much my soak class for picking up the Faerie quests in Il Mheg if I don’t have a character up high enough to be able to run them. Another thing of note is I have finished up my gatherers and now Miner, Botanist, and Fisher are all sitting at 80 and I am sufficiently geared to start picking up maps for map night every day. Side note… there is no way to see all of your jobs at once so I photoshopped them together like this just to provide a better visual representation. Right now I am splitting my daily roulettes between Monk and Dark Knight because a number of them I really do not want to do as a Tank.

Another thing that has happened is that I have become terribly distracted by the Dark Knight anima weapon questline and at this point have completed the first four steps in the chain. I am very close to being able to knock out the fifth step because apparently without knowing it I have been ratholing the materials needed to knock this out quickly. This is going to slow down really fast however because I am about to enter the Crystal Sand/Umbrite phase… which involves doing a bunch of things none of which are actually rapid. I am going to need around 75 of each which means I am entering the hardcore phase of the grind…. which I am probably going to ignore until I hit a lull after the release of Endwalker. I want to rush through the next phase however because it opens up the vendor that lets me buy different replica versions for glamour purposes.

I have roughly eighty days until the release of Endwalker, and my goal is still to be sitting at 80 on all of my jobs when it rolls out. Blue Mage is a bonus, given that it doesn’t exist at level 80 yet but I am not including it in my mission. I figure Dark Knight, Monk, and Dragoon will be hitting cap before too much longer which leaves me Gunbreaker, White Mage, Astralogian, and Black Mage. After I finish the current trio of classes that I am working on… I guess I will grab another healer to space those out a bit. White Mage is my lowest currently so I will spend some time focused on it. I am trying really hard not to just go no-lifer mode with Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High, but I have a feeling before all is said and done there will be a bit of that happening just to push through faster. Still finding myself having a blast on my little mission, so here is hoping that I keep the stamina and make it.

Blaugust 2021 Wrap Up

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Hey Friends! We did it! We made it through another August and with that another Blaugust. We had a pretty solid turnout this year with forty-five participants making at least one new blog post during the month. During this one month, we introduced the world to nine hundred and eighty-one new blog posts, which seems like a pretty big success to me. More interesting though is that this seems to have rekindled the fires in a few latent bloggers that I am happy to see back in the fold. Ultimately that is the part of Blaugust that gets lost in the mix, that it is a festival of blogging and that maybe just maybe it will prove to people that they can post on a schedule… then figure out whatever schedule actually works for them. While Nait somewhat disagrees with me about it, I personally do think that setting a schedule helped me to keep this blog active over the years.

However, you are likely not here this morning to listen to me wax on about blogging to a schedule but are instead here for the unveiling of the awards. As always I give the disclaimer that I am sometimes bad at math, and if I somehow missed a post here or there, let me know and I will correct the record. First let’s take a moment to review the definition of each award.

  • Newbie Blogger Award – You did it! You created a new blog and we are extremely happy to welcome you into this raucous community. As a result we are going to recognize your efforts just for signing up.
  • Bronze Award – You made at least 5 posts during the Month of August 2021.
  • Silver Award – You made at least 15 posts during the Month of August 2021.
  • Gold Award – You made at least 25 posts during the Month of August 2021.
  • Rainbow Diamond Award – You did it, you posted 31 or more posts during the month of August 2021.

Newbie Class of 2021

This year we had four folks start the challenge as newbies, but two of them didn’t leave the starting gate. However, the two newbies that did manage to complete the challenge, did so at a rainbow level which is pretty freaking spectacular.

Bronze Club 2021

This year we had nine bloggers that got started on the challenge and made at least five blog posts during the month. Often times we set ourselves to a goal but fall short, however, if you think about it this way that is an average of one post a week!

Silver Club 2021

This year we had seven bloggers that made at least fifteen posts during the month of August. One of these is a little different given that it is scattered between three sites, but the count is tabulated for them combined.

Gold Club 2021

This year we had two bloggers, myself included… that got really close to thirty-one posts but didn’t quite make it across the finish line. However, they did have at least twenty-five posts qualifying them for the gold award. [Edit] – A miss count happened and as such Krikket is bumping up to gold.

Rainbow Diamond Club 2021

We had a phenomenal twenty bloggers finish the month with at least thirty-one posts. We had several overachievers in the group with probably the most staggering being Aywren who came in at forty nine posts.

Honorable Mentions

We had a number of bloggers who for one reason or another didn’t make those five posts in order to qualify for bronze, but I feel like it is important to give them some recognition for putting themselves out there in the first place.

Final Thoughts

One of the things I have done in past years is to post some statistics, so let’s begin this section by mirroring the items tracked during 2019, which was effectively the last “normal” Blaugust. In 2020 we had Blapril instead and a much shorter and more low-key Blagust.

  • 981 posts were made by Blaugust 2021 Participants
  • 45 Individuals Participated in the event and made at least one post
  • 2 Newbie Bloggers Participated and both made 31 posts
  • 40 out of the 45 participating made at least 5 posts qualifying for Bronze
  • 31 out of the 45 participating made at elast 15 posts qualifying for Silver
  • 23 out of the 45 participating made at least 25 posts qualifying for Gold
  • 20 blogers made at least 31 posts qualifying for Rainbow Diamond

It is a smaller year than some of those in the past, but it is also a year where the community is recovering from the state of the world right now. I talked about it yesterday, but we no longer have Stropp and Psychochild with us and both participated in Blagusts past. I am extremely proud of those who participated or even thought about participating. It takes a lot to put yourselves out there, and I am hoping as we keep this institution rolling that it will gain traction with entirely new audiences. My wife runs her own Blaugust mirrored after ours, and it did not happen this year because it was just too much stress on their community. So the fact that we managed to make it happen and be extremely successful is a testament to you all.

As always if I have made some errors in my calculations, please get with me and I will sort it out. Additionally, if you want the full-sized version of the awards to use on your blog, you can find them on the Blaugust Media Kit page. Thanks so much for participating, and I will as always see you for Blaugust 2022.

Know That I Care

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There are times when you want to make a blog post, but you don’t exactly know how to get started at the actual writing of it. This is one of these mornings because I am not exactly sure what I want to say… but I do know the general message. It is always hard when we come to gather to mourn the loss of someone from the gaming community, and over the last few weeks, we have lost a couple of big voices in Epic Insanity and yesterday Rades. In both cases I know the impact they left on this community largely by the way that their passing has impacted the mutual friends that we shared. In truth I knew neither of them, and there is a bit regret there because they both seem like extremely great people to be around.

That isn’t to say that I didn’t know “of” them both. I recognized the “Epic Insanity” logo from a few discussions I have been involved with and I absolutely remember Rades from Wildstar and the “Rainbeer Road Raceway” that he created. I was talking with my friend Grace about her memories and how she donated so many of these signs to the cause. He seemed like a chaotic force of joy in the world and based on the lives he touched, folks will be talking about his antics for a whole generation of players.

The blood elf with the fire festival sunglasses is probably the image that I will always have in my head when I think of Rades. The challenge however is that for whatever reason, in spite of how many people in common that we both seemingly cared about deeply… our paths never really crossed. I’ve thought a bit trying to figure out how that happened, given that we both got our starts in the WoW Blogging community and I have to figure both interacted with the Blog Azeroth crowd. The only thing I keep landing on is that he was a Horde player and that for most of my WoW Career until Warlords… I was a dedicated Alliance player. I never really read Orcish Army Knife, I think in part because I mentally thought of it as a “Horde” blog. Based on a few of Grace’s favorite articles that they linked me yesterday, I really wish I had because they were absolutely hilarious and poignant.

Steve “Slurms” Litchtsinn

What this has made me think about is just how fleeting our connections are when we are potentially hundreds or thousands of miles apart and can’t physically lay hands on one another. While I didn’t know Rades or Epic Insanity, I have my own list of people that touched my life that we lost way too soon and that I end up thinking about at least once a week. My friend lists on various games and Twitter follows are littered with emotional landmines of folks who are no longer with us, but that I cannot bring myself to unfollow. Slurms, TenTen, Zann, Stropp, and Psychochild all come to mind as people that I miss talking to greatly. I finally did unfollow River, because his account got hacked and it was trying to distribute Malware, but I wish I still had it there preserved.

Mario “Ten Tentacles” Delgado

The thing is… I can’t say that I was super close to any of them… but at the same time they made up key building blocks of this community that I have come to call family. I am super bad at expressing how much I care about the folks that I spend my free time with. Like in the list of names that I just rattled off, I don’t think I ever said to them specifically how much they meant to me and how much I enjoyed whatever time we had interacted with each other. The connections we have online are so ephemeral and often not rooted in the day-to-day reality of our lives. I go into minor panic attacks every now and then when I have the sudden realization that I have gone several days without seeing anything from a specific person, and then spend the next hour trying to figure out what might have happened. Thanks if you have ever helped me on one of these panicked jaunts because I have this overarching fear that someone will slip from memory without me realizing it.

The thing is now that I have sat down to talk about this today, I am absolutely certain there are other people that we have lost that I am not thinking of right now. I’ve kicked around the idea of hosting a sort of gamer memorial page but wasn’t sure if that was creepy or morbid. The thing is… we know parts of each other, but rarely do we know the totality. You know what I choose to share with you, which is a fraction of the total picture of what makes up my life. So for example I got a window into the lives of Slurms or TenTen, that was curated for me to see but I can’t really say that I knew the totality of the person they were. I worry sometimes about what people will remember me for when I am gone. Above all else I want you to take away from this post that I care.

I might be bad at putting it into words sometimes, but if we have ever interacted for any length of time you have made an impact on me. I maybe care more about “digital ” friends that a lot of people do, because I cut my teeth on IRC. I met my wife on IRC and was introduced by a mutual friend from Belgium, so people have always been far more than the pixels dancing across my screen. Be it introversion or distance… there are very few of you that I will ever actually get to know “for real”, but I think it is important that you understand that it doesn’t mean you have not already impacted me greatly. The times we find ourselves living through right now, seems to conspire to rob us of the people we care about in the blink of an eye. I just want to make sure you understand that if you are reading these words and interacting with me… that you matter to me.

Mixtape: Faith Funk Fish

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Good Morning Friends! I return this morning with another segment in what is shaping up to be one of my longest-running series. Each Monday I present my readers with a collection of tracks bound together into a specific Mixtape. Since I can’t actually mail out a physical tape to each of you… and it isn’t like most of you would even have a player to play it on… I create a collection of tracks and present them on YouTube and Spotify for your listening pleasure. Along with this I create some fake album art so the entire thing feels like a complete package. I loved doing this as a kid and I still enjoy doing it as an adult, and I hope you enjoy the effort.

Faith Funk Fish

This is another mix that I have been sitting on for a while now, largely because I was uncertain if it was finished. The idea was pretty straight forward and I wanted to try and figure out a way to blend Faith No More, Living Colour, Fishbone and Bad Brains into the same mix tape. The core theme here is bands that have rock sensibilities but also have a fusion of funk with heavy bass lines. Some of these skew more punkish like Bad Brains and Helmet and others skew more melodic like King’s X and School of Fish. I’ve listened through this many times at this point, slightly pruning and tweaking until we have reached the point it is in currently. There are some times when you creation needs to just be left alone to stand on its own, and I feel that is more or less the case with this mix. I hope you all enjoy it.

Track List

  • Cult of Personality – Living Colour
  • Servitude – Fishbone
  • Tip – Finger Eleven
  • Falling to Pieces – Faith No More
  • Lakini’s Juice – Live
  • Unsung – Helmet
  • Levitate – I Mother Earth
  • Clean My Wounds – Corrosion of Conformity
  • A Shogun Named Marcus – Clutch
  • Thunder Kiss ’65 – White Zombie
  • I Against I – Bad Brains
  • It’s Love – King’s X
  • 3 Strange Days – School of Fish

Listen on Spotify

Listen on YouTube

Listen On Tidal

That brings to close the Eighteenth Mixtape in this series. As it stands I have one more left in the hopper, but I have a feeling that I am going to go on another bender of creating new mixes soon. This one is more delicate than some of the other ones I have released because it felt like it was a challenge to make it work. However I already have a few songs in my mind that didn’t fit into this one, that I will probably use to spin something new off in the near future. As always I hope you enjoyed this blend of songs and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts. If you are just now getting into this series, I keep and archive of all of the mixes so far.