Thalen

#Blaugust Day 12: Liebster 2: The New Batch

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I have been Liebstered once more, this time by Tamrielo. I’m not going to try to come up with another 11 facts about myself; that was hard enough the first time. I will answer his questions however. Rumors that I am using this as free content because I can’t think of anything better to write today are absolutely false and should be disregarded. The computer is your friend.

The computer desires answers

What is the best spell to cast?

Time Stop, no contest. Casting Time Stop gives you the opportunity to set up a cascade of fireballs, lightning bolts, and delayed blast fireballs all capped off by a prismatic sphere to utterly annihilate your foe. Not that I have any experience doing this, nope, not me.

What food item(s) from a game do you want to eat above any others?



I’m extremely curious about that goblin cheese. If the Illuminati want it, it must be some impressive stuff.

You’ve got an infinite supply of one consumable, and can never carry any others. Which consumable do you choose?



Fairies in bottles. Infinite fairies in bottles mean you can brute force your way through any problem.

Cures what ails you

You have to choose a race and class that you’ve never played seriously before. What do you pick?



Bugbear warrior. Bugbears are clearly the chosen race, and are particularly good at beating people up.



What game did you think you would hate but actually loved?

Team Fortress 2. I got it in the Orange Box because Half-Life 2 and Portal. Turned out to actually be a whole lot of fun.

What game did you think you would love but actually hated?

Ultima VIII. I was a huge fan of Ultima, and the idea of taking the fight to the Guardian’s world was really interesting. The game was… not good.



Pick a zone from any game to live in. Why?

Hrm, maybe pre-Cataclysm Loch Modan? I always liked it, and it’s a reasonably pleasant terrain and climate. Good fishing too.

You can excise one class from every future game. Which? Why?



Warrior. Replace with something more interesting than ‘guy who hits people with sharp objects’

What’s your favorite story?



The Wizard of Oz

What hobby does no one (yet) know you have?

I’m a (very) amateur birder. I’m not going for a Big Year anytime soon or going way out of my way to hunt down rare birds, but I do actively keep an eye out for birds when going about my life, and keep record of new or interesting ones I see.

What is your favorite secret shame? >:D



I enjoy bubblegum pop music way too much.

#Blaugust Day 10: Liebster

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I have been tagged by Grace with the Liebster. She has questions, I have answers. Let's see here.

11 Facts about Me

  1. I own approximately 50,000 comic books. They are mostly superhero comics, and are very well organized.
  2. I've never broken a bone.
  3. I got my first computer when I was 4; it was a TI 99/4A and I was hooked from then on.
  4. I wear hiking boots most days. They're very nice boots though.
  5. I own all the Street Fighter RPG books that White Wolf released. It's a better system than you might think.
  6. The only sport I pay any attention to is soccer, and that mostly just at World Cup time. If we had a club in my area, I might actually go to matches but that's not happening any time soon.
  7. No matter how much I try to change my sleep schedule, I remain a night owl. It's just how I am.
  8. The first book I read (not counting picture books and such) was The Wizard of Oz. It's still a favorite.
  9. Washington, DC is my favorite city in America. I've been there 4 times and there's still so much more to see.
  10. For most types of games I prefer PC over consoles. JRPGs are the main exception.
  11. I play FPS with keyboard and mouse.

Why do you blog?
I blog as an excuse to write. It's something I like to do, but without some concrete goal in mind I tend never to do it. Therefore, blog.

What was your favorite childhood cartoon show?
I have to pick just one? Man, it's hard to think back and decide what was my favorite then as opposed to what I like now. Probably Duck Tales, I think. Duck Tales was pretty awesome.

Fantasy or Sci-Fi?
Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

What’s the most amazing place you’ve ever been?
Tokyo is incredible in ways I have difficulty putting into words. I had been to large cities in America such as Chicago and New York, and I still wasn't entirely prepared for the scale of Tokyo.

Pizza: Chicago or New York?
New York. Chicago has excellent pizza-flavored casseroles; they are not pizza.

If you could only pick one game genre to play for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Hmmm, toughie. I think the 4X genre (Civilization and that sort). Infinite replayability.

What inspired your character name?
I needed a dwarven sounding name, and I just started throwing syllables together until I came up with something that didn't sound stupid. The original Thalen Firebeard was a dwarven mage I played in the first D&D 3.0 game I was in. I reused the name for my dwarven hunter in World of Warcraft, and it ended up becoming my main internet identity.

What is your greatest gaming moment or achievement?
Hard to choose. Possibly the Sindragosa kill that Belghast has mentioned in the past where I was one of just a couple of people still up and got the killing blow on her just before she put all of us in ice blocks.

Do you share your love of games with your real-world friends and family, or keep it to the internet?
Most of my real-life friends aren't big into online games, but we play local multiplayer games together on occasion. And we play plenty of tabletop RPGs and board games on a regular basis.

Have you ever had a really weird pet?
It wasn't really a pet, but we had a quail in a terrarium for a couple of weeks after it hit my dad's truck and he brought it home. It turned out to still be alive, so we kept an eye on it for while and he eventually took it back out and released it.

What is your favorite type of environment/biome in-game and IRL?
Forest, definitely. Preferably nice open forest without too much undergrowth so it's easy to walk through.

And now I'm supposed to tag some people.  Finding people who haven't already been tagged for this is not easy.  If I pick someone whose already been Liebstered, I apologize.  My tags:

Aywren
Dallian
Wolfy

And my 11 questions:

  1. What movie, game, or book do you love that noone else seems to?
  2. Birds: Fine feathered friends or freaky tiny dinosaurs?
  3. What's a place you've never traveled to and would like to?
  4. Mac or PC?
  5. What's the first video game you remember playing?
  6. How quickly do you tend to adopt new technology?
  7. What video game character can you just not stand, and why?
  8. What's your favorite non-gaming hobby?
  9. How many cars have you owned over the course of your life?
  10. Would you rather live in an urban, suburban, or rural area?
  11. Do spiders and insects bother you?

#Blaugust Day 11: Whalers in the Sky

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Last night was my regular raid night in Final Fantasy XIV, led by Tamrielo. This is the more laid-back raid of our Free Company, so we tend to be a little behind the most current content. Up until last week we’ve been working on clearing out the remaining raid content from before the patch, the Coils of Bahamut. Last week we defeated Bahamut Prime, leaving us free this week to begin in on the Heavensward raids.

We started out by running the Alexander raids, which are lower difficulty raids designed to be doable by random groups. They definitely still require everybody to be paying attention, but there’s a little room for error. I had only been in the first and second of the 4 wings before, so two of the bosses were entirely new to me. We took them down without to much difficulty, and by the end of that content a number of us walked away with new gear. I ended up with new boots, gloves, belt, and a ring.

Face away from the explosion for maximum cool points

After we finished up in Alexander, we moved on to the Limitless Blue where the flying whale primal Bismarck dwells, for the extreme version of his fight. For those not knowledgeable of Final Fantasy XIV, primals are the summons of previous Final Fantasy games, generally summoned by the prayers of various beastman tribes. Bismarck first showed up as a summon in Final Fantasy VI and is the patron of the birdlike Vanu Vanu in Final Fantasy XIV.

A number of our raiders had tried this fight a couple of weeks ago but hadn’t been able to do damage fast enough to make it through. Last night it took us 3 tries to get the hang of it, but once we all understood the fight, we managed to down him without much difficulty and Tam walked away with a whale-themed two-handed sword to use in his Dark Knight job.

He’s much more impressive these days

After months of raiding near the top of our ability pre-patch, it’s nice to once again be in the period where we’re working our way up through the ranks to see how far we can get. More runs at Bismarck are likely in our future to get weapons for the rest of our raid; next up in difficulty is Ravana in Thok ast Thok. This is reportedly a fight demanding much more precision, so I imagine it’ll take us a little longer than Bismarck did to get a handle on. I’ve been surprised before though.

#Blaugust Day 9: Books

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I've always identified as a reader. Reading books isn't just something I do when I have to to learn something, or even as occasional recreation; it's a major element of who I am. I've taken some pride in the fact that I'm always reading; whenever I finish a book, I always have another to start on and I make a point of reading at least a few pages so I'm never in between books.

Recently I've not been reading as much and I've been a bit disappointed in myself because of it. Between work, gaming, family time and so on, I haven't been carving out time to read like I used to. Where I would normally be reading at least a book a week on average, I've only read two in the past month, and one of those was a reread of a book I had already read once.

I'm going to try to make an effort to change this, to take more time to read again. It's always been one of my favorite pastimes and there are so many books I want to read that I would hate to not get to. As such, I'm setting a short term goal for myself. For the remainder of Blaugust I'm going to read at least one new book each week, and I'll review each one here once I've finished it.  If I get back up to speed and read more than one in a week, then I'll review multiple books that week.

First up is a science fiction classic that I've been wanting to read for years and finally got ahold of at a recent library sale; The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison. Hopefully I'll be reporting back next weekend with a glowing review.