Dynamis - Bedroom

On the one hand, lots of stuff happening, but then it doesn't feel like too much for some reason. This weekend actually should be rough since I have plans to leave my house twice within two days (amazing!). Other than that though, just a nice relaxing week or so getting some important things done.



Got my second to last drop for the Opo-opo crown a few days back. We got it on the first kill, amazingly. The reason this was particularly note-worthy was we got Draco's on the first kill as well.



Did my NPC's G1, though I have another one I have to do for her now. Honestly its a bit of a pain, takes a while to get these quests done.



I got an O-hat! Ok sweet my Thief is ready to exp-wait fuck Sirocco. Dammit. I need to convince myself to forget about all this R/E junk that would make my Thief great and just level the damn thing to 75.

For now at least, its Paladin time though.

Pictures, with a side of lulz

If you only care about the comedy, scroll down until you see the screenshot that consists of a whole bunch of orange text, that'd be it.



Unfortunately this ones already out of date. My PLD is nearly 29 now, can't wait to put on my eisen/kampf gear.



Got one of the more useless pieces of relic on Thursday. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have it and appreciate the drop, but. . . lets be honest. Its not exactly something most people would be happy to catch a WHM wearing in a party.



Got my first level of Devotion, mostly for Draco. Its pretty fun, I don't regret picking it up. I need to cap it off now unfortunately. . . oh well at least I have SAM to do that with now.



75 SAM! That makes two.



I also got Diabolos randomly, which means I have all summons. Ironically, like the day after or two days after I picked Diabolos up they announced the Ixion thing, and even though I know now that he isn't a summon (yet), I still cried.



Got my Minstrel's finally! I think I mentioned it, but Saruka helped me get the drop. Draco also camped it with me quite a bit. Go go BRD end-game gear at 62!



I also picked up an Assault Jerkin recently, which I really don't deserve. This should be Draco's or Saruka's. But we should be remedying that shortly. . .



Ah the lulz. Anything more I could say about that conversation will only detract from the hilarity, so please, enjoy.



Ah, Cutaru. I just thought this seemed appropriately. . . cute? With her (his?) ass up in the air like that. Ironically, soon after taking this screenshot I found out that Cutaru is in my Dynamis shell. What a tweest!

Wait, what?

So I finally got around to installing photoshop and cropping up all my screenshots into what I want posted. I even organized them all so they're nice now. I go to upload them and. . . what? Photobucket got hacked?

So I can't upload them for the moment. Honestly I'm not sure what exactly happened to photobucket, I had JUST gotten a party on PLD as I noticed so I couldn't look into it much.

Anyway, improving Dynamis runs like I promised. Chat. Talk to everyone, get them mentally involved. If they're thinking about chatting with you and still doing their job, they're not thinking about whatever drop they haven't gotten yet or the fact that they've been there for 3 hours. Doesn't matter what you talk about, make a stupid joke. Just get a chuckle out of them or something. If your members are feeling good and not getting angsty over a mistake someone made or the drops or some other retarded drama, Dynamis is a lot more tolerable. The most important thing is to try to involve everyone unless they repeatedly act as though they don't want to be. Make them feel like they're part of the group even if its their first run. ESPECIALLY if its their first run. Get to know them all, even if only just a little.

You want people to have fun attending your runs, and lets be honest the game doesn't really facilitate that on its own most days.

Anyway, thats about it until photobucket comes back online.

PS: STOP FUCKING UNDERCUTTING KAGINAWA, FUCK

Thievery, Merits, and a second 75

So I want to post screenshots, I have a ton of them, but theres just one hitch. No photoshop. I have CS2, and I can install it any time, but I'm like. . . . I think 1 gig away from a full hard-drive at the moment and I'm too lazy to find stuff I want to delete/put junk on a DVD. Too busy dinging 75 Samurai I guess. Whoops, that was for later.

Saruka got 75 Thief though, which is awesome and I feel great for him because hes pretty much in the same situation I am. We've both been Thief for about the same time period (5 years) and are only just now close to capping it, and in his case, finally capping it. I actually hadn't realized that I have as much in common with him as I do until recently, its been a lot of fun screwing around killing stuff with him.

I've also worked on merits some, and thought about what I want to get. Until the last few days, I had only ever gotten one merit, and it went right into Regen. However I got three in the last few days and picked up the first level of Devotion, which Draco has wanted me to have for quite a while.

However the real interesting thing that I was thinking about was what I was going to do overall with my merits in the short term, and specifically how I might use them as a tool for improving a job as I'm leveling it. Namely, Paladin. The main thing that I have thought about improving is HP or MP, because those would be pretty much universally useful. However what I was thinking was, in the interest of Paladin, going full 8/8 on MP. I know, I know, most full-time Paladins reading this are probably thinking I'm nuts or stupid. There are a few factors here. First, I don't plan on tanking in end-game. I have White Mage and probably Bard as well for doing any of that junk, and I don't think I'm a particularly good tank as a player anyway. I am better suited for a support role. Second, looking at Paladin from the perspective of someone who more or less intends to use it only for leveling up, and then random raids or missions where my friends need a tank, HP isn't that important. Point for point, in that situation (to me at least) it makes more sense to go after MP. On top of that, I look at how most of the jobs I level and enjoy are mages (I know two of my three highest are melee, but overall I'm a mage player), and from what I can see it makes the most sense to go after MP.

To top it all off, I finally got Samurai to 75 in this ridiculously fun party that I got to sub Dancer in. We had three Samurai, a Thief, a Red Mage, and a Ninja, and the Thief only ever got to engage the mobs when they pulled a link, because we were killing so fast. We got a good 30k, which allowed me a healthy 10k buffer, which I'll probably be too lazy to extend. So now I don't have to merit on my White Mage, and a shell member (Djohn) is slowly nearing 75 with his own White Mage, so its great that I have another option.

I'd go into detail about what I want to merit on Samurai but the only real interesting dilemma I've thought of is Meditate versus Third Eye. Everything else seems pretty obvious to me, and thus not very interesting. At the moment I can't really decide between Meditate and Third Eye because on the one hand Meditate turns into more hate generation, which I don't really need, and I'm honestly not very good as using Third Eye all that often, even though I have toyed with the idea of tanking with Samurai rather frequently, especially after Dancer was introduced. At any rate I'll probably do Meditate simply because its more useful than only five seconds off of Third Eye, and coupled with Shikikoyo its reasonable to see myself using and wanting even more TP than I already get.

Anyway, I'm either going to nap or go walk to an awesome family owned donut place near my house for breakfast, but the next entry will be something that at least interests me; a way to improve your shell's Dynamis runs without making any in-game adjustments.

Dynamis - Kitchen

Joined another Dynamis shell. . . Elminster runs it, its pretty cool. Aside from a blatantly obvious gilbuyer (SH+1 + a key ring belt full time in dyna windy after not knowing if the airship in sandy went to windurst as a level 70 THF - oh and he got a relic drop) and some people who say things they shouldn't / act like they're on a power trip most of the time, its a great shell. Excellent PLDs, and a number of cool people.

I WHM'd of course, which was a lot of fun since the first party I was in (5 DDs and me) was very relaxing and enjoyable, and then they threw me in the tank party which at first was scary as hell since I wasn't quite ready for it, but once I figured out how things were going mostly it was easy. The PLDs did a wonderful job and made it quite easy for me to keep them alive.

I've also been doing ZMs, I never really realized how freaking easy they are. In the last little while we knocked off ZM4 and ZM5, kicked the crap out of both of them despite getting slapped around by the zi'tah headstone NM a bit. Can't wait to get sky access, there is a particular shell I would like to join, though I'm going to have to be careful about my work schedule and joining various shells like the dynamis one and this one.

Anyway, SAM partay. Maybe I can get 75 this weekend.

Lolwut

Yea I left for a while, more so this blog than the game. Left the game for a month or two to do better in classes, did worse, so. . . I don't know.

Anyway, update day. Pretty sweet, lots of stuff, but most of them are things I want to see in game or screenshots of before I really form an opinion so not too much to comment on beyond feeling as though my SAM likely has some different goals now gear-wise.

SAM is 73. THF is 70. DNC is 37. RDM is 4. . . 43? Either 43 or 42, I don't remember.

SAM has actually been a lot of fun. I don't know what is up with the missed WS crap but for some reason its been happening less despite no gear changes, but when it does happen its like 3-4 in a row and then no misses for a while. Not really sure whats up with that, but I can only really move forward at this point.

Some douchebags jacked the price up on Shinsoku randomly, I've been trying to pick one up but I'm not paying 200k for something thats been 110k for a long time.

Lastly, I started making egg fried rice. This is excellent food and any retard can cook it easily, heres how you make it:

- Make some rice (I prefer brown personally, healthy), and refrigerate it the night before if you can though I don't think its completely necessary.

- Prepare the vegetables/meat you want to use. Personally I like to go with broccoli, carrots, and corn but red bell peppers and pretty much any meat work well too. cut them up fairly small, its best to be able to get a little of everything in most bites.

- Throw the rice in a wok or large pan with high sides, add some vegetable oil, maybe like 4 tablespoons or something, I just pour a bit in. the idea is to get it on all of the rice

- You have two options with the eggs: you can either do them separately (what I prefer because I make a big batch and my wok isn't all that huge) or you can do all of it in one pan. If you do it separately, just make scrambled eggs with salt/pepper and whatever else you'd like to add to them in a separate pan, and when they're more or less solid throw them in with the rest and continue to cook them. Try to get the individual pieces of egg relatively small. If you're doing it all together, at some point during the cooking, whenever you're most comfortable (I go shortly after I've put all the other stuff in) move everything but the eggs off to one side of the pan as best as you can and pour the eggs in, just make 'em scrambled right there. You might be able to just dump the eggs in without moving anything aside and cook it all together but I've never tried it and it might be kind of difficult.

- For the rice and vegetables, just stir fry them pretty much (which is to say heat the pan they're in and move them around with a bamboo or wood spatula until they're cooked). You'll want a little bit of soy sauce, depending on how much stuff you throw in other than the rice it will vary. Try to experiment with how much you use. You can also use other sauces, I'd imagine teriyaki or oyster sauce would work but I've never tried either personally.

tl;dr: Stir fry rice, meat and vegetables. Make scrambled eggs. Mix together.

Hockey players are the best, period (2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRdRYq2CpjE&feature=related

Well, despite being a tech guy I can't figure out how to directly put the damn video into this, so theres the link until someone posts a comment on how to do it, not that anyone reads this.

But anyway, I noticed this video because my team (San Jose Sharks) just traded for Jody Shelley, who is in that. Basically, a leafs player autographed a stick for Shelley during the game, and threw it over the divide in the glass. What other sport could you possibly see this kind of friendliness in during a game in? Football? Fuck no. Baseball? Maybe, but probably not. Basketball? I doubt it. This is the one thing that makes hockey better than any other sport will ever be; the culture is just so ridiculously awesome that it is beyond description.

Another example, and I'm sorry that it involves the Sharks again but they're really the only team I watch, was when the Sharks were playing. . . maybe the Coyotes. . . I don't remember, but it doesn't really matter. A couple fights started up after a play, and in one of them, the opponent's player got injured a bit, and was laying down on the ice. Jeremy Roenick (pretty big name in hockey, generally speaking), who was the sharks player in the fight, was the one who called for the opposing teams trainer. Thats right, he wasn't throwing punches or trying to hurt the guy more. He STOPPED, let go of the guy, made sure he was laid down ok on the ice and called for a trainer. This is all right after they were throwing punches at each other.

This is why hockey players are so fucking awesome. They're not out there to kill each other, and its not as violent of a sport as people think. Fights on the ice are almost always about one of the people owning up to a mistake they made that hurt or could have hurt another teams player. They're about accountability. Not hurting people. Got that all you idiotic mothers who stop your kids from playing because "OH MY GOSH ITS VIOLENT"?

Hockey culture is win.

Soboro, Stir-Fry, and. . . S. . . s. . . reformatting

So, as you can see in the picture, I got a Soboro. Its nicer than I had expected. Its not godly, by any measure, but its still quite nice I think. As you can see in the picture, Val was having a bit of fun harassing people about their (in)ability to spell things correctly. However, there were two other things that happened during the run. One was epic, and one was epic fail.

Lets start with the epic part. Towards the end, people started leaving and being pricks, so eventually we wound up with just 12 people, and our 'main' tank was afk (part of the epic fail). We wound up fighting one anyway, and its second self-destruct raped Enc, who was our 'second' tank. He immediately re-raised and voked it, and tanked it from like 50% until we killed it. He had 221 max HP I think during 90% of that. So, yea, Enc is now easily the most badass PLD I know, which is actually saying a LOT since I hang around Draconum a ton. Though I did pull hate off Draco with Regen III once, so. . .

On to the epic fail. On the second or third to last run, the 'main' tank Linkstrife said he had to hit the grocery store, and that it'd only take about one cycle (as in he'd be back a little after the next ??? popped, but before the one after that). We killed one, wiped, and waited like 2 hours total for him to come back. The other thing is, we would have been DONE at that point anyway if he hadn't brought out his second account to get one, and while he claimed otherwise, a few of us think he ALREADY GOT ONE FOR HIS MAIN. So, after a while we just said fuck him and left. He stayed there until or past like 1:30 AM or so (CST?) that night according to Val, so he was afk for a lot longer than "20 minutes or so".

Anyway, real life. I've been trying to get a wok for a while, and yesterday I finally got one. It is unfortunately xbawks hueg, but all of the other ones were tiny, so whatever. I made some vegetable stir-fry last night with a few things, and man was it ever filling. I haven't eaten vegetables in. . . forever. But yea, I wish I had a digital camera so I could put a pic of it up on here, it actually looked really nice for something I made (IT HAD COLOURS!). All part of an effort to kind of round out my diet so I can be healthy, since last semester I sort of ate almost nothing but pasta and lost 40 lbs. as a result, and I'm not going to say I was super thin or anything (6 feet tall and was like 180-200), but I'm not really fat either, so suddenly going and dropping 10 pounds a month just wasn't looking like a healthy thing.

Also, I got some stupid viruses on my desktop that turned into losing my net connection for 24 hours a week or two ago, so I've been trying to reformat it and because of a combination of about 3 impossibly irritating things, I can't normally reformat without a floppy, but I'm using this opportunity to put ubuntu on there as well, and my friend says I can use that to reformat, so hopefully that will work. The only thing that sucks about it all is I just realized that I don't have photoshop any more, so I'll have to downlo-I mean. . . ask my. . . family. . . for one of the copies from uh. . . home (actually now that I think about it, I actually am going to do that, I'd forgotten, but my parents bought CS2 and such, dad used to work for Adobe so he probably got a deal on it).

Anyway, off to make breakfast. . . recently discovered the joys of simple buttered toast.

Freakin hell. . .

You know when you just kind of get off track and one mistake or problem creates another one and it just branches out until you're pretty screwed overall? Happening right now, kinda depressing. I know I need to just put my head down and work, but that has always been my one problem. I can't just strap in and turn on easily. Whether its because I make excuses, or am lazy, or what, I don't know, but it always happens and its the ONLY thing between me and the top of the class.

First problem was that my housemate is still a fucking douchebag, and even a hour or two ago was slamming and cussing at his computer, which has consistently either woken me up or made me unable to sleep, and that combined with the fact that the beds here are absolutely horrible and extremely difficult to sleep on, its virtually impossible to get a decent sleep schedule going. This has in turn caused me to miss a couple classes in the first three weeks because I've been on the verge of passing out, and to avoid the embarrassment of passing out in the middle of class I just went home and slept. In turn I was unable to do the first assignment in one of my classes (bye-bye 5% of my grade) and haven't done too much of the reading in my other classes.

The result? Well, I am trying to just straight force myself to get this work done and finish as much as I can as soon as it is assigned, and also get this stupid fucking excuse for a human kicked out of residence for being an all around douchebag.

This crap is creeping into the rest of my life too though, but I'm finding it easier to remedy it there. I've always been a tech/computer person, but I've also got a fair bit of intuition with story-writing, though at the moment its mostly just picking out what is wrong with other people's stories. As a result, coupled with my love of games I've been trying to aim towards a career in game design (not programming them, but literally designing the game/plot). Lately I've come across nothing but people saying there aren't any openings, and pretty much all discussion of it that I've seen ends there. This got me thinking about whether or not my goals are even vaguely realistic, and the whole thing is just depressing. At the same time, I understand and acknowledge that this isn't the kind of thing I can just decide and plan out on a whim, and in reality I have no idea what its going to be like 2-3 years from now when I graduate and really start working on a career, but it still gets me down.

Lastly, with FFXI I've been feeling severely unmotivated. Yea, I really want to get X, Y and Z but really. . . do I even have time to utilize sky access if I got it? Sea access? Any of that sort of thing? Hell, even just another 75 job? I'm trying to get myself into a relationship and I think its extremely likely that FFXI will take an extreme backburner seat when that happens, so whats the point of enduring retards in the dunes? I guess it might just be a result of the overall negative attitude that I've got going right now, but damn. Even my entertainment is kinda dying off here. I guess on the flip side I'm trying to get myself to listen to Canadiens and/or Leafs games as well as Sharks games (hockey for all you lolamericans, since any Canadian who doesn't know who the Canadiens or Leafs are whether or not they like them ought to have their citizenship revoked), so that might help me enjoy things more and motivate me to head out of my room some time to watch games, maybe a bar, I dunno.

Anyway, feeling a little better now but. . . theres still kind of an argument going on in my head between the new me (post-depression) and old me (depression). New me knows the game and beat it, several times, but it still takes a while to do, and the old me is still stuck in the same old loop. . . it feels like I'm playing therapist for a friend again, but its me, weird feeling.

Anyway, back to my reading.

Hockey players are the best, period

So Thatsmypunk bugged me at 6 or 7 AM again, heres the result.

Ovechkin on a Segway

I asked why he was riding a Segway around D.C.

"Have fun," he said. "Why do I have to stay home? No. It's good. Watch beautiful city, watch girls...."

"Have you seen any girls?" Backstrom asked.

"No," Ovechkin replied. "Girls, where are you? I can't find you."

I've never been an Ovechkin fan or a caps fan, but man. I sure as hell am now.

There're a million awesome things about hockey, this kind of thing is just one of them. . . . freaking hilarity.

What am I doing?

I've gotten a bit caught up in wanting to level too many things at once again, and its costing me a bit. Part of it is that for some reason I just cannot establish any kind of sleep schedule. Honestly if I had that taken care of I'd be doing fine and be enjoying things a whole hell of a lot more, but as it is my brain is all over the place and I'm writing in a blog at 5:53 AM after getting. . . . I dunno, see I'm not even sure I actually fell asleep between 2 and 4 AM, I think I was close but not quite there.

Honestly I'm not quite sure why I can't get a schedule down. Maybe I'm being stupid with late night gaming. Maybe the mattress sucks. Maybe I think too much when I'm trying to sleep. Maybe my housemate is loud at the wrong times of day (shockingly hes been better, but I still want to burn his ass at least once).

Looking back at what I've just written, I'm kinda surprised how quickly I went from "I want to level all my jobs" to "I can't sleep". Just goes to show how out of it I am these days. . . .

Far as FFXI progress goes, I've made it to 36 on Red Mage, which isn't bad I guess but. . . I dunno, honestly it doesn't feel like I've accomplished much.

Anyway, back to trying to sleep before I head over to tim hortons and buy breakfast. . .

Back up north. . .

Well, I leave for Toronto this Friday, which kinda blows, I was enjoying myself here, but there are some upsides to Toronto as well, despite the fact that I'm going to immediately have to deal with the housemate situation pretty much starting the second I enter the house.

Oh well, at least now I can actually use my Wii. Hopefully I'll take some pictures of how I'm doing it and put a little thing up for people to read since its actually a really useful tool to get for a college student since its a pain to carry a TV around when you're already hauling a laptop and/or desktop. To be honest, it is lagged a little bit since USB isn't nearly as fast as a direction connection and it has to change the signal but like I said, its better than hauling a TV across the continent, or even just to and from storage every year. Just wish one of the stores around here had the Paper Mario game for the Wii, went shopping for it today and came up empty (still got some good headphones though).

I've also managed 60 BRD, and have purchased and/or farmed all songs up to 63, along with all useful instruments, and currently have pretty much the best reasonable gear I can get. Just bugs me that it takes so long to level, but, I think I may be able to stick to it and manage 75 in the next couple months maybe. I might wind up seeking out a soboro and leveling DNC instead just because SAM/DNC seems so awesome in theory, but I'd like to finish BRD if only for utility purposes. Its something kinda laid back without being melee that I can take on runs and things without having to worry too much about gear and "WTF I MISSED AGAIN". Well, technically theres resists, but now that I have + wind and singing from AF its kinda. . . I dunno. Just never seems to happen.

Weird, I feel like I have more to write about but I can't think of anything. Really just been playing Disgaea, leveling BRD, eating, and slowly killing myself with chocolate. Oh I did discover that I randomly lost like 40 pounds during first semester, not that I really care beyond that probably being a really bad thing. Oh well, probably got most of it back over the holidays anyway. Oh, and Seether's Fake It is an awesome song.

Aftermath

So, Christmas at least is over, and I guess there might be new years crap coming up for most people, but personally I don't usually do anything unless a friend is having a party (or when I'm not single), but to me the whole new years thing is kinda meaningless.

I didn't get anything of note really for Christmas other than cash, which is what I actually need (FOOD!), and I don't really deserve much so, good stuff, just not horribly exciting. The main thing of note really was that I ate LOTS of really good food over the holidays. Highlight was probably the salmon with three cheese tortellini in a basil sauce. It was kinda mild but the salmon was perfect and I like tortellini a lot, so, good times. Actually back up in Toronto I bought some beef tortellini and it made me sick, so it was nice to get some real stuff. I've also bought myself a fair bit of chocolate, enjoying some now actually. Also ice cream, theres some mint chip in the freezer. So yea, overall great for food.

Theres also been some interesting activity with friends, getting to do a bit of psychology stuff and manipulating things to a degree. I'm in a wonderful position to completely ass rape a friend of mine mentally if I wanted to, but like I said hes a friend (even if hes done some retarded things in the past trying to get into penor fights), so I'm not going to play that game unless I would normally, and its kind of a complicated situation there. Very interesting though, and potential to come back into contact with some old, but crazy friends. Not likely, but possible.

Anyway, back to gnawing away at this chocolate block. Kinda fun, but my teeth fucking hurt.

Crappy Music Day

Yes, its that time of year again. When some twit who no one will stand up to puts on horrible "holiday" music that would never sell at all if not for its "festive" aspects. I mean, come on, seriously everyone agrees here right? The music fucking sucks without exception. Doesn't matter if you normally listen to rap, rock, lolemo music, or whatever. This is the time of year when we can all come together in agreement over how ridiculously horrible Christmas music is.

Anyway, on to FFXI. For a long while I was looking to pick up a scroll of Carnage Elegy, but they cost a ton on the AH and Draco and I have both spent days (almost a month) trying to farm the damn thing. I think. . . night before last or around there, Draco managed to get the drop, and sent it over to me, so I owe him big time. Between the links and the fact that it took FOREVER to just get the damn thing to drop, it was really rough to try and get.

As a result, I'm looking to level bard again, and I do need to get my hands on those last two pieces of AF (body and hands), and work on the Opo-opo Crown and then finally a Minstrel's Coat to finish pimping out my bard, none of it is really necessary and I don't really need to pause my leveling for any of it. They can be taken care of as things go on, and I should be able to manage 75 in no time, which opens up new opportunities for meriting.

I've also been sorta half looking to get my hands on a Soboro and get dancer up to 37 for a very fun combination of SAM/DNC. For me, it would likely be perfect. I'd be able to support the group through healing tons, possibly also tank a little, and to top it off still be capable of doing some considerable damage. The only thing that would suck is that imps would absolutely destroy me even more than they already do, and I think we all know how often parties go after imps. Oh well, at the very least it'd be freaking disgusting for soloing random things and for coffer key raids. Hell I'd probably wind up soloing most of my keys after setting that up.

Anyway, off to get breakfast. At my grandparents house in San Diego, would MUCH rather be at home but it can't be helped.

Ten Year Olds in University

I haven't really hidden the fact that I've had problems with my housemates up in Toronto, but it has gotten way worse. Initially, I didn't have any problems with this one guy, but now he thinks hes the greatest thing ever and doesn't need to pay attention to what anyone else says. . . so basically hes ripped off part of our bathroom door and likely damaged his room (which we all have to pay for unless we burn his ass, which I'm going to do). He has also created numerous issues with noise and just acting like a ten year old in general, even going so far as to try to provoke me while I'm not even in the country via facebook, which was a good laugh but its a clear sign that its high time he gets out of a respectable university and starts begging for change, because quite honestly thats what he deserves. Not sure how the hell he got in.

Chances are when I bring up the problem, I will be the one moved, but if I can essentially prove that he has damaged the house. . . he might get removed from the school entirely. To be honest, I want to burn this guy. It would be so satisfying to see him kicked off campus after all of the shit he has pulled, and maybe I'd be a bad person for genuinely enjoying ruining someone else's life, but hes well on his way to putting a significant dent in mine, so, him or me I guess.

Anyway, I've mostly been playing Guild Wars because its easier to pick up and put down whenever I want to, and with finals and getting back to California its been a little rough finding time to just sit down and play, but I think I'm slowly getting back into an FFXI mood, though some minor drama mongering has put me off a tiny bit. I will likely continue with RDM, I still want it up, but I'm at the stage where I just need to get any motivation at all back, and then move up from there to whatever comes next.

Oh, also: California is colder than Toronto? lolwut? Seriously though, 33 here, 37 there, kind of disturbing. At least theres no snow I suppose, and I've got my cat and a TV and real food (something other than pasta). Parents have done some yelling, and forced me to follow suit, but its MOSTLY been nice, and its certainly better than having some 19 year old who thinks hes 10 slamming his keyboard because he sucks at Half-Life. I can't wait to see the look on his face when he realizes that I wasn't joking about having a chat with some UTSC staff

Why red?

Been leveling Red Mage lately, wondering exactly why its red and not green or something. Someone also asked me why I was leveling RDM, which kinda surprised me. Its a semi-useful situational sub to have for WHM, to be sure, but honestly I just felt like leveling it. Also, Galbatorix's Phalanx II made me a little jealous, it seemed extremely sexy and useful.



Currently sitting at 26, dinged earlier today before I went down for a nap. The party I got was kinda. . . . not so hot, but we powered through it and at that level it doesn't really matter anyway. Just not as smooth as I would have liked.

So far I really like the job but its been rough keeping up with resists. It has felt kind of like BLM, where I was having a lot of trouble having my spells not get resisted even though I had pretty much the most INT gear I could get. Because of that and mostly only really having debuffs that're useful (DNC take care of healing pretty much exclusively in the lower levels now, because theres so many of them and because there are so few WHMs) I've felt like I wasn't really a good use of a party slot most times, but even so things seem to be going ok, and around 33 things will begin to change dramatically.

I've also been really unsure what kind of gear exactly I'm supposed to wear. I feel like a WHM, except everything is the holy breastplate, and by the way if anyone reading this is a WHM who wears that, go kill yourself. I mean I get that RDM is supposed to be a hybrid but gear wise that turns into light DD gear because all the mage stuff thats even vaguely useful is either all jobs or the 'pure' mages only. I mean it doesn't really matter, I just feel weird wearing lizard gear into the late 20s because theres nothing worth upgrading to unless I wanted to look more pretty and go with beetle.

Thankfully school has more or less ended until next semester with the exception of finals, which is mainly why I'm moving significantly on RDM, but it also means that my housemates are around constantly so its been kind of a game of seeing if I can guess when they'll be loud and act like retards so I can fall asleep and then avoid them waking me up 2 hours later. Its also been rough actually trying to keep a reasonable sleep schedule. I'm a pretty light sleeper typically, I mean not that it matters since these idiots literally slam things around at 5 AM (like punching walls slamming) so even if I could sleep through the more minor stuff, that would wake me up pretty quickly, but a lot of the time they either keep me up or wake me up shortly after I fall asleep. . . . . I'm really looking forward to going home for a few weeks. There're a number of things I want to do and people I want to see (like my cat), but at the moment it looks like I might have to go down to southern california for christmas yet again which pretty much assfucks any plans I had to do anything even remotely relaxing over break. At any rate, I gotta get through finals first I guess.

Progress. . . . ?

Managed Rank 8. . . . last night? I don't remember, my asshole housemate in the room next to mine keeps cussing at his computer because he sucks at games and dies a lot so I haven't really been able to get that much sleep despite telling him to shut up on more than one occaison. Anyway, yea. Rank 8, pretty nice, but I've got 10 in my sights.



As mentioned previously, I've been going through the CoP missions. . . ya know the more I see him the more I feel like Bahamut is a little pansy. I mean, if the Mammets were kicking his ass a little, surely he can't be THAT mean.



Beat up the Mammets pretty easily second run we went through on it. Oops, lolNIN is in this picture. Maybe I should have censored the names. . . . nah.



Also kicked Diabolos' ass, wasn't too hard, but it kinda blew that we had to run down there for it twice.



Best cutscene ever. I'm sure there are already MANY rule 34 related images around on the net somewhere.



Also kept leveling BRD though I've stopped recently because farming up the level 59 elegy is a pain in the ass and I don't really feel like spending the money on it yet, but with my source of income going through the roof thanks to the re-nerfing of 2 handers, that might change soon.



Lastly, Imac was around a couple weekends ago and there were a few fun moments, this being the primary highlight.

Miserable Failures

So a while ago I joined up with a group moving through Chains of Promathia missions, and it was going MOSTLY ok, and a few of the people on the runs are actually quite smart, but eventually it got kind of. . . . . .

There is one central character in all of this bullshit, and I'll just call him lolNIN until he pisses me off enough that I feel the need to reveal his name. The short version is he is a complete moron who never prepares for anything at all and needs to have his hand held through every single thing no matter how trivial.

First instance was prep work for Mammets. For those of you who don't know, the prep involves a lot of running around, and if you're a retard (or just lolNIN) it takes FOREVER. Amazingly, I was lucky enough to be paired off to DUO the entire thing with this moron. He is a level 60 NIN. He is rank 4. He needs ports for every step the entire way.

The prep also involves fighting an ant lion that regains all of its HP if it returns to its spawn point, which it attempts to do every time it uses an ability. It took about 5 minutes of saying "MOVE THE FUCK AWAY FROM ITS SPAWN" and it got all of its HP back about 6 times before this retarded lolNIN could figure out that he needed to move. Several call1's were also involved. After that, whenever it moved back and we couldn't turn it, I had to spend about 2-3 minutes again spamming that he needed to get away from the spawn before he moved. After about half an hour he finally figured it out and it only took a couple notices in /p before he moved.

Please note that nothing in this is an exageration. I really did have to spend about 5 minutes getting this jackass to move away from the spawn, and it really did take about half an hour for him to figure out why DESPITE KNOWING THAT IT GOT ALL ITS HP BACK AT THE SPAWN POINT.

Eventually, after being about 2 hours late thanks to this guys inability to do his rank 5 mission, we got to Monarch Linn. We go in for the first run, seems to be going ok, we had three NINs (or two NINs and one lolNIN depending how you count). How I did not see this coming is beyond me, but the lolNIN got the mage mammet, and IMMEDIATELY pulled it right in between the other two NINs so that any AoE would pretty much hit everyone. At this point I figure that maybe hes just trying to fuck this up, but apparently he really is that stupid. After a few pointed comments in his direction we went again, told him to just shut up and go hump a wall with his mammet, and we won.

A few days later, we go to Pso'Xja to farm chips to get the pass for the Diabolos fight, and not 2 minutes after he and I zone in he spawns the two golems from the thing that you get the. . . . blue? bracelet from and is promptly assfucked. Of course, he decided not to follow me, so I can't do anything to make up for his idiocy until I run back and raise his sorry ass.

Now, we're on Ouryu, and while we lost the first fight (and had to warp because everyone was retarded and spammed their mistmelts on the first time he went up until they had none left), lolNIN amazingly managed to not fuck up anything major that I noticed. Course, now that we're on our way back to run it again he and everyone else in our party except me managed to split up into two groups, both aggro hippos, and both die, so, don't give him too much credit.

Gonna write a non-rant bit later probably once I have enough free time to fiddle with pictures.

Not good enough

No one is perfect.

That isn't going to stop me from being incredibly pissed about this idiotic WotG PC delay. Thanks, I have no drive whatsoever to go and play the game so I can watch everyone around me enjoy new content while I have to wait. . . what is it now, 5 days?

Also, people at EB Games are douchebags. Not really news to anyone I'm sure, but its worth pointing out.

For the Lulz