thistlechaser | Jul. 8th, 2006

Started out with a round of chocobo digging, but soon rediscovered that digging on the weekend is insane, so ended after one round. I didn't feel like figuring out what to craft to use up crystals, so decided to go NM hunting instead.

To LTP first, in search of a mama bird! A Fallen Egg spawns in one of three areas in LTP, you need to find it and click on it. I clicked 22 times, got nothing 17 times, a bird egg 4 times, and then finally the NM! It was sort of like mining when there is only one MP up at once, in a zone the size of LTP. Lots of running around! Heeerrrreee's Nihniknoovi! Fear the angry pink birdy! Got the drop! Yay!

All job, level 14(?), -1% enemy crit rate. Useless to me, but I wanted it anyway! :D

Next up, two NMs in CL: Mycophile and Hercules Beetle! Mycophile was spawned by trading a sleepshroom, woozyshroom, and danceshroom to a ???, the ??? respawns every 15 minutes. Hello Mycophile! I had to kill him 8 times before getting the drop:

Again, useless to me, but I wanted it. +2 MND, +1 int, -something. SMN/WHM/BLM only.

All I need is a hero: Hercules Beetle? To spawn him, you traded a honey to a ??? on three different trees at 22:00, then at 4:00 you checked all three ???s to see if you "caught" him. It took me three tries to get him, quite annoyingly. But yay! He dropped for me!

DRK only pants? Yay? Not really. Enmity +1 (along with STR +1 and some DEF), which makes me go 'Buh?'. I stuck them up for sale, since I won't ever need them. (The other two drops were rare/ex, so I stuck them in my locker to collect dust.)

I stood around in CL for so long that cobwebs formed on me~.

So the other big task of the day was to work on using some of the tons of crystals I have stored, right? Unfortunately just the opposite happened: After spending so much time in CL, I walked out with 30 new clusters. Gah! I used about half of them tonight before logging, but man! How will I use the rest? (I refuse to sell crystals, since if I craft with them they'll be worth so much more.) Must work on it tomorrow!

The two Besiegeds were Undead and Savages (the two a few hours apart). Both went well (won, got full reward, didn't die, didn't crash), but by the second one I was tired so I mostly played WHM. Ended the night with:

That's enough for a turban, no? If nothing new is added to buy with IS (in the coming update), maybe I will buy one just for fun.

For anyone who has never gone to a Besieged, this is why I have a post-it reading "Sapper = Bad" stuck to my monitor. Sapper = Bad! I got really, really lucky there: I had gotten aggro from WSing, so I took off at a run and must have gotten just out of range.

Cehra pinned me down to do a synth for her between Besiegeds, one I've never done before! Check out this cool shield! And nice stats, too! It almost makes me wish I could use shields. :)

And one last screenshot. In the quiet seconds before Besieged... Aurian later said it looked like we were holding hands, but I hadn't seen that and didn't grab the shot for that reason. I just liked the setup of it and how the colors worked. My black to her white, my full metal to her skin and softness. The way you can see the broken stone wall around us from previous Besiegeds. Just a really nice shot. (Plus ha ha ha! I'm taller~! And no, it doesn't look like we're holding hands, so stop projecting your fantasies, Aurian~! ;) )

Man, this post has gotten so long, I'll be brief about the movie. Evita (starring Madonna, heh!) was on HBO today, and happily I caught it. I had forgotten that it even existed! But I'm glad I spotted it. Such a nice story, and I love that it was all done in song and dance. The world needs more musicals! And, while Antonio Banderas was (of course) hot, I really liked Jonathan Pryce. He really came off as loving her so much! Eeee! And the song at the end, where Madonna's character is dying? 'Where do we go from here'? Eee! Luckily I recorded the movie, so hopefully I'll have time to re-watch it soon!