Category Archives: Personal

Motivation: Zero

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It’s kind of funny how you can forget about things that you used to make time for.  Blogging has been the main victim of my laziness lately, with me not feeling the need to write at all. I’ve been lazy and boring and didn’t feel like telling about my adventures in online games anymore. I guess I feel like one of the many gaming blogs out there, that struggle to get a blog post going because whatever can I write to stay original?
Most of the things are said and done by the time I get around to writing and post 9000 about Blizzcon and someone’s thoughts about the event and games there isn’t very attractive reader material. I had planned to write about the US elections, it’s result and the impact it had on me and my life, but honestly? Living here in Europe I’m so far removed from what is happening over there that I can only sympathize with the people who have been devastated by the results… And that’s it. Ofcourse I am shocked like the rest of the world at this. But I refuse to join the “white oppresive males have won the elections” crap that is being thrown around the internet. Trumps’ victory has been one that has been coming for a long time. A combination of poor midwestern US, Hillary being vastly impopular in her own country, people not showing to vote at all (45% did not participate!) and many other factors contributed to Trump winning presidency, and the Republicans winning the elections overall. Do I sympathize with Trump? No. I think he’s a sexist, racist, mysogynistic bigot. But people have made a statement against the ruling parties and I think the US as a nation has a lot of ear scratching to do to see where exactly this went wrong for them.

If I have to go on a bit of a rant about this I think humanity as a whole has a lot of ear scratching to do. We are a world divided by culture, religion and government. Censorship has become so normal in everyday life that we don’t even think about it anymore. We may not censor our news the way some countries do, but we are censoring society, sheltering everyone and creating a world where people need “safe spaces” and get offended by everything. Instead of keeping a dialogue going we take away freedom of speech and label people whatever we want to justify our own perspective at the world. The world is not a matter of white versus black, man versus woman, gay versus straight. Treating someone like shit because of their worldviews has become normal and a nation throwing a tantrum because people didn’t get their way was impossible to think of 20 years ago.
I refuse to take a side in a world like this. I can’t be outraged at the US elections because it’s what they apparently wanted. I can’t get mad at the Brexit because it was a majority vote. And even though people are fighting very hard to show that they don’t agree with this, at some point you will have to accept your losses and move on. Don’t look at what divides us, but look at what makes us the same. I can’t imagine people want to willingly see society burn, just because of different political, social, cultural and religious views. If we could just learn to accept eachother the way we are, and yes this includes people whose worldviews are different than yours, and keep the dialogue going I’m sure society would be a much better place.

Learn to agree to disagree, accept that even though we are of equal value we are not the same and build a better world for the future. Because right now I shudder at the thought of how the world may look 20 years from now.

Socializing

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This weekend I’ve not played anything. Not a single game. And I loved it.
Instead I got to see a friend who I hadn’t seen in well over a year and I got to be Aunty Sandy again to my adorable godchildren. It makes me super happy to do this kind of stuff so I had an amazingly positive weekend. Unfortunately it doesn’t really give me much interesting stuff to blog about so I apologize for not putting anything online over the entire weekend. I will resume blogging as normal again tomorrow, and hope that I’ll be able to do all three Crystal Tower raids tomorrow evening aswell. Since you know, I normally do that over the weekend

So yeah just a tiny post about why I didn’t blog yesterday and I’m not really blogging today. Being gone for two full days. I feel reinvigorated though and ready to take on the world this week.
What a little socializing can’t do huh?

Not Fitting In

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Today’s post is going to be less gaming related and more something personal… With some gaming in the mix I guess. Bare (bear?) with me on this one, I have a very chaotic mind and a slightly chaotic writing style so I’ll try to make this as comprehendable as possible.

Something I notice as active gamer, blogger and online community member is the sheer amount of people that count themselves as introverts. I take a look around on Twitter, I read the blogs in my Feedly, hell I talk to some of my online friends and almost all of them identify as introvert. Some are a bit more outspoken about this than others and that’s okay.
I can get a bit cranky about all the “handbook to introverts” post that seem to pop up on the internet every now and then though. That’s the type of introversion that I can’t really deal with well. It feels a lot like attention whoring which, if I remember correctly, is not something a true introvert would be into at all. So if I rage about these things on Twitter now and then, don’t worry. It’s not that I have something against introverted people, I just have something against people that use said introversion to make them look like a special snowflake.

I myself am an off the scales extravert. I’ve done dozens of personality tests and all of them point in the same direction. I’m highly curious about new experiences, love to partake in social gatherings and have absolutely no issues making new friends fast or talking to strangers. All of this is actually me in real life. I thrive when my life is filled with exciting stuff. Social outings, doing new stuff, doing exhilarating things. I love the feeling of adrenaline pumping through my veins. I’m that girl who will go to the highest steepest waterslide in the waterpark and enjoy the adrenaline rush that I get when standing at the top gazing down what I’m about to do. I’m that girl who will stand on glass bridges over cliffs, staring into the abyss and loving it. I will be that girl who will be chatty with anyone at a party and go home with a new friend or a possible new friend.
This also has translated to my MMO habits for a long time. Due to work restrictions I’m more or less forced to be a “Low Energy” player. Someone who takes a more casual approach and enjoys games as they come. But in my heart of hearts I’m a “High Energy” player. I always want new stuff, more stuff. To be bigger, better, louder! I want to be the first one to race to max level in a new expansion. To get geared. To start clearing raids. More more more, higher higher higher. In my glory days of raiding in WoW I even tried to get into one of the best guilds at the time: Method. Unfortunately I got denied due to not having enough server first experiences but the hunger to join them was there.

If you look at this fact, and how I described earlier that I’m mostly surrounded by introverted people, it’s not strange that I have issues recognizing and identifying with their issues. Of course I am depressed sometimes myself. Ofcourse I have anxieties. Even though I like being around people and tend to draw attention to me I’ve also suffered from crippling anxieties that related to self-image and confidence.
However, where introverts experience their anxieties in relation to people, stress brought on by dealing with people and the fear of the unknown, my depression and anxieties usually have roots in lacking these exact things. I’ve had a very rough year where I was more or less isolated from a lot of social interactions. I was at home, unemployed and done with my education and it slowly drove me mad. I get my energy from being out and about and interacting with people on a daily basis. When I don’t get that I spiral into a black hole that is really difficult to crawl out of. Where an introvert will be happy when a big social event gets cancelled, since they don’t have to deal with the stress of interacting with people, for me it’s a major bummer. It’s denying me the energy and positivity I take out of these things and will confine me to my home where I’m alone, staring at four walls which I hate.

Looking at all of this it’s actually quite strange that one of my biggest hobbies is gaming. I guess there’s a reason why I massively prefer MMO’s over any other genre, but still. Gaming isn’t necessarily a social activity and it’s probably also the reason why I have periods where I’m just completely done with gaming and being a gamer. It’s a nice hobby to have though since it helps me get through days where I have nothing planned or when I have moods where I just want to be left alone.
It’s also the reason why I sometimes feel like I don’t entirely fit into the larger gaming/blogging/internet community as a whole. The internet is an increasingly “safe” domain for a lot of introverted people who are normally afraid of social interactions. It’s safer doing it from an environment where in essence you are talking to a person, but in reality you are typing on/talking to a screen. Whereas I’m way more comfortable talking to someone in person so I can read their body and social cues that you lack on the world wide web. It’s reading posts where people, very justifiably so, express their worry about group content, endgame content, about how to enjoy a game, about how to deal having to play with strangers. Posts I don’t really recognize any of myself in because I don’t have any issues with any of this. It’s people who say they need some alone time, to retreat, play alone or recharge that I don’t identify with. I charge up by playing WITH others and get drained when I have to do everything alone.

It’s all these little things that make me wonder sometimes, do I really fit in? Is this really the platform for me? Am I not to different from all these people I surround myself with? And honestly, up untill today I’ve not been able to answer these questions.

P.S.
As I write this it’s rather funny to realize that all my IRL friends are actually very outgoing and sociable like I am, all extraverts in a sense. And there I tend to not really “fit in” due to my “serious” gaming hobby. It’s kind of odd how the world works huh?

Summer?

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It’s about 10.15 am as I start writing this post. My brain is still half asleep and my body is exhausted after working a grueling 40 hour week.
Normally I would be happy working extra hours, because it means extra money. Since I’ve already gone on vacation and summer in the Netherlands is shit anyway I don’t really mind spending more time at the office. However this week has just been incredibly insane and it’s knocked me down majorly. I really need this weekend to regain some energy… which probably won’t really happen since I have a ton of chores waiting for me together with a birthday and the enormous guilt of not going to the gym during the week. All in all I’m unsure how much time I will have to relax, but I do hope to get atleast some hours of gaming in somewhere during the day today and tomorrow.

With me being extremely tired when I got home every evening, and having to cook and do everything myself because my dad and his GF are still in Canada, I’ve not really gotten much done in the way of games. I think I’ve only spent some time playing FFXIV and doing atleast the Moogle dailies… But that’s it. The only positive point here is that my Weaver is now level 58 and I’ve gotten all the old blue scrip gear for my left side to use, so that’s very nice. Other than that I’ve not really made any progress anywhere, not even on any of my 3DS games or my Wii U. It’s sucky, but oh well.

Being still in half zombie stat I’ll keep this post short and sweet. I have a seriously long list of chores to work through, which includes doing atleast three loads of laundry in two days and plucking weeds in the backyard. If my mood clears up a bit and my chores are done I’ll probably come back for a better blog post, but for now this is what you’ll have to do with. I’m sorry!

Sun, Games and Planning

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It’s always a sad moment when you find yourself sitting in your room, typing up a blog post when only two days ago you were still enjoying the amazing sun in Lisbon, Portugal. I really wanted to go down to southern Europe for a vacation or citytrip this year. Here in the Netherlands the sun is scarce and temperatures are often cold. We don’t really have a summer to speak of, not in the way southern Europe has so I never really get a chance to tan or enjoy the weather here. So way back in March I decided I wanted to go on a citytrip to Lisbon, dragged a friend along, and there we were.
I have to say it’s a seriously amazing city. The weather was great, even though we had clouds on our second day, the food was good and cheap and the people were nice and all spoke English very well, something a few other countries can learn from *stares at France*. The climate alone has me wanting to go back to Portugal for atleast a proper vacation. It’s a beautiful country and I really want to explore more of it, but that will be something for in the future. Now real life has started back up again and I’m only 4 days off going back to work.

Super Mario Time
I took my 3DS with me to Portugal and managed to get a lot of time to play New Super Mario Bros. 2. As you all may remember, or maybe not, one of my goals for this year was to finish that game since it’s one of the first games I bought with my original 3DS and I never really finished it. So 3 hours back and forth on an airplane would be an ideal time to atleast work through some of the levels… And I have! When I started out a few days ago I was still sitting at the first level of world two, now I’m halfway through world four! Which means I only have two worlds left to complete after this.
I’m not running a perfect game, when the big coins you get in every level are too hard to reach I just skip them, but I do try to obtain them wherever I can. Then there’s the issue of seeing hidden levels and not really knowing how to get there, not even to mention the two complete worlds that you need to access via a special way. I will look up how to get there eventually, but for now I just want to aim to defeat the last boss… And then go back to unlock additional stuff.
Next to Super Mario I’ve also spent a lot of time playing FFXIV. I have unlocked all the patch 3.3 content there is on my Moogle character next to being on time to finish the Golden Saucer event on both my characters. I also dinged my MCH level 50, so I’m quite a way in when it comes to my gaming goals for this month! I even switched over to Monk now and she is sitting at level 42. I hope I can push that to 50 aswell before the end of the month.
All in all my gaming comes along really nicely. Which brings me to my next topic…

Planning my life
I am hopeless when it comes to starting and completing things. A lot of my time is spent either staring into the abyss or lying on my bed feeling tired when I’m home from work. I have real issues deciding what I want to do on any given day, and when I have decided it takes me forever to get my butt into gear and go. I think the foundation of this lies in the fact that I’m a very chaotic person who on top of that is quite unmotivated to do a lot of things. So I decided to set things straight and start using Google Calendar to plan my days and sync said calendar to both my iPhone and my tablet. Although I don’t really plan every minuscule detail for every minute there is a bit more structure to my days now, which allows me to actually get stuff done. As example I “reserved” an hour to blog today (from 10-11am). I probably won’t use the entire hour this time, but sometimes when I have a bit of a writer’s block I do need an entire hour to blog, so that gives me some space to work with. It also helps me settle down and actually write instead of thinking “I should blog sometime today” and then just not do it.
The same goes for planning my gametime. I realise that sitting on my butt and gaming all day on my days off is just as bad as sitting on my butt in the office all day… So I’ve been hacking my gametime into 1 or 2 hour periods inbetween doing other stuff like chores, working out or appointments. I’ve also decided to already fill in those chunks of gametime because I know myself too well. If I don’t plan in advance what game I want to turn my attention to I will never play anything but FFXIV, and that’s seriously a shame. Obviously 1-2 hours isn’t enough to really get into the big RPG’s and thus I’m saving those for the weekends when I have more time to play and I can fill more blocks with one single game. Instead I’m choosing mostly platformers that I want to play and can play for an hour or so and then just shut down without feeling like I should be playing more or that I forget where I was.
This whole system is still more or less in a testing phase, but I do hope that I can start using my time better and actually feel like I’ve accomplished something, instead of now where I wish I had done a lot of things in hindsight.

Playing Pokémon and Cleaning House

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It has finally sunk in that I really do have a two week vacation. With my trip to Lisbon coming up in only a few days and work feeling like it’s on the other side of the world I finally have time to do some much needed cleaning. We have a shed and attic full of old stuff, most of which is my dad’s, and it’s just been taking up space everywhere. I intend to atleast get rid of all the broken stuff that is laying around or stuff that I seriously  no longer need and hope to use the space that creates to my advantage. I can’t really keep on storing all my stuff in my rather small bedroom so having a few shelves emptied out on the attic would help me out a lot.
The shed is mostly inhabited by old chairs, deflated balls of all kinds and even an old rubberboat that I’m pretty sure is broken. So I’ll take out all the stuff and slowly but surely pick my way through it, deciding what can go and what can stay. Especially a ton of old folding chairs are on the list to just go to recycling. They’re old, unused and I’m pretty sure the cloth that’s on them will never ever be clean again, so we might aswell get rid of them. My dad already said he’s not really planning to use them anyway so there’s that aswell. So this week or when I’m back from Portugal I’ll probably load them into the back of our car and take them to recycling and there they can do whatever they want with it.

Greninja!

I’ve been playing a lot of Pokémon. A whole lot. Both on Blue and on Pokémon X I’ve been making a nice amount of progress and I actually feel like I can finish both games very soon. I picked the Water starter in both games so I’m looking forward to getting my Blastoise and Greninja (see above picture). I feel like I’ve been cheating a bit on Pokémon X though, since I brought over a lot of Pokémon from an earlier playthrough, including a lot of event Pokémon. I asked a friend to keep them as I resetted my game and now half my party exists of Pokémon who have a level advantage due to being traded. I’m not too bothered though, I’m happy with my current team and I’m not far off the third Gym!
In Pokémon Blue I managed to get my hands on all the starter Pokémon now (trading with a newly acquired Red version from a friend!) so I’m one step closer to completing my Pokédex. In my very first playthrough when I was about 9 years old I managed to get up to 148 types of Pokémon. I don’t actually remember which ones I was missing, but I still regret resetting my game when being so close. So this time I will aim for getting all 150 Pokémon that are available in the game! But first I need to make my way to Gym number four.

NBI
A few words on the Newbie Blogger Initiative. I’ve seen it started up for this month, but honestly I don’t have the time or motivation to participate. Inbetween going away on vacation, cleaning, trying to finish games and going back to work on the 20th I just can’t find the time to blog a lot. I’m trying to churn out 2-3 posts a week atleast… But it’s difficult. I’m just so busy! I do love to write here but there’s simply other stuff that’s more important to me right now. I hope everyone understands.

Two Sides

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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

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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

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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

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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.