found myself actually playing games again. it feels weird to say that "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-job-loss depression episode i've found myself in for the last idk... 4 years? it's kinda a long time. but it was a needed break. i can't really raid anymore because i know that if i'm going to find 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 a really pleasant person to be around while chasing down a number on a website that ultimately means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

still, returning to xiv was a breath of fresh air. played picto 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 this time, 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. oh how i wish i could raid the newest ultimate. i am one of those people who's super glad they skipped stormblood story because i just don't think it'd be much of a fight. but oh well. maybe one day i can do it. hopefully the weapons are nice, 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: 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 raid mindsets. 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. 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 and i probably wont stay subbed very long. maybe i'll see if people want to do christmas TEA for a meme again. a few 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 got 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 on like... just mabi. and people were so nice to me that i didn't have the heart to tell them like "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." but then again, mabi's userbase always has had an issue with xiv players considering the fact that at some point during chp7 it took them 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 so there was this big mass exodus and what not... i guess some of mabi's players have never really gotten over the fact that people just left for something else.

i don't really know what else to say about mabi in this instance. i've never really did much on the game. xiv was always a game i took super seriously, and back in the day, so was maple. but mabi was always the game i played to get away from that type of stuff. i'm here to vibe and not super bother with endgame or gearing. i just wanna cook food, make clothes, shear sheep, do commerce (well minus the seasonal stuff. like i ranked one season and it was rough to say the least.) at the very least i always come back whenever mabi puts out new story stuff, but i am absolutely guilty of starting to skip through events when they don't interest me lol. and this halloween took forever to build up. at least the homestead items are nice.

i guess the last thing i really did was i joined the new pokemon tcg mobage. i'm not good at tcgs i say, loving a series that is literally about playing a tcg. but like... i dunno how i will be with that. most pokemon mobage i tend to give a shot, 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. 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 though, i should probably start prepping for gw. i really don't want to do gw though lmao. i LOATHE wind gw.

well i suppose that's all for now. have a 2kki playlist.

if you've never played 2kki or any yume nikki fangames, i think you should consider checking out YNO. it's basically a bunch of yume nikki fangames 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 a basic login 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 sadly.

ok bye for now