Incoherent Thoughts

It's been snowing recently. It appears that people here might not be used to it. It hasn't even been snowing that much - yesterday they cleared the roads and now it was piled up ankle-height (although considering the kind of shoes I wear my ankle-height might be higher than most people's). Even so, it seems to have brought some troubles in road upkeep. It's noon now. Noon. And they still haven't cleared it up.

Gotta love these southern cities.

Other than that, I've discovered that a place close-by makes pretty good croissants. I guess in a way it's a good thing, considering now every day I get this urge to go take a little walk and come back with several... it's just that. Well. That's still not very healthy. xD

FF11 news: Holy shit, Windurst controls Ronfaure this week. O.o; Also, I now have my BLU up to 26 and have quite a few spells from the 30s learned already. Progress! Next goal: lv 30 so I can use Wild Carrot. Although maybe lv 31 would be more appropriate, I'm severely lacking in points and spell slots... will have to see if I'll bother re-making my regular spell set just for the sake of getting to use Wild Carrot one level earlier.

Warning: this is yet another post about Final Fantasy XI.

Finally reached level 50 RDM. =D I'd hoped to get to that by the end of December, but kitty's work schedule got too hectic for us to arrange enough time online together to achieve that. But...hooray! Now we're finally there! Only 25 more levels to go to final level cap, and what's facing us now is the first level limit break quest, as well as the artifact armor quests. Finally I'll be able to look like a real red mage, complete with the red feathered hat...
Well, just as soon as I hit lv 60 first. The last of the AFs (the hat) has a lv 60 requirement, but I can wear the first piece by lv 52. Just gotta go obtain them now. What worries me now is getting the money for the rest of my new equipment. Damn is stuff expensive at these levels.

I think I've said it before, but Kupofried's ring is made of awesome. I used up one charge of it while bored, and ended up getting my blue mage from barely level 20 to lv 23 in one session. Solo. >D Which is just as well, kitty recently helped me learn Poison Breath, and that's the last of the spells I needed to learn that I can use before lv 30. My level kind of needs catching up with my spells.

I think I found the reason I stopped playing FFT the last time. Happened to randomly pick up the game yesterday and decided to take a look. I was a lot farther than I remembered...but there was also a damn hard story battle right next to me. The...the...? Golgollalda? *tries to figure out from the Japanese name* Something like that. Some execution place. Tried it twice before giving up again. Oops. xD;

Perhaps I'll train a bit and try again. My guide recommends level 17-21 for that battle, and my people are 16-17. Not that I think getting a couple levels and doing everything the same way as before would help much, what matters more is if Disable (/other enfeeble stopping actions) sticks to Gaffgarion the first time I try and how long it lasts. I wonder how hard it'd be to break his weapon like the guide suggests.

I swear one day I'll finish that game. One day...

I've also been editing waff lots. Wrote about half of all character profiles for Four Warriors of Light. :P Those, plus some random other ones from other titles. And added some area introductions. Now I keep wanting to edit it more but can't decide on anything to edit. The remaining FWL profiles would require me to actually finish the game first, and I'm up against this really hard boss that I just can't seem to beat. xD;;

Okay, some time for impressions of the 光の４戦士-ファイナルファンタジー外伝- (Four Warriors of Light: Final Fantasy Sidestory) game. Got it this Christmas, I'm...actually, I don't have a clue how many hours in I am, don't recall it saying anywhere. but pretty damn many hours anyway. Judging by the crowns (jobs) unlocked I'm a bit less than half-way through the game.

If you're not familiar with the title, it was made with the intention of presenting it like an old-school game, complete with music (not actual orchestra playing, the music sounds like it came off a SNES) and game play (overworld, turn-based combat on a battle screen, complicated dungeons/cities/houses that don't even attempt to make it look like they came out of a real world, etc), with graphics replicating the SNES-look in 3D (which mostly just means the charas are SD. The backgrounds looks like they came out of a story book).

This will include some minor spoilers, but no major points.

( Down the Memory Lane )

My judgement so far? A good distraction, but falls a bit flat on its face in certain aspects.

Yesterday was a damn good day in FF11.

Well, it didn't start too spectacularly. But then we both leveled (lv 48 now, awesome! Lv 50 is suddenly so very close. Maybe we'll even get our first limit break done this year) and Kitty teleported me way up north so I could get the Fauregandi Outpost.
That done, we headed to Bastok to finally camp Lizzy again. We were the only ones there, and did get the claim on her, and..well, I somehow ended up going 1/1 on the boots! :O The bane of everyone's lives, and the first time I got the claim (well, Kitty did that, but we were there to get the boots for me) she put out. I've heard horror stories of people going some 0/30+ on the boots, so this is definitely something to celebrate. Now I have my fancy boots that are good from single-digit levels until 40s or later on some jobs. Awesome. xD

Spurned on by my success so far, when Kitty went to sleep I switched to my BLU and headed out to attempt learning Healing Breeze, once again. (my fancy boots immediately got some use, BLU is one of those jobs mentioned) That'd be the fourth day for me, with every 'day' having 2-3 hour sessions. Sure enough, something odd was going on with the dhalmels. All but one of them used Healing Breeze. o___o And quickly too, some before 50% HP, others promptly at around 25% HP mark. I don't get it! Before, I'd do whatever I could to feed them TP while still keeping them alive, and they'd absolutely refuse to use that damn spell. Well, with all the Healing Breeze spam they did, it was no trick at all to learn it. I got it after only 50 minutes! And that's not even all. Overjoyed at the thought that I wouldn't have to prevent myself from killing them again, I ran around simply butchering every dhalmel in sight for a bit. And what do I see? Serpopard Ishtar. I know, useless random NM, lol. But still. An NM with a (useless) unique drop. I proceeded to take it down. From the comments at the lolwiki it seems that mostly BLUs have come across it. I now consider killing Ishtar a BLU initiation rite of kinds. You're not a real one if you haven't killed it while trying to learn Healing Breeze. xD

Afterwards, considered going out and butchering some higher-level dhalmels in Buburimu, but decided against it since all kinds of storage are just about full with random crap I need to sell already. xD Will do it today, hopefully at least something has sold while I slept.
Today they also did the rest of the 'November' update finally. Not even really sure what they added besides the new crafting system - or did they just add that?, will have to check before logging in.

..wait, what? RL? Does that thing really exist? Woah, I could've sworn it didn't!

Time just flies. It flies even more when you're not writing. I reached a bit tougher part in my outline, and haven't touched my Nano for this year since. That was some 10 days ago. *sweadrop*

I've been quite thoroughly distracted, first with playing a bit more Echoes of Time, and then trying to finish NG+ on Ring of Fates. I think I still like Ring of Fates the most out of the Crystal Chronicles games, mostly because of the story. It lacks wi-fi multiplayer, but I can deal with that.
I'm getting to the very end of my NG+ now. Next up is character re-union thing right before the final boss. Started some four days ago from the aftermath of Abyssus Forest, so I consider this a really fast playthrough. I've even managed to squeeze in some farming, so it hasn't been all story mode dungeons exclusively.
My people just reached level 80, which makes me wonder how difficult NG++ would be. After all, the level cap is 99, and I started NG+ with my people level 42-43. Some of my stats already occasionally reach the cap of 999 too, so I don't know...would probably just need some amazing dodging skills to survive all the battles. o.o; What makes it a bit difficult is that I like playing Gnash, and his defense really sucks. I guess it won't matter if I get some super-armor that raises all his stats to 999, as at that point the 5-way shot ability should be really godly...

I've also come to the result that no matter the title, you need ungodly amounts of Mu Fur in a Crystal Chronicles game. To my horror I discovered that there's two pieces of armor that both require 15 Mu Fur, and I'd just emptied the shop of them and made silk/leather/fine silk/fine leather with them. Would need more farming, definitely...

Hello there November. Nanowrimo is..doing surprisingly well, compared to some past years. I have some 7,9k words, which is barely a 100 words less than I wanted to have by today (doing 2k/day as usual, although I've never really kept up with that pace for long). I suppose that's a good improvement from yesterday, when I started writing way late - as in, had about an hour left of the day - and ended up scrunching in a bit over 1k words. Ah well. I've made up for it today.

While looking at my notes I discovered that my remaining scenes will net me some 22k words more, presuming my scene average stays the same. I suppose this was to be expected, and it's not like I even meant to carry through the whole Nano with just those scenes. Still, I'm suddenly wondering if I shouldn't be looking through my random notes/questions file for Mythopoeia, coming up with exact scenes needed based on them. Writing by the plan seems to be going surprisingly well this year, so I might want more scenes planned out.

Let's try this posting thing again. As usual, you'll probably skip over the entry if you're not interested in FF11. xD;

I've had a lot of small stuff to do recently, stuff that I should have done long ago. All those long lists of stuff to do was kind of oppressive, and made me not want to level much anything. After all, that time could be better spent catching up on the small stuff... There's been various little quests, some NMs to camp, and most of all a couple annoying BLU spells to get. Since last week I've been slowly trying to get everything done, and am actually nearing the list of stuff I can do by myself. Now that's something! =D

( Accomplishments of late )

I really, really like playing Blue Mage I've found. Even with all the spell-farming. Maybe because of all the spell-farming. It gives leveling another goal than just getting more and more exp. So far, I'm buried in spells to get on BLU. And while I'm certain that it won't be quite so busy on that front later (levels need more exp to get, and spells aren't getting any more frequent, the opposite in fact) but it still gives nice intermediary goals on the way to 75.

Maybe, when I'm done with one more quest and getting that Blastbomb, I'll finally try out Dark Knight too...I've been meaning to do that for ages.

My reaction this morning when doorbell rang: "..buh? @__@" A big package greeted me. Confusion. Checking the sender. ...oh yeah, the kitty sent me a package. Realization. ....it's THAT big? No wonder she complained about the cost of sending it.
Open package. Stare.



Damn you kitty, now I can't in any conceivable way claim I'm not a total geek. xD (yes yes, I should really get that camera sometimes. Cellphone picture still suffices for this purpose)
Anyway, thank you. I'm branded a geek for life but thank you. Yes, I do like it. And damn, how much did you spend on this, arrgh. xD;
Well, seems that I got my first PlayArts figure quite a bit earlier than I expected. I've looked at them before and contemplated buying (and ways of buying, considering how much it sucks to try to get anything of this kind delivered to Finland) but..yeah.

What else...I'm sure I had something else to write about too. Hmm. Well, I'll write about it later when I can remember what it was.

Happy birthday me and so on. You know it's your birthday when your email inbox is full of "happy birthday" messages.

Something really weird happened last night while playing Final Fantasy XI. I was idling on Black Mage in northern San d'Oria, and when I came back from AFK, I noticed I'd...gotten a party invite. xD;; Not only was I idling with no flag up, I was also in a party already (we were having a dinner break). Made me go a bit wtf... I checked later, the person who invited me wasn't even a BLM trying to come up with a manaburn, no. Not even a low-level party in Valkurm desperate for some healing and willing to invite a BLM to do it. They were a DNC/MNK, so a straight-out DD, and the party was in Qufim. I mean..seriously, wtf? xD;;

As usual, there's not really anything else to write about. My life. Have you seen it? I think it must be hiding from me.

Ugh..my dreams from last night bother me. I don't remember much, just that I saw two with post-apocalypse themes. Or maybe the first one was right during it, or at least during a long fall to chaos. It's been a while since I last saw dreams that linger with me as long as these do.

Played FF11 too long yesterday. Kitty wanted to make a party with my PLD and her BRD, and we ended up making one which mostly broke up after a couple levels, and then a second one that took us to 18/19. The second one would've even continued if we'd wanted to, but the DNC had to go and Kai (our WAR) wanted to try his hand at the summer event since there was a lot of downtime (Kitty had to go eat dinner). Ended up helping him get his yukata (summer event reward), and escorted him first back to Valkurm to get the OP, then through Konschtat to get his Dem crystal to Jeuno. xD; Well, it never hurts helping others, especially in this game. We even tried to make a Qufim party afterwards but it broke up soon with our THF DCing, DNC having to go, and COR deciding to go as well since he was there only to help out the THF. =D; Even so, this whole process took..what, 12 hours? Played way too long.

...I guess I did reasonably well, even though it was my first experience playing in a full party. And in such an important position too! But I did manage to keep the vokes pretty regular (it has a 30-second recast) and judging by how long the second party was willing to stick with us, I can't have done too badly. There were a couple instances when the mob almost got to the mages, but that was generally in the instances I needed a lot of curing and voke came up a second or two too late to keep its attention on me. Although there was this one fight where I was seriously distracted for some reason, didn't manage to keep up my voke cycle, and let the WAR (Kai) drop down to half health. Oops. .___.;;
Not to mention the Qufim party, a real nightmare. I felt bad about it, but I couldn't keep voking the mob regularly in that party. I was a level under the lowest level recommendation, and very squishy. I had to spread hate a bit to keep alive (if I died with the worm at quarter health, that wouldn't be good), but I still felt really bad about it. Especially since the THF kept grabbing hate. :/ Lesson learned, no more Qufim parties on PLD until after a couple more levels. I feel like apologizing to the THF in person, but I guess that'd be just silly. =D;

Eh-heh, I guess I should finally post something. =D;; Certainly been much longer than I thought it has been.

Final Fantasy XIV! :O ( Cut for rambling )

This week was mostly spent waiting for actual scans of the FF14 article and obsessively going over it in an attempt to glean every hint from the info given. xD;

Sunbreeze Festival has started in Final Fantasy XI. I haven't really had the time or interest to even think of participating in the event yet. Tomorrow at the very least I'll play some, since Sunday is mine and Kitty's FF11 day. Last time we played we spent hours and hours just fishing on the Mhaura-Selbina ferry. xD; Well, and killing some select monsters that appear on it. We even got attack by pirates twice, but didn't get the items we need from them. Bah, should go again to wait for more pirate attacks...we've had that particular quest active for ages, it'd be really great to finally get rid of it.

Arrgh, have played entirely too much the past couple days. So much, in fact, that earlier today my whole left hand started hurting a bit. It faded with an hour-long break, but when I started playing again my left thumb (on the DS, I'd usually be pressing the joint down on the center of the arrow keys and use it like that) went all funky. It's tingling - or more specifically, the joint is tingling. And starts hurting if there's any substantial pressure on it. Oops. Methinks it's time to keep a longer break from playing. At least until tomorrow or so. =D;;

( Ring of Fates )

( Echoes of Time )

It bothers me that to be able to hire one of the mercenaries in Echoes of Time, you need to have a minimum of five people on your friend roster. Anyone have on the flist have the game and access to wifi? >.>'

If there wasn't so much lag in wifi multi-player mode in Echoes of Time, it'd be a lot more pleasant to play... The last couple days, I've been playing that, both single and multi-player. Kitty got the game finally so we've been playing together quite a lot.

( Echoes of Time )

This is making me want to pick up Ring of Fates again. I still have quite a lot of the multi-player mode to go through, and I haven't even tried New Game+...

Google Chrome OS? Wowza. Should've been expecting that I guess, with all the rumors floating about. But I didn't, not after Android. And here we are, with a Google OS on the horizon. Awesome: :O
It looks like the best option by far for laptops and netbooks. I mean, when would you normally use those things..on the go. And there's really no need for a heavy-duty OS with all the relics of a by-gone era bundled in with it (desktop calendars, document and picture editing, music and video playing software, etc) when all you really need is the web. Chrome OS deals away with the middle-man (the OS interface with all its extra software) and goes straight to the point (the web). Go, go, Google. That's a bold new path they're forging there. =D Combine Chrome OS with Google Wave, and there's some really exciting things coming from Google.

..if you're not familiar with Google Wave (it's not yet released), it's basically this web platform that combines email, different chat softwares, social networking sites, wikis, collaborative documents, video, music, etc. Everything that you can imagine getting some use out of working on it together or enjoying the experience together and then some, it's all in Wave. You can't really describe it well, you have to see it for yourself to see how innovative it actually is. It's truly the next generation of web interaction, and a shining example of what can be done when you break out of the old ways of doing things.

I've been looking around for a good world map of Final Fantasy I, but haven't had any luck with it. So I finally got fed up with it and decided to draw my own. Got the continent boundaries and places of different terrains and the places of dungeons and cities from a conveniently big scanned map that I found, and am well on my way to prettifying it. Got the basic map down, just need to add some details. And wait for Kitty to come up with all map icons since she promised to try. Sorry for putting the hardest part off on you, Kitty. xD;
It looks promising so far. Depending on the result, I might have to repeat the process for most other early FF games at least. It's something I've been planning on doing for a while. Mashups of the in-game graphics (NES, SNES times) in huge size are nice and all, but they're not really much to look at. Especially if you scanned it from a decades-old paper-map you got with the game and the map was all worn out by the time you scanned it, leaving white lines all over it in the places you'd folded it in...
The things I do for waff, really. *shakes head*