If I ever have to fight a Buffalo or Sheep, I swear I’m going to threaten AFK after this weekend… basically we were up in the North killing buffalo to farm some meat and other stuff. We ended up getting milk. Lots of it. Then what do I get for making a comment about it!? Udders. Damned udders.
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Despite being busy in real life at the moment, I have had decided to take a few pet projects in FFXI to make things interesting and to give myself me time instead of always trying to think of what to do for other people.
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February has been one hell of a month for me. In real life I ended up struck with a lot of health problems, but in FFXI I ended up having a lot of positive experiences with my friends and my new Dynamis shell. I’m starting to get into the groove of things, and am kinda feeling the love from the people I am starting to PT with regularly in Dynamis. The past few runs, however, haven’t been as kind to us as our first run in Jeuno in terms of AF drops. San d’Oria seemed particularly stingy, but at least I had fun getting myself killed over and over and over and over again. No, that’s not sarcasm either. I kept rolling over laughing with how many damn links we had until, well, we had a particularly nasty pull and Hiroshiko accused me of wanting that big of a link. WHICH I DID NOT, THANKYOUVERYMUCH. Sure, I wanted to be able to do more than Ballad, toss cures, and what have you… but that doesn’t mean I want to see wipes of epic proportions… <.<; At least now I can say I have finally obtained these titles!

We also did a quickie BLU set last weekend, which was a lot of fun. A very nice Elvaan RDM also decided to help us out while he was waiting for his friend to arrive so that they could take over the world!

I wasn’t very keen about the camp spot, but it was at least nice being able to hit the occasional Chain 5. We were basically camped out in Gustav Tunnel fighting Bones and Robber Crabs on the second map. We had only one instance of blood aggro, but that was our fault since we had fought too close to the area we were pulling mobs from. Still, I kind of wish we had harder mobs to fight but it was still a nice place for us to all skill up and get our Sword and BLU Magic Skill up to speed from having done Campaign and Level Syncs for awhile. But now that we’re getting up to speed (close to 65), I’m steadily looking forward to getting new spells despite knowing that I am probably the only one who feels that way.

And finally… wanted to see if I could get any rewards with the Adveturer Recruitment Program I used to invite my brother with a long time ago and found I could get this! Yay! Now to try and get my brother to pick out his last reward so I can get the Lunar Cap!

Since getting my BRD to 75, I’ve often wished I had enough time in the day to do end game things. Alas, when I get home its usually 8:25 and then I unwind or do homework, and weekends are the times when I often have religious obligations and have the desire to do things with my friends. So I’m REALLY happy to finally find a Dienamis Dynamis LS that seems ok with me missing some runs because of my obligations and has most of my friends in it.

It is mostly a start up shell, and we’ve just done two runs so far in Jeuno and Bastok. It is kind of a little boring as BRD, but I’m still happy to do something with my BRD instead of letting it rot in its little corner. But being in the shell is more incentive for me to push BLU to 70+ since I REALLY want BLU Relic (I’m in love with its color scheme).

But all in all, I feel as though I’ve been pretty busy in FFXI when I’m able to log on. Awhile ago I was able to get Assault Jerkin with Mekare, Orophen, and Hiroshiko and then thanks to everyone’s help in joining me in Campaign I managed to get another medal rather easily. I’m slowly shooting to catch up to everyone else, and it makes it easy since I usually need to either a.) cap my BRD exp after Dynamis or b.) try to level BLU when I only have a short time available to me. At the same time, I need to be very careful about spending too much time on the game on weekends now since I just have a little over a month before I finish my Montessori teacher training… ._.; Wish me luck?

Despite not having posted anything in awhile, I’ve done a bit here and there in FFXI and have even *gasp* logged on during the weekday to try and do more things!

First off, kitty! For awhile I’ve wanted to go after Ose in hopes of getting an Assault Jerkin. We decided to make an attempt at farming it last Sunday, despite me feeling sick as a dog and wanting to pass out in my chair a few times. Eating soup managed to revive me, as did competing against Hiroshiko on trying to erase people’s status effects as WHM. It was a lot of fun and made me a little more determined to finish leveling WHM when I can. I know I’ll suck at it but standing next to my new fully AF’ed RDM boyfriend should help keep me sane and willing to keep going. ^_^b

Most of the time I’ve been on I’ve been doing Campaign to try and regain the medals I lost. Its been really hard and frustrating for me, especially since I’m more apt to just zone out when by myself in a Campaign battle. I’m finally at Sterling Star, but I have a looooong way to go before I am caught up to everyone else. I AM thankful to my friends when they do decide to join me for Campaign though! I feel a little more focused and entertained, and a lot less lonely than I can sometimes feel when playing WoW. The only thing I hope for is being able to get higher in terms of medals without going crazy doing Campaigns so much. Granted I’m getting a chance to level BLU… but its certainly not as fun as playing with Meka and Oro as BLU.

Which brings me to… yes, our BLU set is going through a transition. Because I really needed to rank up but couldn’t really do it as BRD or WHM without QQ hardcore, Mekare and Orophen granted me permission to do Campaign as BLU. I was resistant to it at first, but they insisted it was ok and Orophen pointed out I need to do things for myself sometimes. Which seems a tad bit frustrating because it means I’m on my own most of the time, but its also a little relaxing and makes the game seem a little less daunting when I can do things at my own pace.

I also learned something NEW about FFXI! Two things in fact. One of them I remembered from long ago but the other one I had no idea about until Mekare mentioned it last Sunday.

/translate and /macro set/book #!

Translate is probably for my own amusement whereas macro set will probably have me re-writing all of my BLU macros so that I don’t have to think too hard about what I am doing when creating spell macros on the fly.

To translate an item (items only, unfortunately) you type in: /translate (item name) and then either J, E, G, or F

/macro set/book # allows you to write out several macros and if you need to re-use them for OTHER macros, just write out its number and place it on the macro line. I’ve yet to try this out myself (been too sick) but I’m hoping it will make my BLU macro sets more intuitive and less painful when I need to keep writing out gear swaps for BLU.

Last Saturday, I managed to get everyone around for a short level sync party at level 62. Its been awhile since we were able to party and I actually felt a little nostalgic when I was leveling my BRD in Mount Zhayolm. This time I was mostly BRD so I could help lessen downtime with Ballad and not get father ahead of Orophen and Mekare as BLU. It was a trip down memory lane, and I knew I was really rusty with my singing. I actually kept kicking myself for being a lousy BRD in that party, because songs would go off and I’d want to scream out “Noooooooooooo” and worry if others were thinking I was such a lame, lazy bum because I honestly felt like one. I almost felt as though I were in my own little world, because keeping track of the chat log and such was a little hard for me. I kept worrying if someone was going to bite my head off because I missed a mob buff…

I think the main reason I was so bored, however, was because there wasn’t much for me to actually worry about besides making sure Ballads were up. Things didn’t seem to get too ugly (ok, maybe once), I didn’t have to pull like a maniac, and we took a break when it came to Firesday. Simple, no?

I am even working on DNC on the side once in awhile, which is actually a lot less painful after I got to 15. I never thought I would get that far because I would often gnash my teeth from levels 1 – 15. At one point I remember begging to play with Orophen because it would have lessened me wanting to kill myself trying to solo.

In WoW I’ve been some what productive… when I can actually log on. For a few weeks Misha had a number of problems with long queue times being one major problem, followed by insane lag, and then some weird problem that resulted in no one being able to log onto Misha and then having their quests messed up in very strange ways. It made me feel spoiled by the ease of which I can log onto FFXI without having to wait up to an hour to get onto a server and play. Which would have been ok if I didn’t just want to go on for a short time before going to bed. On the other hand, I found I could complete an FoV (solo) in about 30 – 45 minutes or less depending on what kind of page I chose. So kudos to WoW for forcing me to level DNC in short bursts since I couldn’t go messing around with my Hunter or Shaman.

Since I slacked off on doing this… Here is my Top 10 taken from JP Button (https://www.jpbutton.com/?page_id=1516):

What is 「10大ニュース」？

10大ニュース (juu dai nyuusu), is literally a list of 10 big(大) bits of news(ニュース) or events that have happened to you over the past year.

In Japan, the end of the year is filled with parties and drinking, much more so than the beginning of a new one. As the next year fast approaches, people will hold a 忘年会 (bou-nen-kai) , or a gathering (会) to forget (忘) the current year (年). This is accomplished through copious amounts of alcohol, and often times, the telling of one’s 10大ニュース. It’s like a personal Top-10 list.

This list can contain any 10 events that you feel have affected you deeply, most often in a positive way. As we all close another year here on Earth, (and thus another 25 years in Vana’diel), I felt it would be fun to combine a little bit of Japanese culture with the community’s penchant for touting in-game accomplishments. Everyone likes sharing their success, so here’s a perfect chance!

Here’s an example of what a list might look like:

You can include equipment you’ve gotten:

10. Acquired Dancer AF Attire

9. Completed all Automaton attachments

You can include things that were special to you.

8. Got promoted to Sackholder in my LS

7. Convinced my friend to sign up for the game

Maybe you conquered some personal challenges, however big or small.

6. Beat all the Level-20 Avatar quests

5. Solo’d all my Scholar Artifact quests

Perhaps endgame is more your thing.

4. Completed Relic Weapon: Claustrum

Or e-peen.

3. SOLO tanked Cerb against ally of DD’s

The more creative of you out there could write from your character’s point of view.

2. Teamed up with Lilisette to catch Cait Sith

And game-related stuff is okay too

1. Opened a new website and received amazing support from the best MMO community in the world.

What is my list like? Click the link to read more!

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Ignoring the fact that is a WoW screenshot, I’ve actually been busy in both games. More so in WoW than FFXI, but with partially good reason! In FFXI I’ve been mostly leveling as DNC with Orophen and we made it to 19 before taking a break watching Code Geass R2 and Nodame Cantabile live action drama. I highly recommend the later if you’re into Asian dramas or just watch the first episode! The facial expressions in some of the scenes are some of the most hilarious ones I’ve ever seen before!

I’m actually just waiting until we can all get together to party and help my brother level up. Its kind of aggravating waiting for everyone’s schedules to coincide with each other, but I guess that’s just the sort of thing that happens with a set. Hopefully it will happen this week, that’s why I’ve been kind of messing around in Azeroth more so to get the most out of the $30 I paid for 60 days of playtime.

I’m currently a 27 Shaman, and would have been higher if I wasn’t getting booted off the server so much or having to wait through queues. Its aggravating as hell that Misha is no longer a Low – Medium rate server, and I’m crossing my fingers that they will do another server migration to get the losers off. I hardly remember having to deal with so many beggars or lamers, which makes traveling to the major cities a pain in the ass when I need to get there.

At one point the lag was getting so ridiculous, I was literally screaming at my monitor when I started to lag out during one of the last Bloodmyst Isle quests. Unlike escort quests in FFXI, escort quests in WoW can be really annoying and a big pain in the ass. You can’t control the NPC and take your sweet time picking things off. You go at the pace of the NPC and make sure they don’t get too overwhelmed while you handle adds and help them out if they are getting overwhelmed. Ideally this should have been easy for me at level 26, but it wasn’t because I was lagging like crazy and couldn’t tell that my NPC had run off to who knows where and was getting the crap beat out of him. I even died once because I hardly realized I had so many damn Blood Elves on me beating me up to a pulp.

I guess, in a way, that’s why I really appreciate FFXI because I normally don’t get lag that bad unless I’m doing Campaign or Besieged. Both are easily avoidable and even then… Besieged hasn’t been bad as of late and Campaign can be remedied by avoiding heavily crowded areas.

… ouch. Speaking of Campaign, I guess I better get to doing that again since I’m pretty sure I lost yet ANOTHER badge… /facepalm

Merry Christmas to all my readers, friends, and their family! I hope everyone has a safe and enjoyable holiday. ^_^v

A few months ago, I found this site after reading a news article that mentioned it (not going to say what was in the article, because its kind of depressing and seems morbid to me). justin.tv is kind of like youtube but you are able to do live broadcasts instead and show off people your own channel! There are all sorts of different channels, but I tend to like watching the gaming channels myself.

Here are some of my favorite channels:

FFXI Related:
https://www.justin.tv/hairk
https://www.justin.tv/calvyno
https://www.justin.tv/icetrack

WoW Related:
https://www.justin.tv/claudian — Really funny because of the voice commentary he (and sometimes his sister) adds! Plus he has a really cool sounding voice that I’m partially in love with.

Sometimes I broadcast, too, so you can find my channel here:

https://www.justin.tv/calaera

or just watch here! :o