Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Many, many years ago, I used to post about gaming more than anything else. As people left LJ and my friends list changed, I pretty much stopped posting about it, even though it's still a major part of my life. My friends list had been mostly gamers, and it became mostly not-gamers, so I figured I was probably boring everyone with my posts and switched to writing about non-gaming stuff.

I love it when tersa, fbhjr, and others post about their MMOs, so I think I'll start posting about mine now and then as well. I really need to make a FFXIV icon, it's kind of surprising I don't have one already...

Brief history: I played FFXI for more than five years, left for WoW where I played that nearly five years, and for the last year and a bit I've been on FFXIV. I love FFXIV in a way I haven't loved a game since FFXI (and one expansion in WoW: WotLK), and I don't see myself leaving anytime soon.

MMOs are a great value: I pay about $20/month and I get more play-value than I have hours in a day to take advantage of. I get home from work, log in, and stay logged in until I have to go to bed. On weekends I'm logged in all day. Sometimes I'm doing little but chatting, but even that is fun -- pretty game to look at while chatting! It's the best $20/month I could spend.

Despite the vast hours I spend in game, I'd be considered a "dirty casual" -- I have zero interest in raiding or endgame stuff. I don't even like the dungeons you run to level. So what do I do? I make money. In FFXIV, same as in FFXI and WoW, I'm very, very, very rich. In the previous two games, I was one of the richest people on my server, and though it's harder to tell in FFXIV, I believe I'm headed that way now as well. I enjoy "AH PVP" as I call it (auction house player-vs-player fighting).

My biggest goal in game right now is to buy a house. "But Thistle! If you're so rich, why can't you buy whatever house you want?" Two reasons: I'm on the most populated server, so there are zero houses available to buy. Also, I'm picky. I want a house in an area that housing doesn't exist yet, though will sometime in the future (a year from now!). So I'm waiting. Impatiently waiting.

I love the server I play on (FFXIV's unofficial RP server), but it being the most populated has big downsides for housing -- when new housing was last added, it was all bought up in hours; on other servers there are still plots for sale to this day. So when new housing is introduced, I'm going to need to take time off from work and not sleep, so I can be online the moment it's available. I do not like having to do that for a game, but I want a house, so...

While I do lots of different things in game (basically everything except endgame stuff, I do everything from leveling all the jobs to murderfacing in PVP), my favorite thing by far is RP (role-playing). I'm in a good position for that right now -- I'm in two different groups dedicated to it (usually I'm only ever in one). My life currently is jam-packed full of good RPers, which is so so so so rare. I hate to sound conceited, but its very rare for me to find people who are as good at RP as I am (I've been RPing longer than most current RPers have been alive, so that makes sense). I'm so happy right now, the only cloud is that I'm waiting for the shoe to drop and one or both groups to vanish. :P

FFXIV has an AMAZING dev team (developers, the people who created it and keep new content rolling out). I've never been on a MMO before where the devs actively care and respect their players so much. Not some of their players (looking at you, WoW and FFXI), but all of them. One of the things that always amuses new FFXIV players is that men end up in "plate bikinis" (skimpy, "sexy", unreasonable armor) just as often as women do! Yoshi-P (the game's producer) can and does interact frequently with the players, and he posts about why decisions were made, why something was handled X way, etc. The dev team is very fast to react, apologizing for and correcting issues when they come up, big ones or small. It's unlike any other game I ever played. I feel liked and respected, valued by FFXIV's devs. :)

I mean it quite literally: Other than the lack of housing, I couldn't be happier with a game than I am with FFXIV. :D

I'm too old for this.

The MMO I play (FFXIV) has a new expansion coming out tonight. Current players get a couple days of early access. For most players, it starts at a reasonable 5 AM (east coast of the US), late morning/noon-ish for EU, and JP afternoonish.

For me, on the west coast of the US, it's 2 AM.

Of course everyone, me included, wants to log on as soon as possible to play with the new stuff. If I lived anywhere else but the west coast, I could get a whole night of sleep. But 2 AM? Blah. I did try to go to sleep early, but my neighbors ensured that I couldn't sleep. That and the fact it was still daylight out.

It's only 11 PM, an hour after my bedtime, and I already feel braindead. Times like this make me wish I drank coffee!

In other news:

- Work actually has good stuff happening. I'm getting a new desk! Recall that my current desk is next to the guy who literally narrates every moment of his day out loud. "Oh I just got a new email. I'm clicking it, I'm opening it. I'll read it now. Oh I know him! *leans over* Hey, [Thistle], I just got email from [person]! Okay, checking to see if I have a meeting now. Two meetings this afternoon, one at 2 and one at 4. Okay, now I'll look into that bug-- Oh I guess it's coffee time. [Thistle] I'll be back in a few minutes..." etc. And he doesn't talk to himself, he talks loud enough for people to hear rows away. And he endlessly treats me like his secretary/personal tech support/audience. I can get nothing done because of him. Also, my desk is in the worst position, as that anyone and everyone who enters our floor looks directly at my monitors. Ugh!

My new location is just the opposite: Perfectly private, and I even have half of a window! Natural light! Eeeee! It's going to be so wonderful!

- I haven't written about my bariatric surgery in a while. It's been nine months since then (wow, almost to the day: Nine months and three days), and I think I've settled into my new normal. I'm pretty okay with life/my new diet. I feel like I can eat just about everything I want (other than sugar, though I don't miss that), just in much smaller amounts. I tried fried pickles for the first time last week! (They were on my food bucket list -- I love pickles. Apparently I don't love them enough to like fried pickles though.) Usually, for "bad" foods, I eat just a couple (couple fries, couple fried pickle chips) and throw the rest out. And when I say a couple, I mean it: Like four or five fries, and I'm usually good. Food lasts a lot longer, which is nice (like two slices of pizza becomes four meals/my whole day of food).

The only thing I really miss is 'grazing'. Eating a whole pack of Oreos while on the computer in the evening, things like that. I don't miss the Oreos, just the 'eating as much as I want, nonstop' thing.

Not drinking until an hour after I'm done eating is a pain, but I'm pretty much getting used to it. I'm still hungry a lot of the time, but I can cope with that.

So: Good work stuff. New game stuff. Okay diet stuff. Week of vacation. Things are looking up! Yayzzzzzz

This has been a really rough week, and I've had quite enough of it. In handy bullet points:

* Two weeks ago, I gained a pound. My first weight gain since surgery. Last week I stayed exactly the same weight (to the tenth of a pound!), and my spot check this morning showed another pound gained (official weigh-in day is tomorrow). What the bloody fuck? How? Can't claim water weight gain three weeks in a row. I'm trying not to panic, but dammit. Not losing weight is bad enough, but gaining? NO.

For the first Easter in my entire life, I didn't have ONE SINGLE piece of candy or chocolate. Nothing. Not even a nibble. And THIS is how I'm rewarded? Grumble, mumble.

* Social things in FFXIV are annoying me muchly. A linkshell/LS (like a way more casual guild, but you can have many of them) I'm in made me a staff member a while ago. This made sense, as I was the one who was most actively a leader, helping people, dealing with membership crap, all that. Last night the LS leader threw a tantrum because some other staffer made a mistake (re-invited someone after the leader had kicked them from the LS for good reason but without telling any of us), demoted every single damned staff member for it! And then said he was going to close/destroy the LS. People talked him down, he made all of us staff members again... including the person he had rightfully kicked and had wrongfully been returned to the LS! Why make her staff? As "proof that he wasn't showing favorites". What the everliving fuck? Staff positions are (or should be) work, not a mark of who the leader likes best! I told him so, but got no reply.

I'm so done with that LS, but... I have a few friends left there (very few) and I have no where else to go, and I'm still without a FC (free company/a guild). It's so damned hard to find a good group in MMOs.

* I had (very mistakenly) thought my trip to the ER last week would be covered by my insurance. I had paid all of my deductibles already, so I thought it would 100% be covered. Nope. As of this point (bills are still coming in), I'm up to owing $800. This is on top of an unexpected owing $2,000 on my taxes (after LOSING getting a $1,000 refund). I bought my new computer ($1,800) based on my tax refund and having no other big bills coming in. Sigh.

Mumble, grumble, mumble. It's like every part of my life is stressful right now. Offline? Bills. Online? Social issues -- the whole reason I play is to have friends to chat with, RP with, and hang out with. Online and offline both? Better not eat, I'm gaining weight!

Blah.

And in lighter news, the Fandom Secrets site has a winner this morning:

Haha!

First off, I love the sound of this. Supposedly all those drummers are famous, and one person got them all together:



In other news, the MMO I play (FFXIV) had a fanfest this weekend, and kindly they had a livestream of most of the weekend. Talk about nonstop exciting! I'm kind of sorry I wasn't there in person, but there are a whole lot of benefits to attending from home, and it was just not practical for me to travel this year. (Plus tickets were nearly impossible to get, sold out in a couple minutes.)

In other other news, I hit the 12 day point of losing no weight. I eat about 600 calories a day (I used to eat more than that in a meal!), so not losing any weight for nearly two weeks was boggling. Was it a plateau? Maybe? So I googled how to break one. Unsurprisingly, the advice was all over the place: Eat more calories! Eat fewer! Exercise more! Exercise less! Eat only protein for 48 hours! Go back to a liquid diet for a week! I decided to try the easiest one, eating only protein for 48 hours. Just the way things worked, that also reduced my calorie intake to about 400/day. (Sometimes I feel like I have an eating disorder, eating like this...) I lost two pounds over the weekend, so maybe, if it was a plateau, I did break it. (Or maybe I'll gain the pounds back tomorrow, who knows.)

Between pre- and post-surgery, I've lost about 50 pounds now. (20 pre-surgery, 32 post.)

Things they don't tell you about this process (or maybe it's unique to me) : Your skin goes to hell. I slather myself with the strongest lotion I can find, twice a day, and I'm still nonstop flaking all over. I finally started putting olive oil on my skin instead, and that seems to be helping. Too bad I can't put it on my scalp, because that is flaking as badly as the rest of me. :/

But hey, at least I have two more months before I'll start losing my hair! :P (At the three month point you lose some to all of your hair. I really, really, really hope I'm on the low end of that hair loss scale.)

1) This video is making its rounds both through my group at work and my LJ friends list. I think it's the first time that sort of overlap has happened! (We're tech writers, so it makes sense that my work group liked it.)



It's really catchy, and I love that LJ is used as the example of blog sites!

2) Today I finally get my hands on my copy of the FFXIV catalog! Straight from Japan, it'll be on my doorstep today, just two days after its release in Japan. It's in Japanese unfortunately, but it's packed full of pictures of every item in the game, so that'll be interesting to see.

I still have (and love) my Japanese books about FFXI, so I have high hopes for this one as well.

3) The book I'm currently reading, Quarantine, is better than I expected it to be. I thought I'd be knocking another bad self-published book out of my To Read pile, like I had with Ruin. Turns out it's neither self-published nor bad. In the first chapter or two, I thought Quarantine would be another fantastic read, but it's gone a little downhill. Still good, but not OH MY GOD good.

I think I might read that were-warthog romance one next...

Hello to all the new people on my friends list! I added a dozen or so new people though the latest friending meme (still going on here if you're interested), and I'm looking forward to seeing you all on my friends list from now on!

Do you own a Kindle? If so, did you know that in addition to borrowing ebooks from Amazon for free, you can get one to keep forever for free each month? You only get to pick from four of them, but hey, a free book is a free book, right? Details here, if you're interested.

This coming week is going to be busy, mostly because the sleep study people are just so endlessly incompetent. I had an appointment last Thursday afternoon to go pick up the machine. Got there on time, they sat me in a room... then forgot about me. After 15 minutes I stuck my head out one of them actually said "Oops! I forgot you were in there!". So then the tech came in and starts explaining things to me. I looked down at the paper and noticed it had another patient's name on it. She apologized and went to get my paperwork, but returned empty handed. Turned out my machine was on backorder, it had been due to arrive at 10 AM but never did. My appointment was at 4:30. They didn't bother calling me to cancel.

So, in addition to seeing the surgeon on Wednesday, I have to go back on Monday for another appointment. Assuming the machine even gets there. Assuming they remember to call me and tell me if it does.

I did take Tuesday as a vacation day at work, because FFXIV is getting a new patch overnight Monday and I wanted the time to play with it. I wouldn't usually take time off for a game (that's a road I do not need to travel down), but this one time is an exception. We're getting personal housing, and there's nothing I like more than playing house in a video game, so I want to be online ASAP to fool around with it.

This post is only about FFXIV. If you don't play or don't care about game stuff, feel free to skip. :)

Arg! Flail! Arg! New content was released hours ago and I can't check it all out because I'm stuck at work arg!

Which is a totally silly reaction, I know. Lots of people work during these hours and the new stuff will still be there later but OTHER PEOPLE ARE PLAYING WITH THE NEW STUFF AND I CAN'T BECAUSE I'M AT WORK ARG

Yesterday was a big high and low for me in game. I "finished" the storyline quest. Half-hour cutscene, credits on screen, "last" dungeon, YAY! I cheered on /fc about being done, and people said I wasn't. I was confused at that. Then I noticed the quest-giver had a storyline ! over her head. Buh?

Turns out I finished the storyline for the initially released content. There have been two patch updates with tons more content since then.

SOB.

If it were just quests, I could handle it. But the problem is, the FFXIV storyline sends you through each dungeon as well. I really, really, really hate dungeons. I mean like stress all week over doing it on the weekend level of hate.

That's really the only thing about FFXIV that I don't like, that it forces you to dungeon. Blah.

Other than that great disappointment, everything in-game is going really, really well. I'm so happy to have a game I love! I loved FFXI way back then, and while I enjoyed the RP in WoW, I never loved WoW for the game itself. (And the more that's now coming out from Blizzard about WoW, the even less I like it. "Story isn't important! Neither are anything but straight males!" They've all but outright said they don't want me around, so hey, I'll just happily stay on FFXIV.)

So all in all, everything's great in game. Even if I were to do nothing other than log in and stand around and chat, I love the beautiful settings and there are great people to talk to. :)

Now, if only I could go home and log in...

Edit: You know, I haven't gotten talking about it out of my system. Heh. I love that, like FFXI, FFXIV has such a strong, emotional storyline. The details of the plot blow me out of the water. The quality of the writing. Not to mention the voice acting and the HOURS of cutscenes! The music, of course. As a whole, the entire thing is just such an emotional blow to the chest. Again, like FFXI, it's the story that drives everything else.

And then there's the opening movie. I've watched this multiple times a day for weeks now, and I love it so much. On good (bad?) days, it makes me tear up. Everything in the plot ties into this, so many details from this video show up later (the broken staff! *sniffle*).

When I returned home from work, my new Kindle was waiting at my door. Same with the previous Kindle: They just left it at the door, in a public walkway, where anyone could have just walked off with it without notice. Luckily no one did.

In the first moments of using it, I was very unhappy: None of my books had cover images and it was slow as hell to use. Turned out the slow part was the cause of and because of the lack of covers, and soon both issues were fixed. (It had to download 100+ covers, and apparently downloading so much made everything slow.)

My first reaction was that it was cool that it was so small.
My second reaction was that it would be a problem that it's so small.

Unfortunately small ereader means a small screen (duh). I like to keep the text big in an effort to go easy on my eyes, but just using the second largest text size (which is smaller than what I use on my iPad), and I get very little text per page. The largest size is bigger than I need -- luckily, as then you get just a tiny bit of text per page. It's just too bad the second largest is too small.

The other issue is that, unfortunately but understandably, the Kindle feels really, really cheap compared to my iPad. However, as one was $700+ and the other about $150, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The touch screen doesn't work nearly so well (with the iPad, it's like you're moving it with your brain because it's so responsive), plus even when not downloading something, the Kindle is noticeably slow. Not like AOL dial up slow, but things like my computer, phone, and iPad respond instantly to a tap or a command, there's a slight delay on the Kindle. The delay plus the less responsive touch screen makes it frustrating to use.

Another issue is that it's all black and white. I know it's not reasonable, but I wish sellers would list things an item doesn't have -- like I wouldn't have bought that first Kindle if I had known it didn't have a touchscreen. Color only comes into play when looking at the covers/picking a new book, but it's depressing to not have it.

However, this is only my first day using it. I'm going to finish at least my current book on it (probably the next one as well) to give me a chance to get used to it. Maybe I'll stop noticing the issues. (And speaking of not noticing things, the built-in ads only bugged me once today, with that was with lots of use and playing around with it. I'm pretty sure they won't be an issue.)

Positives to it? It's smaller and lighter, though when using it at home, the iPad's size and weight aren't an issue (away from home is a different story). I can't really think of any other positives other than "It's cool" (though a lot less cool than it would be if it had color...).

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And on RP! Eeeee! I RPed all night and it was wonderful! I haven't RPed so long and with so many people since... I don't know, sometime back in WoW? Usually scenes with lots of people are rough, but mostly the group broke into smaller conversations with new people coming and going through the evening. I love playing a social butterfly character -- it makes it so easy to ICly meet new people and take part in scenes!

RP seems to go on all day and all night, so I think I'm going to be able to go back to playing daily. So happy! :D And oddly for a large group of RPers on a MMO, no one was bad! I think the worst RPer I encountered today was still at "pretty good" level.

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I'm loving the current book I'm reading, and the Kindle tells me I'll finish it in about three hours of reading (okay, cool feature there!), so in the next day or two I'll post the review for it. If I don't get to it before Monday, have a good long weekend, all! (Unless you're not in America. In that case, have a good normal weekend, all!)

FFXIV as a whole is new to me, I've only been playing two or three weeks now, so even though the giant 2.2 patch is coming tomorrow, I didn't watch the trailer until today.

OMG. I should have watched sooner!

First off: Fishing! The fishing questline story wasn't a tall tale after all! Haha!

Second: Big fishing? (I sure did laugh at the guy being in one spot day and night over multiple days fishing!) Wonder what it is, but YAY REASON TO FISH AGAIN! Boy have I missed doing it.

Third: Gardening? EEE! Let me play farmer and I'll be happy!

Fourth: The music (the whole trailer) is done SO WELL.

I'm enjoying this game so much. I really should cancel my WoW subscription, but I'm having a hard time letting go (even though I don't want to play at all). I was a little worried I'd soon run out of things to do on FFXIV (I'm halfway done with all crafts, along with leather 41 and fishing 50), but looks like they'll be keeping entertaining new content coming.

SE and Comcast: Two great companies so long as you never have to interact with them.

I decided I wanted to buy the FFXIV collector's edition -- basically $20 more for a special mount. Tried to enter my credit card. Error. Second card. Same error. Third card. Same error.

Please confirm the status of any relevant options and then try again.

How helpful is that? Went to the official forums. There is a 92 page thread of people with this issue, going back to 9/2013. Hundreds? Thousands? of people who want to give SE their money and who cannot.

Okay, forget about the CE, my account is expiring in three days, I'll just set up automatic monthly payment for that.

Same error.

SE's official solution to this? "Wait 24 hours and then try again."

I swear to god. How can a company let this issue go on for so long? It is preventing people from giving SE money. In this day and age, how can it take MONTHS for them to fix this issue? Multiple people posted about having this problem even today. I'm not alone in this.

I just don't get it. I really don't.

Edit: In the last SEVEN HOURS I've been trying to deal with this, I've:
Bought a $25 gamecard. SE errors out when it's used.
Put $20 into my Stream account. SE errors out.
Paid through PayPal ($20). SE is timing out.

Seven hours. $65. All in an effort to pay SE, which I still cannot do. Is there a worse company to deal with on the planet?