Grace

Daily Creative Thing

July 24, 2017 by Grace

As usual I had a silly idea one day and decided to put it into action and see what happened. I wanted to do something in the spirit of Blaugust this year, but without the stress of having to come up with a complete, coherent post every day. I also wanted to get back into some of my creative hobbies that I’ve dabbled in over the years. Thus Daily Creative Thing was born.

The idea is very simple. Do something creative every day, and stay positive. The part that makes it work is that the bar for “do something creative” is set intentionally low. Did you doodle something cute on a post-it at work today? That counts. Did you sing in the shower for 15 minutes straight and annoy your roommate? That counts. Did you add a row or two of stitches to a bigger project? That counts. This endeavor is about recognizing all the little creative things we do, in addition to encouraging spending a bit more dedicated time on whole projects. The creative thing doesn’t have to be completed, finishing a whole project every day would be exhausting, and wouldn’t leave room for things like writing a story or knitting a blanket. It also doesn’t matter what kind of creative thing you do, as long as you consider it creative. Drawing some fan art, writing a blog post, baking a cake… you get the idea. It all counts!

The other key here is the “and stay positive” bit. It’s okay to be critical of your own work sometimes. That’s how we improve. But when sharing things for this project, I’m taking the stance of “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”. Especially when posting half-finished things, the temptation is to apologize for it. Instead I want to celebrate that I made an effort and made something new in the world, and look for the things I like about it so I can keep doing those next time around. The internet is full of places where people tear themselves and each other down. I want this project to be focused on building things up. Stay positive.

That’s all there is to it. Keeping it simple means there’s at least a chance that I’ll follow through on it but making it daily means it is still a challenge and a change for the better in my habits.

If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll join me on this journey. I would love to have a network of people sharing their progress and cheering each other on. I also selfishly just want to see all the amazing things that you all will create when you get in the habit. Try it for the month of Blaugust and see if it sticks. Let’s create some things!

D3 Season 11 Starts Thursday!

July 18, 2017 by Grace

Is anybody out there still excited about Diablo 3’s seasons? I mean I’m excited to really dig into a playthrough with a necromancer, and the new pet looks pretty great, but the season itself? Definitely lost a lot of its charm. It doesn’t help that I fully completed the season’s journey last time around, so there’s nothing much to aspire to. Many of my usual D3 buddies have stopped coming around for the season launch at all, although there’s still a few of us that still plan to team up on opening night.

Unlike previous seasons, S11 is starting on a Thursday. That’s bad news for trying to get to 70 or onto the leaderboards right away, but I’m not sure how much of a hurry I’ll be in this season anyway. I’ll be happy to get as far as I can in the few free hours I have, and then make the real push on Friday as usual. I don’t have any expectations for this season other than getting the cosmetic items. I also still have 3 barbarian set dungeons to master. I haven’t decided yet whether I want to go for the Masters of the Universe conquest again this season, and use it as an excuse to finish up the barbarian and necromancer dungeons. There are several conquests that are much easier this time, so it certainly isn’t necessary. I also already have most of the sets collected now on my non-seasonal barbarian, and I’m not sure I want to have to level and farm everything up again on a new one.

It actually feels pretty nice to go into the season with very low expectations. There’s no pressure, I can take things at my own pace, and once I get my cosmetic goodies I don’t have to feel bad if I get distracted by something shiny and wander away for a while. I’m especially glad that I can put the new necromancer through its paces without worrying about having to play it at a high enough level for the Conqueror or Guardian tiers. A nice chill D3 season is just what I need to distract me from the fact that we’re starting on Omega Savage this week in FFXIV.

Monk Set Mastery

July 13, 2017 by Grace

Monk is probably the class I have played the least in D3. I mean I don’t love the barbarian, but I had at least leveled one to 70. Not so with Monk. That made a bit of extra challenge, since I had to spend a lot of time leveling and farming to get reasonable gear for this project. After having done these dungeons, I still don’t really enjoy monk, but I’m not as intimidated and annoyed at playing melee.

The first monk dungeon I tried was the Inna’s Mantra one, entirely because that’s the first full set I found via my farming. That might have been a mistake. Inna’s is one of the dungeons where too much power is a terrible thing. The objectives are to avoid getting frozen, which is incredibly easy, and to unleash mystic allies on 10 enemies within 10 yards (x5). Unfortunately my allies were a bit too helpful and kept killing the enemies well before I could round up a group of 10. I had to play a game of stripping off my legendary gems and swapping out gear until I got to a point where I could meet this objective even once in the dungeon, much less 5 times. I finally got it thanks to a combination of moving gear around and getting extremely lucky with spawns of enemies. In the end I had to remove one of my rings entirely, which seems questionable. Definitely a frustrating start to this group of dungeons.

Next up was the Dungeon of the Raiment of a Thousand Storms. The two objectives are very straightforward, reach the golden chest in under 2 minutes and do not get hit by a single succubus projectile. This took a couple tries, since you have to find a good balance between clearing the early parts of the dungeon and getting to the middle of the maze to hit the chest in time. The first few times through I could either hit the chest or clear enough enemies but not both. Eventually I found that clearing most of the straight outside path, rushing to the chest, then backtracking through the maze seemed to work pretty well. Even though it took a few attempts, this one felt more like a fun challenge than an annoyance. I liked it!

Third on the list was Uliana’s Stratagem. The first time through I didn’t complete either of the objectives, I’m not sure whether that is the fault of the dungeon or my unfamiliarity with monk. The requirements are to simultaneously explode 15 enemies marked with exploding palm (x4), and to take no fire damage at all. Only the elites have fire attacks, but unfortunately the dungeon itself has various fire traps in the floor you have to watch out for. This dungeon is also quite large and sprawling, so it pays to either look up a map or run it a couple times to get used to the layout. On my second attempt I got both objectives but was still missing around 50 enemies, simply because I hadn’t cleared fast enough. I ended up “cheating” the fire damage with the Star of Azkaranth, and got it on my 4th try.

Last but not least was the Sunwuko (Monkey King) set dungeon. The objectives are to maintain sweeping wind for the duration of the dungeon, and use decoys to hit 20 different enemies in 6 seconds (x5). On my first try of the dungeon, I both failed to keep up sweeping wind and also died because I was dumb. I got the mastery on the second attempt. I’d say this was definitely one of the easier dungeons to master. The map is big but manageable with dashing strike, and there were plenty of enemy groups to hit for the decoy objective. I think there’s a legendary belt that might have helped me keep up sweeping wind more easily, but I didn’t have it and I managed fine without it.

This group of set dungeons was a very mixed bag. They ranged from incredibly annoying (Inna’s), to very easy (Sunwuko’s). They also included one with a gimmick that I suspect some people probably hate but I thought was actually pretty fun (the golden chest in Thousand Storms). I was afraid at the outset that I was going to struggle more than usual with these since I had never played monk before, but it turned out not to be much worse than any of my other set dungeon struggles. Now only the barbarian stands between me and two pairs of awesome wings!

Reading Challenge #88: The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn

July 11, 2017 by Grace

It’s reading challenge time again! This time I’ll be sharing my thoughts on #88, The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, originally published in 1991. This is a rare find for this challenge – part of a large series of novels licensed to expand on a movie franchise, as opposed to the many novels on the challenge list that eventually got made into movies.

I have been looking forward to reading this book (series) for a while now. In fact, the weight of other people’s opinions and my own expectations actually made me delay starting this book a bit. What if I hate it? What if it doesn’t live up to the hype? Eventually though, my own curiosity and honest desire to see what all the fuss was about won out and I got started. I only read the first book, Heir to the Empire. As with the Elric saga, I suspect I’ll want to pick up the rest of this story once I am finished with this challenge list but it didn’t quite grab me enough to convince me to get sidetracked from my goal for it.

This first novel in the Thrawn trilogy takes place after the events in the movie Return of the Jedi. There’s no way to place it into context with the newest films since the entire Extended Universe of these old Star Wars novels has been declared non-canon. This was unexpectedly off-putting for me while I was reading. I felt like I was reading a piece of fan fiction instead of a professional, sanctioned novel simply because I knew up front that the world in this book is no longer connected in any way to the events in the ongoing movies. Sure, the new movies are going through and systematically lifting some of the choicest bits from the Extended Universe, but the specific events and specific characters and their reactions in this novel are no longer tied to the greater cinematic universe.

In this novel, Leia has been training with Luke to become a Jedi herself. She is also pregnant with force-sensitive twins, representing a potential rebirth for the Jedi order. The New Republic is established as the new government for at least part of the galaxy, and the remnants of the Empire are trying to fight its expansion. The main antagonist of the story is Admiral Thrawn, whose keen strategic thinking keeps him a step ahead of our heroes for much of the book. I can see why Thrawn is so memorable as a villain, he’s smart and calculating and poses a true threat to the Republic. Unlike many movie villains, Thrawn also knows when a battle is lost, and chooses to save his forces and regroup instead of lashing out. That move definitely raised him in my esteem.

Throughout the book Thrawn is slowly drawing together several threads of his plan to defeat the Republic. Some of these come to fruition in this novel, while others are left hanging for the other two books in the trilogy. While he is thinking on a grand scale, the story also becomes personally perilous for Luke and Leia. Thrawn enters into a bargain with a dark jedi, promising to hand them over in exchange for help coordinating the fleet’s attacks using the force. Both bounty hunters and squads of lethal aliens under Thrawn’s command are hunting both Luke and Leia.

One of the people hunting Luke in particular, for her own reasons, is fan-favorite Mara Jade. I can only imagine that she does some awesome stuff in the later books, because I didn’t really like her much in this one. She spent most of the book brooding, with a planet-sized chip on her shoulder. Sure, I wanted to find out what her deal was with Luke, and her hatred was probably justified. After all that build-up, though, I’m still not sure why exactly she never just orchestrated an “accident” to kill him on the many occasions she had the opportunity. Something about honor? It never came across clearly.

The book ends almost immediately after the climatic space battle, with a fairly major cliffhanger. It threw me off a bit, mostly because my copy had a hefty excerpt from the 2nd book tacked on at the end so I didn’t realize I was so close to being finished. Zahn did a good job of making me want to see what happens next with Thrawn’s plan, but not quite good enough to get me to dig into the second book right away. Overall, Heir to the Empire felt like a huge disappointment mostly because it had been hyped up so much over the years. I believe I would have loved it if I had read this back in the 90’s when I was both younger and desperate for any new continuation of my beloved Star Wars. Now it’s just a reasonably decent “what-if” story set in that universe.

TL;DR: It’s essentially high-quality fan fiction at this point. It was okay but I’m sad it didn’t remotely live up to the hype. I wish I had read it back when it was first published.

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

Rating: 3/5 stars

Verdict: Great for die-hard Star Wars fans but I’m not sure it’s a must-read in a post-The Force Awakens world. If you don’t love Star Wars (what’s wrong with you???) you can definitely skip it.

Next up: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe