Good Morning Friends! It is time once more for me to present you with a blend of music for the week ahead. For those who might be new to my blog, every Monday for the past several months I have been presenting you with a new Mixtape. Sure it is actually just a YouTube or Spotify playlist, but I assembled it in the loving manner that I used to assemble custom mixtapes for my friends. I am uncertain how long inspiration will keep this section of the blog alive, but it has done so for twenty posts thus far.
Melancholeidoscope
Lately, I have been struggling a bit with melancholy, but it isn’t like it has just been one unified feeling but more a kaleidoscope of feelings. So there you go… this one is a portmanteau of those two words. Sometimes you listen to down songs because you are down… but also you are not looking to be cheered up and are fine with staying down. This journey all started when I heard something on the radio that I had not heard in years… and started to piece together an album around that song… and then proceeded to edit it out of the mix in the first place. It is funny how the creative process works sometimes, and your original inspiration is chucked aside for something new. Essentially this album is a mixture of some of my favorite melancholy songs. Some have hope for better days, and some just wallow in that feeling and that is okay. Sometimes we have to be down, but it helps to have friends along for the journey. A song can be like an old familiar friend that you have not visited in a really long time, and it similarly is amazing how many emotions come rushing back as soon as you open that door.
And that friend is my twentieth mix, and I gotta be honest I was not sure this series would have lasted this long. I am not sure how many more of these I have in me, but I am going to keep creating when the inspiration strikes me. Sometimes an album builds itself. For this one each time I thought of a song to add, listening to it would make me think of another song and then I simply had to cull what no longer worked. I think at one point I had almost thirty songs on the list and whittled it down to the blend that I present today. As always if you are tuning into this series late and wanting to catch up you can check out the archive below.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This evening we are down a Grace and went through a whole carnival of tech issues before the show, and as such were delated getting started. Bel starts the show off talking about finding a batch of WoW Screenshots he thought were lost, and it turns out that no… he likely deleted them on purpose due to the cavalcade of raid drama documented. The Final Fantasy XIV Live Letter 66 was a seven-hour-long presentation talking bout the new job skills and various other system changes. We spend a good chunk of the night talking through some of the changes including the complete revamp of the Summoner class. From there we talk about Deathloop as Tam shares some of his thoughts about the game while Bel talks about almost refunding due to any sort of a single-player save system. Finally, we share the news that there will be no AggroChat next week due to reasons that involve most of the show’s cast.
Good morning friends. There is a topic that has been bouncing around in my skull for a few weeks now, and I have never really gotten around to speaking my mind about it. The thing is I am not even sure what I want to say. Patch 9.1.5 is sticking in my craw for a bunch of reasons, and I am not entirely certain what I want to say about it because I am afraid most of my thought processes are poisoned by built-up bile. There are so many changes going into the game that are needed. For example, maybe the love rocket icon should not have looked like a big cartoon penis for the first twelve years it was in the game. I am also all for the painting changes because quite frankly the artwork looked like shit, and the versions that are replacing it are rather nice.
However, 9.1.5 is shaping up to be this make-or-break moment for the game, with the devs seemingly dumping everything that players said they wanted into the game. Legion Timewalking is this giant fanservice event that brings back a bunch of things that folks had been pining for like the Mage Tower and an ability to collect a whole new set of alternate recolors. The problem is… this is an event… a limited time moment in the game where it is going to feel extremely good for players to come back and play but ultimately has an expiration date associated with it. This feels in so many ways like a lover in a toxic relationship asking you what they can do to keep you from leaving them. Players DID leave and the problem is… a single data point does not make a trend.
Then there is another part of me that is frustrated that if this could have been pulled together so quickly… why didn’t they do this years ago? The changes that are going into the game break so many of the things that I have long considered just the World of Warcraft design ethic. Previously it seemed like we could never get something just universally good for the players, without it also being horrible in some way. Like Transmog has gone through this cycle for years, with you being able to collect item appearances… but only for the armor class that can be equipped by the person looting the items. There is part of me that wants to believe that this is a shift in the direction of the game, but the cynic feels like this is an attempt to make players temporarily forget about the bad times.
Then there is the developer in me that realizes that a lot of this is unfair to the team working on the game. Even in my own job there is a long list of things that are relatively quick to wrap up, but never quite get done because there is a prioritized by management list of things that take precedence. This part of me thinks that what we are seeing is probably a combination of two things. Firstly the management is caught off balance and desperately grasping and universally good things that they can pump out quickly, and a lot of these things were probably side-projects of the devs and are now given leave to finally finish them up and get them out into the game. Everyone has a list of items that they know would be really good… but that they can never quite find the time to finish up, and I think folks are being allowed to finally work on these things.
Then there is the other part that is frustrating me right now. I see folks making their way back to Blizzard titles, when in the end… nothing has really changed yet. There have been some high visibility exits from the company, but none of the demands that the Blizzard employees have made have actually been met. To make things worse there is talk of fears over retaliatory firings, which may or may not be a thing but the rumors are there. I am just not personally ready to forgive and forget yet, and I am thankful that I had already made my break from being a “Blizzard Gamer” back in 2011 during Cataclysm. There are folks who were hurting when they were not playing the game, and there are good employees that potentially suffer as subscribership goes down… so I get that this is an extremely complicated issue. However I am just not personally ready to jump back and pretend that everything is okay.
I am frustrated that gamers have extremely short memories. Patch 9.1.5 seems poised to be the gaming equivalent of Calgon, and is fixing to take away all of the memories of bad times… at least temporarily. I guess on one hand I am happy that the folks who are capable of making good with Blizzard and returning are going to have some excellent new toys to play with, but frustrated that I can’t look the other way this time. I miss the hell out of Diablo 3, but I am not ready to come back yet.
Sometimes the YouTube algorithm is creepily accurate. Over the weekend it decided that I needed to be exposed to a channel called “TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin”. I watch a lot of crafting videos because while I am far too lazy to actually do many of these things, I do daydream about one day following through on some of my real-world ideas. I love toys, more specifically action figures, and big vinyl toys, and apparently, I watched enough crafting videos and toy videos to where they have morphed together into a single entity known as the Crafsman. This channel is presented as a puppet and all of the close-ups of the work is a human wearing a pair of gloves in order to keep the illusion. There was a Q&A video that at one point hinted that the gloves became a thing because the creator was embarrassed by their ashy calloused hands. Whatever the case it is this delightful experience of a mild-mannered relatively child-friendly puppet making awesome crafts.
There are times that you have memories buried so deep inside that you have not thought about them in decades. While watching these videos, it finally hit me like a bolt of lightning why I was bonding with them so heavily. When I was a little kid we would occasionally go visit my Great Aunt and Uncle in Witchita. Next door to him was this super nice old black man named Flip, and I loved Flip so much… even though in truth I realistically spent a very small amount of time with him. The character that the Crafsman plays… reminds me almost exactly of my memories of Flip. The sad thing is I don’t even know what his last name was, but I do know he passed away probably when I was in middle school and I was fairly devastated. It is bizarre how such short encounters can have such formative experiences in your life that are rooted deep enough that they stick around in the background to come bubbling to the surface decades later.
There is a lot of me that wishes I spent more time on physical products. There is a version of me from the past that used to really like to sculpt, and always wanted to create my own action figures. This Crafsman does exactly this and while the videos are extremely entertaining, they also bring forth a lot of easy to understand information. For example this video shows you how you can take a mold and either grow it to increase the size of the casting or shrink it to refine details. I knew my entire life that toy sculptors actually sculpted in a larger format and then shrunk the model down to make the details more tightly packed, but I never understood how that worked until watching this video. The dude reminds me a lot of my own wandering nonsense, because he seems to flit back and forth between a bunch of related disciplines, using whatever he needs in order to get the desired effect.
Speaking of nonsense and side projects, yesterday at some point I realized that I have been informally cataloging my journey since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV in screenshots of my character jobs. I was stuck on a very boring conference call yesterday and I opened up Google Sheets and started tabulating all of the times when I took a picture of the state of my jobs. Looking back through all of my blog posts since returning to the game the weekend of July 4th, I had eleven different data points… twelve including one I took this morning.
I created a spreadsheet with jobs across the top and dates running down and a snap shot of what level I was sitting at which which jobs at a given point. Trying to figure out a way to track growth, I decided to simply add all of these levels together into an aggregate total. It would be way too complicated to track a trendline for each of the jobs and I also lack enough fine granularity between samples to really make something that is reasonable.
When I take all of this data and chart it with a logarithmic axis, you end up with something like this showing the general trendline of my leveling since the first data point on 7/6/2021. Why the hell did I spend time doing this? I have no idea. I mean remember I was manually charting Covid-19 numbers as they were being released on a daily basis, so apparently there is a part of my brain that likes to see how things are progressing and be able to play with the data myself. This isn’t nearly as cool as crafting a figure from scratch and then casting dozens of copies of it… but it is still some of the nonsense that I get up to that is largely only useful to me.
To close out this mornings post, I ran into mister Pine Sternn for the third time last night. This is the first time I have used his name in a post, and is the guy that is willfully choosing to level a bunch of classes without ever turning them into jobs. It was a few minutes into the run when he recognized my name, I was waiting to see if he would remember me. I guess I have reached a point of peace with this aberration because it is something he is doing on purpose and not just because he doesn’t know better. He has a number of jobs, just more that have never finished the quests needed to get the job crystal. My theory is still that he has been no-lifing the Deep Dungeon systems and simply has not taken the time to pop out and do the job quests and at some point in the future these will all end up as their proper jobs. For the time being however it seems like he is making the most of his nonsense.
The thing is… just like Craftsman and my stupid charting of things no one cares about but me… leveling a bunch of classes without ever turning them into Jobs is absolutely related nonsense. Once I realized this… it made me realize that this is probably something that I would have tried. This is no less weird that my self imposed goal of trying to level everything to 80 before Endwalker, when there really is no actual NEED to do this. So I guess my advice is find whatever nonsense makes you happy and stick to it, because life is too short to worry about what appears to be normal.
