Blog Features

A Drought of Silverware

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One of the things that I have learned about myself is the more responsibility that I gain in the workplace, the less I want any at all in the gaming space. Yesterday morning I was completely gung-ho about getting in and doing some Eden on reset day. I even went so far as to make plans with some friends to try and make this thing happen. However by the time I got off work, I was in a completely different mindset and just could not handle any sort of serious activity.

There are days like yesterday when I leave the work environment completely emotionally and physically drained. A few years back we took the DISC assessment, and I remember being warned by the person going over the results with me that I was operating in the work environment well beyond the bounds of my comfort level. If I remember correctly there was 30 point swing in several of the indicators between my natural and adjusted or “work” states.

I feel like I sorta operate in this weird place as a sociable introvert. I can pretend to be extroverted really well, but it has a pretty significant cost and last night more or less was an example of this. I logged into Final Fantasy XIV but I didn’t really pay attention to chat at all and just spent my time quietly grinding away at Palace of the Dead. I think this is why I have enjoyed the Deep Dungeon systems so much is that it feels like I am doing group activity, but really I am largely just soloing with very limited consequences.

My hope is that as the week goes on I will get the “oomph” required to be a responsible adult and do my tankly duties. I really do want to get some more gear and collect another one of the doodads that will eventually turn into a shiny new axe. What I ultimately did however was head to bed around 9ish do my dailies in Dragalia Lost and play some Final Fantasy V for awhile on the tablet. I’ve played the game for Four Job Fiesta a few times, but never actually played it legitimately the way I would want to play it.

As far as Blaugust news goes, we are continuing to have a handful of sign-ups trickling in. However we are starting to get down to the wire. Next week is the official beginning of the event and I feel like there are a bunch of people that have yet to actually go through the process of signing up. The discord is active once again, but I have not had that much time to check it during the day. Unfortunately when I get home at night I tend to enter a space where I seemingly go blind to social media. I am however catching up on what is happening as often as I can.

As far as participants go, Chestnut is working on another twitter list pulled from the spreadsheet. Basically the information is copied and pasted from the sign up form verbatim, so if there are errors with the way you are showing up in the list that likely means I need to correct how your site was signed up initially. I’ve been trying to triage issues as they arise, but I generally don’t go back and update the previous lists. With that note… here is the most current list of participants to date.

Once again repeating the common links that folks catching up now might find useful.

This weekend I plan on starting some brainstorming about topics that I would find helpful were I just getting started out in this madness. If you have at all considered doing this thing, then please by all means sign up and be counted! Once again I will throw out the disclaimer that the email address being collected from signing up on the form is going no further than that initial spreadsheet. It is only there if for some reason I need to contact you regarding Blaugust. In the past we have had sponsors pop up and give prizes and largely I have used email addresses to contact folks directly for these purposes only.

Passport to the Crags

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This past weekend was a weird mix of extremely busy periods and extremely languid gaming stretches. On Friday itself we went through a whirlwind of activity where we got a ceiling fan installed in the bedroom, went and got copies of our birth certificates, found a place to do passport photos on zero notice and managed to talk an appointment only passport application location to see us as a walk in because they were thankfully not busy. However the whirlwind of activity meant that I will not have to take a day off work in the future to try and wrap things up. I personally found the whole process of applying for a passport to be exceptionally stressful given that neither of us have had one before.

Saturday I managed to get in on a run clearing Eden with nearly a full free company group, and I joined while downstairs which means I was not on voice chat. That is probably not something I will repeat again because I more or less felt lost the entire time. However I managed through it enough to finish… with Meca-Titan and Hydra-Leviathan being the hardest fights to adjust to. I do think it is sorta badass that we are seemingly on a path to repeat much nastier versions of all of the Primals we fought before. I also think I will be trying to get in on a guild group on the night this opens from now on, rather than waiting as late in the week as I did.

My main project for the weekend was getting the Dragoon leveled to 71 so that I could start doing Trust content with it. It is weird the way I think of the various jobs as though they are different characters, even though technically it is all the same Lala Bel each time. Through all of the running of content I managed to collect enough poetics to deck the Dragoon out in most of a full set of Scaevan gear, and the pieces that I didn’t pick up on the right side of the gear screen were augmented by items picked up in the first Trust dungeon.

Another side note is that I managed to pick up another full set of barding, this time the Expanse barding originally from Bismarck. I actually managed to pick up two full sets of it, and the second of which I gave to Ashgar who happened to be standing there at Heaven on High as well. I mean I could sell stuff on the market place but would ultimately rather find most of it a home amongst my friends. Some of the things that are dropping in the dungeon have to have wreaked havoc on the prices as all of the Thavnarian gear seems to drop there as well. It is a nice bonus incentive for leveling in this fashion however to pick up previously hard to get items.

I should have in theory taken the Dragoon as a win for the weekend… but instead I started pushing up the Red Mage in Palace of the Dead. It is weird going from Heaven on High bad to PotD, because it is very clear that they learned several lessons between the two designs. PotD seems actually a much harder dungeon experience than HoH, and I actually managed to wipe out completely on the third floor of a run last night. In part this is due to a bunch of tanks starting to try pulling everything to the portal and waiting for folks to burn it all down… which sorta works at times in HoH but does not work at all in PotD. It is still a much better leveling experience for dps than pretty much anything else available in the game. Largely I like the fact that I do not need to give a shit about gear in the least, and I get to run dungeons while listening to random tracks from the amazing FFXIV musical back catalog.

It was a good if not busy weekend, but we got a lot accomplished in the real world as well as me ticking a bunch of boxes in the virtual world. On the Blaugust front people continue to trickle in and we are up to I believe as to the time of writing this 34 entrants. There was apparently a problem with some of the links on the previous list. They came directly from the sign-up sheet and a handful were missing the scheme part of URI… aka the https:// bit. This should be updated and the new list of folks looks a little something like this.

Once again a reminder that you still have plenty of time to sign up and participate in this years running of Blaugust. Here again is the summary of links with pertinent information related to that.

of Serialized Content

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No one really wants to see another post about my leveling the Dragoon in Heaven on High. Admittedly I find the Deep Dungeon systems to be some of the more relaxing gaming in Final Fantasy XIV as it allows me to chill out in a rogue-like setting while listening to the amazing soundtrack. Instead this morning we are going to talk about some event related stuff. Blaugust has always been a blogging thing, but I am wondering if I should have changed the branding this year. Over the years I have attempted to make this a more relate-able process given that maybe writing big chunks of text is not really your thing.

Sure it is my hope it keep text based media alive and well for the foreseeable future, but I realize that while I bemoan the lack of written guides that have been replaced by video guides… YouTube can be a much more tactile format for interacting with your fans. Similarly while I am not the type to hang out on Twitch, Mixer or your streaming platform of choice… for some folks that is absolutely a community that they feel extremely welcome in. In the end what is really important is the serialized content aspect of this upcoming month. The concept of picking a thing that brings you joy and doing it over and over for an entire month until you reach a point where it feels unnatural to not do the thing.

After doing this daily blogging thing for years, it feels extremely awkward when I decide that I am too busy or otherwise engaged and cannot make a post. My morning posts are a long extended albeit mostly one sided dialog that I am having with you my readers. I think there is something deeply therapeutic about sharing your thoughts openly with the world in an uninterrupted manner. There was a time when the default method of long range conversation was to sit down and write a letter, that then could be read and re-read to digest its meaning. On some level I view my blog as me sharing a long extended open letter with you all.

However if traditional blogging is not your thing there are a lot of other methods for serialized content that could also be equally engaging with your readers/viewers. This morning I am going to throw a few ideas out there.

  • A Tumblr where you share a sketch every day and maybe post a few lines about your inspiration for it.
  • Stealing this directly from Grace, an project blog where you commit to working on something fairly daunting in scope and take us along for the journey as you post progress shots. This would be truly awesome for cosplay folks especially as you could see how the costumes are put together.
  • A nightly twitch stream where you treat it as though it were a talk show and either cover topics that you want to talk about or invite friends on to have discussions.
  • A micro-podcast where you release rapid-fire five to ten minute clips about something that happened that day or something that was on your mind.
  • Posting a recipe a day to social media and talking a little bit about the end product.
  • While still a blog, just talking about your media viewing habits… what you are enjoying watching and what hasn’t sat that well with you.
  • Posting a photo every day to Instagram visually illustrating your travels or the day to day flow of your life. Each time throwing a few words along with the photo to help us understand what is going on.
  • Releasing a song or a snippet of a song to SoundCloud every day and maybe talking a little bit about your inspirations behind it.

Basically all of those things are completely valid ways to approach Blaugust along with hundreds more that I am not even thinking about yet. I give you the freedom to take this concept and run with it and remake Blaugust in your own image. While yes I like the revitalization effect of this thing that I do, I think it is more important that it be treated as an event focused on self expression and the serialized nature of doing a thing multiple times during a single month. Get creative and impress us all by doing a thing that we never would have thought of.

While I decided to do this thing several years ago… it is now as much yours as it is mine.

Killer Riffs

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Every so often I get something stuck in my head and am forced to push forward with it. This week it has been leveling more characters to 71, and the present fervor has largely been focused on the Bard. I spent an excessive amount of time in Heaven on High either solo or with some FC friends, and managed to finish off the ascent to 70 last night. I’ve been going around since then unlocking the various spells for the quests that I completely ignored during the process of leveling. This is a weird place to be in because the game will even let you drag an ability to the hotbar… but you can’t use the spell until you have completed the quest.

The other thing I have been doing an awful lot of is Main Scenario Roulette, which effectively is always going to be either Praetorium or Castrum Meridianum… aka the last two raid like dungeons required as part of the ARR main story quest. In both cases they have now disabled the ability to skip any cut scenes, which means you will be surrendering 30 minutes of your life. However this proposition becomes well worth it when you consider that doing this scenario at level 70 will pretty much make you instantly level 71. Even at level 79 when I completed this while working through a gap in experience to the next level… it was worth almost 75% of a level.

One of the things that Final Fantasy XIV is excessively good at is incentivizing content that no one wants to run. These were painful at level and continued to be a painful process to get through as a fledgling player who was trying to random queue for them. Now they become an experience in watching how players have figured out how to optimize the process to take the least possible amount of time in doing so. Sure the player gets to watch every single cutscene, but they also will get lost in a heartbeat if they are unable to keep up with the optimized routing through the place.

I did some experimentation and they are absolutely not chain running, as I maybe got 10% of a bar filled when I was not getting the Roulette bonus. This has become a ritual for me pretty much every night to get one free level on one of my alts and then go on about my business. I am absolutely now using this as a way of jumping across the gap at 60 or 70 to fix those missing runs on the latter that I talked about the other day. In truth I really liked both Praetorium and Castrum Meridianum because they felt extremely epic when we ran them with a full party of 8 players. Now it feels sorta like going back and soloing Molten Core.

Blaugust Stuff

As far as Blaugust goes… the sign-ups are starting to trickle in and I have been transferring them from the private sheet over to a more public listing. Additionally if you read this post early in the morning you may have missed that I added a Media Kit page that was requested. As time allows I will be moving some more of the event information over to that page so that it is kept in one spot. Additionally I want to go back and stub in data about the previous runnings of the event.