Good Morning Friends! This morning I have promised a Blaugust preview to some folks that are anxiously awaiting information, but first, you have to wade through a Final Fantasy post. Last night I hit level 77 on my Paladin job and I have been focused on leveling it before really spending much time catching up on the MSQ. I could have easily ground this job to 80 by now, but I am trying my best not to actually mindlessly grind. Instead, I am zipping around the world doing a bunch of different activities, all of which slowly contribute to my leveling process. My working theory is if I can approach the game in a non-frenetic manner and focus more on community interaction, that it might just build the recipe for staying power in the game. The times I have been the happiest in Final Fantasy XIV are the times when I was not focused on a specific goal, but just sort of hanging out and letting the game pull me in this direction or that.
Whatever mental block I had about doing the roulette seems to have passed and pretty much every day I do at least three of them. The first that I get out of the way is the PVP Frontlines Roulette and while I have begun to grasp how each of the maps works… it is in truth just a rapid dose of experience that I am concerned about. From there I tend to do a leveling roulette, which often produces the least predictable results because there is such a wide range of leveling dungeons available. Lastly, I queue for the 50+ dungeon and one of the things that I am marveling at is just how many dungeons there are in this game that is still relevant. I am also shocked at just how fast I remember the specific boss mechanics of a given dungeon. I just start pulling and before long I am back in the flow of doing the dungeon and even remembering where most of the chests are. I do however think they might have removed a few chests at some point because I pulled back to a location that I am almost certain a chest used to be in Amdapor Keep.
The other thing that I have been doing a lot of is Hunt logs for Sacks of Nuts. I noticed the other day that there was some gear on the Hunt vendor that was ultimately a significant upgrade to my previous level 80 warrior tanking gear. So I am slowly acquiring pieces of that set through doing the daily hunts, which do not inconsequentially add up to a sizeable amount of free gil. The other focus that I am doing each day is my Beast Tribe dailies. I have wrapped up all of the ARR tribes other than the Ixal and have moved forward to finishing up the Vanu and starting the Vath. I am still doing at least three quests a day for Ixal, but I find the crafting dailies to be the most taxing and try my best to spend the rest of my allowances elsewhere. I will end up with a level 50 carpenter as a result of the Ixal quests, but that entire process of crafting is more than a bit draining. I realize there are easier ways to level but I honestly prefer to brute force craft than to drag it out forever.
Another thing that has happened is the release of the Endwalker Benchmark. You can download the Benchmark and it serves as a way to do a few different things. Firstly you can test out your gaming rig to determine how well it is going to run Endwalker when it releases. Secondly you can play with the character creator and save appearances that you can then load later in the full game, which allows you to really devote all the time you need to making sure you craft the perfect Bunny Boi. I crafted a Bun, and while I was surprised that I could have facial hair, it is still not really my jam. It is going to take an awful lot to pry me away from that Lala Life. I cranked all of the settings up to the maximum and ran the test at 4k and it came out as “Very High” with an average FPS of 98 which seems perfectly cromulent for Endwalking.
Over on the Blaugust discord there has been discussion about wanting details surrounding this years Blaugust. I am not quite ready to announce everything, but I thought I would at least give folks a preview of the calendar. This year is a reversion back to the more traditional pre-pandemic Blaugust as well as shortening the whole thing to largely take place within the month of August. Thursday July 15th I will be making the official “Announcement” post with all of the details contained within, but this calendar image should at least give you some idea of the plan. If you have ever participated in a Blaugust it is going to feel fairly familiar with no wild deviations this time around.
The post Roulettes A Plenty appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! It is Monday morning and once again I am bringing you all a hand-crafted mixtape. For those uninitiated to this series, I greatly enjoy crafting Mixtapes and have since I was a youngster. Given that we no longer use tapes or burn CDs, the next best thing is to create carefully curated playlists on Spotify or YouTube. Along with this process, I also create custom album artwork since so much of the mixtape process was adorning the physical media with sharpies and other colorful markers. Instead of sending a tape to a specific person, I broadcast these out to all of my friends and readers on the internet. It makes me exceptionally happy when I hear back feedback from one of my friends as they enjoyed a specific musical blend.
Hot Chicken Cold Stares
There is a specific flavor of rock that I associate with bands like The White Stripes or The Kings of Leon. It is heavily distorted, jangly, and fuzzy around the edges and I am uncertain what you can actually call it. However given that both Jack White of the White Stripes and The Kings of Leon now record out of Nashville Tennessee, I mentally associate the particular sound with that scene. What else do I associate with Nashville… well hot chicken of course because I love it so. So this morning I bring you a Mixtape dedicated to that style of music and quite honestly… this is one of my favorites so far. I am certain it will be an acquired taste much like the capsaicin laced hot chicken that gives this blend its name. I also feel like it is important to pay homage to where I think the sound came from… with The Rolling Stones and The Animals.
Ruby – Kaiser Chiefs
Fell In Love With a Girl – The White Stripes
King of the Rodeo – Kings of Leon
Melatonin – Silversun Pickups
Come a Little Closer – Cage The Elephant
Hate To Say I Told You So – The Hives
Get Free – The Vines
Steady, As She Goes – The Raconteurs
Hang Me Up To Dry – Cold War Kids
Here It Goes Again – OK Go
Hash Pipe – Weezer
Paint It, Black – The Rolling Stones
Lonely Boy – The Black Keys
Reptilia – The Strokes
E-Pro – Beck
Flathead – The Fratellis
House Of The Rising Sun – The Animals.
Listen On Spotify
Listen On YouTube
There is my latest Mixtape and with it, I hope signals the beginning of a wonderful week. This week I am transitioning back to remote work, and hopefully, that goes smoothly. Like I said above this is probably one of my favorite Mixtapes that I have created, and while it has been waiting on release I’ve listened to it for hours at a time. If you are tuning into this series late, you can find the entire archive of Mixtapes released to this point here:
Good Morning Friends! This morning I decided to make good on an idea that has been kicking around in my head. Mixtape Mondays have given me an anchor to the week, a focal point to sort of plan the entire week around. I had this idea of a second fixed point, but I am not entirely certain it will be as regular as the Monday offering has become. Favorite Fridays is a time for me to break out something that I love in a game, pop culture, or pretty much anything else I am passionate about and do a deep dive on it. It might be a favorite weapon or a location in a game that I absolutely cherish or maybe even a specific section of quest dialog that I greatly enjoy. Whatever the case it is time for me to explore that item in depth in post form.
Usagi Kabuto
There is one item in Final Fantasy XIV that has become more synonymous with my brand than pretty much anything else. It is a cosmetic hat known as the Usagi Kabuto, or “Bunny Hat” as I tend to refer to it. This single item has spent more time on my head in glamour form than pretty much any other item in the game. The truth is I largely stumbled upon it when I was first exploring the options of what I could use for glamour purposes. There isn’t anything special about it as items go, it is a Kabuto or a type of helmet often worn by Japanese warriors… most specifically associated with Samurai. That is the first thing in its favor because I have always had an attraction to that classic Samurai appearance.
The item first made its appearance as part of the Heavensturn event in 2011 and then was reprised briefly in 2014 as well… aka the first Heavensturn event for A Realm Reborn. Heavensturn for those unfamiliar is the in-game holiday in Final Fantasy XIV associated with the Lunar New Year and as a result, has a heavy association with whatever animal of the Chinese Zodiac represents a given year. For example, we are currently in the “Year of the Ox” and as a result, the Kabutos associated with that event featured an Oxhead. 2011 was the “Year of the Rabbit” which I believe would have been the very first Heavensturn in the original version of Final Fantasy XIV. When the event first game to A Realm Reborn Rabbit, Dragon and Sheep were all available for purchase.
I cannot say for certain what it is about the appearance that really drew me to it. It was however a happy coincidence that pretty much all of the Warrior-specific sets happened to be black and red, which meant the specific version of the Usagi Kabuto that I liked the most matched them perfectly. Over the years I have been a Bunny Warrior, a Bunny Bard, a Bunny Samurai, and most recently a Bunny Paladin. I even have the Gold Saucer-themed bunny ears so that I can craft “Bunny” outfits for things where this helm doesn’t exactly match. I realize that Zepla’s whole thing is calling her community “Buns” but I have been a Bunny Warrior since those early days of A Realm Reborn when we were first exploring this game.
There is just something about being a Lalafell and having a hyper-serious expression most of the time… and wearing a giant bunny hat that makes me happy. So many of my memories of this game… involved a cut scene where I was wearing this exact helmet. I used it so often that prior to the existence of glamour plates I carried around a stack of crystals and the hat on my person at all times so I could glamour over any other appearances.
In fact, I believe that it was “Bunny Bel” that was my very first commission that I had my good friend Ammo work on. It has pretty much graced the masthead of this website since the day it was created. If I was going to single out any specific version of Belghas to represent me as a whole… it would probably be that version. It is the incarnation of me that brings me the most joy, and now that I have come back to Final Fantasy XIV and embraced the bunny once again… my happiness quotient has increased significantly. So when I was trying to think about the single item that I wanted to kick this series off with, it was quickly evident what it had to be.
The only negative of the Usagi Kabuto is that since it has been largely inaccessible in the game since 2014 for some seven years there is now a pretty hefty price tag associated with it. In theory, if the pattern holds, it should make a reappearance during the Heavensturn event for 2023. I am not sure when they started this, but after a certain point, anything that was seasonal was no longer able to be listed on the Market board. It means those first few holiday events have items that fetch a hefty premium. I know both Thalen and Tamrielo made their in-game fortunes by selling housing items that were obtained from those first few events.
Square Enix now uses expired seasonal content as a way of propping up their cash shop, which honestly I feel is fair given that they churn out brand new seasonal events every single year with zero repeats that I am aware of. If you absolutely must follow in my footsteps and join the order of the bunny warrior, you can drop $3 to get your very own bind-on character version of the helmet. It features a slightly different item name, which I assume is to differentiate between the store-bought and market purchasable versions. If I ever got serious about playing on another server I would probably pick one of these up on the market so that I could still be the Bunny Warrior of Light there as well.
The post Favorite Fridays – Usagi Kabuto appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was an unforced error on my part because I had to get up super early… then never actually got around to writing a blog post. When I got home from work I pretty much crashed on the couch and along with doing some chill maintenance gaming in Final Fantasy XIV, I decided to binge my way through Black Summer season 2 on Netflix. For those who are unaware of this show, it is another in the zombie survival genre, but it is told in a bunch of disconnected story fragments shifting perspectives between a large cast of characters. This means it is not necessarily told in chronological order which can completely screw with your perspective at times.
There are very few characters that carried over from the first season, and this time around we are introduced to a large number of new players centering around what ultimately is a handful of events told from different perspectives. The central conflict of the season is that someone is flying over the snowy expanse of land and dropping off supply crates. Some contain food and medicine and others weapons… but all of which are highly sought out by the groups of survivors inhabiting what appears to be the backwoods of Colorado or some other similar area. I enjoyed the show in spite of the fact that they seem to be really bad at dispatching zombies. However one of my friends stated that was one of the things that they actually liked about the show because no one seems to have a supernatural aim.
For those unaware, Black Summer is the higher budget and production value cousin to Z Nation. I had no clue at all that these two series were connected until I watched this video outlining how the virus in both shows worked. The Red Death as far as zombie virus strains go is one of the ones that produce near-instant zombies. That means… your highest priority when someone is dying is either to damage the brain or get the hell away from them before they wake up and start running around seeking their next meal. As far as Zombies go, these also appear to be of the stupider variety meaning that if they ever lose sight of their prey they cannot seem to reason out where they might have gone to and begins the process of open hunting again. There are times when the cast of humans literally hide around the corner of a building and the raging zombie seems to be incapable of understanding spatial reasoning enough to figure out their hiding place.
Another thing about Black Summer is that much like Walking Dead it posits that humanity will break down into tribal factions that will quite literally kill each other over a can of beans. This is where I start to wonder about how a hypothetical zombie invasion would actually play out. Firstly I somehow doubt that it would spread terribly far at least in the region I live in where a large percentage of the populace is “packing”. I think armed militias of “good ole boys” would be all too willing to roam around hunting down packs of the undead. I mean my initial instinct would be to leave the city center and then ride it out with family in a small town with plenty of ammunition. There is more than enough open land to slow down the spread and each of these small towns would likely become a safe haven as the townsfolk protect against roaming packs.
The part that starts to conflict with me on a personal level when a post-apocalyptic fiction predicts chaos erupting around us, is that I have seen chaos first hand. I live in the area of the country lovingly referred to as Tornado Alley. We’ve gone a few years without a bad one, which means we are due for a significant tragedy at any point. The above picture is the aftermath of the Tornado in Joplin Missouri that took place on May 22nd of 2011, just over ten years ago. The thing is… we were there shopping with my mother-in-law the weekend before this took place. Had we picked a different weekend we could have easily been in the path of this disaster?
In the face of a tragedy like this, I have watched as folks who have nothing are all too willing to give what little they do have to help others. Ten years ago when the Joplin Tornado happened there was a mass volunteer drive to go clean up and pretty much every organization was doing some sort of food, clothing, and essentials drive to help the victims make it through the coming weeks and months. So in the face of ravening hordes of the undead, I do wonder if our response will be inherently selfish as our fiction predicts or if we will instead band together in defense of humanity? This is actually a conversation I have had with friends before. Sure my first instinct is to leave the city core just out of a sense of preservation in that fewer zombies equates to a higher survival rate. I fully expect however that once you reach the outskirts that folks will rapidly begin grouping together to help weather the events.
What are your thoughts? Does our zombie fiction get it right and that you think it will be self-interests over the needs of the many? Do you think we will instead band together to fight back? Drop me a comment below.
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