Mixtape Mondays: Aether Consumed Prayers Answered

Good Morning Friends! It is time for another Mixtape Monday, and I am going to take a moment to sorta slide into this discussion. It is Blaugust and we are supposed to be giving some sage advice or some such as mentors. This friend is what you would call a series and it gives me some structure when it comes to planning around my blog. I know that in theory every Monday, which is one of the harder days to be motivated and post something is taken up by a fixed construct that I can count on. This also gives me the ability to plan ahead, knowing that each Monday I am going to need a Mixtape to write about. As such I tend to have these super productive days when I crank out a half dozen or so tapes and then keep them in the bank for when I need another Monday post.

The double-edged sword of having a series is that you are more or less expected to keep it going. While you have a predictable slot in your blog schedule, it also means that you have to more or less produce on a pattern. I have been super bad at actually keeping series going throughout the course of this blog, and so many of these have been abandoned by the wayside. For example, probably no one actually remembers Easing Into Eorzea, Media Consumption, Steampowered Sunday, or Storytime Saturdays but they were absolutely series that I attempted to make a thing and now looking back had a shocking number of posts under each of them. They are failed series because I didn’t plan ahead enough or work on trying to create a backlog of content to post under each of those categories. Essentially my advice to you is if you plan on doing a series, treat it as something that you are going to create content for ahead of time so that you can meet those weekly drops.

Aether Consumed Prayers Answered

It is shocking to no one who has read this blog for more than a few posts recently that I am back playing an awful lot of Final Fantasy XIV. The game itself is great, but one of the things that have always stood out is the music. I realize there are a number of you that do not listen to in-game soundtracks, and I would say at least for Final Fantasy XIV it is a critical flaw in your logic. This game spends so much effort devoted to making sure that the music is great and synchronizes down to the frame with animates. One of the places this is most clearly evidenced is the Primal fights and something like Titan for Leviathan would not be the same experience without the soundtrack and the changes that are made during the source of the fight. This morning I share with you some of my favorite big fight tracks, while not all are from Primal encounters they represent the vast majority. Unfortunately this means that the YouTube version of this playlist is going to be super spoilery and I will give it a very special warning below.

Track List

  • Fallen Angel – Masayoshi Soken
  • Spiral – Masayoshi Soken
  • Rise – Masayoshi Soken
  • Battle on the Big Bridge – Nobuo Uematsu
  • Amatsu Kaze – Masayoshi Soken
  • Unbreakable (Duality) – Masayoshi Soken
  • Under the Weight – Masayoshi Soken
  • Through the Maelstrom – Masayoshi Soken
  • Metal – Brute Justice Mode – Masayoshi Soken
  • Oblivion – Masayoshi Soken
  • Birds of Prey – Masayoshi Soken
  • Wayward Daughter – Masayoshi Soken
  • Unbending Steel – Masayoshi Soken

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Normally I embed the YouTube Playlist here, but I feel like I need to give some very special warning with this one. Unlike is normally the case, the vast majority of these videos are actually fighting spoilers and show players fighting along to the primal encounter itself. This means watching the videos could spoil not only fight mechanics but significant story beats. Please watch at your own peril and I realize this is frustrating given that up until this point I have tried to give both Spotify and YouTube equal treatment. So I will link to the playlist, but if you have not experienced these fights then I highly suggest minimizing it and letting it play in the background without actually watching the fights themselves.

Well folks that were the Fourteenth mixtape in this series, and as a result, it is clearly aligned to being music from Final Fantasy XIV. I am going, to be honest, this is entirely a happy synergy that I did not plan in the least. I have been playing a lot of the games and loving the music, and this sorta happened spontaneously. Again if you are not listening to the music while you play this game, you really should remedy that. As always if you are so inclined, you can listen to the entire Mixtape Mondays Archive:

Happy First of Blaugust 2021

Hey Friends! Happy Blaugust! I feel like since I am the instigator of this nonsense I am obligated to make a day one post, even though this year it lands on a Sunday when I am already making a Podcast post. For those who are completely oblivious to this thing called Blaugust, you should check out the 2021 kick-off information post here. If you just want a high-level overview, since August of 2014 I have been running an event where I challenge folks to write 31 posts during the month of August. This has morphed and changed slightly over the years, but essentially the core of the initiative is to spur active blogging in the community. Even if you don’t want to post every day, it is a time to dust off that blog and be more active in the blogosphere.

The Participants

It is by no means too late to sign up, and you can do so through the official sign-up form here. Currently, at the time of writing this, there are thirty-eight folks who have signed up to participate in this nonsense. I would greatly appreciate you going out there and show these blogs some love.

The Information

If you want to participate, it is pretty simple. Either start a new blog or dust off an old blog and start writing. Sign up using the official sign-up link just to make sure you are going to get credit. Tag your posts with #Blaugust2021 just to make it a bit easier to track them for participants. Join the Discord so that you can mingle with your fellow Blaugustans and chat about “bloggery” things. Finally, get out there and comment on other blogs as you hopefully collect enough inspiration to keep going for all thirty-one days of the initiative. If you want images or information, it is all collected on the Blaugust Media Kit page. If you work better with bullet point lists, I have you covered as well.

As always if you have any questions feel free to reach out here or on the discord. Happy Blaugust and welcome to this initiative!

AggroChat #353 – Games We Forgot About

Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we had the whole gang back and start the show talking about how Bel was apparently replaced by a totally different person as he both healed a few dungeons and ran raid content in FFXIV as a mage class.  From there we talk a bit about Blaugust which is starting the day this show releases.  The rest of the show is sort of a rapid-fire remembering of games that had dropped off our radar over the years or that we just plain forgot about.  We talk about MMORPGs gone by, games that had DLC releases, or just games that we started but never actually got back around to playing.  We dive a bit into Genshin Impact and the most recent content release as well as apparently the ability to play your pc/mobile account on the PlayStation 5.  Lastly we finish the show with a discussion of Ghostrunner, a movement puzzle platformer game featuring a deep cyberpunk aesthetic.

Topics Discussed

  • Bel Heals and Does Castery Things in FFXIV
  • Blaugust 2021 is Here
  • Great Games that dropped off our radar
    • Games we forgot about
    • Games we have returned to
    • Games that got good when we weren’t looking
  • Genshin Impact
  • Ghostrunner

Mixtape Mondays: Tides of War

Good Morning Friends! I hope that you had a sincerely good weekend and that it was restful in the right ways. It is the start of a brand new week and I hope it is a most excellent one. Later this week Blaugust 2021 officially begins and I am looking forward to seeing all of the participants posting away. For those of you readers who might be finding my blog for the very first time welcome. Mixtape Mondays is a series that I have been doing each Monday for a few months now. As a kid, I loved making Mixtapes for my friends and now that I don’t really use physical media I was missing that experience. After getting heavily into Spotify, I realized just how well the Mixtape format translates, and as a result each Monday I post a new mix with new album art.

Tides of War

I think every generation goes through a period of time where they heavily engage with the music of their forebearers. For me, that time was late middle school and early high school and I am not entirely certain what triggered it. I do know that in 1990 when the massive Led Zeppelin Boxed Set was released I was already bought in and fully engaged. My personal musical explorations were largely contained to the genre then termed “Classic Rock”. It does make me wonder if that moniker is a sliding scale that changes meaning as the music ages. Does that mean that Nirvanna is now considered to be “Classic Rock”? Regardless this is also music that I deeply associate with Vietnam and post Vietnam era thanks to Hollywood choosing to populate the soundtracks of these films with large swaths of these songs. It has become a cliche that if you want to set a war film in the 70s, it needs to include the song “Fortunate Son”. The thing is I get it because that track is an absolute banger.

Track List

  • Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin
  • Paranoid – Black Sabbath
  • Dream On – Aerosmith
  • Sympathy for the Devil – The Rolling Stones
  • Behind Blue Eyes – The Who
  • Limelight – Rush
  • Radar Love – Golden Earring
  • People are Strange – The Doors
  • White Room – Cream
  • Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • You Really Got Me – The Kinks
  • Revolution – The Beatles
  • Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Bob Dylan
  • All Along the Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix
  • Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

Well, friends that brings to a close Mixtape number thirteen in the series. As always I would love to hear your thoughts below. If you are tuning in late to the entire series you can find the archive page linked below. I hope you have a most excellent week and if you are so inclined, check out the information about Blaugust 2021 and maybe sign up.