Good Morning Friends! It is Monday morning and once again I am bringing you all a hand-crafted mixtape. For those uninitiated to this series, I greatly enjoy crafting Mixtapes and have since I was a youngster. Given that we no longer use tapes or burn CDs, the next best thing is to create carefully curated playlists on Spotify or YouTube. Along with this process, I also create custom album artwork since so much of the mixtape process was adorning the physical media with sharpies and other colorful markers. Instead of sending a tape to a specific person, I broadcast these out to all of my friends and readers on the internet. It makes me exceptionally happy when I hear back feedback from one of my friends as they enjoyed a specific musical blend.
Hot Chicken Cold Stares
There is a specific flavor of rock that I associate with bands like The White Stripes or The Kings of Leon. It is heavily distorted, jangly, and fuzzy around the edges and I am uncertain what you can actually call it. However given that both Jack White of the White Stripes and The Kings of Leon now record out of Nashville Tennessee, I mentally associate the particular sound with that scene. What else do I associate with Nashville… well hot chicken of course because I love it so. So this morning I bring you a Mixtape dedicated to that style of music and quite honestly… this is one of my favorites so far. I am certain it will be an acquired taste much like the capsaicin laced hot chicken that gives this blend its name. I also feel like it is important to pay homage to where I think the sound came from… with The Rolling Stones and The Animals.
There is my latest Mixtape and with it, I hope signals the beginning of a wonderful week. This week I am transitioning back to remote work, and hopefully, that goes smoothly. Like I said above this is probably one of my favorite Mixtapes that I have created, and while it has been waiting on release I’ve listened to it for hours at a time. If you are tuning into this series late, you can find the entire archive of Mixtapes released to this point here:
Good Morning Friends! This morning I decided to make good on an idea that has been kicking around in my head. Mixtape Mondays have given me an anchor to the week, a focal point to sort of plan the entire week around. I had this idea of a second fixed point, but I am not entirely certain it will be as regular as the Monday offering has become. Favorite Fridays is a time for me to break out something that I love in a game, pop culture, or pretty much anything else I am passionate about and do a deep dive on it. It might be a favorite weapon or a location in a game that I absolutely cherish or maybe even a specific section of quest dialog that I greatly enjoy. Whatever the case it is time for me to explore that item in depth in post form.
Usagi Kabuto
There is one item in Final Fantasy XIV that has become more synonymous with my brand than pretty much anything else. It is a cosmetic hat known as the Usagi Kabuto, or “Bunny Hat” as I tend to refer to it. This single item has spent more time on my head in glamour form than pretty much any other item in the game. The truth is I largely stumbled upon it when I was first exploring the options of what I could use for glamour purposes. There isn’t anything special about it as items go, it is a Kabuto or a type of helmet often worn by Japanese warriors… most specifically associated with Samurai. That is the first thing in its favor because I have always had an attraction to that classic Samurai appearance.
The item first made its appearance as part of the Heavensturn event in 2011 and then was reprised briefly in 2014 as well… aka the first Heavensturn event for A Realm Reborn. Heavensturn for those unfamiliar is the in-game holiday in Final Fantasy XIV associated with the Lunar New Year and as a result, has a heavy association with whatever animal of the Chinese Zodiac represents a given year. For example, we are currently in the “Year of the Ox” and as a result, the Kabutos associated with that event featured an Oxhead. 2011 was the “Year of the Rabbit” which I believe would have been the very first Heavensturn in the original version of Final Fantasy XIV. When the event first game to A Realm Reborn Rabbit, Dragon and Sheep were all available for purchase.
I cannot say for certain what it is about the appearance that really drew me to it. It was however a happy coincidence that pretty much all of the Warrior-specific sets happened to be black and red, which meant the specific version of the Usagi Kabuto that I liked the most matched them perfectly. Over the years I have been a Bunny Warrior, a Bunny Bard, a Bunny Samurai, and most recently a Bunny Paladin. I even have the Gold Saucer-themed bunny ears so that I can craft “Bunny” outfits for things where this helm doesn’t exactly match. I realize that Zepla’s whole thing is calling her community “Buns” but I have been a Bunny Warrior since those early days of A Realm Reborn when we were first exploring this game.
There is just something about being a Lalafell and having a hyper-serious expression most of the time… and wearing a giant bunny hat that makes me happy. So many of my memories of this game… involved a cut scene where I was wearing this exact helmet. I used it so often that prior to the existence of glamour plates I carried around a stack of crystals and the hat on my person at all times so I could glamour over any other appearances.
In fact, I believe that it was “Bunny Bel” that was my very first commission that I had my good friend Ammo work on. It has pretty much graced the masthead of this website since the day it was created. If I was going to single out any specific version of Belghas to represent me as a whole… it would probably be that version. It is the incarnation of me that brings me the most joy, and now that I have come back to Final Fantasy XIV and embraced the bunny once again… my happiness quotient has increased significantly. So when I was trying to think about the single item that I wanted to kick this series off with, it was quickly evident what it had to be.
The only negative of the Usagi Kabuto is that since it has been largely inaccessible in the game since 2014 for some seven years there is now a pretty hefty price tag associated with it. In theory, if the pattern holds, it should make a reappearance during the Heavensturn event for 2023. I am not sure when they started this, but after a certain point, anything that was seasonal was no longer able to be listed on the Market board. It means those first few holiday events have items that fetch a hefty premium. I know both Thalen and Tamrielo made their in-game fortunes by selling housing items that were obtained from those first few events.
Square Enix now uses expired seasonal content as a way of propping up their cash shop, which honestly I feel is fair given that they churn out brand new seasonal events every single year with zero repeats that I am aware of. If you absolutely must follow in my footsteps and join the order of the bunny warrior, you can drop $3 to get your very own bind-on character version of the helmet. It features a slightly different item name, which I assume is to differentiate between the store-bought and market purchasable versions. If I ever got serious about playing on another server I would probably pick one of these up on the market so that I could still be the Bunny Warrior of Light there as well.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was an unforced error on my part because I had to get up super early… then never actually got around to writing a blog post. When I got home from work I pretty much crashed on the couch and along with doing some chill maintenance gaming in Final Fantasy XIV, I decided to binge my way through Black Summer season 2 on Netflix. For those who are unaware of this show, it is another in the zombie survival genre, but it is told in a bunch of disconnected story fragments shifting perspectives between a large cast of characters. This means it is not necessarily told in chronological order which can completely screw with your perspective at times.
There are very few characters that carried over from the first season, and this time around we are introduced to a large number of new players centering around what ultimately is a handful of events told from different perspectives. The central conflict of the season is that someone is flying over the snowy expanse of land and dropping off supply crates. Some contain food and medicine and others weapons… but all of which are highly sought out by the groups of survivors inhabiting what appears to be the backwoods of Colorado or some other similar area. I enjoyed the show in spite of the fact that they seem to be really bad at dispatching zombies. However one of my friends stated that was one of the things that they actually liked about the show because no one seems to have a supernatural aim.
For those unaware, Black Summer is the higher budget and production value cousin to Z Nation. I had no clue at all that these two series were connected until I watched this video outlining how the virus in both shows worked. The Red Death as far as zombie virus strains go is one of the ones that produce near-instant zombies. That means… your highest priority when someone is dying is either to damage the brain or get the hell away from them before they wake up and start running around seeking their next meal. As far as Zombies go, these also appear to be of the stupider variety meaning that if they ever lose sight of their prey they cannot seem to reason out where they might have gone to and begins the process of open hunting again. There are times when the cast of humans literally hide around the corner of a building and the raging zombie seems to be incapable of understanding spatial reasoning enough to figure out their hiding place.
Another thing about Black Summer is that much like Walking Dead it posits that humanity will break down into tribal factions that will quite literally kill each other over a can of beans. This is where I start to wonder about how a hypothetical zombie invasion would actually play out. Firstly I somehow doubt that it would spread terribly far at least in the region I live in where a large percentage of the populace is “packing”. I think armed militias of “good ole boys” would be all too willing to roam around hunting down packs of the undead. I mean my initial instinct would be to leave the city center and then ride it out with family in a small town with plenty of ammunition. There is more than enough open land to slow down the spread and each of these small towns would likely become a safe haven as the townsfolk protect against roaming packs.
The part that starts to conflict with me on a personal level when a post-apocalyptic fiction predicts chaos erupting around us, is that I have seen chaos first hand. I live in the area of the country lovingly referred to as Tornado Alley. We’ve gone a few years without a bad one, which means we are due for a significant tragedy at any point. The above picture is the aftermath of the Tornado in Joplin Missouri that took place on May 22nd of 2011, just over ten years ago. The thing is… we were there shopping with my mother-in-law the weekend before this took place. Had we picked a different weekend we could have easily been in the path of this disaster?
In the face of a tragedy like this, I have watched as folks who have nothing are all too willing to give what little they do have to help others. Ten years ago when the Joplin Tornado happened there was a mass volunteer drive to go clean up and pretty much every organization was doing some sort of food, clothing, and essentials drive to help the victims make it through the coming weeks and months. So in the face of ravening hordes of the undead, I do wonder if our response will be inherently selfish as our fiction predicts or if we will instead band together in defense of humanity? This is actually a conversation I have had with friends before. Sure my first instinct is to leave the city core just out of a sense of preservation in that fewer zombies equates to a higher survival rate. I fully expect however that once you reach the outskirts that folks will rapidly begin grouping together to help weather the events.
What are your thoughts? Does our zombie fiction get it right and that you think it will be self-interests over the needs of the many? Do you think we will instead band together to fight back? Drop me a comment below.
Good Morning Friends! This weekend started innocent enough with a few goals. The first being to level my Paladin as far as I could take it and the second being to knock out a bunch of beast tribe dailies along the way. On Friday I managed to finish up things with the Goblins and now have the spiffy floating chair thing held aloft by Final Fantasy style “bombs” aka the mount you can see me riding above. This meant that I could focus my efforts on the Amalja which is the last of the normal beast tribes that I have not maxed reputation for in A Realm Reborn.
This also meant that I had spare daily allowances and should probably return to working on the Ixal Dailies. The thing with the Ixal is that they are not battle quests, but instead involve collecting crafting components and turning them in. One of these quests involves crafting a number of items and then “donating” them to the Ixal and gaining a number of point per item turned in. Since I had been working on Carpenter I decided to keep going down that path. The easiest item I could craft on the list of items available for turn in was the Ash Composite Bow. Ash Lumber is no big deal because I have high level gathering professions and could just pop over North Shroud and harvest all I could ever want of that. Animal Sinew is dirt cheap on the vendor in the Free Company house, so that was easy as well.
Antelope Horn however was a bit tricker. I could not find it available on a vendor and the Market prices were way too rich for my blood. So instead I resorted to doing something I have never actually done in Final Fantasy XIV… and looked up the mob type that it drops from and then proceeded to lay waste of South Shroud until I had enough to craft the handful of items I wanted to. The thing is… I enjoyed this process. I liked the little adventure of trying to find the components needed to craft the items needed for a quest. It got me out into the world and exploring areas that I had not explored in years, and something felt better about turning this quest in without spending exorbitant amounts of gil on the market for my components. This friends planted a seed that ultimately dominated my weekend.
Yesterday it seemed like the optimal item that I could craft was the Garnet Grinding Wheel. It required Mithril Ingots, which could be obtained from collecting a bunch of Mithril Ore from Southern Thanalan. Mahogany Lumber was easy enough from collecting logs in Raincatcher Gully in Eastern La Noscea. Raw Garnet however is where things began to go off the rails. It comes from along the Bloodshore in Eastern La Noscea, but for some reason in my head I got it stuck that I needed Cut Garnets and not Raw Garnets.
This set me down a path I absolutely did not need to go down… which was leveling Goldsmith to a sufficient level to be able to actually cut all of those garnet I had gathered. This path required me to collect a significant amount of silver, because basically anything I could craft to skill up on required silver ignots. This took me back to the Upper Paths section of South Shroud to harvest up a big stack of silver ore. Using the Silver Ingots required me to have some whetstones, so this lead me to pop over to Western La Noscea to farm up a large amount of Mudstone, and then converting that into whetstones. The silver managed to take me just high enough to be able to cut the Garnets… which I did and then almost immediately realized that I didn’t need to have done this step in the journey but managed to get Goldsmith up over 30 in the process.
This left me with Blacksmith to level because I was nowhere close to being able to smelt Mithril Ingots from the ore that I had gathered. Any progress made was going to require Steel, which is made up of two components… Iron Ore and Bomb Ash. Bomb Ash can be gathered from Bomb type mobs… and I first made an attempt at farming this up through killing Bombs in the Copperbell Mines area but it was not dropping fast enough for my tastes. So instead I went back out into South Thanalan to harvest large amounts of Bomb Ash required to move forward. The Iron Ore is also harvested through the Copperbell Area in Western Thanalan so I farmed some of that up when I was over there attempting to kill bombs.
Everything that I could craft required a large amount of Oak Logs… which in turn required me to go harvest a bunch of that up in the swampy area below Camp Tranquil. This essentially meant running back and forth between three nodes and gathering this up until my eyes bled. It required several rounds of gathering, because I kept going up prematurely to Camp Tranquil to craft up items thinking that maybe just maybe it would be enough to finally unlock the Mithril Ingot pattern. Which it was not… and required more lumber to continue the journey.
I had started this specific leg of the journey pretty early in the day. In fact if I am remembering correctly I started sometime around 10 am when the server reset happens, and did not wrap things up until after 5 pm last night. Tedious though it may have been at times there was something interesting about the journey of leveling two tradeskills in order to feed items to a third tradeskill. The journey took me to places that I had not really spent much time in since I was initially leveling in Eorzea the first time. It does make me wonder if I have robbed myself of this experience in the past, because having this focused craft based mission definitely kept me engaged throughout the day as I ticked off little portions of it.
All told I made a lot of progress in a lot of different jobs. On the Carpenter side of things I managed to get it up to level 44, which was what I started out trying to level through the Ixal quests. The side adventures managed to get my Goldsmith up to 31 and the harder grind which was Blacksmith to 35 in order to craft the needed Mithril Ingots. Somewhere along the way I got a level in weaver because I needed to craft some bits and bobs there was well. On the battle side of things, I managed to push my Paladin up to level 70 and I am enjoying it greatly.
More importantly I am actually queuing for dungeons again… completely random and as a tank. I am not sure what happened… maybe it is just the fact that I knew I had a social safety net in the form of the Super Dungeon Friends discord… which side note is quite hopping these days. You should absolutely check out the original post on Super Dungeon Friends if you are playing Final Fantasy XIV and looking for a cool low pressure environment to hang out in. Whatever the case I seem to be getting over my mental block against queuing for random dungeons. In spite of playing on the server that was a nexus of chaos this weekend due to a prominent streamer setting up residence… I had nothing but enjoyable grouping opportunities with strangers.
Another big highlight of the weekend is that my good friend @JazSquirrel set up shop on the server as well and is leveling I believe a bard… or technically an archer leading up to becoming a bard. Having her around along with Bells and Zuu and a bunch of folks like Thalen and Waren showing back up as well, are making it feel like “old home” week in Greysky Armada. I’ve also been enjoying random interactions with members of the community, which ultimately was a lot of what glued me in place in Cactuar for years. That is the difference between a good game you finish and move on from and a game you inhabit is the people that you inhabit it with. It seems like I am well and truly back in Final Fantasy XIV and it seems like a great time to be there.
