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

After thinking that the Moblin Maze would never come out, I finally found it was up and running and decided to try it out first with just Orophen and then with the rest of my LS. Doing it as a duo was incredibly hard. Orophen and I were 75 BRD and 75 RNG and then we tried again as 75 RNG and then 63 BLU. We were first beaten up hardcore by elementals and then by some other mob. It was really sad and frustrating, because I was slightly hoping for a place to duo or trio with my friends.

Anyway, we went into it the next day with Hiroshiko being a level 60 something SCH and had a much easier time with a full party. There was even a HUGE crate inside that had some medicine in, which would have been nicer if it showed up more often. The eye patch comes from the MMM, and you only need 10 marbles for it! Though now I need to save up marbles to get the other tabula and runes so that I can try to level up my crafting skills… I just wish getting marbles was easier since I had mistakenly thought you could re-enter your maze as many times as you wanted in the day and not just once for 30 minutes a day. Kind of lame, but I guess I can see why S-E did it (which is still lame).

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I don’t really care for the PSP (I honestly think its shit next to the DS in terms of handheld gaming), but this game is tempting me into getting one or at least borrowing my brother’s so that I could play with it.

By the way, I’m totally loving the laugh of her’s. Its totally how I imagined it to sound and am so happy that Megumi Hayashibara is voicing her to boot! <3

Since 2000-something or so, I had enjoyed playing games on my cute little rig. It was and still is a very sturdy machine, not having the system failures that the other machines in our household have had over the years. Sadly, it is an aged machine that was starting to choke on FFXI when it used to run it so beautifully years ago.

I’ve wanted to upgrade my rig for awhile now, but money (like with anything else) was an issue. I didn’t really NEED to upgrade, it was more of a want. My sister’s computer, however, had finally eaten the dust about a month ago and it was a good reason as any to pick up parts during Black Friday this year. So while my faithful friend has taken me through all my years of college by not only entertaining me but helping me with research and the writing of my papers… I had to bid farewell as I sent her down the hall to my sister’s room and now welcome my new baby whom I have fondly named Shantotto.

The specs aren’t the top of the line, but they are much better than what I had before and are more than enough than for what I typically do. Here are the specs:

– Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
– OCZ Reaper HPC 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2
– GeForce 9800 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3

The end result was remarkably beautiful! I downloaded and tried the FFXI Benchmark 3 (which in the later years of my last PC’s life, it totally killed it), and I got well over 8k before I just closed it. I also cranked up most of the settings on high, with the exception of shadows which I left on normal. Putting it on high did this stupid layered effect which made me want to orz more than anything else. Watching the benchmark and then going into the game with my new PC was almost like playing a new game! I could actually see the sky! I was pretty astonished to see that the sky was so pretty with clouds in the sky. I could even see people MOVE and animations which I had to start turning off a little more than a year ago.

For the fun of it, I even reactivated my WoW account and was tickled with how awesome the game looked with pumped up settings. It was mind boggling to see flowers, butterflies, or even fur on the flying mounts! It has definitely made playing WoW more tolerable, since I am no longer as slow as a snail. ;o

Speaking of WoW, currently playing as a Shaman Draenei. I wanted to wait for Orophen before touching Hunter, and am kinda of frustrated with my Rogue BE. Its certainly much easier playing Shaman this time around, and after a few hours of gaming I’m already level 15 and am mucking around that stupid bloody island of… blood. Ick. At least it doesn’t make my eyes bleed nearly as much as it used to.

But why write when I can actually play and get myself off of that accursed place… again. D;

After beginning a journey that started many years ago, I never imagined myself finally reaching to this area. It seemed like a pipe dream then, and now to be here and closer to completing CoP is not only amazing but it brings back so many memories of the journey to this point.

I started out just wanting to get Promyvions done and then thought of getting sea done with friends, watched it fall apart, and then brought back together again with a different set of people who are still very dear friends or loved ones. Even though I completed it after all the adjustments that supposedly made things easier, it was still quite a bit of work to get it done since many times we had to deal with different schedules, real life problems, leveling jobs, and other problems that could have dissolved our group due to long wait times.

Last Saturday, I actually cried when we finished Chapter 7 and found ourselves in the midst of mutated sea creatures and pink fluffy clouds. It was hard to believe we were there or that I had gotten that far not with random strangers but my friends who have stuck it out even when I was a rambling bitch.

We started off Saturday’s events not during our usual time but later in the day due to a hair appointment that would have interrupted the events if we had gone earlier. I gathered the boys early for the runs when I returned, thanking the heavens for the creation of text messaging since it means I have my boys on a chain that I can yank at any time I please. We took down the NMs before the BIG fight of the chapter, with a little trouble here and there thanks to my hastiness and such. At least we had no deaths and great fun was to be had by all (except Hiroshiko who most likely wet his pants during the incident in Carpenter’s Landing).

When Mekare came on, we were all getting ready to fight Tenzen. Unlike missions past, we all decided to go all out. We nixed the BLU jobs and decided to go as the highest jobs we could or the jobs we had that could deal the most damage against Tenzen. Our set up was BRD (me), WHM, BLM, WAR, RNG, and MNK. It went by smoothly, although I could have sworn Hiroshiko was going to pass out at any moment with how many cures he needed to toss out during the short battle. It was very straight forward, with me using SV and Troubadour and people tossing in 2hrs when appropriate. I kind of wished we had Tenzen’s head on a pike after the battle, but eh… I guess having sea is supposed to be better.

After we toured sea a bit, got the map, and I had my head chewed out by UFOs that wanted to suck my brains out of my toes and have my pigtails become their new mustache… we topped off our night doing Assaults so that Orophen and I could finally get Potent Belt!

I just hope the next time we go to sea, someone won’t decide to let me become guppy food…

Last weekend I found there was a lot to be thankful for after our Thanksgiving Holiday. I have my health for one (which could be a LOT worse than it is), a job, friends and family, and probably the best year of games that I had experienced in a long time. Most importantly, we finally beat that damn airship battle and we’re now just one step closer to getting sea.

The second attempt we tried, we did a dry run and it went pretty well. We reviewed our tactics and tried again with the hopes of coming out victorious this time around since we had managed to pace ourselves well. We went in again thinking this run would be our winning ticket, but for some reason… Mammets went horribly bad. Not just in a “Oh, well, we can probably salvage this.” but in a “OMFG ABORT! ABORT! ABORT MISSION!” fail. We think we mostly failed because the Mammets synchronized themselves to all be in staff form at the same time and basically nuked us to death. It was really horrible but I think I was more mad that Orophen was the last man standing.

Our second real run of the night, we revised our tactics again and then went in and everything went much more smoothly. We had at least two wipes during the fight, and after those wipes it usually happened towards the end of the fight with Omega and Ultima respectively. And both times? We raised and went to full health before letting my brother, Makai, just AM to death. It was kind of funny and really awesome, and all so very sweet that we were finally able to finish this mission after waiting for so long.

Funny enough, Hiroshiko was in such a panic over the other battles he zoomed past the CSes and was unable to watch what happened afterwards. I took the longest out of the five of us, and actually cried a little because it was just so great to finally get that burden off our shoulders.

This upcoming Saturday, we will be attempting all of Chapter 7 of CoP. We are doing everything that night, and cross our fingers that we get things on the first try so that we can finally get ourselves to sea. After that we just have to get Hiroshiko and Makai sky, finish ZM, finish ToAU, and get everyone caught up on WotG. o/