The New abNormal

Okay, I totally gotta grab a screenshot next time the weather is fine - - - last week, I got my wyvern pet in Final Fantasy. DAMN cute.

AND kicks ass.

I spent a little spare time while convelescing and levelled it to 10 in practically no time at all. But it's also just really cool having a pet in that game. Saved my butt more than a few times.

Over the past couple weeks we've been slowly unlocking some of the new things in the expansion pack of Aht Urghan - but I really haven't completed a lot, just a lot of running around and staring at all the newness.

The scope of this game constantly shocks and awes me. I had all but quit playing over a year and a half ago, thinking that it was just getting dull and boring, and in the last month or so, I've discovered that I'd only seen about 5% or LESS of what's out there. There are a series of quests that take you deep into the crags that merely exist - or so I thought - as teleporting points around the world. Whole chapters of adventure that exist along a central plot of the game itself.

It turns out that it's not JUST a "level your character" game. Sure, that's what eats up most of the time in the game, BUT it's merely a means to an end.

Whenever I play the regular non-online versions of FF, I follow the plot and only fun amok, devouring the landscape and killing hordes of beasties when it's obvious I can't take out the level boss. I level up and go back, wipe him/her out and move on.

Then, before the final boss, I run around, catch up on all the quests I missed, and hit the endgame when I've maxed the character out. I did that once in FF10, and killed the bad guy so quickly it was actually anticlimactic.

But this game - - - well, its turning out that there is FAR MORE plot out there than I'd realized. I've started really enjoying the various little sub-missions and side quests, and really come to see that the Vana Diel world is pretty richly developed.

And there are little touches - the details that make the overall experience very enjoyable. I ran about the other day with Max (my baby dragon) and went hunting, just kind of building experience and collecting stuff to sell, that sort of thing... and sat down to heal up between fights - and Max laid down and curled up nearby - occasionally poking his head up to watch for anything that might get too close to us. Then he'd preen a bit and curl back up.

Okay, yes. I know it was designed that way as a "hold action" for the character, but honestly, it was just a cool little visual.

It impresses me that people still make things - even video games - with such care for the details. I've said this before, but I truly believe video games are fast taking the place of contemporary entertainment.

God knows I get sick of watching movies where people do the illogical, utter the incoherent, respond as inane examples of humanity. I get tired of watching movies about people making stupid choices.

But that's another blog for another day. :)


Meanwhile - - - its' wednesday! Cheeznight!!! w00t!

the truly sad thing about final fantasy is that I started playing back in May.

Of 2004.


Ye gods.


Anyway, the new release comes out today, so I pick up my copy and do the whole fun install two-step. I have this recurring mental image of a thousand characters crowding around inside the town of Mhaura, waiting for a new ferry to pull into port to allow them to be the first characters inside a whole new area of the game.

Characters doing the "/clap" emote as the ferry pulls in...

and all of them pushing through each other's 'collision' surfaces in order to be the first one on the new ferry....

like it's a general admission rock concert or something.

Makes me wanna ride out there just to watch the spectacle.


oh, cheezes? What's the plan for tonight? Where are we going?

I don't suppose it says a lot for me that I only really post these LJ entries on wednesdays, which, in my vernacular, has become known simply as "Cheeznight."

But screw it.

Seriously, after the events of the past week, I have really been looking forward to tonight.

I can't really go into a lot of detail about what's up, mostly because I've had to request that my company's HR get involved - suffice it to say that a co-employee of my company has said a highly unthinkable accusation against me - and has told other co-workers.

And we're not talking about nosepicking or that I farted once when I thought no one was listening.

Anyway, it's pretty horrific. People, on the one hand, really suck.

At the same time, I've come face to face with some of the most amazingly supportive co-workers, so I still like my job, in spite of the nightmare.

And my wife has been AMAZING. I feel terrible for the rest of you cos you can't have her.


I also spoke out against a Fred Meyer which is trying to be built on the corner of my street, in a county council meeting. That was pretty exciting. My first formal political debate since high school. It kind of sucked, but considering I had about 5 minutes notice, I'm not terribly disappointed.

That helped charge me up, too, helped break me from my funk.

Also, got a new icon here - - I took this screenshot the other evening in Final Fantasy. The picture doesn't do the moment justice, though. It was the aurora borealis, from horizon to horizon. For a moment, I forgot the lumbering sea monster which idled ignorantly a few yards from my character and the trio of Bogys which patrolled above me.

For a moment, it was just my little Taru mage, the crashing surf, and brilliant flowing ribbons in the stars.

Sometimes, you gotta love the little things.

yikes. I put some deep religious/philosophy mumbo jumbo over in my reverb blog, and it pretty much shut me up for the past few days...




Anyway... it's Cheez night!! Yippee!!!

*bouncy bouncy bouncy*

Come, fellow cheezes, let us frolic!

- - - oh, and don't forget to bring an instant warp scroll for a death-free return to safety... :)

okay, honestly, last night was a lot of fun!

We headed DEEP into the jungles of Khazam, and we even made a new friend!

During the course of the night, every cheez (and our new honorary cheez) leveled. I even leveled twice, I'm now at (cue dramatic Final Fantasy victory music)

LEVEL THIRTY!!!!

This means I can start questing for the advanced sub jobs. We've got maybe one or two weeks til we're all there, and then we can all go - I'm not gonna do it til we go as a group.

But also, a really cool thing that happened last night was that we found a couple folks who'd been killed trying to flee stuff. So I raised them both, healed them, cast a protection spell on them, and, when their party leader offered to pay me, I waved him off. "No charge".

some folks actually do charge for stuff like that, but, honestly, I was raised so many times when I first started out - - I guess I just can't see doing that.

So I'm on my way back, and I caught up with the rest of their team, and I guess their party leader told them I didn't charge - cos they all applauded me as I ran past.

THAT was very cool.

ouch. Have I mentioned how the Jungle of Khazam just HATES me?

We met with much Death last night. Maybe we just weren't in our game, maybe we just had a lot of bad luck. Goblins kept popping up right behind me as I rested, and, in the end, everyone died at least once.

Poor Gorgonzola! He died 4 or 5 times. One death, in particular, was a truly noble death. He died in the violent clutches of a rabid Goblin Smithy in order to buy the rest of us time to catch our breath and take the bugger out. If he hadn't, the thing would have laid waste to us all.

We made some headway towards the magic number 30, but we also all took small hits in our XP pools.

*sigh*

The trouble with being a healer is that you always blame yourself when people die. Very sad.

Okay, so I missed a week - - Disneyfied and all that - - but now the Whiz is back, and ready for some good old fashioned Cheeztime!

We're all coming up closer and closer to level 30, and you know what THAT means.... you don't? Oh. It means we can start hunting for those ever-elusive Advanced Jobs - -Samurai, Summoner, Bard, Ranger, Ninja, Dark Knight, Beastmaster.... did I forget any? It's been so long...

Plus, the new upgrade comes out in one month - Aht Urghan or something like that. With Blue Mage, Corsair and Puppetmaster.

Just in time.

I wonder if a new manual will be coming out with that? I hope so, I've fallen behind on a lot of the stuff in the game over the past two years.

!!!

Two years. Crikey.

That does it. Some gobs need to perish. We got some leveling to do, fellow cheezes!

yay for cheezes!

y'know, as a side note, I'm not posting as much here as I used to. Have I mentioned www.reverb1.com? Well, that's where you'll find all those wordy epistles I still write. It's kind of more of a suitable environment there. Just an FYI. It's not that I've forgotten about you all.

But for cheeziness? Me and Gorg need our keys to one leg of a quest that will give us access to an airship which will take us to my most hated island in the entire world.

Honestly, my old character used to die there just trying to change maps. The CHANGING OF MAPS KILLED HIM. Oh, sure, I can't wait to go back, but HONESTLY. DEATH is there. It is Death Island.

I can't wait. Khazam, here come the cheezes!

yay! Cheez night is upon us again!

Thrill! Joy! Merriment!

What's on tap for tonight, fellows? Comrades? Cohorts?

I'll be on tonight, fellow cheezes. I need to kill monsters. Many monsters.

Tonight, I'd just like to wrap vana d'iel around me like a blanket.

Last night was fun! Our little cheez group tooled around for a while, I got some fishing done (loaded up about 3 stacks of moat carp in the auction house, even though I went through 3 fishing poles in the process), and we ran out to the Dunes to get my big guy Kalidus the items for the support job quest. He'd been sitting out there for like a month, off and on, with no one throwing out party invites. It really sucks to be a big brute. No one wants you.

I'm thinking I'll take Kalidus to Beastmaster or Samurai when/if he ever gets that high. Poor guy, he's just misunderstood. Forced to take the loner's path through no fault of his own.

I think I mentioned closing out all my stuff on a different server - well, I re-made Heuwii (my most invested character on the other server) over on my new server. I really wish, by the way, that SquareEnix would support Server Migration, it sucks to spend that much time on a character and then have to just toss it away.

But it's been fun developing the character again. I've learned a lot about how to play the game that I didn't know the first time - like, making money, for one thing. I'd been really happy to peak 150k in money before. Now, I've got 3 active characters, all of which have more than 100k. Heuwii is coming up on 250k, and I've only been playing him for about 2 months - and far less often than I played last year. Plus, the other nice side effect of not playing like I used to is that I've now played for as many months as I did before, but I'm still REALLY enjoying it. this time last year, I was pretty bored with it. But playing only once or twice a week, and only for a few hours at that... well, I've got plenty to do in the game, and there' plenty of fun left to be had.

Plus, I'm a huge fan of my fellow Cheezes. They are what's really made the game so relaxing and fun.

And tremendous thankyous to my lovey and the Bean for letting me having my weekly cheeznights, too :)

To all my fellow cheezes, this one's for you!

 

May all your wishes come true!

Is that really a question?

Well, chili is out of town over the next couple weeks, so I wonder what's gonna happen. I got my lovey loaded up with the upgrades, so once she gets her account reactivated, we can get her a character too!! Squeeee!

So, Cream and Gorgonzola? What's the skinny?

Oh yeah baby!

LethalCheez is in da hauz!

I'm really ready for some mayhem. And no work tomorrow. So tonight shall be fun.

Cheezes?? Are we ready?????

 

Well, fun was definitely had in cheezland last night... but with a cost. Without going into the details of the drama - cos I don't feel like it's my place - one of the cheezes appears to have lost interest in playing in our group. I don't really know the whole story anyway, I'm told he was having issues even before I joined the group, but last night he just didn't want to come with us. To be honest, I just never got to know him. He's on the game a lot, I see his other character on the server every time I log in - but he and I have never really talked.

I confess I did take issue with his playing style, but thats' all I really knew about him. He tended to jump into fights constantly, even though his character's primary responsibility is a healer. So the first few games, folks were dying every week. He took a couple of weeks off, so I changed my character to healer and we went from there. So I keep thinking he was just feeling like he'd been replaced. I also know I made a couple of snarky comments, but mostly because he kept making comments to the group about not feeling like playing or being angry cos we'd kept playing the weeks he didn't make the games and now he had to catch up. To this day, I don't accept his complaints. The guy is on ALL THE TIME, and if he really was worried about catching up, he'd have taken an hour or two to do so on one of the days we weren't having our cheezy fun.

So this has gone on, off and on, for the past couple months, and finally last night, while a couple of us were collecting stuff and getting ready (we were a few minutes early), he comes on and starts complaining "this is what I hate, this is why I end up falling asleep, cos some people can't get here on time"

I mentioned we were actually early, but he ignored me. So we did start a bit late, a couple of our folks have new jobs that commute them longer than before, but it's all good. So we party up and get ready to leave, and he makes a comment about how one of our peeps has 3 levels on him. [note: after 3 levels of differential between characters in a party, the exp starts to drop - it's pretty negligible, but after about 4 or 5 levels it drops off more dramatically], and drops. Just like that. Like as we're stepping out to go fight. And he immediately jumped into another party, which, granted, isn't hard to do where we were at, but it kind of felt like he had another group waiting.

The kicker was that, about halfway into our fun, we start getting "misstypes" on our group chat - comments about us he was apparently saying to his party. Like "it's my xp thats going to be screwed" and stuff like that. And a couple rude comments, overall.

Honestly, I was pissed. My friends who were on this linkshell with him before I came on have always defended him and his comments in the past, and it seems REALLY harsh to them for him to keep putting them in the position of defending him, and THEN to just quit anyway.

I just don't care for the drama. It's stupid, it's pointless, and it's wholly counterproductive. It's a game, you know? You go and play with your friends, you have fun, that's it.

You know, *I say this with a smile on my face* when you get a little mold on the cheez, you scrape off the mold, but you keep the cheez.

 

Cheez night was fun - I think we all leveled in the wilds of Qufim, though we had a spot of trouble when a Banshee (read: a horrible nightmare beasty) appeared right over my head while we were healing up between fights.

But Gorgonzola threw himself heroically between us and the beastie, offering up his wee life to save ours.

Damn noble guy.

After that mishap, we decided that one bit of bad luck was enough for the night, and we went back to our mog houses.

but some of us weren't done with the world. So we swapped out to different characters and swept the land for smaller beasties. Honestly, we just ran in a zig-zaggy course across the plains of sarutabaruta and killed EVERYTHING THAT MOVED.

The only real moral I could come up with was that sometimes in life, you struggle against what appear to be impossible odds... and then you take a step back and deal with the smaller problems you know how to fix, and it gives you a fresher enthusiasm for the larger ones.

Just cos I don't want you to think that my video game playing is totally without merit. :)

yay cheeznight!

I don't know how dramatic tonight will be - though I plan on helping Themessiah work on his "And on the 3rd Day" special attack a bit more. Prolly, what, just fighting little monsters in Qufim?

I wonder what the mascot for the Qufim high school would be? Just a random thought. Anyway! Cheez on!

Someday I will be a mighty warrior. Ph34r t3h t4ru!

Ah, the duchy of Jeuno. Where valiant heroes and ruthless mercenaries congregate from all over the known - and unknown - world to launch their grand quests for glory. Where hundreds of the famous and not-yets pass one another, give somber salutes and hope neither will have to later call for a [raise]. A place where may be found the threads of adventure. Of riches untold. Of artifacts arcane and of magic beyond time.

And can I just say.... LAG?

Crikey, no matter how little time you spend away from that place, you forget how damn slow everything is. Even the typing is just riddled with typos by the time it finally aaaappppppaaapapppeearrssss on the scffgdrreeeeeennn...

Ugh.

Well, anyway, we were outta that place as soon as we could be. On to the frozen lands of the hidden island of Qufim. Poor, sadly named Qufim. I still haven't figured out what that word sounds like it wants to mean. Something naughty, I'd wager.

Anyway, we needed a bit to get into our groove, but eventually found it. And about that time, some yahoo went fishing near us and dredged up one of the nightmares of the deep - a tremendous octopian beast humorously named a "Sea Bishop". Now, I've been filleted by a Sea Monk in the past, so I'm inclined to believe this chap won't be any more friendly. So we skedaddled. We fought a bit more, felt good about ourselves and then made the brief run back to Jeuno and uberlagness. Poor themessiah decided to test the new skill I shall dub "And on the third day" in his honor. It worked pretty well from what I could see. It basically boiled down to getting gakked by about 500 monsters and waking up at home. Sure cuts down on the commute time.

Me and Gorgonzola, bereft of such abilities, doused ourselves in sparkly prism powder and ran back under the noses of some nasties with them left none the wiser.

We rock our socks off, I tell you.

I even had time to take some pictures, one of which I'm using now as an icon. I think it shows off my nobler qualities. Even, yes, as a taru. I know you were thinking it.

cheez day came fast this week, I had to remind myself it was wednesday!

Currently, Whiz is out in Jeuno, so I'm gonna have to grab a ride back to Windy, unless we have specific otherly plans...

Also, a HUGE shoutout to blackspiral66  who sent me the most yummylicious set of mashups EVAR. It has one of my faves (and which I couldn't find ANYWHERE), a mash of "Sexy MF" by Prince with "Are you gonna be my girl?" by Jet.

I've found some good music editing software, so it means I might start being able to whip up some of my own. Also, I've started reading up on making animated icons, so I might start some of that too.

Ah, the joy of rebooting my creativity circuits!