Author Archives: sandrian

Birthdays, books and bringing down the chaos

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As I sit down to write this post another weekend has gone way too fast. Granted it’s “only 19.30” as I’m writing this and I still have a few hours of evening to fill. However it feels like the two days respite you get inbetween the five days of hard labour seem to last shorter every week. Somehow the more stressful work is the faster the weekend goes. Normally I could attribute my short weekends due to sleeping in late but not this time. I woke up around 9.00 both yesterday and today and I didn’t really stay in bed for long after waking up either. This has caused my mornings to be filled with World of Warcraft and consequently freeing up my afternoons for other things.

Yesterday the weather was nice and I really needed to get my eyebrows back in shape so I decided to go into town to walk around a bit, poke my head into the “Used Products” shop we have and get my eyebrows done. I probably should have picked a different Saturday to do this because this weekend was the last holiday weekend for the country before schools and normalcy starts up again. Our city center was absolutely crawling with people and there were lines for everything. Success was had though! I bought a used copy of “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” for the Nintendo DS for only €10. I remember owning that game for my computer back in the day and even though I may still own the disc, I doubt I can get it to work on my current PC. The DS however is still going strong so I figured I would pick this up and enjoy it 13 years after release date. I also managed to get my eyebrows plucked and cut, after an hour wait, but decided against getting my hair done due to the fact that it was already late and I had to be home on time for the big event of the evening: My uncle’s 50th birthday!
I’m not sure how big of a deal this milestone is in other countries but here in the Netherlands we celebrate it in a big way when a man or woman turns 50 with set traditions and usually a very big party. So that’s where I spent my Saturday evening, dancing with my family and generally having a good time. A lot of my coming weekends will look like this since September seems to be the birthday month. It drastically cuts down on my time but it’s nice to see my family and friends and celebrate life.

As for today I decided to slowly start getting rid of stuff I don’t use or wear anymore. I wanted to start small so the thing I’ve tackled today was my jewellry box and my rack of earrings. There was a period of time where I owned over a 100 pairs of earrings. After getting rid of everything that wasn’t real silver, I’m slightly allergic to “fake” silver earrings, I’m now down to a total of 20 pairs of earrings/earbuds and I’m happy where I am. I’ve also gotten rid of a lot of cheap, bulky bracelets which in turn opened up some space to store my watches. All in all it was a very satisfying task and it will save me the headache of having to do it when I move out next year.

Finally I managed to get started in a book again for the first time in a few months. Last April I discovered Robin Hobb as writer and the amazing books she has written. I’ve bought the entire Farseer Trilogy and am currently a little over halfway done in the second book. I’m really hoping to finish it off in September and start reading the final book in the trilogy after. It atleast gives me something to do that doesn’t involve a screen and reading also improves my writing so it’s a win/win situation overall.

As for the rest of my Sunday though. I still have one or two chores to do and I really want to get atleast the Beast Tribe dailies done in FFXIV so my Machinist will gain a bit more experience. Otherwise I predict some more time in WoW to get the emissary quests done on my Paladin and an early night so I can be fresh for work tomorrow.

Gaming Goals: September 2018

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Hovering meditating paladin World of Warcraft

I’ve not done one of these posts in a while. So I guess I’ll bite the bullet and try to set down a set of goals for September. Most will probably involve Battle for Azeroth but who knows what I come up with as I write this post! Seeing as my Paladin just hit 120 aswell I can scratch out any leveling goals in WoW for now and focus completely on endgame content.

World of Warcraft

  • Finish off the remaining quests on my Rogue. I’ve gone through all the zone stories and I’ve done about 90% of all sidequests but my questlog is still quite full. I want to focus on tackling everything I can find and finish it up, even if it’s a “Wanted” quest in the middle of nowhere in Vol’dun. I also still have my War Campaign to finish off but that one ties in to my next goal.
  • Get my BfA reputations to Exalted on my Rogue. I will only need Revered to get the count in for the Pathfinder part 1 achievement but I want to aim for Exalted purely so I can unlock the sweet mounts and Dark Iron Dwarves
  • Finish off the last remaining zone story on my Paladin. I’ve finished Vol’dun and Nazmir so far which leaves me with Zuldazar. I’m not planning to tackle every single sidequest here just yet but I do want to do the story arc in the zone so I can unlock the Mythic dungeon at the end.
  • Gear my Paladin and get her ready to run Mythic+. This was a goal for BfA to begin with so I’m sticking to it. Luckily I have some friends who can help me get started with the gear grind so I should be okay there.
  • Get Alchemy and Engineering to 150 BfA skill. I’m pretty sure that Alchemy will go a bit faster but I’d love to get my Engineering leveled up a bit more aswell, I need to have the goggles!

Final Fantasy XIV

  • Level my Machinist to level 70 and do all job quests. This goal is slightly cheating because I’m already level 69 but it’s going on the list regardless.
  • Level my Weaver to level 70 and do all job quests. The Namazu beast tribe will hopefully help me with this and I really would love to have atleast one crafter at 70 to begin with.
  • Pick another Battle class to level and pick another crafting/gathering job to level after completing my first two goals. This one should speak for itself. I’m leaning towards leveling Black Mage after I’m done with Machinist so that I will have all ranged jobs at max level (and it will give me the Goddess of Magic title). As for the next crafter/gatherer I’m doubting between Carpenter, so that I can start decorating my house, or Fisher so that I will have all gathering professions maxed out.

That would be my MMO goals for this month. I’m trying to keep them small and doable because I will have a busy month ahead of me with lots of birthdays and a ton to do at work. I’d like to add a final goal to my list which would be:

  • Make progress in a single player game and blog about this. I’m not sure what game it will be yet but any game will do at this point. I really want to start tackling my backlog and setting this goal will hopefully have me start doing that while also providing material for my blog.

The final day of Blaugust

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Screenshot around Costa Del Sol

Completely unrelated screenshot but Costa Del Sol is by far my favourite zone in FFXIV so I figured I would feature that at the start of my post. There’s something about that azure blue sea and the beaches that makes me feel like I’m on vacation and that’s a feeling I desperately need right now.

We’ve arrived at the final day of Blaugust. At the start I set a goal to write a post every day. Unfortunately things didn’t really work out as I hoped they would and I end the month just a few posts short of the fabulous Rainbow badge. On one side it irks me. I would have loved to write a post everyday and I had enough material to do so aswell. I was planning to talk about Octopath Traveler and I had so much to say about the Battle for Azeroth launch while also still doing some stuff in FFXIV. However a valuable lesson I’ve learned over the past month is that as an adult you have to make choices. There is just no way I can do everything that I want with the limited time I have. I love to game and I love to talk about gaming but when work gets to be super stressful gaming comes second to trying to stay healthy. There have been many a night where I’ve fallen asleep before or after dinner as I was exhausted. Even as I’m writing this blog post with the semifinal of the EU League of Legends Summer championship in the background I’m battling sleep. I’m just not giving in because I know I’ll wake up around midnight feeling really bad and not being able to fall back asleep. So sometimes I chose to go to bed early and minimize my screen time. Sometimes I’d choose to stay up a little later so I could finish a blog post or something in a game, knowing that I would be a bit of a zombie the next day. It happens and it’s how life is when you have very long work weeks.

All in all I’ve found this Blaugust a very positive experience. Hanging with the “crowd” in Discord was fun and even though I didn’t really get to commenting on other people’s blogs I did add a few more to my Feedly to read, which is nice. I want to continue having a regular posting schedule, which basically boils down to more than once or twice a week, because I have so many things to write about still and I’ve noticed that writing on this blog more often just helps me clear my head aswell. Especially the more personal posts, even though they always seem to end up a bit on the rambly side, help me organise my thoughts and deal with things that I normally try to deal with on my own.

So with that this is my final post for Blaugust and I’ve already got an idea of what my first post of September will be. Luckily September starts tomorrow, which means I’ll actually be rested (yay for Saturdays!) and I’ll have time to write. It was a pleasure to participate and I hope you all enjoyed my posts.

Bite sized gaming

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Alternative post title: Why MMORPG’s work so well for me.

I’ve already kind of mentioned this on our Blaugust Discord but lately I feel I don’t really have the time or energy to really get stuff done anymore. With 40 hour work weeks (that have been extra stressful for the past 3 weeks or so), social obligations and the inability to function in the mornings I’m really left with very few hours to myself. Even moreso considering I set aside atleast half a day on Sunday to get a plethora of chores done like vacuuming, dusting, doing laundry and cleaning my various collections of games/plushies and other stuff. These things are major dust magnets and I’m allergic so it’s important to me that everything stays as clean as possible.

Due to being severely limited in time to spend on gaming, but also blogging, I’ve been making a lot of choices the past days and weeks of how to spend my time because honestly… I just can’t get it all done anymore. As I write this post for example it’s 20.45 local time. This means that, if I don’t want to be a complete zombie at work tomorrow, I have about two more hours to spend my evening on whatever I want to do because around 22.45 I start winding down for bed. I could in theory go to bed later but I’ve noticed that I really need a good dosis of sleep to not feel like a zombie the entire day afterwards and even more tired when it comes to having time for myself.

So “only” having two hours to myself I’m starting to notice that I prefer logging into an MMO instead of starting up one of the many single player games that I own. I do this because I can get stuff done in WoW and FFXIV in less than 30 minutes and still feel like I’ve made some sort of progress. By the time I’ve spent 30 minutes on a game like Persona 5 or HZD I only barely remember what it was that I was doing and real immersion doesn’t really kick in untill the hour mark or so and I’ll already be halfway through my gaming time then. That 30-60 minutes that I spend in WoW also mean some casual conversations with friends while I game/progress, something I don’t get when I play solo. I guess I could fire up one of my platformers and just settle for completing a few levels and I may do that the coming weeks. However seeing as I’m stuck in the beginning of the story in a lot of my RPGs it’s taking me a while to fully get with the story and get to the “good parts” as people tend to say. I already have the good parts in my MMO’s. I’ve seen the stories and done the quests. I’m in maintenance mode and it’s so satisfying to tick off the boxes there. This means casually leveling up an alt or working on reputations where I can say “I played this character for 20 minutes today and it’s gotten me X amount of progress”. It feels nice, nicer than ticking of one or two quests in a single player RPG that basically don’t really get you anywhere yet.

Then again, maybe it’s a matter of me using my MMO mindset on my single player games and just tackling smaller steps. I know that I’m itching to continue Octopath Traveler for instance but I’m hesistant to fire up my Switch due to being in a “grind” phase with no clear goal set. I also want to finish Mario + Rabbids and Yooka Laylee. Both platform/level oriented games where Mario + Rabbids is a more strategic game and Yooka Laylee is a collect-a-thon. Perhaps it’s time that I just fire up these games and set small goals for myself like I do in WoW. Do a level. Level a character to level 20. Kill the boss of this zone. For now though I’m still preferring to log my MMO’s so I will keep doing just that.

The need to play solo

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I’m a social person. I pride myself on being an extravert and enjoying the energy of other people around me. If I’m at home alone a lot I get depressed and I’m at my happiest when I’m in a big city surrounded by people and the buzz of city life. But sometimes I need some alone time. I’m not always super social. I’m not always looking for company of other people. Sometimes I just want to do my own thing without anyone else getting involved in it.
This is when I put my Battle.net as “show offline” or flee to my Au’Ra alt in FFXIV. Because I don’t want to talk to people. Because I don’t want my friends to “quick join” my dungeon queue. I just want to be left alone and do my own things without anyone interfering. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s because I’m so focused on getting something done that I can’t or don’t want to also be my usual entertaining self. Maybe it’s because even as an extravert I need to recharge my batteries a bit with some alone time.

When I was doing my Mage Tower challenges I’d often show up as offline to my friends. The whispers I tend to get were distracting me and I also didn’t really want to engage in any social chatter while trying to get these challenges done. I’ve done the same with finishing off the “Pride of Kul Tiras” questline on my Rogue. I went offline because I didn’t want to break my immersion into the quests and I certainly didn’t feel like ruining my queue times because people wanted to join when they saw me queue up for Waycrest Manor and Tol Dagor. Sometimes I just need to fly solo and that’s okay. I’ll be available another time.

It may sound weird to want to play solo in an MMO. Maybe it is. Maybe I should instead focus on playing some of my single player games when I feel like this where I know I won’t be bothered by anyone. But I like playing WoW and FFXIV and I like being able to do what I want on my own terms. Especially WoW is an excellent solo experience. Ofcourse for some stuff I may have to group up with strangers but I’ve never really had issues with that. Most of the chatter in random dungeons or in this expansion Island Expeditions is virtually non-existant. People don’t really talk and if they do it’s often only a “hello” or “goodbye”. It suits me fine. I can just focus on doing my own thing, which is get through the dungeon without dying while doing decent dps, and still get my goals done for the day. Sometimes I like to queue up with friends an have a ton of banter instead. And maybe sometimes I will choose to play that single player game and not be online for a while. This would also help me slowly plough through the enormous backlog of games that I have built up over the years. With the new WoW expansion settling in, and me probably spending less time on it over the coming few weeks, I may go into solo mode a bit more and play Octopath Traveler or a game on my PS4 again.

For now though I’m putting myself offline anytime I need some breathing space and will enjoy the game solo.

Sunday and chores

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It’s a bit of an odd day today. As I realized that I hadn’t post anything since Thursday I figured I’d get back on the Blogging horse. I had set a goal to write a post everyday during Blaugust but unfortunately real life has gotten in the way and I’m okay with that really. I may schedule a few extra posts to see if I can make up for the days that I’ve missed but I’d have to check how many posts I actually have up so far and I’d have to come up with ideas for posts and well… My brain seems to be a bit too tired for that to happen right now.

I’ve been spending most of the morning going back and forth between World of Warcraft and cleaning the bathroom and my bedroom. I usually do my “chores” on Sunday because I like having a clean room when starting a new week on Monday and every now and then I add the bathroom to my routine aswell. I’m guessing as I move out and really have my own space I’ll clean a bit more often but for now I’m happy with my weekly dust and vacuum sessions. It also makes the day not completely about gaming, which is nice. I feel the need to “descreen” a lot these days and cleaning helps do just that. It lets me zone out and relax while also getting important stuff done. It may not be a favourite pastime but atleast the bathroom smells like lavender now, my sheets are fresh and clean and there is no more dirt and dust on my bedroom floor.

I mentioned swapping between gaming and cleaning and as far as gaming goes I’m making some strides on my Rogue to finish up the Alliance side of the expansion story so far. I’m finally doing the “Pride of Kul Tiras” quest chain after finishing up the last two chapters of the Stormsong Valley quest achievement yesterday. I’d expected to be dumped in a scenario of some sort but so far I’m actually in the middle of a gigantic questchain that spans all the new zones and three separate dungeons before leading up to the final dungeon, which is apparently a Mythic only one. With my item level being only 303 I’m still far away from clearing that one but atleast I’m making progress!

I’ve also dipped into FFXIV this weekend to complete the Moonfire Faire event before it would go away today. It was a nice short questchain and rather fun to do. I know a lot of people did the extra jumping puzzle to get on top of the event tower but I passed on that one. I was only interested in getting the new emote and the new outfit on both my characters so I did that and logged back out.
I did make sure to visit my house on my Moogle character since there has been a bug going around that you lose your house way faster these days. It would be such a shame for me to lose my home now that I was finally able to buy a small plot after borrowing money from a friend. I hope to get a bit more time into FFXIV the coming months (preferably until the end of the year) and start decorating my house and level my remaining classes. I’m so close to getting Machinist to 70… I really should hop back into this game again.

A hunger for Retro

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For the past few weeks or so I find myself becoming a bit more interested in playing some of my older games. I have a decent collection of Gameboy (advance) games and still working consoles and I find myself longing for the simpler times of the Gameboy and the games it brought with it. I’m also finding myself hanging out on the Gameboy subreddit a lot, admiring people who dare mod their old Gameboys to have back or front lit screens and wishing I could do the same. I’m heavily contemplating getting a modded original Gameboy Advance, like the one shown in the above picture. I’d love to have one that has a backlit screen and that I could use to play my advance games. I remember being rather jealous when my cousins both got one of these and I was still “stuck” playing on my Gameboy Color back in the day. My dad got me an Advance SP not long after those came out but I’ve always felt a bit more love towards the one model that I never had. I remember a ton of good times playing my Gameboy and I kind of want to recapture that again.

The real issue is that I’m already swamped with my current gen games that I really need to find time to play my retro games. I would love to do a whole new playthrough of Pokémon Emerald, but my internal battery has run dry which means I don’t have any time based events anymore like regrowing berry tree or the flow of tides. I’m considering taking my cartridge to a retro gaming shop nearby and asking if they can replace the battery for me and then relive my GBA Pokémon days. I’ve also have a ton of other cool games that deserve a complete playthrough or a replay but again, I’d need to find the time.

Going through my collection is making me super nostalgic though and I wish I had someone I could share these moments with. Maybe someday, but for now I’ll need to start with finding the time to play some of my retro stuff to begin with.

Fatigued

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Winnie the Pooh in Stormsong Valley!

I like this picture. I like that Blizzard put Winnie the Pooh into their game with all his friends. Its one of the many easter eggs of Battle for Azeroth. But it’s not my topic for today. Rather I’d want to talk about fatigue on multiple fronts. A type of fatigue I’ve been noticing a lot lately and which I want to talk about to get it off my chest.

The past three years I’ve been working for a big Dutch retail company at their headquarters. I started out as a simple Data Entry employee getting paid thanks to a w2 generator top tool. Along the way my role shifted to less entry work and more organizing work. Yet the 8 hour screen days stayed. Right now I’m in a role where I am a direct link between a part of the commerce department and the data management department. Even though my screentime has been reduced a bit and has been replaced by meetings I still feel like I’m a slave to the machine so I try to take a lot of breaks away from staring at a screen all day.
The funny thing is though that as gamer when I come home from staring at a screen for approximately 8 hours each day I then spend my evening staring at a screen again. And this is causing me some fatigue issues. I just can’t bring myself to spend so much time infront of screens anymore. I’m trying to stay away from any and all screens the moment I get onto the train home untill after dinner. This means my eyes and my brain can rest a bit and I actually do take that time, which is about 1-1.5 hours to lay down and rest. I feel like I need to reset and restore my energy for the rest of the evening like that and if I don’t I notice that I get headaches and sleep worse at night.

This fatigue is also causing me to start to dislike gaming in general. I just can’t seem to bring myself to play anything on certain days, mostly because my brain subconciously steers me away from the screens. There is a screen overload, especially when you factor in smartphones and tablets, and I’m pretty sure as human I’m not supposed to treat my body or my eyes the way I do it now. I’m lucky that I don’t have to wear glasses yet and that I know when to take breaks away from sitting down too long or in a wrong position. I’ve never experienced RSI or any discomfort in my shoulders or neck due to sitting the wrong way. But I do experience fatigue and tiredness when it comes to screens and instead of powering through it I think I need to learn when to step away and do something else. I’m trying to start a workout routine where I just spend time at the gym or at home doing some light workout for about an hour. It’s a nice way to empty the mind and to not put strain on the eyes while also keeping my body used and it’s most definitely better for me than sitting on my butt 24/7.

Does this mean that I’m going to give up gaming completely on some nights? Maybe I will. I’m not really sure about that yet, maybe I’ll restrict myself to only playing for an hour. Maybe by the time I finish my workout I’m so tired that I just want to take a shower and go straight to bed. I’ve done this before where I’d go to the gym and get home around 21.00, take a shower and something to drink and then just head straight to bed. Other nights I’d have a bit more energy and I would game for an hour or so before giving up and closing down shop for the evening. When I did this though I felt less fatigue when it came to staring at screens but also less fatigued when it came to gaming itself. I wonder if I get back to that routine I will have more joy from gaming aswell. I guess we’ll see in the near future. For now though I will probably spend one of two evenings less on a game filled night and more on recharging my batteries and making sure I don’t ruin my body and my eyes too much.

Fate is sometimes kind

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I found this a very striking picture to start off my post with today. I was planning to do a post on the FFXIVxMHW crossover event but that will be postponed untill tomorrow.
Some stuff at work has got me thinking about where I am today and how I’ve got there. We are finally finishing off a huge automation project that will probably take a lot of the pressure off our department and get people off edge. It was fun partaking in this project and it’s so nice to finally see the fruits of everyone’s labour. For me personally it gave me an opportunity to learn how to program a robot, even though I can only do simplistic stuff, and to see the enthusiasm of people when they realize what this project means to them. If I hadn’t stuck around at my job this year I would’ve never had this opportunity. It must’ve been fate.

I can slowly feel the stress from work fading and it makes me more focused and happier when I’m at home. I’m also learning when I hit my wall in WoW after a week of expansion madness. I’ve been making small “quest logs” of my own in a notebook with all the stuff I want to do in game (and in real life) for the evening and I try to stick to it. So for today that meant I completed all my open emissary quests on my Rogue and finish off the Daelin’s Fort questchain in Stormsong Valley. On the Horde side of the fence I’ve finished off the Krag’wa questchain in Nazmir and some Herbalism quests to start getting my two star skills. I try to keep my goals small and realistic and I try to not do too much in the way of WoW because I don’t want to burn out like I did in Legion. For now my plan is to do a small bit everyday on my Rogue and Paladin and try to switch it up by either playing a bit of FFXIV, read a bit of my book or watch a show on Netflix. I’m not in the race for world firsts so I’m not in the race to gear up like mad.

Next to my gaming shenanigans I also want to pick up my courses in programming/IT again. I’ve been letting them fall to the wayside due to the stress at work and me just wanting to relax and sleep at home. Now that I have a bit more energy, and time, I want to see what I can learn and add to my skillset. Seeing as I’m 29 and my resumé isn’t that impressive I need all the extra skills I can get these days. So next to building robots with Automation Anywhere I want to be able to show off that I understand databases aswell as basic webdesign. I’m not sure when or how this will come in handy but having a bit of knowledge about how things work will never hurt. And who knows, maybe I’ll end up somewhere great because of it. And then I’ll look back and say “it must’ve been fate”.

Nazmir is okay

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So I’ve spent more time on my Paladin than I thought I would today. I’m currently sitting at level 112 and am starting the first leg of the War Campaign from the Horde POV. Even though I stated I wouldn’t want to play Horde as main I enjoy playing my Paladin much more than I do my Rogue. Maybe it’s because I’m less squishy. Maybe it’s because I know I will be going Tank when I hit max level and thus have no real queues to worry about. Seeing as trying to queue for dungeons on my Rogue has been an absolute nightmare and all my friends are over on Horde side, I feel the pull to main Horde after all much more now that the expansion has launched.

As I mentioned in my previous post I’ve started off in Nazmir. I picked this zone because it gave me the creeps when I did the War Campaign stuff on my Rogue and I figured I wanted to get this zone over with first so I would be done with that. I guess I grossly overestimated how creepy this zone actually is. Okay, the Blood Trolls ARE creepy but I’ve also seen some really pretty sceneries so far and I’m really in love with all of the dinosaurs that populate this zone. Plus the swamp vibe isn’t that bad.

Story wise it can’t really compete with Drustvar, which is hands down the best zone this expansion. As far as atmosphere goes it can’t compete with Drustvar either. I’m probably fangirling like mad here but Drustvar was such a joy to quest through that I completely forgot time and didn’t want to take a break untill I saw the story from start to end. I’ve not had that with any of the other zones yet and Nazmir is no exception. I do like encountering the Loas, I made contact with Bwonsamdi and Hi’reek and am now on my way to Torga, the turtle Loa.

I guess I need to be a bit careful though because I don’t want to burn out on my Paladin like I did on my Rogue. I expect to swap between the characters as it suits me but I think I will be spending more time on my Paladin than on my Rogue as I reach 120 on her. Up untill then though I can enjoy the scenery. And the dinosaurs!