Currents of Time

Awesome: I have 31 hours next week (and despite this, I am only closing once! Which is very exciting) and the first two days of November off! I did not ask for them, they were just GIVEN TO ME. So I at least have the option of getting a good start on NaNo. And I am feeling a lot better than I was! AND WE GOT THE NEW GLOVES AT WORK YAY YAY YAY they are so much nicer than the ones we've been using oh my gooosh.

Less Awesome: oh god nanowrimo. Also, apparently there are no interesting Halloween events anywhere near me, so I guess getting out from work early on Monday (and not working at all Saturday) doesn't really make any difference. And my NaNo region has absolutely nothing planned for write-ins or even a pre-November meet up. EVERY SINGLE TIME I DECIDE I WILL FIND SOMETHING TO DO TO BE SOCIAL... see, this is why I don't bother. Well, that and the fact that it never comes to anything anyway, 'cause I'm a loser.

EVEN LESS AWESOME: Square has apparently hit the bottom of their coffer for FFXIV, and so, sometime next month or perhaps in December (there is no information on this anywhere, other than that it is happening), they are going to start charging for the game. How much will they be charging? WHO KNOWS! THERE IS NO INFORMATION ANYWHERE! Hopefully not the full $13, because it is not worth that yet, and are they going to stick with their original plan of cutting fees if you play FFXI, as well? Basically I am really kind of freaking out (like, unreasonably so) because NO NO NO I don't want to have to pick one or the other and damn it, considering their plans for FFXIV v2.0 next year, I really, reaaally don't want to miss this once in a lifetime storyline (APOCALYPSE!! Or CATASTROPHE, anyway, since part of the plan for 2.0 includes completely reworked maps, so the entire world is going to be redesigned. And characters won't be reset, so it's not even like they're ending the world and starting a new one, this is really an actual thing that is going to happen in Eorzea. WANT TO SEEEE). So, uh. Damn it, what do I do? Other than cry over my current inability to afford both games, I mean.

LEAST AWESOME: I know I said I was done talking about the Family Drama, but adskjflgbfjdbhs my cousin's mother-in-law has had to quit her job and move in with him because she was the best option, and he's got to go back in for another round of spinal fusion surgery and either something else is going wrong or it's just psychosomatic but his vocal chords are beginning to not work so I DON'T KNOW I am resisting the urge to throw things across the room only because I know it wouldn't do any good. BUT I have her address, now, so I can write her letters, if I want.

OFFERED AWESOME: oh right speaking of letters - I do have a couple people on my mailing list WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT they probably know who they are, but I feel like bombarding the post office again (every time their state of NO MONEY AT AAAAALL makes the news, I remember I am supposed to be single-handedly reviving them), so if getting snail-mail interests you, check out this entry, here, please.

There was a guy sitting on the street holding a piece of cardboard with the above written on it.

...I always think of things to tack onto these entries for above and below the cut while I am at / walking to/from work, and then I always forget them all as soon as I get the door open. Ridiculous.

30 Days of Video Games

( Day 29 - A game you thought you wouldn't like, but ended up loving )

Tomorrow is the last day!

Also, pills make me feel tired. ugh. Naptime? Oh! BUT! I have officially dry swallowed a pill now! It only took me 25 years! Maybe this means someday I will stop gagging on Advil?

(Server merges soon! I will get to meet the other half of my linkshell in-game! Excitinggg.)


Hey, look! You can stalk my progress in FFXIV! Blog will obviously have nothing, but Character Profile and History both have stuff. (And, let me tell you, I was not happy to see that getting from level 10 to level 11 would take TWENTY THOUSAND EXPERIENCE POINTS. SE, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK.)

I do not want to go to work tomorrow. It is a long day and those are lonely and sad, and it is a Sunday so I will have to walk, possibly in the rain, and I am feeling unappreciated by my manager, who is writing shitty schedules.

Whine.

30 Days of Video Games

( Day 07 - Favourite game couple )

… wow, I will try to be less ridiculously allcaps-y tomorrow.

I was able to stop taking my allergy meds a bit ago! Oh, good, I thought. Maybe this really does mean spring is just early this year (or late last year, or... I don't know, something)! Only today my mouth is itchy again and I'm excessively tired.

I've been having trouble getting to sleep lately, though, so maybe it's just that. I don't know. Irritating, whatever it is.


Mom and I went hat shopping. She says I am a hat-person. I ... would have thought otherwise, but I also know nothing of such things, so, uh. Anyway, we had no luck, but one shop looked promising. It was closed, so she's going to try to find time later this week to help me check it out. WHY IS CLOTHING SHOPPING SO HAAAARD. (On the positive side, I finally have a pair of nice black pants. They are neither too short in the leg nor too wide in the waist. WELL, THAT ONLY TOOK TWO YEARS no I am not joking, there has even been talk of having a pair tailor-made for me. Now we don't need to! Yay, second-hand places.) (Seriously, what does size even mean these days? What is a 4? What is an 8? Why can't we just go with the simple waist-leg measurements they use with guys' clothing? WHY ARE ALL OF MY PAIRS OF WOMEN'S CLOTHING ALL DIFFERENT SIZES? I have size 0s and size 10s and everything in between and seriously what is that. Just give me the 30x32s (or whatever. They're a little big in the waist, but they have a drawstring and don't come any smaller) and let me get on with life, already.)


WHY IS THIS ENTRY ABOUT CLOTHING.


I'M GOING TO GO KILL ORCS NOW. 'CAUSE IT'S FUN. And because my Fomor hate is getting kinda high. eek. (HEY GUYS, if you'd just drop the item, already, we wouldn't have to do this.)

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.

I was rummaging through a storage box - looking for the proper place to put something away. I found it! Anyway, while I was in there, I decided to dig out my extra hair-ties, and while I was there I decided to play the nostalgia game or something and pulled out my convention photo albums, and, anyway, it turns out, thanks to mysticeden having a camera and then sending me copies of what she took, I actually do have pictures from after the modifications we made! Yay! I am very pleased.

I did comparisons of the before and after pics and, okay, it's kind of subtle, but it definitely looks better. Looked? Well, it still looks the same, but I haven't worn it since AB '06. Still, photos! I was so sure I didn't have any! Instead, there is, indeed, eternal evidence of the fact that I am, in fact, a complete loser by some standards. (Not that this is anything new. I like to pick on myself, and most of the time it is harmless, and if you haven't caught on to the fact that I mock or complain about everything I like incessantly, then, well, for one you've never read my interests section, and for two, you've never actually read any other entries or spoken to me, either, have you?) EXCELLENT.


It is Summerfe IT HASN'T BEEN CALLED THAT SINCE THE ONE TIME IN 2004, SELF the Sunbreeze Festival in Vana'diel. I really need to log in and check it out before that ends. Squeenix, look what you've done. Half of your player base is too afraid of you to log in.


Bit disheartened at the moment. Been trying to both reconnect with older friends and also make new ones, and I'm failing pretty amazingly on both counts. I never really learned the art of "how to make new friends" (pretty much every friend I've ever had, I've had because they approached me, or someone else introduced us) and everyone I've reconnected with doesn't seem to want much of anything to do with me (judging by actions and not words, here). Right now I really want to just talk to someone (voice, not text, I mean, I talk with my brother and usually one other random person almost daily), but am feeling too bummed about my success rate at the moment to try anything. (It took me seven rounds of picking up the phone and putting it back down after listening to the tone for a few seconds before I figured this out. Who would I dial, anyway? I've exhausted my very short list of phone numbers.) Maybe tomorrow.


I went through my old memory cards and deleted a bunch of old files (I think at least half of them were doubles on the memory card I brought with me to Maine, because the times on some of the files were too close). I cleared up over a full memory card's worth of space! So now I have plenty of room to play through more games! I'm going to get back to / probably just restart Xenogears (rented it ages ago, obviously didn't have time to beat it in the, you know, five day rental period, store closed, finally found a copy selling new-as-used when the game shops phased out Playstation games, never got around to picking it up again), and continuing working my way through FFVI again. Let's see if I can handle game multi-tasking.

Here are some things from the weekend I wanted to mention but forgot, in my sleep-deprived haze:

( Yes, more on this. )

Anyway, my new field placement started today! AT 8:30 AND BY THE WAY I HAD TO DRIVE FORTY MINUTES TO GET THERE so I had to crawl out of bed at 7 am and I'm still recovering from the flight home, but I made it. IT IS SO AWESOME.

We went out on a boat and drove around and I got to do stuff already! No standing around stupidly this time, they put me right to work putting things in the lake and taking them back out, and dropping them in the lake, and hauling them back out, and tossing things in the lake and heaving them out again and THROWING THEM IN THE LAKE AND THEN PULLING THEM UP AND TAKING THE SAMPLE AND we saw some great blue herons in their nests at the top of some dead trees, and a bunch of fish clearly not adapting well to living in the lake-proper instead of the hatchery they must have been from, and also there were spiders all over the boat augh, and oh man, I am so excited and grateful, but I am seriously going to have blisters the size of China growing on my hands in a week's time ow.

I GO BACK AT 9:30 TOMORROW. Not nearly as far, though. I had to go to Waterbury to do some paperwork and stuff, but they'll be picking me up from a much closer location from now on.

SOEXCITED. (Too excited for the space key, evidently.)



And, while we're on the subject, SQUEENIX I HATE YOU.


WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY


THE ONLY GOOD THING HERE IS THAT I DIDN'T SEE ANY TARUTARU IN THE TRAILER AND I COULD LIVE WITH NO TARUTARU BUT AAGERHJKTLGEMNH


(And that's all beyond that they're promoting XIV before XIII is out...)

I don't think I mentioned that I finally finished setting up my room. So now all the lights are plugged in and working and the stereo isn't on the floor. AWESOME. And I taught my Dell to open .PDFs since teaching this thing to print is apparently outside the realm of possible things. VISTA. WHY. LEXMARK YOUR SITE IS SO USELESS. I can't get the Dell to connect to the internet, so I had to download Adobe's install on this machine, then transfer it to my old one. It was a bit annoying. I need a fax machine. A thousand curses upon Sundays.


Lately, I have found a new mind-numbing activity.


Fishing.


Yeah, that's right. Fishing.

No, not ice fishing. Online. FFXI. The usual.

It is the slowest skilling 'craft' in the history of everything. It really is. My brother's trying to get to 30 so he can try to catch a special fish to try and get a special item to try and fight a bunch of monsters to hope to get an extremely rare drop. It's taking a while. Aniko's fishing, too, and I, being bored and curious and mostly for lack of anything better to do, decided, why not? So now we all fish, but not all in the same places or at the same times. Aniko's collecting carp for a special item. I am also collecting carp, because that is what you catch at my level of fishing. Then I move on to ... also carp, but in a different area. All right!

Sometime in the last, uh, five years, anyway, they changed the fishing system! This is a good indicator of how much attention I pay to the updates and how well I keep track of what happens when. I have no idea. My brother only just noticed the boat time NPC in Mhaura (he's been there for a few years), and he asked me if there was one in Selbina and I couldn't tell him. Anyway, they changed fishing at some point, but I can't remember if the new way is really any better or worse, but apparently some people find the fatigue aspect of it annoying. Lemme tell you. I am sick of fishing long before my Mithra can't catch anything more.

SO YES.

FISHING.

my carp. let me show you them.


Ways to tell SquareEnix hates their player base: to get the super awesome fishing pole, you must collect carp. Oh, that is not hard!

Guess how many carp.

No, really. Guess how many carp.

50? No, not quite.

100? No, higher.

... 500. No, actually, it's a bit more.


..... 1000?? Nope, higher, still! Guess again!



TEN THOUSAND CARP.



F.U.S.E. IS A WAY OF LIFE.


If this entry weren't too long already, I'd talk about yesterday's Transformers: Animated, but as it is, I probably don't have anything to say that hasn't been said already.