Sleepy Ramble

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Last night was one of those nights where I did not get much of anything accomplished. Starting around 8 pm I was ready to sleep… even though we managed to hold out until around 9 before actually doing that. Once I hit the pillow I was completely zonked for the night and didn’t wake up until the wee hours in the morning when my brains auto timer seemed to think I had slept enough. I was able to shrug this off however and go right back to sleep… and given the slightest opportunity as I sit here at the keyboard I feel like I could still successfully doze off again.

I feel like I might be starting to fight whatever crud has been going around through the office. Initially I think we all thought it was just allergies… because even folks who do not traditionally have problems elsewhere end up developing allergies here in Oklahoma. The oppressive heat has not helped either with recent days nearing 100 but with a heat index well 15 to 20 degrees higher than the actual temperature. We are finally starting to get a break from this over the last few days, but it is somewhat sad when you consider 85 degrees to be “cool”.

Last night I put some more levels on the Red Mage and even though I am absolutely convinced I am probably playing the class wrong… I am enjoying myself. It is funny how adding a sword to a finger wiggler instantly makes it more enjoyable for me? I remember back in the day one of my favorite party comps in the original Final Fantasy was Red Mage, Monk, Thief and Warrior. I mean it is not a suggested comp by any means but when I was grinding it allowed me to use as little magic as humanly possible. Magic made me go back to town to rest, and my goal was to stay out as long as humanly possible.

I am wondering if this first Final Fantasy game ultimately set my feelings about Magic users from that point out in future outings. My preference from that point forward has always seemingly been to include as few magic users as humanly possible in my parties. The classic comp would insist on a Black Mage and a White Mage, but I often times took a Red Mage just so I could use proper weapons. In Final Fantasy V I am super partial to the Mystic Knight because it is effectively a Warrior with elemental buffs. Side note… I kinda hope that eventually makes its way into Final Fantasy XIV as an eventual job.

As far as dreams went, I did have a super lucid dream where I apparently was visiting the Blizzard games campus in Anaheim and wound up taking some sort of an assessment. I have no clue why I was taking an assessment, because I thought I was visiting as a blogger. I don’t remember a lot of the questions on the assessment, but for whatever reasons various Devs were talking with me while I was sitting there filling it out. I quickly became aware that all they wanted to talk about were the more modern games like Overwatch, and really the only thing I was interested in talking about was Diablo or World of Warcraft.

There was a time when I felt like I more holistically cared about the output of Blizzard Entertainment, and now they really are just the Diablo and WoW company for me personally. I am passingly interested in a lot of the other things that they create, but they aren’t exactly how I want to spend my time. I feel like I got the whole online multiplayer shooter thing more or less out of my system during the 90s, and once MMORPGs existed I was more or less gone. While I dabbled with MOBAs it was also not really my jam.

I feel like during the 90s there are a whole bunch of games that I played more or less because online play was somewhat of a novelty. We were still enthralled by the fact that the internet existed, and if I could play a game with other people over this new fangled invention I was going to try it. Even then… I was way more into making maps and sharing “PUDs” with my friends than I was ever into actually playing Warcraft II. However I do remember some really happy times surrounding that game.

In college, towards the end of my stay there… the campus opened a state of the art 24/7 computer lab. There were many a night when several of us would go there to hang out on IRC, because there was something special about being both in the same room with someone and being online in a shared environment at the same time. Many times however we would wind up installing Warcraft II on eight computers and engaging in a massive 8 way battle. Why? Well because we could of course and because it was new and exciting.

Now online play is more or less expected… and as a result a lot of my hook for playing some of those other games went away. Anyways… today’s post has ended up being a massive ramble. I blame either getting too much sleep or not enough sleep. Here is hoping that I return tomorrow with something resembling a normal and proper post.

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.

Nerfed I guess

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Last night I could have done a bunch of things, but instead of doing something productive… I piddled around on alts. Timing and a last minute run to Walmart made me unavailable to run content for Thalen which bums me out a little bit. My focus was largely to get the Dragoon to 61 and capable of starting in on Heaven on High. I noticed that Main Scenario Roulette even had DPS as the bonus role, so I decided to roll the dice and give that a shot again. What I ultimately needed was just a little over half of a level to hit 61.

Since I talked about this yesterday, this time around I managed to pull Praetorium and even with adventurer in need bonus… I just managed to get slightly more than half of a level. I am thinking at some point they stealth nerfed how much experience this was giving out during the 5.01 patch making it significantly less rewarding. Maybe they saw the numbers that told them that people like me were using it to fix gaps in the MSQ while leveling in Shadowbringers and they wanted to nip that in the bud. Regardless it is still a viable way to bridge the gap but it now takes two days worth of runs instead of a single day.

I will likely keep doing this thing given it is a really low pressure way of getting across that chasm. Sadly I think I am out of level 60 characters apart from the Gunbreaker, and I am doubting that I want to tank Castrum/Praetorium on a class that I have barely played at all. I could in theory start up a Dancer and push it across to Heaven on High levels. More likely I will start mixing up HoH and PotD runs and pushing some of my 50s to 60s to start this process all over again. I have no clue at all why I am suddenly obessed with leveling all of the things, but I apparently am.

As far as Eden goes I still have not touched it. Right now I know Warenwolf and Thalen both will need it and we are tentatively making plans for Friday night pending on a bunch of variables. Today is effectively my Friday this week, as I am taking tomorrow off to deal with a bunch of errands that need to be taken care involving locations only open during the 8 to 5 window. So in theory I probably will have some time to push characters between those activities. We had an installer reschedule us for 8:30 in the morning so it is my hope that we have our afternoon completely free.

As far as Blaugusty things… we continue to pick up steam as we roll towards the official start in a little less than two weeks. Timing this thing is always a challenge because I don’t want to make the announcement too far ahead of the event that we lose steam before it has officially started. Last year I posted on I believe the second week of July which seemed maybe a bit too early. I effectively waited a week later and so far it seems to be providing enough of a reminder and catalyst to get people engaged.

So far we are up to 29 official sign-ups with still a few more who will likely be buzzer beaters that I know are planning on participating.

I will also likely keep providing a daily summary of links for latecomers to have a quick way of onboarding.