*dusts it off*
Oh right, it has been awhile. I wish I had some spiffy images for the FFXI-related part of this update, but I don't, oh well. All text all the time.
In real life, things are much as they always are. I'm still game testing at Nintendo, which is pretty decent. It's not super or great, but for now it's reliable and there are far worse jobs. I've started doing some freelance writing on the side as well now to pad my resume more than my income. azumauta and I are planning on moving back to the Midwest, to Minneapolis really, in a couple years and by then I'm hoping to have enough writing references or experience on my resume to land a good writing-related job in Minneapolis and really delving into a real career there. I'm not sure if I'll have the time in Seattle to really get into anything job-wise, but at least I have freelance opportunities to build on and work my way into something bigger down the road. As far as the move goes, we've decided that since (most of) our families are in Minneapolis, we should be there too. Seattle is nice, but it's expensive and the only family we have here is her dad... in Minneapolis we have her brothers and my mom and probably my sister by the time we move out there. Since we're homebodies, we don't see much logic in staying in a place where we are, besides one person, without many friends or people to rely on. At least in Minneapolis, if we don't go out and be social and make friends, we'll always have multiple family members to fall back on. So the plan is to stay here for a couple years, pay off our debts, then comfortably make a move to Minneapolis once I have landed a job there (I'll seek from here when we decide we're ready and have my Mom do some major networking for me). But things are good here and life continues moving on.
Football is interesting, but I don't have the attention span right now to keep updating picks. It was one thing last year when I was competing with liberalkami, but since he's not competing with me this year, I just can't find motivation to analyze picks early and then post them up. But I've been paying close attention and was very disappointed to see the Lions lose today... they'll probably go 8-8 this season now, maybe 9-7 if they're lucky. I just don't see them going 4-2 down the hardest part of their schedule.
And then there's FFXI... not too much going on there either. It's a regular pattern of Dynamis, Limbus and Salvage, with some Assault squeezed in. PLD is 75 now and I've been busy capping exp on that via skilling up. Club got capped, Polearm got capped, Staff is almost there. Quested Black Halo and Retribution for fun. I'm somewhat frustrated with the game at the moment, with some of those frustrations relating to Dynamis and some that had been relating to Limbus, although those got cleared up. Salvage has become an interesting activity for me and my friends. We came in pretty green but we've been doing better and better. We can farm most 35s we try to, but the real challenge lies ahead - we poked a zone boss once for fun and it wasn't pretty. I'll be interested to see what happens when we poke one for real. But when we tailor a whole run to clearing the boss and we set up our jobs for that, I'm sure it'll go differently than taking a set of people prepared to farm 35s up against the boss.
I would be lying if I said my motivation in FFXI is a little lacking lately... I'm playing more out of habit at the moment than I am out of motivation or eagerness, I think. It shows in my lack of excitement for Wings of the Goddess... I think in a lot of ways I was just so disappointed in the Aht Urhgan expansion that I'm not sure what this will bring. Aht Urhgan did a lot of good things, but it was a let-down to me after Promathia. We'll see. I'm going to keep playing unless I get totally disillusioned with the game, but with azumauta playing other things and my own motivation being less than usual... it's hard to say what it'll take to turn it around. I'm probably just a little burnt out, but I don't have anything sitting on my shelf that really is grabbing my attention and pulling me away from FFXI, either. Usually when I'm burning out, I have some single-player game that rivets me for awhile until I'm excited about FFXI again.
We'll see. Part of it too is probably a lack of a solid LS environment, too. I sit around alone in Takara most days, which is fine, I like the quiet, and I talk to my friends via /tells. MoonlitPath doesn't do it for me, despite being a lot of Howitzer, but despite how much I like Howitzer as a shell, there's a lot of people there that I'm just not interested in knowing on a social level. I'll figure it all out eventually, I suppose. For now, at least, the events keep me going and my overall enjoyment of the game hasn't lessened. I probably just need to finish all my stuff on PLD and get going on a new job to 75 or some change of pace like that which will get me all excited again... you can only stay so excited for Steelshells for so long, after all =P
With any luck, some fun stuff will happen in Salvage in the near future. Maybe we'll rip a Deimos's Cuirass out of a Qiqirn Astrologer. That'd be neat shit! Although, we did see Skirmish Pephredo three times in one Bhaflau run awhile ago, too bad he's such a stingy bastard.
In real life, things are much as they always are. I'm still game testing at Nintendo, which is pretty decent. It's not super or great, but for now it's reliable and there are far worse jobs. I've started doing some freelance writing on the side as well now to pad my resume more than my income. azumauta and I are planning on moving back to the Midwest, to Minneapolis really, in a couple years and by then I'm hoping to have enough writing references or experience on my resume to land a good writing-related job in Minneapolis and really delving into a real career there. I'm not sure if I'll have the time in Seattle to really get into anything job-wise, but at least I have freelance opportunities to build on and work my way into something bigger down the road. As far as the move goes, we've decided that since (most of) our families are in Minneapolis, we should be there too. Seattle is nice, but it's expensive and the only family we have here is her dad... in Minneapolis we have her brothers and my mom and probably my sister by the time we move out there. Since we're homebodies, we don't see much logic in staying in a place where we are, besides one person, without many friends or people to rely on. At least in Minneapolis, if we don't go out and be social and make friends, we'll always have multiple family members to fall back on. So the plan is to stay here for a couple years, pay off our debts, then comfortably make a move to Minneapolis once I have landed a job there (I'll seek from here when we decide we're ready and have my Mom do some major networking for me). But things are good here and life continues moving on.
Football is interesting, but I don't have the attention span right now to keep updating picks. It was one thing last year when I was competing with liberalkami, but since he's not competing with me this year, I just can't find motivation to analyze picks early and then post them up. But I've been paying close attention and was very disappointed to see the Lions lose today... they'll probably go 8-8 this season now, maybe 9-7 if they're lucky. I just don't see them going 4-2 down the hardest part of their schedule.
And then there's FFXI... not too much going on there either. It's a regular pattern of Dynamis, Limbus and Salvage, with some Assault squeezed in. PLD is 75 now and I've been busy capping exp on that via skilling up. Club got capped, Polearm got capped, Staff is almost there. Quested Black Halo and Retribution for fun. I'm somewhat frustrated with the game at the moment, with some of those frustrations relating to Dynamis and some that had been relating to Limbus, although those got cleared up. Salvage has become an interesting activity for me and my friends. We came in pretty green but we've been doing better and better. We can farm most 35s we try to, but the real challenge lies ahead - we poked a zone boss once for fun and it wasn't pretty. I'll be interested to see what happens when we poke one for real. But when we tailor a whole run to clearing the boss and we set up our jobs for that, I'm sure it'll go differently than taking a set of people prepared to farm 35s up against the boss.
I would be lying if I said my motivation in FFXI is a little lacking lately... I'm playing more out of habit at the moment than I am out of motivation or eagerness, I think. It shows in my lack of excitement for Wings of the Goddess... I think in a lot of ways I was just so disappointed in the Aht Urhgan expansion that I'm not sure what this will bring. Aht Urhgan did a lot of good things, but it was a let-down to me after Promathia. We'll see. I'm going to keep playing unless I get totally disillusioned with the game, but with azumauta playing other things and my own motivation being less than usual... it's hard to say what it'll take to turn it around. I'm probably just a little burnt out, but I don't have anything sitting on my shelf that really is grabbing my attention and pulling me away from FFXI, either. Usually when I'm burning out, I have some single-player game that rivets me for awhile until I'm excited about FFXI again.
We'll see. Part of it too is probably a lack of a solid LS environment, too. I sit around alone in Takara most days, which is fine, I like the quiet, and I talk to my friends via /tells. MoonlitPath doesn't do it for me, despite being a lot of Howitzer, but despite how much I like Howitzer as a shell, there's a lot of people there that I'm just not interested in knowing on a social level. I'll figure it all out eventually, I suppose. For now, at least, the events keep me going and my overall enjoyment of the game hasn't lessened. I probably just need to finish all my stuff on PLD and get going on a new job to 75 or some change of pace like that which will get me all excited again... you can only stay so excited for Steelshells for so long, after all =P
With any luck, some fun stuff will happen in Salvage in the near future. Maybe we'll rip a Deimos's Cuirass out of a Qiqirn Astrologer. That'd be neat shit! Although, we did see Skirmish Pephredo three times in one Bhaflau run awhile ago, too bad he's such a stingy bastard.