Time Spent in Eorzea

30 Oct, 2024

I Found myself actually playing games again. It feels weird to say "I took a 6 week break, and that felt like forever," but considering I would be playing like 1 of 3 mmos daily for hours during the weird COVID jobless depression episode I've found myself in for the last 4 years? It's kind of a long time. But, it was a needed break. I can't really raid anymore. I know that if I'm going to be successful in finding work again, I can't just have an awful sleep schedule where I make my life revolve around games. It wasn't healthy, and I wasn't exactly a pleasant person to be around while chasing down numbers on a website that ultimately means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Still, returning to FFXIV was a breath of fresh air. I played Pictomancer and got some of that started, because at the very least, I think I should hit 100 & finish my usual rounds of quests & fates that I do for each expac. If I can get the current Savage tier done with friends for the sake of getting the mount, it'd be cool, but I'm in no real rush. Besides it'd have to be at their convenience and when times align, and who knows when that will be considering Ultimate is coming out soon. I honestly wish I could raid the newest Ultimate. I am one of those people who's super glad they skipped Stormblood MSQ Ult because I just don't think it'd be much of a fight. Oh well. Maybe one day I can do it. Hopefully the weapons are nice, maybe even enough to make me want to Pf. But, considering how things have gone the last time I did ultimate, I'm just not looking forward to the group finder aspect.

TL;DR on that: While trying to do what should have been one of the easiest Ultimates (Bahamut) turned out to be way harder due to the people we were with just not having the right mindsets for Ultimate raiding. It's not that they're bad people, but good company doesn't necessarily mean good raid partners, especially when people want to have involved conversations at all points of prog when they should be focusing. It made me second guess whether I had the right to say I was good at raiding at all in the first place, considering the points we were walled at were seen as simple by most others. I literally still cannot believe Bahamut gave me an existential breakdown, LMAO.

Oh well, I'm kind of glad I'm not allowing myself to resub (As I am barely using the free 4 days,) until the next patch is about to come out. I probably wont stay subbed very long if I do. Maybe I'll see if people want to do christmas TEA for a meme again. A few more totems should be pretty fun to get.

Other than that, I found myself also attempting to be active during Mabi's Halloween event solely for the Homestead items. I did get some weird messages from people asking me about why I was active and didn't rejoin a guild we were in that required activity, but like... To be honest, It wasn't that i disliked people in particular, but I also didn't vibe with the constant desire that some people who played really wanted people who played more than 1 game to be active only on Mabi. And considering people were so nice to me, I didn't have the heart to tell them "Yes, I appreciate you and still want to talk to you, but I dont think it's very kind of you to ask people to quit other games solely because you 'don't like that game.'" Then again, Mabi's remaining userbase always has had an issue with FFXIV players. Considering the fact that during chp7 it took Nexon so long to get the ball rolling with the last part of the story and what not & Stormblood was about to come out and looking really good, there was this big mass exodus. I guess some of Mabi's players have never really gotten over the fact that people just left for something else, mostly because of the fact that a lot of them did so on bad terms, and it caused a lot of drama from what I saw on Mari.

I don't really know what else to say about Mabi in this instance. I've never really did much on the game. FFXIV was always a game I took super seriously, and back in the day, so was Maplestory. But Mabi was always the game I played to get away from that type of stuff. I'm here to vibe and not always bother with endgame or gearing past what I need. I just wanna cook food, make clothes, shear sheep, do commerce casually. At the very least, I always come back whenever Mabi puts out new story stuff, but I am absolutely guilty of skipping through event stories when they don't interest me. And this Halloween took forever to build up, so the inevitable happened. At least the Homestead items are nice.

The last thing I did was join the new Pokemon TCG Mobage. "I'm not good at TCGs," I say, loving a series that is literally about playing a tcg. But, I don't know how I will be with that. Most Pokemon Mobage I tend to give a chance, but I tend to fall off them. GO is not exactly my favorite. PMEX is okay, but it feels like the time restrictions hurt it, because I can't just grind a bunch of things out the way I would in GBF. If I could play like GBF, I'd legitimately find myself spending more money on it and playing constantly, but that's another topic. Cafe wasn't my type of game. And TCGP will definitely be a learning experience for someone who's collected the TCG since base set was still in stores, but has never bothered to learn the rules.

Speaking of Granblue Fantasy though, I should probably start prepping for GW. I really don't want to do GW though, LMAO. I simply loathe Wind GW.

Well, I suppose that's all for now. Have a 2kki playlist.

If you've never played Yume 2kki, or any Yume Nikki fan games, I think you should consider checking out YNO. It's basically a bunch of Yume Nikki fan games hosted online with the ability to play with other people. Yume 2kki is the most popular game out of them, usually having quite a few people online at any given time. It stays up to date, all you need is an account if you want to chat, and you're ready to go. Alternatively, seek out LSD Dream Emulator if you've never tried that as well. However, that game is a bit hard to get normally, so you'll have to look into that on your own.

Ok, bye for now.

It's 2 AM

28 Oct, 2024

As like the title says, I constantly find myself up at the odd hours of the night. It's almost a bit frustrating. On one hand, I've repeatedly attempted to fix my very "Depressed person trying to get their life together" sleeping schedule. For a while it worked. Despite that, since I decided on a whim to make this post, I've noticed my sleep schedule just flipped entirely due to the fact that well... Let's be real here, most of my productivity just happens at night. It's simply easier on me to be productive in the later hours. Everyone else is in bed, whether it be friends or family. I guess it sucks because doing stuff during the day just feels better. And it doesn't help that they're about to push the clocks back, making the daytime of winter feel even shorter for nocturnal people like me.

Either way, this blog is up and running and I couldn't be happier. I've never had a blog that wasn't tied to some sort of big service with automated posting and WYSIWYG editing. So this was a bit of a struggle, for sure. It almost feels a bit surreal to dust off all my old coding and graphics skills to put something together by myself again. It feels so much more fun and involved though, so I don't mind the struggle of trying to get things working. Finding all kinds of sites the old fashioned way of just stumbling upon them while figuring things out was also really fun. Wondering how to put my code together in a way that displays everything I want on my site. Making layouts using an old copy of Photoshp with some of the sloppiest webgraphics known to mankind. It's just fun. I've missed this kind of stuff dearly, and never really realized it.

On that topic though, I said it at some point that I would eventually put up some of my old webgraphics for people to take and use. But yeah, you can take and use my stuff. I really don't care. I used to run one of those webgraphic sites back in the day, where people made LiveJournal anime icons and all that, with super bright images and tinytext everywhere and those dust & paper textures, and the rest of the details those graphics tended to have. I think I still have some of the old ones floating around somewhere. I could probably find them if I looked hard enough, but I don't know where to start. Anyways stuff like my code, my graphics, etc? I don't really care if people wanna use it. 10+ years from now, I don't know what my online presence will be. I remember how many people used to be over webgraphics and people taking them for use. But it's 10-20 years later now. People have come and gone, and I doubt most of these people would even care if you took from their graphics archives (unless they're custom art.) Like, yeah we should definitely respect people, and try to credit back to old sites when we can. That's always important. But it's really interesting to see how many graphics have been scavenged from now dead websites and just passed around. I see credits going back to repost tumblr blogs, but I never see any actual definitive sources for a lot of Sozai. All I can really say is "Damn, scavenged really is the right word choice here." Makes you feel like you're stumbling upon a treasure trove of sorts, when you pull up a well archived site, or even one that's still publicly hosted but hasn't been touched in ages. Anyways, if anyone wants anything taken down or links back to where I found a particular image, I'll try to provide it to the best of my ability. I definitely haven't sat there and saved the source of every image I've ever used, and I've saved so much over the years, passing it from pc to pc. I can only reverse image search and hope for the best. If you're a creator and you haven't been credited or want things removed, please feel free to let me know.

I guess on the topic of my site, it does feel nice to be done with things. I still feel that I have a lot left to do, though. It feels like I've just put image galleries all over pages rather than putting actual commentary alongside them. After I get files organized, I'll start actually making proper pages. I think I'd like to actually make a web shrine at some point. Probably for the TCG page. If there's anything I really love, it's Pokemon cards (Says guy who keeps ending up selling their cards every few years when they go inactive in collecting.) But, I guess if that means I get to talk about cards and their really cool designs, I'll make an entire new layout and what not for them. I dunno if i'll do the same for anything else, but I definitely should go through and make a page related to the various merch I've collected over the years. I feel like if you're not taking pictures of merch to show others how passionate you are, well... Then it's just sitting there collecting dust. Collecting tends to be one of the only things I'm really into. Part of me wonders if that means I'm on my way to becoming a hoarder at some point later in life. I guess that's why I tend to cycle through my merch and let go of things a bit easier, if I don't feel too into it anymore.

Speaking of displays, I keep putting off looking through my art. I guess that's the next part of the website on the to do list to get through. Well, that and a few other features to add, but I've gotta sit down and figure out how I want to display my cbox. That, as well as things like webrings & fanlistings that I want to join. Feels like so much to do, but so little time. I'll just have to remember to take it day by day. Might remove the blinkie & button marquees and put them on another page. I've gotta make a proper links out page at some point too.

The more I look, the more there is to do. Maybe I should just close my eyes and play some games. Today's probably a good time to go back to FFXIV considering there's a free log in event. I also still have yet to do the current Mabi event. I should do that before it's too late.

I'll cut this blog off here, considering I don't have much to talk about and I'm just rambling. I've been slacking hard lately. Lots to do in FFXIV, considering 7.1 is soon and I haven't logged in for a good while. I'm unsubbed currently, as I'm just here like, "Well I'm not raiding, I can't do the new Ultimate without a tier clear, not that I even have the time." I wish I had the time to do so, because I wan't to attempt the new Ult. I don't want to dwell on it though, I'll just end up depressed. Luckily, theres a new Alliance Raid soon. I haven't played FFXI before, so I'm excited to see.

I also have slacked for this years Mabi Halloween event. I really hope they put more transformation medals in the event. I know they said they did the current event NPCs, but other than that, I think they're just doing the regular pool of NPCs again. I have a ton left over from last year that I meant to sell, but I got distracted by starting this site.

Honestly, I should make a game log soon. Talking about games is great. But, I guess it's been a while since I've actually played any games... Insane.

That's all from me for now. I have plenty of stuff to do, so I should get to work.