May Recap.

Posted on May 31, 2016 by sandrian

The month of May is over today and it’s time to take a look back at what I’ve actually achieved this month.

Goals for FFXIV

Level Monk to 50
Level Machinist to 50
Level Alchemist to 30
Level Armorer to 30
Level Blacksmith to 30
Level Culinarian to 30
~~Level Goldsmith to 30~~
Level Leatherworker to 30
Level Fisher to 30
Level Miner to 30
Finish Scholar 2.0 Relic Zenith
Finish Monk 2.0 Relic Zenith

Unfortunately I spent a lot less time playing FFXIV than I would have thought. With work being seriously overwhelming, me starting a new training regime and picking up a few new and very addicting games I actually only completed one goal this month, and that is level Goldsmith to level 30. I have barely touched any other crafters unfortunately, but I did level my Monk and Machinist. My Monk is currently sitting at level 40, where my Machinist has dinged 46 yesterday. All in all I made some progress and actually am not that far off level 50 on atleast the Machinist. Seeing as I have a nice vacation coming up I think I’ll be spending a bit more time in FFXIV so I’ll keep the goals I set for May and just push them over to June.

Goals for Blizzard Games

~~Get rank 20 in Hearthstone~~
~~Finish second wing of League of Explorers~~
Unlock third wing of League of Explorers
Finish Diablo 3 chapter 4 for the season
~~Play Overwatch! (I got early acces to open beta)~~

Other Goals

Finish reading Illidan
Finish watching Gotham season 1
~~Defeat second and third Gyms in Pokémon Blue~~
Play through two additional worlds/mission clusters in Ratchet and Clank
Wrap up some personal stuff related to University.

I got rank 20 in Hearthstone pretty fast with the release of the Old Gods expansion and also took the time to play through the second wing of LoE so that’s done. I’m still trying to unlock the third wing, but all in good time. I played less Overwatch than I thought, mostly due to being seriously tired. I did get some time in and am played about 5-6 games since launch. I’m still trying out a lot of the roster available and am mostly playing one or two games inbetween other activities as a sort of distraction.
I started out strong in Diablo last month, but unfortunately fell into the “I’m bored of grinding” after only a day or two. I do want to complete chapter 4 for the goodies, so I’ll try to focus on that next month.
As far as my other goals go. I read through Illidan pretty fast and really enjoyed the book. I’m way past the Third Gym in Pokémon Blue now (yay for playing on the train) and I’m over halfway with watching Gotham so I have been doing a lot outside of games. Unfortunately I was just too tired to do much of anything else so a lot of these goals will probably get dragged over to June aswell. I’ll see. I’m looking at what games I’m currently playing and enjoying and probably frame my June goals around that.
I’m a bit disappointed by the fact that I couldn’t do nearly as much as I’d hoped, but well, feeling tired a lot kind of takes away from gaming.

The Backlog part 3.1: Oldschool Handhelds

Posted on May 29, 2016 by sandrian

A few weeks ago I did a backlog post of my current games on my current generation consoles/handhelds and PC. In the first post I promised I’d also do a backlog of all my older games, to show you all the collection I built up over the years and to sketch how my gaming habits and ownership has changed over the years. Seeing as my oldschool backlog is quite big I’m splitting it up into two or three separate posts, the first of which will be today and will cover my gaming career on handhelds.
So without further ado, let’s start with the first 10 years of my life in gaming which was dominatied mostly by Nintendo and their Gameboys.

As you can see I have a reasonable collection of Gameboy games. I tried to divide them up by placing them under the type of Gameboy that was needed to play them, hence the “weird” row placements. I started out with a Gameboy Pocket and Pokémon Blue when I was about eight or nine years old. Pokémon was all the rage at the time and a lot of my friends were playing with Gameboys. Add up the fact that we would travel to birthdays and family a lot during the weekends, and those drives would take 1-2 hours every time, my parents decided to get me a Gameboy to keep me busy in the car and at some family events where I would be the only kid. I can’t even begin to describe how many hours I played on that thing and of all the games you see in the left row there’s literally three I haven’t 100% completed. These are Super Mario Land 1, Kirby’s Dream World and Bugs Bunny. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t really complete the Bugs Bunny game though, it was kind of like pacman where levels just got gradually harder untill you died. Super Mario Land didn’t have a save option so although I’ve played it a lot I could never get to the endboss of the game in one go. Kirby is actually a game I picked up way later and played for a bit, but never completed. I think I spent the most time on my Pokémon games. As you can see I own a lot of them (the only Gameboy game I actually lack is Pokémon Leafgreen, which I did own but gave to an ex-boyfriend as birthday present). Unfortunately Silver and Gold no longer work due to empty battery, but I don’t want to know how many hours I’ve sunk into all of those games.
The Gameboy Color generation was next and there I’ve only not completed Hamtaro (I remember being quite far in though) and Animorphs. Animorphs I didn’t really understand, but I’m willing to pick it up again. The Tetris game was more one for my mom to play with and I believe she still has the high score on that particular cassette so I don’t really want to touch it.
I got my Gameboy Advance SP after my mom passed away. I’ve played with this for about 5 years untill I bought my DS Lite. Unfortunately I’m missing two games on this picture which I think I left at my ex’s place and thus will never see again. I managed to rebuy Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories but I’m still looking for the original Sonic Advance to complete my collection. I’m also considering getting Pokémon Leafgreen again just so I have all the old Gameboy generations complete. I have completed less of those games than on previous generations. I gamed less during highschool and only got introduced to WoW when I was 17 and that took up so much time that I didn’t really look at my handhelds anymore. I did complete quite a few games, most notably the Pokémon games and the Crash Bandicoot games. I do intend to go back and play through the rest, starting with my recently re-obtained Kingdom Hearts game.

On to the next generation!

When I was about 18 I bought my first Nintendo DS with my own money. Although I never really acquired that many games for it, I think I had enough to keep me busy for a while. I bought it when it was out for quite a bit already and the bundle came with Need for Speed Most wanted (which I completed) and Fifa 06 (which I honestly didn’t touch at all). Again I have quite a few Pokémon games and I have completed all of them except Diamond, which I didn’t acquire untill much later. Children of Mana was a game which I played a whole lot aswell, it was very grindy and hard but fun to play. I don’t think I’ve defeated the last boss so technically not completed, but boy the amount of hours I sunk into that. Zoo Tycoon was very much a nostalgia buy and I played around with it for a bit. Nintendogs was just plain cute and I did unlock a lot of puppies, but eventually my enthusiasm for the game died down. Sonic Rush was a gift from my ex and Bleach I had to buy as fangirl, neither games I have completed though.
Kawasaki’s More Braintraining was very hip at the time so I obviously had to have it, and I did use it a lot. As far as Final Fantasy III goes. I do remember playing a bit of it, but I never finished that one either. The only thing on this picture that I really regret buying is the Nintendo DS Browser. Before the smartphone area Nintendo offered a way to use the internet on your DS. I bought it and used it a bit but in hindsight it was a real waste of money. Oh well, you can’t buy awesome things all the time right?

I hope you guys liked looking at my “oldschool” handheld collection. I have actually completed a lot of these games, especially the Gameboy and Pokémon ones. I think it’s due to being a kid and not having that much money to spend on yourself. I would only get new games when I had saved up enough pocket money to buy one or when it was my birthday or a special occassion. I guess lack of choice makes you appreciate more what you have and actually play it fully before moving on to another game. Now that I have more money to spend, and I like getting my hands on new shinies, I get new games almost every month, which distracts me from the game I was currently playing. This buying habit, combined to looking back at my old games and the amount I actually completed has more or less woken me up and strengthened my resolve not to buy that many games anymore and focus on completing the ones I already have.

In my next and (hopefully) last backlog post I’ll take a look at my two old consoles: The Playstation 2 and the Sega Genesis. Stay tuned!

No Overwatch?

Posted on May 24, 2016 by sandrian

Honestly on launch day I can’t really ignore the fact that Overwatch is now officially playable. I dipped my toes in earlier this evening after dinner, but a pounding head and an overwhelming desire to sleep drove me away from the game to relaxation instead. Trying to learn new heroes and staying with the pace of the game while also trying to not fall asleep in my chair wasn’t really doable, so I’ll probably play some more over the week and then talk a bit more about it aswell.
Instead I want to talk a bit about Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright.

A local multimedia store had a nice sale going this week. Buy three games and only pay for two. I took this opportunity to nab a copy of Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World for my WiiU but also my very first Fire Emblem game. I have heard a lot about the series and they seem to have gotten positive reviews, plus I have a serious weakness for JRPG graphics in a game so I got the last nudge I needed to pick up the game and experience what it’s all about. I picked Birthright because apparently it’s the easier of the two latest Fire Emblem games that are out now. I plopped the game into my 3DS last night and played for a bit before hopping onto FFXIV for my roulettes. I’ve also played a bit on the train to work this morning and on the way back home and I think I’m done with the prologue/tutorial part, which takes about 1.5 hours to complete. I unlocked my castle and built my first building and now I’m kind of poking around what exactly I need to be doing to advance in the game. I think I’ll need multiple playthroughs in this game to begin with because the game lets you choose multiple storylines and I kind of want to explore them all… But let’s just start with the one I chose: the Hoshido story. I play the game on Classic mode since that is apparently how it’s meant to be played and I managed to already get two of my dudes killed off so that’s a good start, right?!
So far the story is a bit thin but the graphics and music of the game are absolutely stunning. I haven’t been able to skip a single cutscene just because how breathtaking the design of this game looks. I like how you can customize your character up to a point and how they allow you to switch your hairstyle halfway through the game. As said I’m only 1.5 hours in so I can’t really comment too much on the game yet, but it looks to be an epic experience and I’ve currently set aside all my other handheld games to play it.

From what I understood the story of this game is cut up in three separate games so if I would want to experience it fully I’d need to get my hands on the other two paths aswell. However since this is my first game and I’m not sure how much I like the franchise yet I think I’ll stick to finishing Birthright first, and then I can always look into getting Conquest and/or Revelations later. Maybe Nintendo will let us purchase the other paths for cheaper when the games are out longer. Who knows. For now though the game has really captivated me and I want to know how the story unfolds and how bad (or good) I really am at the strategy parts of this game.

Vacation Inbound
My two-and-a-half weeks off are getting closer and closer aswell. With officially only 5 days of work still ahead of me I can feel my body ache for some nice relaxing time off. My vacation starts on June 2nd and I won’t have to go back to work untill June 20th. The idea of having 18 days off is seriously amazing and I’ve also booked a 4-day citytrip to Lisbon to get me out of the country and the house for a bit. I hope I can use this time to sort through a lot of junk on the attic and in the shed, tie up loose ends in my life, work out a lot and maybe finish a game or two that I have bought over the years. It’s just a really nice feeling to not have any obligations or alarm clocks in my life for a bit and that I finally can spend my time the way I want to without feeling guilty, because next to having 18 days off I also have the house to myself. My father and his girlfriend are going on vacation to Canada for almost 5 weeks, and I will have the house and car to myself for that time. So yay for me!
As for the rest of this week, I’m going to be very busy so I doubt I can get much gaming hours in. I do hope to push my Machinist to level 50 though with my Monk trailing not that far behind. But Overwatch will dominate my free time the most.

Two Sides

Posted on May 22, 2016 by sandrian

As far as I can remember I’ve been fairly lucky when it comes to the gaming community as a whole. I’ve always been in friendly environments with overall nice guilds, nice people and nice servers. From the moment I set foot in WoW untill today I can honestly say that I’ve never experienced extreme toxicity, harassment or other negative experiences in the games that I play. Ofcourse there are some games where toxicity is unavoidable, MOBA types like League of Legends are one of the most notorious for this, but I’ve always tried to stay clean of that and if there was negative stuff in my games I just stepped away.
I think the “worst” experience I had online was with guys who couldn’t take a hint about me not being interested in them and they would stick around and be annoying for a little bit too long. In the end I either had to have a firm talk with them or just put them on ignore and they wouldn’t bother me anymore. All in all I’ve been lucky I guess.
It also helps that I’m not famous in any way. Most likely because I can’t commit to a game to become good enough to compete with the top people in that game, and that’s fine by me. I like poking about on my own or with a group of friends, just having fun and doing random things. That’s why I don’t hardcore ladder in Hearthstone or do ranked games in League of Legends. The only game in which I tend to tryhard and achieve stuff is Heroes of the Storm, and I am actually planning to actively ladder up when the season starts. Other than that though, I play relatively safe games where the only thing you have to deal with sometimes is DPS elitists, but even they are starting to become a rare breed.

However…
Over the past weekend I’ve seen how truly toxic the gaming community can be. One of my favourite casters from League of Legends has gotten into trouble because of false allegations aimed at him personally. Very long story short, a streamer accused said caster of pedophilia for no apparent reason other than to create drama. Although he retracted the accusations the damage has already been done and Krepo has been dealing with the fallout ever since. This happened about a month ago after I visited the League of Legends playoffs in Rotterdam.
Fast forward to the present. Caster X has been streaming for the past few days, a mix of League of Legends and Digimon. The Digimon streams were small and fun, lots of viewer interaction and all in all quite positive. The moment he goes back to streaming League of Legends though, the jerks appear. Constantly reminding him of the false allegations, calling him out, trolling him in Twitch chat, on social media, via messages on Snapchat and Facebook. It’s gotten so bad that they tell him to go kill himself followed by “haha joking”. I can only imagine how tough it must be to deal with this on a daily basis and when things got too much for him yesterday he quit his stream and annouced he’d go blackscreen for quite a while.
As a fan and as a human being this saddens me. No one would have to deal with this amount of harassment and I can honestly not understand why people would do this to someone. I’ve seen some toxic behaviour already but this just overshadows everything I have ever encountered. People seem to enjoy bringing him down and I just can’t seem to grasp why. If it were only a handful of people doing this it’s one thing, but when it’s tons of people every single day it turns into something much more serious.
Suddenly the positive gaming community, the community I have always called my second home that was and is filled with nice people has turned a very very dark page. I guess there is always two sides to everything, but in this case I feel like Pandora’s Box has been opened and there is no way to close it anytime soon. It also makes me very sad that it gives the League of Legends community, and the gamer community in a broader sense, bad rep. All these people identify as “gamer” in one way or another and it just adds negativity to the tag. It only strengthens the stereotypes where gamers are kids and ragers and where gaming is bad for you and turns you into horrible people.
This has also shaken my core belief that people all have some good in them. Seeing people revel in someone else’s misery, seeing them make light and fun of serious accusations and seeing them just absolutely ruin someone’s day and maybe even career just for fun… I just can’t deal with it properly. My heart bleeds and I’m upset and angry at these people. I don’t think they feel empathy of any kind, if they are willing to be like this. But honestly what can I really do about it?

I guess this is the price you pay for being “famous”. People like bringing you down because of jealousy or malice and whenever a juicy drama occurs people are eager to jump into it. You see it happen with the normal athletes. With people from Hollywood and now also within E-Sports.
It does make me wish I could somehow punch them though.

Setting a Baseline

Posted on May 20, 2016 by sandrian

So I went in for the first session with a personal trainer yesterday. Initially it was only meant to be an intake conversation but due to him having enough time, and me being there anyway, we decided to do the first session right then and there… And boy was I sore all over. Today the muscle aches and pains seem to have subsided a bit, except for my shoulder area which still hurts quite a lot.
To establish a baseline for me to work from he needed some info about my age, weight, height and ofcourse the resulting BMI. I’m on a BMI of 28 which means I am overweight, but not obese. It’s not the worst out there but ofcourse I want to be closer to 23 or 24 which is more or less ideal. After talking for a bit, establishing what I wanted from him and why and how, we started doing some exercises so he could see “how I move”. I found this to be a bit of an odd term, but now I understand it completely.
Basically it comes down to seeing how I use the muscles in every part of my body and from there see which are the problem areas that need the most work. He asked me what personally bothered me the most and for me it’s the area right below my shoulderblades. Due to excess weight hanging in the front I always need to “compensate” my stance with my shoulders and I definately noticed when he started poking and prodding the area there. Next to that we found out that the muscles in my left leg are much stronger than in my right and that I have “core muscle” problems, like most people that sit all day do, which means my back, butt and hips are much too weak to offer proper support. What was also an uncharacteristic issue was the fact that the muscles in my calves are always tensed, even when I’m not actually tensing them. He was unsure what caused this, but it would explain why I often get pain in my calves when I walk for a while.
All in all I think I had a good evaluation and we ended with doing some exercises that train about 70% of the muscle mass that is a problem area for me. Now that I’m sitting at home though I can really feel the fallout of this “light” training, and although pain and soreness is usually a good sign, I worry if I’m able to get out of bed tomorrow!
My next training appointment is in a week and then we are really going to establish a routine for me to follow that optimizes both muscle growth (and thus make it so I burn more fat) and fat reduction at the same time. No this doesn’t mean I aim to get ripped, but muscle mass makes it so you burn more calories during the day. Which is good when you want to lose weigh

Catching up on Pokemon
So I’ve been playing a lot of Pokémon Blue lately but I also have other games in the series that I have left unfinished. As you can see in my widget bar I am trying to finish atleast Alpha Sapphire right now, but I’m quite lost as to where I should go. I am 6 badges and about 12 hours play in and I know I need to teach Surf to one of my Pokémon so I can advance and start working towards getting Kyogre. I’m kind of bummed though because I already picked a Water Pokémon as my starter, which kind of renders Kyogre useless. I could reset if I wanted to, but with all the promotional Pokémon I have obtained over the past two years I really don’t want to, so I’ll just chug along the game and not use Kyogre in my team I guess.
I know there are ample guides online for almost every game in existence, I prefer playing without them though. I like figuring stuff out on my own, even if it means not 100% completing a game. It’s how I’ve always done things, the trial and error way. However in this case I think I’ll look up an Alpha Sapphire guide and retrace my steps a bit, just so I can advance in the game and the story again.
I really want 2016 to be a year where I actually finish off games, instead of just expanding my collection and not touching half of the things I own. So I’m working towards a lot and use guides and tools a bit more to help me along the way. Ofcourse I want to do most of it on my own, but sometimes a little help is needed. I’ll keep you guys updated on how my playthroughs of various games go! It might not be a separate topic for me to write on, but I will include it in some of my posts.

Weird Evening

Posted on May 18, 2016 by sandrian

Yesterday I went through my Twitter followers on a whim. I had noticed the bot spam and I figured I’d root out all the crap from my account. I swear Twitter bots are a huge annoying thing and count for about 10% of my follower list. I can only imagine the people with thousands of followers and how many bots are among those.
Anyway, I went through my follower list and got hit hard by a few people I still saw on there. I have been active on Twitter for quite a while now, I think since WotLK in WoW, which is around the time I started to blog a bit here and there aswell. Let’s just keep it at 6 years of Twitter activity. Back in the early days there were a lot of WoW blogs out there, Righteous Orbs, Cynwise’s Warlock Manual and the Barrens Chat. I name these blogs for a reason seeing as I got confronted with still having Ercles and Wulfy among my followers. Ercles unfortunately passed away in 2010 and seeing his name again made me swallow hard. The same goes for Tiny Tori who passed away around this time last year and Cynwise who said goodbye to the gaming community in 2014. These are all people I have interacted with at one time or another. All good folk with a passion for gaming. And they are all a part of me one way or another.
I got quite emotional seeing some of these people who aren’t around anymore, and I wasn’t really prepared for this either. I didn’t know I’d be so impacted by things that were, but apparently the past comes up to bite you in the ass sometimes, and that’s ok. Ercles and Tori deserve to be remembered and a part of the community still misses Cynwise and the awesome guys from Righteous Orbs.

All emotional stuff aside, I’m quite looking forward to starting my training. I really hope that with some help I can reach my goals this time and stop feeling bad health wise and also about the way I look. I’ve also thought up a proper reward for when I do get close to reaching my goal: travel to Berlin for a weekend and visit the LCS studio’s. I really loved the atmosphere of the LCS playoff finals in Rotterdam and even though there are obviously less people in the studio, I hope to recapture that atmosphere again there. Plus it might give me some time to talk to some of the casters instead of just getting 20 seconds to take a picture and then having to leave again.
I’m a huge fan of the LCS and the whole show surrounding it plus I may or may not have a slight crush on one of the casters, so it would be awesome if I would be able to strike up a conversation with him. Seeing as I’m already more or less in touch with said person I hope he doesn’t mind some small talk IRL either.

FFXIV and Timezone Woes
I’ve been trying to reach my goals like a good little girl when it comes to FFXIV but I notice heavily that I’m slowly getting bored of the game again. Not that I don’t like leveling, but more that I don’t have anything to do besides leveling. And I’m starting to notice.

Due to not having a proper raidgroup on Moogle I just miss out on a lot of things. Not only progress wise, but also fun/casual wise. I haven’t touched a Pony Farm group yet and as DPS they are actually quite hard to find. Add up that my friends list is more or less barren and I can only really ask 2-3 people to come farm with me and you can see the issue.
I really wish I had some more motivation to keep on logging and playing. I’m missing the sense of community a lot and I feel a bit lost within my current FC. Although I have been around there since forever there has been such a huge flow of people coming and going that I never really get to “befriend” anyone within the timeframe that I play. I’d love to switch over to Cactuar and be more active in Greysky Armada, but the timezone thing is just seriously terrible. The hours the guild is alive there are the middle of the night for me and when I’m online during the week everyone is still at work. I guess during the weekends it’s not that horrible, but if the people you want to play with are 6-10 hours behind you timewise… It gets a bit tough. And it’s such a shame because I would love to play with Chestnut and Belghast to name a few examples… Bluh. Life isn’t fair I guess. It’s also one of the main reasons I never stuck around in Wildstar. All the awesome folk I want to play with are NA based and well, I’m not.
I guess it’s the bane of any person who is in touch with people all over the world. Maybe if I didn’t have a fulltime job I could turn around my sleep schedule, but alas, that is not going to work. So for now I’m just playing on EU based servers with EU based people… Atleast the ones that are still around.

A Breath of Air

Posted on May 16, 2016 by sandrian

Yesterday evening I had invited myself over to a friend’s house on a whim for today. We met eachother through gaming and it’s always nice to spend a day with a fellow geek that loves games and anything games related as much as you do. He asked me to bring over my copy of Bravely Default so he could see what it was about, seeing as he was thinking of picking up the sequel. In return I nabbed his copy of “Ocarina of Time 3D” so I can play even more Zelda games than I’m already doing.
Speaking of Zelda, I’ve been poking around in “A Link Between Worlds” and am currently at my second dungeon, the House of Gales. I saved just before so I haven’t really peeked in yet but so far I’m enjoying the game. I have a little witch who flies me everywhere and I can rent any weapon I want, which ofcourse is super neat. I’m also carrying around monster guts. No idea what purpose they serve but hey, I’ll figure it out sooner or later. I do like the Zelda games. I’ve never really been into them as kid, but now I can appreciate the line of games a lot. They all tell a nice story and the Action oriented RPG is a nice breath of relief after being used to playing games like Pokémon and Final Fantasy, which are all turn based when it comes to fighting stuff.
I hope I can push through on LBW so I can start OoT, which apparently is one of the better installments in the series. That will also probably help me understand Majora’s Mask better.

As me and my friend were hanging out at his room and PC he decided to fire up Witcher 1 and play some. Having bought Witcher 3 myself I do know the series, but I never played enough to really get into anything. Not long after playing we came to the conclusion that Witcher 1 basically evolves around having sex with people, getting drunk and killing stuff. Ofcourse this is more hilarious to play together while commenting on what decisions to take and to try and find out which ladies we could talk into bed. We managed to woo some kind of princess by feeding her raw meat but other than that no one seemed to be really interested.
We laughed hard though at all the options in the game, and although it may not look that good graphics wise it’s still a seriously good game, firing up the desire within me to pick up my copy of Witcher 3 again and give it another go. The problem is that right now I have so many games to divide myself between that I don’t think it’s the best idea if I do that, but my interest in playing is certainly back.

In other news. I’m back on Azeroth.
I had gotten my tax money back last week and figured ah what the heck, I’ll buy a WoW sub. With Legion coming out in about 3 months time I’ll have enough time to earn some gold before it actually hits. Or well “earn”. Basically abuse the Garrison mission system while it’s still in place. It’s nice to just log in and do my daily gold stuff and log out again. When I feel like it I log in for a bit longer and farm some old raids for mounts that I haven’t obtained yet (I’m looking at you Invincible) and sell the gear, which in turn makes me money. It’s a nice thing to do and WoW has been, and always shall be, my comfort game. I’ll mostly be online after work just sorting out missions etc, so I don’t think it’ll take away too much of time from FFXIV which I still see as my main MMO for now.
I do kind of feel like the spark to game and get stuff done is slowly getting back to me again and it’s a very nice mood to be in. Coupled with my team coordinator being back again at work and me starting a rigorous training this Thursday to finally lose weight I can only say I’m feeling really positive at the moment. And I hope I can hold on to this feeling for a while.

Random Sunday Post

Posted on May 15, 2016 by sandrian

I’ve been struggling a bit today about what I wanted to write.
After watching the finals of the Mid Season Invitationals of League of Legends this morning I wanted to talk about the e-sports scene and how Korea seems to be miles ahead of the rest of us, and why this influences games in general.
Then after reading Belghasts post about being burned out on blogging, after an earlier post by him earlier in the week about being burned out on MMO’s, I wanted to write a bit about that subject aswell. Not that I’m burned out on blogging myself, au contraire, I have so many things I still want to talk about, they are just not necessarily all game related.
A few hours later I read a tweet by one of the LoL shoutcasters I follow and I wanted to write about how it must be the weirdest experience ever to get famous with games and have thousands of fans (and haters). How to deal with all of it and how happy I am to be relatively anonymous.

Yet I just can’t seem to find the right words to fit these topics. I’m struggling to grasp the essence to what I really want to say, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because they are all subjects that are hard to deal with, maybe because there are some other more important things I want to talk about first. I don’t really know.
All I know is that there are a lot of things happening right now that I just can’t really seem to grasp and thus I’m not sure on how to write about these things either. The ideas are there, however I can’t seem to put my words properly on paper.
Perhaps this is the true essence of having a so called “writer’s block?”.

Flipping The Switch

Posted on May 14, 2016 by sandrian

As I went to the gym last Thursday I felt like I needed to change up my life. I visit the gym every so often, really not enough to produce a nice result and most of my weight loss from the past few months has actually come from changing my eating habits. Getting more health problems and just not being happy with myself in general I decided to get in touch with a Personal Trainer via the gym I workout at. Lo and behold he returned my email yesterday and we have made an appointment for next Thursday. I really hope he can get me on track with my weight loss goal, because I’m just really sick and tired about how I feel and look for a very long time now.
Being only 1.60m tall and weighing 72 kg is a lot. For a healthy BMI my maximum weight should be 60 kg and ideally I need to be around 55. So as you can see I’m already 12kg above what I should weigh as maximum and 17 kg above my ideal weight. So I set my goal to lose 15kg over the summer, boiling down to about 5kg a month. Seeing as I’ve been able to lose 7kg in one month the moment I started my job working for the mail I’m positive I can reach 5kg a month with daily workouts, provided I do them right. It’s a really big step for me to take. I have the motivation this time around and with someone helping me out I’m sure I can do it. I’ll keep you guys updated!

Breakdown
In other news, work has been awful. With our team coordinator gone I’ve had to step up a lot seeing as I’m the person with the most knowledge besides her in the team. Monday was a real bitch with lots of issues that needed to be solved, so I was happy when I was mostly off the hook on Tuesday and Wednesday. Yesterday however, we were already with less people than normal. An hour into our regular workday one of my coworkers started experiencing extreme chestpains. We rushed her to the resident company doctor who contacted her own GP. Although her symptoms weren’t bad enough for her to be taken to the hospital, we did have to take her home with a prescription for heavy painkillers. So off she went and suddenly I was alone and the entire planning of the day got turned upside down. I’m pretty sure we didn’t do a lot of things we should have done, but with a medical emergency I can’t really blame myself or anyone else that our day was more or less in shambles. This did result into me just collapsing into bed after dinner (I hadn’t been sleeping well at all the night before due to my room being 25 degrees) and waking up at 00.30 feeling very confused as to where I was.
It’s not really healthy to be this tired and needing this much sleep, but yesterday kind of broke me. Although I love my job and I hope to stay there for a long time and slowly work my way up in the company, I notice that I just need vacation and relax. Luckily it’s only 3 more weeks untill I have two weeks off, so really looking forward to that.

Tieing in with this work fatigue is that my desire to game has been reduced to nearly zero. I’m just really too tired to pick up anything and having to think. Thus I’ve spent most of my free time watching game streams or just resting, hoping that the permanent tiredness will go away. The fact that I have a three day weekend now might just encourage me enough to put atleast some time into a game, seeing as I have a bit more time to spend.

The Good
Now not to be a negative nancy throughout this blogpost, I do have some good news to share. Well good for me atleast.
Ever since I got my driver’s license about 6.5 years ago I’ve been driving around in my father’s car. I had one small accident where I scraped the nose of the car across the wall, damaging the paint, but other than that I’ve been accident free. Now he and his girlfriend have bought a new car for themselves, to drive in, meaning that I will more or less have our old car for myself. Of course there are restrictions, but knowing I can just take the car whenever I want without having to ask first is really nice. It shaves off a lot of time when it comes to visiting some of my friends (45 mins drive vs 1.5 hours with public transport) and it gives me some freedom to pick people up myself, instead of always waiting to be chauffeured.
So yeah, some more mobility is very welcome and I’ll definately make use of it!

All in all I hope I can use this weekend to get some desperately needed rest and relaxation and find my gaming vibe again. There’s many things I still want to do and it helps if I can get myself to just log in and go.

Pokémon Day!

Posted on May 10, 2016 by sandrian

Unless you’ve virtually been living under a rock, Nintendo made a few announcements about the new and upcoming Pokémon games, Sun and Moon, today. They officially released the release date for both Japan/US (November 18th) and Europe (November 23rd). I already have it bookmarked in my agenda and have the Moon version pre-ordered.
With the announcement came a look at the three new starter Pokémon. I made my choice immediatly, I’m going for Rowlett the Grass/Flying Pokémon (first time for that type combination too!). The visuals you saw in the trailer so far looked stunning. Game Freak decided to go with an Hawaiian theme for this game and I’m very curious to see how it pans out. Ofcourse this means I will have to hurry along and finish my other Pokémon games before this new one hits. Which means figuring out where I was in Pokémon Alpha Sapphire and finish atleast the Elite Four and Delta Episode on that and finally get to play through Pokémon X completely. And yet here I am playing Pokémon Blue.
I’m not sure why I’m enjoying that emulator much more than the newer games, but I think a lot of it has to do with childhood nostalgia. It’s also a much harder game compared to the newest installments and everytime I advance it feels like I’ve overcome a real challenge. Right now I’m at Vermillion City beating some trainers along the route down there and waiting to board the S.S. Anne so I can get my first HM: Cut. Having traded with my co-worker (who owns Red) I’m now the proud owner of an Oddish, Ekans and Mankey. All Pokémon normally unobtainable in Blue. I even put Mankey in my standard team of 6, replacing Nidorina, and take it to face the S.S. Anne and subsequently the third Gym with me.

Work, Fatigue and New Lipstick
I wish I could come up with a better, more hyped up post about the Pokémon announcement and delve a bit deeper into it, but the truth is I’m just very tired. Having slept badly for two nights in a row, getting less than 6 hours of sleep in, I have felt like a zombie all day. Having to go to your job while the only thing you want to do is lay your head on a pillow and sleep isn’t the most fun to do, especially since Tuesday is usually a messy and busy day for us… I was happy when I got out at 17.00.

The happiness to come home got strengthened by my two new lipsticks arriving. I may have mentioned it before but I’ve become hugely into make-up over the last few years and have now switched from the common retail brands to the more exclusive brands as my skill with applying make-up goes up. It sounds so very cliché but I do really notice the difference between lipsticks and foundation between the shelf brands and the prestige brands. So seeing my two new MAC pink lipsticks in a neat box today made me really happy. I’ve already packed one to put on for when I go to work tomorrow, it’s a soft baby pink, and the other one I tried on right as I got home. It’s a bright pink and I love it. Next to looking great they also smell great so I really have no regrets from this purchase at all!

All in all the Pokémon announcement coupled with my lipsticks finally arriving has made my day a lot more positive than I imagined it would be getting up this morning. Now I just need to make sure I get to bed in time and the world will look much brighter when I wake up tomorrow…

Aeternus Gaming

Tackling an evergrowing backlog of games. But I'm also just an MMO junkie.

Monthly Archives: May 2016