Madness Intensifies

No Getting Used to It

ffxiv 2015-05-17 22-31-40-498 By the time yesterday afternoon rolled around I had well passed my stress quota.  If I were a pinball machine the tilt sensors were going off.  The previous week had been one of the more stressful experiences in part because I don’t really handle change as well as I could.  That said my workplace right now is in a constant state of flux as we are going through a fairly massively floor rebuild.  We have folks tearing down one cube only to take the pieces that were used to make it, and use it to build up a brand new cube.  The positive is that I now have a pretty sweet set up with a more private cube that has an entrance hall of sorts, but getting to that process involved moving out of my office before going to lunch one day… and moving back in a few hours later.  When you combine the fact that we had to cram all of the mothers day festivities into this weekend, we had car troubles, and had at least one partially sleepless night due to dodging tornados by the time Sunday afternoon rolled around I had just checked out.

So as I was sitting there on my sofa mindlessly crafting away last night it was pure dumb luck that I happened to look down and notice that the tell I had just received was from an actual person and not another gold spammer.  It turns out that I happened to be sitting there crafting in the Alchemists guild in Ul’dah next to someone who was apparently an avid reader of my blog.  I’ve been lucky enough to experience this a few times now, and each time it is this mixture of pride, awkwardness and confusion.  I have somehow lulled myself into this state where I feel like I don’t actually have any readers, so when I write my post each morning I can be just as open as I want to… because I am ultimately just talking to myself.  So when I am confronted with the fact that this is absolutely not the case I never know quite what to do.  I snapped a photo with my reader and told him that he would have to be less of a stranger in the comment thread, also threw out a friend invite and said to holler if they needed anything.  My friends joke about me being “THE Belghast” but man…  that is not a thing I will ever get used to.  I’m just a guy who does a few different things and tries to squeeze as much enjoyment out of the games I happen to be playing as I can.  The big point of pride however came when my reader said that I was for the most part the reason why they were playing Final Fantasy XIV right now, so if my joy can be infectious then maybe I guess it is okay.

Madness Intensifies

MadnessOfBel_11s The only real concentrated playtime that I had this weekend were either during the podcast on Saturday evening or starting about 4pm on Sunday afternoon until I went to bed.  During that time I focused on getting all of those tradeskills that I managed to get to level 5/6ish the other day up to 11.  At the point of going to sleep last night I had managed to get all of them up there except for Culinarian, which I will hopefully take care of tonight.  I will say that so far I definitely agree with the notion of this being the ideal way to level tradeskills, but man…  it also means that my entire life right now is pushing tradeskills.  There is no way in hell I am going to cap my poetics especially since they have now doubled the cap to 900 per week.  The positive however is that I am actually finding myself really enjoying the black hole known as crafting.  I like the fact that I am for the most part relatively self sufficient.  This was always the big reason why I pushed crafting up in other games is that when I wanted something for an alt… I didn’t want to have to pester someone else to make it for me.

It is going to be so amazingly nice to be able to repair my gear while we are in instances, or knock out random glamour prisms as my whims suit me.  Right now I am taking no small amount of pride in the fact that I have been crafting all of my upgrades WHILE working on crafting.  The cool thing is that each time I hit a plateau I can have a fire sale of everything that I used to get to that point.  So when I finally bring Culinarian up to level 11 I will be shedding all the early level crafting gear that I have laying around.  The other nice thing about doing it this way is that I have been able to select the cash reward item from each of my crafting quests.  The negative is…  that I am struggling to remember which quests I have actually completed.  I am pretty sure there are one or two of the level ten quests that I still need to go back and do.  I am really enjoying the chill nature of crafting, and I am liking that it gives me plenty of time to watch some Orphan Black.  I managed to watch through the first seasons and just started the second season last night before stopping to watch Game of Thrones.  I doubt I will make it to cap before Heavensward but I am hoping to at least get close.

Forced Engagement

ffxiv 2015-04-25 20-53-28-59 The biggest problem with crafting right now is that it is feeding my instincts to check out mentally.  When I am stressed I tend to disengage from the world, and while I am so focused on crafting my way through the levels…  it is all too easy to simply not watch free company chat or anything else for that matter.  One of the things I am going to have to work on this next week is trying to find a happy medium between my super engaging “lets run all the things” side and my “lets just nest and craft” side.  I am hoping that now that my group at work is done with the moves that I can start to chill back out once again.  The fact that every single day my world was changing significantly made me want to cling to something calm and relaxing in my game world.  Tonight will be a return to my raid schedule so that should help significantly.  There is still some stress in the real world around a potential car purchase that might be happening, but hopefully the big stressers are past me.

Mostly I want to apologize to anyone who was looking to run anything this weekend.  I managed to run a Sunken Temple of Qarn with Liore, but past that I pretty much ran nothing at all.  I had all these grand hopes of doing some pony farming, but that fell through when we tried to cram a visit with my folks in Friday night.  Saturday was pretty much an entire lost day other than rushing home to podcast under the threat of severe weather.  Hopefully as the week goes on I can do more fun stuff with the Free Company because I could use the activity to get my mind off other things.  As we talked about on the podcast Saturday night, I really hope we down turn nine tonight… but in the grand scheme of things I think we are still a few weeks away.  We are just now consistently getting to the dive bomb phase, now we just have to figure out what to do with the dive bombs.  On our best attempt I think we  got to around 35% which isn’t too shabby.  I hope you all have a great week, and please if you are an avid reader of the blog…  don’t hesitate to ping me in game sometime and say hi.