Currents of Time

(The "big cherries" bit does not really fit, to my somewhat-Latin-trained ear, but it's still kind of funny, maybe?)


ANYWAY: Squeenix makes FFXIV free to play indefinitely. Be right back, rolling on floor laughing.

... Really, I was standing up (we'd moved the chair over by the window to stand on for hanging lights) when my brother IM'd me that and I sank to the floor in giggles. (READ IT.)



Meanwhile, the FFXI update has been exactly as awesome as promised. I've unlocked all the job emotes I'm currently capable of obtaining (only THF, DRG, DRK, WAR, BLM, and NIN - my only jobs level 30+), and NOW I MUST COLLECT MORE, except that takes time and energy that I don't have, instead of just performing a simple fetch quest.



I don't really have much to say that anyone would have an interest in (FFXI and XIV fit there, too, but those are too good to pass up). Feeling depressed and unappreciated and annoying. Don't know why (other than the obvious "my brain is stupid"). Too early for SAD to be setting in. Putting a cramp in card-production, but one's in the mail and most of the others are at least in progress. Unrelated, there's no hot water in the apartment, we don't know why. At house today baking Christmas cookies with my Mom. Deliciousss.


Blah, blah, blah, boring, boring girl. Sorry.

All the people running attack ads lost the election again. :3 VERMONTERS DON'T LIKE IT WHEN YOU BASH THE OTHER GUY. WE DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT HIM WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO FOR US (I mean, it was very, very close, but still. I am glad we once again show that that shit doesn't work here.) (This also means that the positions I cared about will all be filled by the people I preferred. Double win!)

NaNo. I'm already behind, but I've also already written more in the last two and a half days than in the five months prior, so I'm calling it a win, anyway. LOOK, WORDS. I MADE THEM!


So, you know what bothers me a bit? When people who should know better by now do that whole asexual = aromantic and possibly asocial or even antisocial thing. A little earlier this week, I was talking with someone and they said something that I'm hoping was supposed to come out as, "Boy, I wish I were more like you in that I could be perfectly content not being in a relationship because DAMN, they're a lot of drama and heartache!" ... but which came rather out more along the lines of, "Boy, you're so lucky you're a heartless icebitch who's going to live and die all alone because you hate everyone!" Followed by a, "you know, even if you do ever get into a relationship, you'll have to have sex. It's the law!" Because, yeah, asexuals? Are NOT AT ALL aware of sex being an important part of a relationship to non-asexuals! THEY SOMEHOW MISSED THAT MEMO. It's not like society throws it in our face every day! RRRG. Fortunately, I won't have the opportunity to speak with the individual in question for another few days, which should be more than enough time for me to stop being all snarly about it, now that I've vented my frustrations. (To the individual in question, who'll probably see this eventually: please don't bother apologising. I'll have put it behind me by the time you see this and all you'll manage to do is remind me that I was annoyed. Instead, just don't do it again.)


...AND IN "WHAT HAVE I DONE WITH MY LIFE" NEWS, AS OF THIS WEEKEND I WILL HAVE BEEN PLAYING FFXI FOR SEVEN YEARS OH MY GOODNESS and still not a single level 75, though that's not the level cap anymore, but shut up. This calls for ... something. I don't know what. (AN INTERVENTION??) Thank goodness FFXIV isn't near as excellent, or I'd really be in trouble now.


(Hi, by the way. I'm back from being a hermit! I would make an intro post for the newcomers, but I already linked to my old one and, really, sadly, nothing much has changed... Whatever, here's the old one again.)

OH WAIT I AM NOT DONE Halloween! We didn't get anyone looking for candy (MORE FOR ME I only bought one bag this year, though, after last year's turnout), but I am mostly glad that I did not have to WALK HOME. 'Cause it was on a Sunday. And the buses don't run! So, three miles in the dark, alone, past a cemetery. AAAAA but I was saved from being eaten by ghosts and instead me and a few friends sat around watching Halloween-themed movies for a bit and it was fun. Yay!

(Also, I saw a lot of people wandering around in costume on Saturday. One of them was a Mudkip.)


ONE MORE EDIT I'm going to pull the links from this music meme at the end of the week, so if you've any interest, you'd best head over.

FINALLY.

( BotCon and Sunday evening )

HOORAY WE ALL SURVIVED. NOW I CAN FINALLY GO TO BED. Because I was stupid and said NO FINISH THE ENTRY.

Though, I swear I keep hearing something moving around outside and it's really freaking me out, so maybe I won't be sleeping as much as I'd like. Boo.

If anyone remembers this drama from back in March, it looks like LJ's trying again. Still not so great. All the info you could want is in this post, here.


Have other, possibly actually interesting, things to post, but it will have to wait until a point when I am not feeling like I have been run over.


...So, yeah, seriously? Nothing like dropping yourself 20 years in the past where everything can - AND WILL - happily eat you and discovering, in the middle of a crowd of sound-aggro mobs, that you are subbing blm and not nin like you thought. DID NOT DIE. Not sure how.



Also, whatever is making ALL THE PETS IN THE WORLD sick/er this week/month, knock it off right this instant. Three people here, another three from real life, my own dog (at least his didn't turn into an emergency)... This is distressing and uncool and it makes me sad.

I had a silly entry to write up! Today was pretty good! EVEN IF THE CRAZY SUGAR-FREE PUMPKIN PIE LADY DID STRIKE AGAIN.

Aaand then I got back from work and stumbled over this. Which, uh, if you don't want to be reduced to either a frothing rage or a depressed lump, both over the state of gay rights, you probably shouldn't read. Time to leave the planet. Way to go, California. ONE MORE MARK UNDER THE "FAILURE" HEADING. Aren't you sick of that yet?


I really wish this was just someone's bad idea of a joke.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN I'M ABOUT TO BE EVICTED FROM MY MOG HOUSE THAT'S


THAT CANNOT BE LEGAL WHAT



WHAT




WHAT




(haha, he says that like Adventurers don't spend 99.9% of their time outside of and far, faaaar away from their Mog Houses and Rent-A-Rooms, anyway...)

Well, Fairy, Kujata, Remora, Midgardsormr, Hades, Seraph, Garuda, and Pandemonium, looks like tomorrow's the big day. (Suppose we could say the same for Sylph, Valefore, Leviathan, Quetzalcoatl, Cerberus, Bismark, Lakshmi, and Asura, too, though more for the population boom.) Hope nothing goes weird in the merge. (The merge is occurring during an update and Square always always always manages to make some fantastic error or another during updates. It's always kind of fun to see what they broke this time, but now it has the potential to ... really do some damage.)


Can't say I envy any of 'em, but the whole thing has me oddly sentimental.


(THEY ARE GAME SERVERS. THEY ARE NOT EVEN YOUR SERVER.)



Perhaps is the the fatigue.


I was up waaaaay too late this morning talking to people online, since, hey, I didn't have work today! So it'll be fiiiine!

9:30 or so (that's not quite 5 hours of sleep), work calls in a panic and I find myself marching in - IN THE SNOW, hahaaargh, I knew that was going to happen... - and working all day. At least I didn't have to close. (And, really, I can't complain about an extra five and a half hours on the paycheck. 'Specially not when I can't even remember most of it. I AM SO OUT OF IT. And going to bed in like three minutes, I hope, hooooly cow.)


Edit:
Down at 11 am (Eastern), March 22. Already dropped from the status list.


Edit II:
Maintenance has been extended to at least fourteen 15(!) hours. The "joke" is that they accidentally deleted everyone. (Whether that means everyone-everyone, everyone being transferred, or everyone but the folks intended to be transferred depends on who you ask.)

Edit III:
Total time was about 15 1/2 hours. Woo, that's a while. Apparently the towns on the merged servers are all broken. TIME FOR EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE! YAAAY!

Woke up freakishly early Friday morning because we were leaving early and because I have a bunch of errands to run before we left. So I throw myself to the floor around 7 am? Run around, barely finish everything, and am ready to go at 9 am! .... 9:05 the phone rings, it's my mother, she's only just leaving, so I've got an hour to waste. I COULD HAVE SLEPT MORE? Woe. She arrives, we finally leave, everything's good! It's kind of warm, sun is shining... We drive without incident for five hours! Then we pull over to change drivers and, in a display if incredible timing skill, my brother calls while we're at the rest stop. He wanted to let us know it was snowing where he was, had been snowing for the last day+. We still had blue skies and sun, so that was kind of strange to hear. SURE ENOUGH, THOUGH, I've barely been driving for ten minutes when suddenly it's snowing! WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?! I don't drive long ("only" about two hours), because my ankle's still bothering me, and the snow's only been getting worse as we've gone along. (I have a bunch of pictures taken from the car, if anyone wants me to upload them, just let me know. Or check Facebook, since they're up there.) It ended up snowing the entire weekend. And nothing accumulated! It was insane.

Anyway, we rolled into town, checked into a room, and then met my brother... wasted some time, ate dinner, crashed early (driving all day can do that). On Saturday, we went to the National Museum of Play, 'cause they've got a LEGO exhibit right now (Nathan Sawaya's stuff), and it was AWESOME. Here is a photo link dump, but I think all of them can be seen at his site (and the pictures are probably better quality. Light was a little too low for no flash, but then the flash bounced off them). LEGO tree, man and his reflection, paint project, no flash and with flash.

Random other images from the trip include the tree behind my brother's place (he doesn't know why there are chairs in it), a MASSIVE SNOWMAN OMG seriously this thing was ridiculous, and the only magnet on their fridge (I love the duck's expression. IT KNOWS IT IS IRRITATING YOU AND IT DOESN'T CARE. It is mocking you).

We ate more delicious food (we ate a lot of delicious food...), didn't really do anything on Sunday, and then drove home Monday in THANKFULLY NOT A SNOWSTORM (we drove home in the dark in a snowstorm last year). It did rain, though.


AND THEN I CAME HOME AND FFXI / THE PLAYERBASE HAD EXPLODED. (To be fair, I knew about that before I got home again, since my brother had seen most of it and told me.) Those of you who get mail from my FFXI characters, in the next set of letters they're ignoring the fourth wall again. More so than usual, I mean. Just so you're prepared.



PS IT IS MARCH NOW HOORAY HOORAY WE SURVIVED ANOTHER FEBRUARY


Edit:
Transformers fandom is full of lunatics in the best ways possible. The thread's a bit long, but you can just read the first post for the story.

I was thinking about writing and characters and fanfiction versus original fiction and all that sort of stuff this evening while waiting for the dishes to dry so I could cook dinner! And. I was going to go into some wordy back story here, but really it was only ever one person, wasn't it? I don't know. I know other people's original characters/universes are generally not that exciting! TOO BAD I'M TALKING ABOUT IT ANYWAY. Anyway. One or two people have, on occasion, asked something about Okame-verse (which still needs a better name) and the timeline and overall storyline and I... generally don't have an answer for it! And I (finally?) put the why behind that into words. A lot of the time when you've got characters that you write about, you write, you know, a story. And, the thing is, with those two, there isn't really one. There's no big, overreaching ... thing. I mean, when I write about them, it's just an incident in their lives. That's all.

I do have a universe or two with, you know, actual plots (I've pretty much never posted about them, though), but this isn't one of them.

And sometimes I feel kind of bad, or weird about that? I dunno. Like, how does Okame freaking out this time relate to wherever you're eventually going with this? And I'm not eventually going anywhere with any of it. I mean, yeah, sure, depending on when in their lives I write them, they act different, or stuff has changed, but they're (probably) never going to do anything special or, uh. Interesting, even, haha. I just like them. Even if they won't ever solve the world crisis of doom or save the whales or anything.

I was going to make an allcaps-y sentence about how they're both weird and dysfunctional and totally not girlfriends shut up Jade will kill you, but I feel like I've been seeing a lot of internet drama lately and don't want anyone to jump on me for accusing [x] group of people of being completely mad. Or socially inept. Or dysfunctional. Or ... whatever. So, uh, I guess I won't.


Good sign you've been spending too much time pounding away at a word doc (EVEN IF YOU AREN'T GETTING ANYWHERE ARGH RAGE): you keep reflexively hitting ctrl-s every paragraph or so. I've attempted to save the update page five or six times now. Good job, self!

( And now boring real life whining )

For your daily dose of is she really still talking about that?, San d'Oria took Sarutabaruta in conquest this week, which is pretty awesome! We've claimed Gustaberg quite a few times, but we've only rarely taken Saru[tab] and, to my unending frustration, those times have always been during weeks I haven't logged on for whatever reason. (Oh, yes, this is FFXI-talk now, if you didn't know what any of this was about.) BUT THIS WEEK - haha! So now I've run supplies to the outpost by Windurst and so now I have finally done the supplies quest for every outpost (on Hisime, and that I have access to, anyway. No Sky yet, but that's the only one, now). I took Aya and Ki out, too, since, you know, Windurst? FAR AWAY. And Ki can't airship it, so, uh, yeah. Long trip for her no matter how you go about it. (EXCEPT NOT ANYMORE i love op warp)

Also, it's been over a year and a half since my brother started trying for the m.kris and all it's got him so far is a couple hundred thousand gil down the drain. He's considering giving up and, since that would mean he can't go anywhere (or going to gt a Joyeuse, which he doesn't have time for), quitting. So right now he's trying to come up with a way to make 3.5 million, because the thought of fishing for more marlin (only for, again, absolutely none of them to give a chart, and even if they did, for the fight to them only give us another fuscina or piece of oxblood and a dwarf pugil) is too unbearable. Dear SE: it would not kill you to be just a little nicer to your playerbase on occasion!


To end on a random note, here's an amusing article on why the US Life on Mars was STUPID. Or at least not as good as the original. Reading that has had the perhaps unfortunate side effect of making me want to rewatch the original again.

So I just put up a hugelong rantramble that directly involves my mother and something she said to me in a place where she’ll see it (I probably won't be cross-posting it, so it's here on Facebook, mostly about asexuality, if you're curious. ...yes, my mother joined FB). Kind of hoping this doesn’t turn into drama! I don't mean for it to, I just don't see the point of hiding it from her. Been in a bit of an inexplicable rage all day, though, so maybe I do mean for it to cause drama? I can't tell. Anyway. Yeah. This was going to be the Dissidia post, by the way, but I got distracted and sidetracked myself halfway through and so I have cut it down to just this, instead. The other stuff's all saved in a word doc, anyway.

Fic. Apparently I'm actually considering plot. Not any more confident about it, but I feel obligated now that other people have prodded me towards the fact checking I needed. (Turns out what I'd thought was right, but I managed to misspell my own name twice today and then lost track of when it was to a point of years, which probably says enough about my mental state and why I really do not trust my brain at all these days.) I have t-- two? Three? Days off after tomorrow, so assuming I don't get called in (and that the oven does not explode - hey, we have a new heat sensor that we attach inside the door and that rests on the door handle, so you drop it on the floor every time you open or close the oven, and the sensor pad on the wire that goes inside the oven is missing, so really it's not effective, either), I should be feeling marginally more functional (coherent is probably too much to hope for) by the weekend.

I am making a poll. It does not, for the curious, have anything to do with the fact-checking I needed to do (those were, you know, facts, and what I'm asking about is more opinion, unless I am forgetting things, which is entirely likely), but I was poking around the fanbase - oh, I'm talking about FFVIII again, here - earlier this afternoon and, you know, stuff, train of thought jumping all over the place, I don't remember where I was looking that this jumped back into my brain, but I'm just wondering what other people think about it! Because I've seen a lot of different thoughts on it (and given it a fair amount of contemplation myself. It's one of the things I always wish they'd addressed more in canon, even though I know there was not really anywhere to work it in), though I think I narrowed it down to the ones I've seen the most? And actually since this will probably end up playing at least some role in the fic I am at least going to attempt to write (no guarantees) (it would be set post-game), if most everyone has different ideas than mine (or if there's stuff in canon), I might work with some of that instead?

(Also, late edit: it is probably better to consider the third question as relating to events post-game.)

( Poll. Contains spoilers for FF8! )

RANDOM COMMENT: it actually makes me really (and irrationally) angry when people say that Final Fantasy XI “doesn’t count” for [insert reasoning here]. Because it’s stupid. Because you have to pay for monthly access. Because it’s online. You’re allowed to not like it! You’re allowed to not want to play it, or to think the MMORPG format isn’t a good one, but it counts. It has a story. It has characters (beyond you and the other players you meet) that you care about. Sure, you’re along for the ride a little more directly than usual, but you’re still not the hero. That role still goes to the NPCs. IT’S CALLED FINAL FANTASY XI. It is a number in the sequence! And I just get kind of upset when people dismiss it (as they often do). Really. You can say “I’ve played all the games in the series except XI” WITHOUT tacking on “because that one doesn’t count” at the end. If it doesn’t count, why do you feel obligated to mention it? No one is judging you. You don’t have to put it down like that. I promise.