New Year, New Theme

I figured it was time to throw a new theme on my blog. The one I had was nice but it didn’t really give me many options in relation to the header and for some weird reason it wouldn’t let me choose where to place images in my posts. This is reflected by the fact that everything that wasn’t a fullscreen sized screenshot just defaulted to the left, something that annoyed me very much. So now I have a fancy new theme with a fancy picture of my FFXIV character at the top (I really love that screenshot of her) and I’m hoping I can take my blog in a more active direction with this. I also really want to start posting more screenshots on here, especially now that I’m getting a new PC on Thursday… I should be able to snap some pretty pictures.

I’ve been trying to make notes in my planner every day with the activities I’ve done for the day. Be it gaming related stuff, reading, watching TV or simply just sleeping a lot. I do this so I can have a look of all the stuff I actually do during the week and what are really bad days for me to plan things because I know I will be super sleepy or unmotivated to do things. So far I’ve been making some progress in various areas when it comes to games, reading and watching shows.
I’ve done the entirety of Tomb of Sargeras in Looking for Raid in WoW on Sunday on my Warrior. Kil’jaeden wiped our group three times before we got to finish him off and I was rewarded with the epic cutscene where Illidan basically transports Argus to Azeroth, or was it the other way around? I’ve also dabbled in Antorus but I feel like I should finish off the story on Argus before I move on in that raid. It would probably make more sense to do that so I’m hoping I can stick to that plan. I’ve also been doing my Honor dailies every day. This has accumulated in me only needing 2 more ranks until I hit Prestige rank 2 and finally unlock that damn skin for my weapons. Especially the Prot Warrior skin is cool for PVP so I definately want to unlock it as soon as possible.
I’ve not really touched my Paladin yet this month, focusing completely on my Warrior for the time being. This is also due to time restraints and the fact that I’ve been taking care of a lot of IRL stuff instead of gaming.

In FFXIV I took to finishing the Heavensturn event. It’s a cute little quest and on my alt (pictured above) it’s the fifth consecutive Heavensturn I’ve participated in. I was a little disappointed with the rewards this year, two dog helmets and a stuffed dog housing items, but the quest was short and charming and a little perverted as usual. I’ve ressed a few people doing the Mochi Pounding FATE who didn’t figure out fast enough what they were supposed to be doing so there’s that. I’ve also dinged my Botanist level 70 earlier and am slowly working my way through the 61-70 part on Miner. After that I guess I’ll have to figure out what the best way to earn Yellow Scrips is so I can atleast replace my main hand weapons with more decent ones than I have right now. All in all I’m enjoying a leasurely pace in FFXIV and it’s suiting me well. I get to make up my own little goals and work towards them and this is something that makes me extremely happy.

As for other things. I’ve watched a few more episodes of “Lie to Me” and have finished season two which leaves me with only season three left. I also got some time into watching Black Mirror. Even though I enjoy the episodes and they get me thinking about stuff I’ve noticed it’s not really the show you want to watch when you’re already in a negative mood, something I had a little exchange on Twitter about with Jaedia. So instead I’m focusing on watching Lie to Me and reading “The Wise Man’s Fear”. I’m already halfway through that book aswell. As it stands right now my e-reader is my faithful companion to and from work every day and it’s astounding how much reading you can get done in about 15 minutes time. The story is still gripping me and I’m severely disappointed that the third book is taking so long to come out. Then again I’m also still waiting on the sixth book of A Song of Ice and Fire so meh. If all else fails I can fall back to the Gentleman Thieves series which I enjoy a lot aswell.
I also managed to grind out the remaining rewards of the Winter’s Veil event in Heroes of the Storm yesterday evening. Inviting a friend and just battling the AI on Beginner level was something I really needed. It makes the game light and easy and you can try your hand at champions you’ve never played before to see how their kit works and how they handle in general. I played a few games as Sylvanas, Zagara and Li Ming. Mostly to get the level ups but also because of quests and, in Li Ming’s case, because I really enjoy playing the character. This resulted in me going to bed a bit later than I had planned but atleast I had a fun evening.

Even though I’ve had an absolutely terrible day at work I feel happy to come on to this blog and write about gaming related stuff. It helps me take my mind off things, even though I technically don’t have anything interesting to say and most of my posts seem like rambling. I just don’t want to have a constant negative mood and writing always helps. I really hope I can take more screenshots from now on and tell more stories as to why and how they were taken. It’s just a real shame I can’t take screenshots on my 3DS since it seems to be my favoured system to play on outside of my PC. I’m really deep into Yo-Kai Watch and am enjoying it way more than I thought I would. I may actually finish it before the month is over… But that is something for another post.

On Shocking Shows and Regional Rigging

Wow. It’s been a while since I took the time to sit down and write out anything resembling a proper blog post.
After logging on I had to dust the corners, do the mandatory updates and clear out the shitload of spam in my pending comments list. I really don’t get why there are so many spambots online or what they think to achieve with random comments on small blogs, but well. The reason why I’ve sat down to write today is mostly because 1: I have an official national holiday and thus finally have some extra time off that I can spend however I like and 2: I’ve bingewatched 13 reasons why recently and I felt like I wanted to give my opinion on the show. So let’s start with that shall we?

Shocking content
First off, I stumbled across this show through 9gag. Yeah it sounds silly. I’ve never even considered the show as a thing untill I saw the jokes online and figured I’d have to watch this. I really don’t regret watching it at all. I think it took me about 2,5 days to get through all 13 episodes. I was fascinated from the start and didn’t really want to put my tablet (my primary Netflix machine) down untill I had seen the end. And what an end it was. Spoiler alert incoming, if you have not watched the entirety of the show yet turn away now!
Showing how Hannah Baker exactly killed herself in detail is something that you really need to prepare for. I understand all the fuss around this particular scene caused by psychologists and psychiatrists all around the globe. It’s not a pretty scene to watch, you literally see how she slits open her underarms and lies down to bleed to death, but I feel like for this show they needed to put it in. Just like the rape scenes weren’t pretty to watch, but they were needed.
We are a culture that sees the most gruesome things online these days and I feel that shows like 13 reasons why know this and step in and say “we can now publish more shocking things ourselves”. Although I don’t really agree with this train of thought I do agree that we are all adults and we should be able to see these things for as they are. Gruesome, shocking, anger inducing and saddening.
I’ve read many opinions about the show and how a lot of people feel like Hannah is being put on a pedestal and suicide is being romanticized here. And a part of me has to agree. But a part of me sees past this and to the core of the show itself. I don’t think this show was envisioned to be something to promote suicide. Instead it envisioned showing how our new, changing “always online” society is having an impact on people in their most vulnerable age range. Puberty is already a tough cookie to deal with with all the hormones changing in your body, your brain developing and having to go out there and rely on yourself instead of your parents. Couple this with kids always being online, in touch and not really having an “off switch” anymore and you exaggerate all the changes that are already going on. It shows how much of an impact social relationships have on humans in general, but on teenagers even more so. It shows how out of control things can get over a very short period of time. With fulltime working parents most kids are left to their own devices (in more and more cases literally devices!) and that doesn’t always turn out for the better.
Of course it’s only a show and an US show at that so things are probably more dramaticized than they are normally. But I still think it’s something we as society need to be aware of. Social media has brought us great things, but everything has a darker side. 13 Reasons Why portrays this darker side to the extreme.

Regional Fuckery
Now for something completely different. I remember the first time FFXIV did a partnership with Amazon for promotional goodies. It got people the Maid Attire and the Fat White Chocobo. At first this was only a Japan and US thing. They rolled it out in some European countries aswell but it never came to the Netherlands, causing me to miss out on something I actually would have wanted to have. Square Enix received a lot of backlash on this, especially from their European community. It’s nothing new that our region is left out. There are many goodies from game companies that are only on the markets in the US (I’m looking at you specifically here Blizzard) and we as Europeans either have to import stuff that costs us an arm and a leg or just give up on trying to get stuff at all.
Now what raised my bristles this past week was that I learned of yet another FFXIV x Amazon promotion… That was again US only. So seeing people post about how they got their Nimbus Cloud and showing ingame screenshots of it while again EU is being completely left out just baffles me. How can such a big international gaming company just completely ignore one of their gaming regions? Why is it always EU that feels like the middle child, the one that gets the least attention, that has to make do with what they have while the eldest and youngest both get spoiled beyond belief? It’s really frustrating to feel that once again our region doesn’t count for anything. Now there have been rumours that we as Europeans can buy the mount off the Mog Station instead. Personally I feel that’s not good enough. Give us a nice promotion aswell! Don’t make us spend money on it while others get their code ‘for free’ while purchasing something else. It’s just plain disgusting, angering and insulting to loyal fans of a franchise, who put money into that franchise every month, to just get the middle finger like this just because they happen to live in a different region. It’s bullshit and it’s stuff like this that makes me want to just cancel my sub and stop playing the game.

I had hoped that Square had learned from the last time they pulled this stunt, but apparently my hopes are in vain. Welcome to living in a part of the world that apparently doesn’t exist for gaming companies.

Dietary Restrictions and PS4 Time

Last few weeks I’ve been slightly pigging out when it comes to food. March is a ridiculous month when it comes to birthdays so every weekend I was stuffing my face with all types of snacks, crisps, cake and other shit. Obviously this is bad when you’re trying to lose weight, so I’m putting myself back on some dietary restrictions. Trying to eat healthier (get some fruit instead of candy) and just eating less in general. I’m aiming for eating around 1200-1400 calories a day, mostly because 1200 is the minimum amount you  need to eat to keep on feeling healthy, and I don’t want my body to go into starvation mode.
Next to dietary restrictions I’m also trying to set some rules on my money spending habits. I’ve been spending a LOT of money on my new Wii U and getting games for it… So I should lay low for a while and stop spending. I’ve given myself a budget of €100 to spend each month on games and/or make-up. Seeing as Ratchet and Clank comes out in a few weeks that’s already some bucks gone, so I really need to think about what I want to buy next to that.

Seeing as it’s Easter, and I managed to get 5 days of free time due to lucky scheduling, I’ve been spending a lot of time just playing games. I can finally sit down for a longer time and get stuff done, instead of getting 2-3 hours of playtime in on a weekday where you can barely do a dungeon or mission in a game and then you need to start watching the clock to log off. I’ve also taken the opportunity to binge watch my way through Daredevil season 2 (which I loved) and start watching Jessica Jones (which I don’t nearly love as much). All in all I’m really using this elongated weekend to relax, play and get some “me” time in.

Sandrian Noble 19/03/2016 13:59:22

PS4 Shenaningans
I’ve been spending a lot of time playing on my PS4 in various games. Mostly FFXIV and The Division and I’ve been making some steady progress in both games.
In FFXIV I finally managed to get my hands on the Vath flying mount and oh my god it’s adorable. I really like the didgeridoo type of sound when it makes as I’m flying everywhere and it just reminds me of a really weird seahorse.
The Vath itself have been a silly but cute beasttribe. It reminded me in many ways of the Borg in Star Trek, and Square Enix did it’s best to incorporate some clear references to them aswell. I’m kind of sad that the Vath and Vanu Vanu appear to be the only beast tribes for this expansion, although you never know with Square Enix and maybe they will let us rank up with the Moogles aswell? Who knows.

Tom Clancy's The Division™_20160314230045

Division seems to be the hot game of the moment right now and ofcourse I couldn’t stay behind in playing it. Although I might not be as fast as most people playing, I’ve been making some steady progress. I really love roaming around in New York discovering stuff. I like taking my time and going into buildings and alleys and collecting all the random little lore bits, instead of just rushing ahead through the story without giving other things a second look.
I’m currently level 15 and roaming around in the Clinton District. I won’t deny that due to the nature of the game I’ve almost thrown my controller through the room in frustration multiple times. Shooters aren’t really my main genre and even if this is a more tactical one, I die a lot and am pretty bad in weapon handling.

The only real downside to Division for me seems to be the female character creator and the fact that lady characters absolutely look godawful if you give them a headpiece to wear. I’m really disappointed about this. Although Ubisoft clearly tried to attract a wider audience with this game, I wish they would actually not just give us variations of butch lesbian haircuts to choose from. Not to mention the seriously weird ass options you have for Caucasian female faces.
Ohwell.