Random Musings

Mother's Day Star Trek

Wanted to start this blog post off with what turned out to be the highlight of my weekend.

As most of you know, Mother's Day was yesterday. The past few years, I haven't been able to do much for family members for holidays or birthdays due to being financially strapped. So far this year, business has been booming and I found myself in good enough shape to actually take Mom and Dad out this year on my own (usually the mother/father day and mom/dad birthday duties were split between my sister and I).

While I was in Maine two weeks ago, I bought Mom a bunch of movies I thought she'd be interested in watching. "Bedtime Stories", "The Spiderwick Chronicles", and three others I can't remember (go go buy 2 DVDs, get 2 free specials). My initial plan was to buy those, take her out for lunch or dinner, yell "HAPPY MAMMY'S DAY" at her a couple times and be done with Mother's Day.

That is...until I saw that Star Trek was coming out this weekend.

So I knew I wasn't going to have a chance to go see it Friday cause it was sold out or Saturday cause of committments in game and for work I had already made...so I had to figure out a way to convince Mom to go see this on her special day. Y'see...Mom isn't a big sci-fi fan. She'll watch Daytime Smut Operas all day long along with "reality" TV shows like Crapvivor, Capitalism Idol or Dancing With Botox-Infused Rich People. She loves going to the movies though and will generally go see anything as long as you buy her some popcorn.


There's one condition to that last line though. Action/Adventure movies like Indiana Jones are perfectly fine. Action/Adventure movies like Wolverine aren't happening. (Seriously...what's really the difference...). So Star Trek was going to be a challenge to get her to go see.

At this point, a lot of you are probably thinking...WTF Q??!?! IT'S MOTHER'S DAY LET HER PICK WHAT SHE WANTS TO SEE!

Which brings me to the other part of dealing with my mother. You have to trick her to get her to try something new. For example:

Years and years ago (think when I was 8 or 9 years old), I had several food allergies. I don't remember all the details, but basically once the doc figured out what I was allergic to, he gave my folks a list of foods that were no-nos for me. One of these things was whole milk. He wanted me to start drinking skim, 1%, 2% or acidophilus milk. My folks aren't made of money, so basically if someone in the family couldn't have certain foods, no one in the family got them. Mom didn't want to drink anything other than whole milk. Swore up and down by it. So we were basically having to buy two different cartons of milk.

One day, Dad decided it would be funny to pull a prank on Mom. He switched the labels on the milk cartons thinking Mom would just instantly spit out the non-whole milk she just drank. To his surprise...she couldn't tell the difference. He told her after she had drank about 3/4 of the glass she had and then she acted like she could tell a difference, but from that point forward...we were a 1-2% milk family.

This is basically how we have to get mom to try new things. So my plan for Mother's Day was to just take her to the movies w/o telling her we were going so she wouldn't ask what we were going to see and I wouldn't have to lie to her. On top of that, I've taken her to see movies like Spiderman before that she said she had no interest in seeing and ended up really liking the film.

Star Trek turned out to be no different (a few spoilers follow).

I had always figured that the Star Trek series was dead. Or at the very least, dormant until the over-saturation of TV shows and poorly produced movies weren't ingrained in the heads of a new generation of kids. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I didn't watch it cause I had an obsession about the show. I watched it cause there wasn't really anything else on at 9PM. During some of my late night channel flippings, I'd come across the original Star Trek series. I don't know if it was just bad timing on my part, but I never saw any episodes other than the one with the tribbles and the one with the "first interracial TV kiss". Seriously...I don't know how many times I ran across those two episodes.

So going into this movie, I didn't have a vast encyclopedia of knowledge for these original characters. I knew the premise, the time period and the typical catch phrases that each of the main characters were known for. I also knew the general framework that had been developed for each of the characters. I was expecting a ton of references that I wouldn't understand.

Boy was I wrong and happy to admit it. I'm not even sure where to start. This movie is so full of story, action and history that I'll go see it a second time just to make sure I caught everything.I can start off with the casting. These guys did their fkn homework in channeling all of the characters to their 1960s counterparts.


The only one I had a problem channeling was Chekov as I couldn't really connect this:



To this:



Outside of that, they seemingly kept the character in tact and the rest of the characters you could honestly ask yourself if they were the offspring of the original cast.

The other great facet of this movie was the absolutely outstanding use of the character cliches and catchphrases. Bones was constantly yelling "Damn it (name)! I'm a doctor, not a (profession)!" Spock had the obligatory "Live long and prosper" line. Kirk was womanizing even in the heat of battle and they even managed to work in Scotty yelling "I'M GIVING HER ALL SHE'S GOT CAPTAIN!" in the midst of the ship falling apart.

The best part of all was what is quite possibly the last appearance of Leonard Nimoy in a Star Trek film and the major role he played. The entire cast of this movie did an oustanding job and it's perfectly clear that the movie is about the young stars, but Nimoy's role said something to me that I hope everyone else picked up on as well. It said to me that Nimoy had the grace to accept that role and pass the torch. Don't get me wrong. I could watch Nimoy all day as Spock and have absolutely nothing against him, but more often times than not, we see actors or actresses let characters go to the grave with them. Art is about interpretation and it's very clear to me that Nimoy understands this and had no issue acting opposite Zachary Quinto revitalizing a character Nimoy put on the map.

It was reported somewhere in an interview with Orci and Kurtzman (writers) that they tried hard to figure out a way to get Shatner, Takei, Nichols and Koenig into the film as well, but Nimoy was the main priority. Between the WGA strike and the inability to achieve continuity with the story lines (Kirk in particular since his character is killed off in Generations), these three were unfortunately left out. However...given the success of this movie already, I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see them make an appearance in the next movie somehow.

And if things coming full circle in life didn't need more evidence...here are two examples I picked up on:

1. Spock and Uhura share several "interracial kisses".
2. There's a Tribble on Scotty's desk when he makes his first appearance about halfway through the movie.

Of all the things...

Anyway...GO F***ING SEE THIS MOVIE. TWICE.

And to those of you wondering the result of my taking Mom to see this w/o her knowing where we were going...

...she wants to see it again despite giving me an eyeroll when she heard what tickets I ordered at the box office. And yes I took her out to a nice dinner afterwards and gave her the movies I bought previously. She had a great mother's day.

Einherjar

I'm a little worried about the next Odin staying on schedule. We had a T3 that left me rather frustrated at the end. We didn't have super difficult bad guys, just a lot of them and we lost with the boss at 1%.

Losing with a boss at 1% does not mean bad luck 99% of the time. It means someone could have done something different and got us the win. We had a large number of no-shows, but we still went in full. We had plenty of time as we engaged Freke with about 6 minutes left. I don't know what happened that caused us to lose, but I do know Gates of Hades went off at least once and that certainly didn't help matters. This was one of the things I can point a finger at saying it was why we lost, but there were other matters I felt were far more detrimental. Namely slowness in status removal. I was paralyzed a good minute of that boss fight and I know personally I can knock off more than 1% of Freke's health alone if I'm not getting my timing jacked up.

Hoping this is just a blip though. I don't expect 50-room win streaks, but it's just frustrating that we were close and couldn't find a way to finish it up...especially on the heels of just changing our schedule to doing Odin every 4 runs instead of every 6. We'll see how it goes the next two runs though. Hopefully Lady Luck isn't in a bad mood...


Salvage

I somehow managed to pick up a Macha's coat. It should have gone to Iceblazek, but I completely forgot he had RDM leveled and was just horsing around like everyone else there who already had it and lotting it (since it was called free lot). This was pretty much a microcosm of how our Salvage runs went the past few days.

Did Arrapago on Thursday, got Macha's coat. We did this as DRG, DRG, THF, WHM, RDM, BRD and destroyed all 6 rats, Flayer NM, Archaic Chariot and the boss with like 20 minutes left on the clock. Not entirely fun timing jumps to replace provoke, but hey...it worked and the timer shows it.

Did SSR on Friday. TH-100 dc'd at the start and couldn't get back on...so down to a 5-man run. Darkdawn dc'd a number of times...so down to a 4 man run for a good portion of the way. Got up to the Citadel Chlenolian (sp?) pull and timed out, but for being 4-man most of the way, damn we killed a lot. Hammerblow, Dekka, Gyroscopic Gear and Gears and the 4 ramparts to spawn the turtle all died.

Did Bhaflau yesterday. Managed to pick up 35 morrigan hands that I think went to Darkdawn and 35 marduk legs that went to Iceblazek. Was a relatively smooth run up to the gears that nerf boss damage. Weather was being a royal pain in the ass and poor Hot Chocolate was having issues pulling. At the boss, I had a brain fart and forgot to fight the damn thing on it's sides. One 1770 Homing Missle later and I'm on the floor w/o RR on since it managed to wear off right after I engaged the boss. We wiped around 5% and managed to zombie the rest of the way down only to have less than 2 minutes to get drops to where they needed to go. Hello HP and -2500 XP! Not a big deal though, I'd do it in a heartbeat for anyone that was on my team and had their asses up against the clock for a drop to distribute.


Crafting


Past few weeks, Cdgreg has been skilling up his fishing. As he has done so, he's sold me his stacks of Istirydes for about 2/3s the AH value (which I greatly appreciate). Over that time, I've managed to accumulate stacks and stacks of pearls and black pearls. My initial thought was to just sell the results on the AH, but then I got the itch to go back to crafting.

Next time I get that itch, I'm going to scratch it with razor blades. I don't know how I forgot just how f***ing dumb crafters are at times.

Bought up a little over 20 stacks of coral off the AH friday night and have since turned them into 120 RR items. I've sold most of them off already as RR items tend to move fast over the weekend. What makes selling these things so difficult is that you have to have a 2nd account to keep up with idiotic undercutters that have nothing better to do than camp the AH all day and prevent everyone else from selling anything. I get it's a 'dog eat dog' world in there, but these are people who aren't trying to skill anything up and recoup as much of their money as fast as possible. These are people trying to make a living off the time they invest in making these items.

And if this is how they make a living in game, it's no wonder they have so much time to kill every market they touch.

Some simple math for starters.

To make a Reraise Hairpin, you need the following items:

1x Light Anima
1x Water Anima
1x Lightning Anima
2x Coral Fragment
1x Pearl
1x Black Pearl
3x Wind Crystal

The synths are as follows:

Vivified Coral

1x Wind Crystal
1x Light Anima
1x Water Anima
1x Lightning Anima
1x Coral Fragment

Coral Hairpin

1x Wind Crystal
1x Coral Fragment
1x Pearl
1x Black Pearl

Reraise Hairpin

1x Coral Hairpin
1x Vivified Coral

Now that you know what you need, here's the break down of what they cost. These prices are assuming you do not HQ any animas and per 12 synths and assuming you HQ 50% of the Shall Shells/Istiryde purchased off the AH and averaging a stack of Black Pearls per 8 stacks of fish.

1x Light Anima (4,100/synth = 10 anima = 410)
1x Water Anima (14,100/synth = 10 anima = 1,410),
1x Lightning Anima (20,766/synth = 10 anima = 2077)
2x Coral Fragment (median 19k/fragment = 38,000)

(8 stacks of fish @ 7k, NPC 2 stacks of pearls for 1,234 gil/pearl creating a cost of 26,384 gil for one stack of pearls and one stack of black pearls. Remember...HQ 50% and assuming you get a stack of black pearls per 8 stacks of fish will leave you with 3 stacks of pearls and 1 stack of black pearls)

1x Pearl (1,100)
1x Black Pearl (1,100)
3x Wind Crystal (variable, but average around 500g/stack meaning 125g for total).

This puts the cost of our RR pin synth at 44,222 gil currently if you buy absolutely everything from the AH and don't HQ any animas. Obviously the cost lowers if you do manage to have a 100 alchemist on tap to make your animas for you or if you can manage to fish up the shells yourself, but not by much. And this doesn't even include if you break anything. Nothing like having to potentially sell 7-9 pins to make up for one crit break.

Thing is, a lot of these people don't understand what will move and what won't move. The same issue plagues the other consumable markets like Shihei, Ninja Sneak tools and food. RR pins and gorgets don't move with the same speed as the aforementioned items, but they do move at an average clip of about 15-20/day during the week and about 40-50 each weekend day. Undercutting isn't necessary and the only thing it does is cause a crafter to have to that much more work to get to their gil goal. I'm not saying dump everything up on the AH at a 100%+ profit margin, but I am saying it's really ridiculous to sell things so close to cost all in the name of "fast" money. It's not fast at all to sell like this. Sure you recoup your cost, but the whole point of is to actually MAKE a decent margin on an item. Most people are comfortable paying a 25-35% margin on an item, which means the RR items should sell from 55-60k at the cost it is currently and not the paltry 6-8% margin it's doing a delicate balancing act on.

The critical thing people fail to understand is one of the most basic rules of economics.

If you can't keep an item on the shelf, you have it priced too low.

But yeah, I made all those pins/gorgets and am in the process of selling them. I also found time to level my Smithing sub from 41-53. Almost done with the subcrafts now and hopefully, if I have this planned out correctly, that will open the doors for far more items to craft for me as opposed to the uber-time consuming RR market and the very volatile angel skin or BLM JSE market.

The latter two seriously make me wonder if the dumbasses that sell the finished cursed items at half of what they paid for the materials do the same thing with shit they try to sell in real life. If so, give me your name and address, I'd like you to go buy me a few things from Best Buy and sell them to me at 1/4-1/2 what you paid for them.