Blaugust

My Backpack’s Got Jets #Blaugust2016

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I've been trying to think of what to write about without a whole lot of luck. I've got some things to say about Stellaris, but I don't really have my thoughts totally organized on that. I don't feel like I've done anything else in Final Fantasy that warrants more discussion of that. And that's really all the gaming I've been doing recently. I suppose there are a couple of mobile games, but I don't have a lot to say about them at the moment.

So I'm going to share with you today a couple of videos that I was reminded of thanks to a conversation about Star Wars Galaxies. SWG was unique in a lot of ways when it came out, one of which was the entertainer system. There were whole skill trees for dancing and music that unlocked dance moves and the ability to play different instruments as you advanced. The moves could be chained together and even synchronized with other players to let you perform as part of a band. Nowadays, Lord of the Rings Online is probably the game best known for its music system, but when it was new SWG had something different that I had never seen before.

Using those systems a player going by Balgosa Windspire recorded some of the first machinima I ever saw; a number of music videos using the Star Wars setting. The graphics look a bit dated now, of course, but you have to remember this was around 2004, so well over 10 years ago. At the time these were all very impressive, and they're still pretty entertaining.  Bringing them up in conversation got me wondering if perhaps they were on YouTube. As it turns out, Balgosa has a channel and all of his old work has been uploaded to it. So that's what I'm bringing to your attention today. I hope you enjoy them!






Jo-Jo the Man Faced Dog #Blaugust2016

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Now that I'm back playing Final Fantasy XIV, I will of course be participating in any limited time game events that come along. Of course there are the holiday events that we get every year, the next one of which starts tomorrow and has a Super Sentai theme this time around. But right now, there is a collaboration event going on with Yo-kai Watch. And I love it.

Okay, so the event itself is pretty much just a long FATE grind. Earn new Yo-kai minions by grinding FATES wearing a Yo-kai Watch, then earn weapons to use for glamouring by grinding more FATES with those minions summoned. The event runs a little over two months, and that's good because it'll take a lot of FATES to earn weapons for every class. So far I've got the Bard, Summoner, Scholar, and Paladin ones and am working on Machinist.

Each minion is a character from the Yo-kai Watch games; there are a number of cat spirits, a couple that I believe are bears, a nine-tailed fox spirit, and so forth.

And then there's Manjimutt.

Jo-Jo the Man Faced Dog #Blaugust2016
Gaze upon his awesome countenance and be humbled

Yokai are Japanese spirits, some of which were once living beings. For instance Jibanyan, one of the mascot Yokai, was a normal cat that got run over by a truck. Manjimutt was a salaryman who died alongside a poodle, resulting in the two being merged into a single Yokai. He's actually based on a Japanese urban legend, the jinmenken. This is the kind of fascinatingly weird Japanese mythology I just love.

So that's what I've been up to in FFXIV when not raiding. Collecting weird ghost pets and weapons associated with them. Manjimutt is probably going to my go-to pet summon for the near future, because he's just hilarious. And as I discovered when learning more about him to write this post, he's also quite the dancer.


Jo-Jo the Man Faced Dog #Blaugust2016

by
Now that I'm back playing Final Fantasy XIV, I will of course be participating in any limited time game events that come along. Of course there are the holiday events that we get every year, the next one of which starts tomorrow and has a Super Sentai theme this time around. But right now, there is a collaboration event going on with Yo-kai Watch. And I love it.

Okay, so the event itself is pretty much just a long FATE grind. Earn new Yo-kai minions by grinding FATES wearing a Yo-kai Watch, then earn weapons to use for glamouring by grinding more FATES with those minions summoned. The event runs a little over two months, and that's good because it'll take a lot of FATES to earn weapons for every class. So far I've got the Bard, Summoner, Scholar, and Paladin ones and am working on Machinist.

Each minion is a character from the Yo-kai Watch games; there are a number of cat spirits, a couple that I believe are bears, a nine-tailed fox spirit, and so forth.

And then there's Manjimutt.

Gaze upon his awesome countenance and be humbled

Yokai are Japanese spirits, some of which were once living beings. For instance Jibanyan, one of the mascot Yokai, was a normal cat that got run over by a truck. Manjimutt was a salaryman who died alongside a poodle, resulting in the two being merged into a single Yokai. He's actually based on a Japanese urban legend, the jinmenken. This is the kind of fascinatingly weird Japanese mythology I just love.

So that's what I've been up to in FFXIV when not raiding. Collecting weird ghost pets and weapons associated with them. Manjimutt is probably going to my go-to pet summon for the near future, because he's just hilarious. And as I discovered when learning more about him to write this post, he's also quite the dancer.


Petulence

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World Go Boom

For the last several nights there has apparently been a shit storm happening on the Blizzard network, or more likely the networks they use as a backhaul.  The frustrating thing about a DDoS attack is that at least on some level, if it is a large enough one there isn’t a whole lot you can do other than triage.  Most successful attacks don’t actually target the servers of company, but instead the connections just upstream of the data center.  If you can somehow manage to get that provider to start blocking the ip ranges that are attacking you… and most of the time they are not nice clean IP ranges, but instead random rootkit/malware infected bot machines…  the attack often times moves upstream again making the effect inconvenience even more companies.  The real problem in this whole situation is that bot networks are dirt cheap to use, because virus infections of all those folks who only use the internet for “the facebooks” are prevalent.  The rumor has it that this particular bot attack is spawned by some of the players who were recently banned from Overwatch for hacks and cheats.  Now as is shockingly commonly the way among spoiled internet brats, they are throwing a massive tantrum in the form of an attack directed at Blizzard and their customers.

Now for the most part the last couple of nights have been chill for me personally.  It seemed as though initially so long as you were not running raid content and as a result switching server clusters… you really didn’t encounter much issue.  I for example happily leveled my way through Pandaria, and it was not until about 8pm last night that I started to encounter issues.  I have to admit it was a little nostalgic seeing the “World Server is Down” message, because it had been so long since that was a regular occurrence on the Argent Dawn server.  Because we were the first Role-playing server sorted alphabetically in the list, we became the target of a lot of protests and down right petulance from players simply wanting to wreck our fun time.  More often than not it was spawned by a similar set of spoiled internet brats, namely in the form of players on the PVP server Blackrock.  Any time their server would go down they would come over and flood our server with level 1 Gnomes “protesting” and as a result bringing our server down as well.  Those same players would likely be the type that are currently DDoSing the network, but back then that sort of attack was not really possible.  I am sure there were plenty of otherwise good people who got swept up in the madness, just like what happened during the “warrior protests” that also targeted our server.  However the bulk were likely simply lashing out at the “lol arpee” server because we made an easy target.

Storming Draenor

Petulence

The servers however eventually recovered and as a result I was able to say goodbye to Pandaria and move on towards Draenor.  I spent a silly amount of gold last night upgrading all of the caster heirlooms I have to level 100, so that I could use them on my Warlock, Mage and Priest… all of which have yet to push through to level 100.  It seemed like gold well spent given that I would likely be playing all of them shortly.  In the grand scheme of things, percentage wise it was not that big of a hit to the total amount of cash that I had laying around.  Additionally questing through the Draenor content is going to make back a good chunk of it given that I will be selling my gear instead of wearing it.  If I find myself desperate for money there are lots of characters that I have not touched tons of quest content on.  In any case I picked up Grimoire of Supremacy that lets me swap my Felguard for a permanent Infernal which seems pretty awesome.  I think running around with an infernal is the ultimate player fantasy for a lot of folks that end up going Demonology, and I remember how much fun it was when I helped my friends complete that quest in Felwood to get their first.   The only negative is… that it seems to have removed my ability to summon these various demons as their short term “fire totem” like variety that was a decent dps boost.  I have a feeling that while fun for running around, that I might eventually swap back to using one of the other talents.  I managed to stay awake long enough to get through the Tanaan Jungle intro quest, and am now in the process of setting up my garrison.  I am hoping that tonight I can make a serious dent in the leveling process, and maybe move into Gorgrond.  Mostly I am making the big push, because I know that Friday night will begin another Diablo 3 season, and I will begin switching time with that game.