Special People

I do have to laugh at people getting bent out of shape in this game.  Normally, they're not worth me wasting time to blog about, but the story of Hazukii and his imaginary war with me is worth telling just for the lulz.  A while back, we apparently jumped his shout group trying to pop Cirein-Croin.  The ensuing conversation looked like this:

Aside from the fact he thinks I'm some sort of German, the biggest thing to take note of here the screenshot won't show is that there were multiple groups here.  There was apparently a trio who had taken forever killing.  Hazukii's group was all gathered up somewhere around the bridge area.  A third group including Spccdog was vying for the ??? as well.  The latter had been shouting his claim over the ??? in his typical obscene manner, which didn't exactly lend itself to us wanting to cooperate with him.  This event happened before SE added multiple pops for the big NMs in Abyssea, which really kind of renders the entire conversation moot at this point.

Anyway, Hazukii got butthurt over it, somehow thought a bunch of JP people would get pissed at me, ruin my reputation and globally blacklist me.  Newsflash to that part is that I don't interact with JP players enough to care.  I have shouts filtered for a reason.  If there's something I want to get done, I have a friend list.  If enough people aren't in linkshell or on my friend list to get said task done, I just go do something else.  I don't waste my time shouting or reading shouts to get things done.

Fast forward a few months and we're in the same general area of Abyssea.  I see Hazukii come up and actually ask for one of his friends to leech something from our group.  Imagine that...

Fast forward a few more months to this past Sunday.  Our scheduled event was to spam Amhuluk since we had a lot of demand for it's +2 items.  Earlier in the week, we had camped Asanbosam and generally filled up everyone who was there with KIs for it.  Just so happened this past Sunday, we had 5 people who weren't at the previous farming, so we decided to put KIs on them.  Turns out, Hazukii was in some sort of cruor party and he gets butthurt when we show up and started killing a few bats.  Nevermind they were bats we had aggro'd and there were probably another 20 or so floating around for someone to pull.  Also nevermind his cruor party was spread out mostly over the colibri.  Also nevermind the fact that if you're going to do a cruor party, using critters next to a relatively popular NM is just asking to get interrupted/slowed down.

He babbles something in /say that I missed.  I was only made aware of it when a few of our LS members collectively said "lolhazukii".  Then he sends me a tell and the conversation from that point pretty much mirrored the above screenshot, except he learned how to spell "douche", I'm apparently just like Hex and Obsidian is the "new resu".  Also, he again somehow thinks the reason he should waste his time to tell me these things is because, apparently, "it does me good to hear it".  There was nothing he said that I took offense to, but I blacklisted him cause I wanted to focus on stuff that mattered rather than feed some frail ego.

You see, he somehow thinks my M.O. (and thus, Obsidian's) is to just show up and wreck people's events.  I'm the first to admit we don't get along with everybody and I'm the first to admit if someone left our shell under bad terms, I'm not particularly prone to cooperating with them.  However, there are a ton of instances where we've changed our schedule around or politely asked "@?" when wanting to pop a particular NM and gone off to do something else if the number was large.  There are also plenty of times where we've been jumped by the very same shout groups Hazukii seems to participate a lot in.

The "cruor party" he was in was a sham at best.  The bulk of it moved slightly south to bounce between vultures and colibri after Hazukii left.  I even got to talk to a couple old buddies and made a new friend who all admitted they didn't know wtf was going on early on in that party when Hazukii was around.  I don't know who organized it.  I didn't get the impression Hazukii did, but one thing was clear...the party wasn't doing anything good.  It was all melee, one mage and a bunch of melee that didn't know how to survive apparently.  If that had even looked remotely more organized when we showed up, we probably would have asked what they were doing.  Given Asanbosam wasn't up when we got there, we figured they were there camping it and just got down to work ready to camp against them.

Later in the day, Hazukii shows up to Minax Bugard with a former LS member (Xanatos).  While I seriously doubt he ran to that NM with the intention of trying to slow us down, he certainly made up his mind to try to do so once he saw us.  I still had him on my blacklist at the time and I decided to take him off it when I saw some of my LS members defending me in /say.  Between what amounted to jabs about his choice of NIN gear and some other idiotic comments by him he apparently thinks phase me in the least, Drakus ended the conversation with "last word" spam.  I put him back on my black list once I had been entertained enough again.  One thing he said that was rather comical...

...somehow a DRG at an Abyssea event with 18 people is mega-lulz.  I don't know what he has leveled other than NIN and don't really care.  I do know what I have leveled and how long it had been at that point since I wasn't on a support, healing or treasure hunter job.  Typically others in the linkshell get to fill in the melee spots now.  So it was rather amazing he somehow went back to a 2004 job crack to try to offend me and showed just how uneducated he probably is.  Doesn't really matter what melee jobs you have in an 18 man abyssea alliance as long as you got the important staggers covered.  Sure...we could have brought in 7 WARs I suppose and killed a little faster, but hey...loldrg anyway.

Hazukii represents a source of comedy for us now.  Mostly because his jabs and ease of butthurt are so pathetically bad.  He may liken me to Hex or compare us to Resu.  He may do so having once been in Resu himself and drinking the Kool-aid.  He seems to love speaking w/o knowledge or viewing the entire picture though, which is pretty typical of one who gets butthurt so easy.  One thing I've learned in my travels in life...lonely and ignorant people are the fastest ones to become morally outraged.  Sad thing is, these outrages are typically based in their own selfishness to the point where the expression of outrage is just to draw attention to themselves moreso than to actually try to fix whatever pissed them off.  I'm guilty of it myself from years ago, but hey...everyone learns shit in their own time.  When morality simply becomes a crutch to fulfill one's own selfish desires, it becomes immoral.  It also becomes comedic.

He can have his little war if he wants.  No one in Obsidian cares enough about him to go chase him down or harass him.  It's like they say though...there are reasons why some people just don't get along with others.  To them, it's everyone else's fault.  To everyone else, it's button-pressing time when the inevitable blow-up happens.  Wonder if he actually knows he was being trolled when he "won" by popping Minax Bugard between our pops...

...probably not.

TF3: Dark of the Moon

TF3 finally showed up this week. I won't say I was waiting anxiously for it's arrival, but I will say I was at least a little excited that it was here. From a long time fan's standpoint, I had felt like the first movie was great, despite some rather stupid designs. The second movie, I don't have to rehash what an atrocity that was other than to say it's glaring flaws were action sequences moving around too fast to really catch all the intricate detail ILM put into the fights and what I feel amounted to Michael Bay not having a writer's leash on him.

So we get to TF3 and my expectations are that it'll likely fall between TF2 and TF1 on good movie scale.

About a month ago, Drakus and I started planning out getting together to watch this at an IMAX. Turns out, the IMAX in his neck of the woods had closed and the one I usually went to at Opry Mills was still closed due to the Nashville flooding that happened a year or so ago. Oddly enough, IMAX option were pretty limited at that point. It was either a 5 hour drive to Fayetteville, Arkansas or it was a 4 hour drive for him to Nashville anyway so we could go to the Hendersonville, TN IMAX. We opted to meet up in Nashville.

So we hooked up, got our tix, etc...and if you haven't seen the movie, this is where you should stop reading.

Real 3D

First thing to note about TF3 is that it's in Real 3D. James Cameron (of Avatar fame) was on hand to help Bay film this. It's clear from the onset of the movie that they were telling the truth about the 3D part of this being at the forefront of their thoughts rather than treating it just from the post-production standpoint. As most reviews would indicate, the opening 10-15 mins of the movie are just awesome. The overall 3D presentation wasn't on the scale of Avatar as I felt Avatar did a much better job of immersing you in the actual environment. TF3 has some moments/sequences where it's almost there, most notably the opening space sequence and the building slide. Aside from that, I didn't think the 3D aspect of it really added that much to the presentation.


Megan Fox/Rosie Huntington-Whitely

One of the other "major" changes was the lack of Megan Fox. When I read she had been fired from the movie, I literally felt like doing a happy dance. I've probably bitched on this blog about her before, but my main issues with her were that she just looked too fake and her character was completely useless. Both of those traits are pretty typical of the lead female role in a Bay film, so I wasn't really holding that against her too much, she just seemingly became the poster child for what everyone hated about the TF films in general and a good chunk of it she brought on herself with her various media appearances.

Her replacement was Rosie Huntington-Whitely.

Who?

Yeah, a lady Bay managed to pick up straight off the runway modeling Victoria's Secret products. Zilch in the way of acting experience, unless you count modeling as acting.

BRING BACK MEGAN FOX!!

...or wait. I was willing to give her a chance, especially considering I just didn't want Fox's character or Fox herself in the last installment. Much to my surprise, she did pretty good. Don't get me wrong, no one goes to see a movie like TF3 for potential Oscar-nominated performances, but if you had to give an oscar to Fox or RHW for their TF performances, RHW is going to win. Her character is actually semi-useful to the plot and she doesn't stand around screaming "SAAAAAAAAAAAAM!!" the entire movie. Hell, there isn't even a slow motion, oiled up running sequence involving her. There is a shot where she's standing there and shit's blowing up behind her moving in slow motion, but she's mostly clothed, remarkably clean and not really doing anything but staring at the bayhem going on around her.

My only major gripe with her is that there are couple times in the movie where it seems like her face does the whole "MY PREEECIOUUUUS" thing that Bilbo Baggins' face did in Fellowship of the Ring.

The Wreckers

Bay had promised the twins (Skids and Mudflap) and their obnoxious personalities would not be in TF3. As information and pictures of the movie toys were coming to light, it was starting to look like Bay was replacing the twins with a trio called The Wreckers.

Now bear in mind, The Wreckers have a long history and when I saw the initial images of the toys, I just groaned. All 3 turned into souped up nascars complete with sponsorships from big boys like Lowe's and Target. Topspin has a mullet. Roadbuster has a ballcap. Leadfoot is bald with a beer gut. All 3 of them have wrap-around sunglasses.

Can you say, rednecks.

This was actually the one part of the movie I was dreading, but credit to Bay and Co., they threw everyone off. The Wreckers are actually pretty fkn awesome, albeit minor characters in TF3. Right off the bat, they're introduced with "We don't let them off the base because well...they're assholes" by the CIA director. Then they speak and they're not redneck or stupid at all, but yes, they are assholes and they're enjoyable additions to the movie.

Plot

The cheesy writing and dumbass story of TF2 was a huge sticking point and fodder for most of it's ridicule. The first 10-15 minutes of TF3 has more story in it than TF2 did as a whole. That's not saying much, but it's clear they put a lot more time and thought into actually trying to tell a story in this movie. They'll blame the writer's strike as the primary culprit for the TF2 bullshit, but I don't buy that as a whole.

At it's core, the plot of TF3 is basically derived from set of G1: Season 1 cartoons called "The Ultimate Doom". I suspect this was done primarily as a fan wank, but it's pretty funny watching just how closely it follows that original plot line. It's almost like the writers, in this case, decided to just fluff up the original story with a few new plot twists, deaths and whatnot, then make a huge movie out of it.

And yet, somehow it worked.

Bay clearly goes for the jugular when it comes to leaving open ends for a 4th installment. Pretty much every main character is killed off. Shockwave (more on him in a min), Ironhide, Wheelie, Starscream, Sentinel Prime, Barricade, Soundwave, Laserbeak, and Megatron.

Shockwave was probably one of my bigger points of contention with this movie. Vast majority of the ad campaign for this movie leads you to believe Shockwave is the primary antagonist. This was much to the glee of G1'ers as Shockwave was always the cold and calculating brainiac that most felt could lead the Decepticons. Turns out, all of Shockwave's appearances in the movie were basically shown in the trailers. He had maybe...3-5 more minutes of screen time on top of what most had already seen in the trailers. Completely irritating.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he was in there in some capacity, but he's one of the bigger characters in the TF Universe. He was mostly killed by humans. He had virtually no lines other than a few grunts. I just didn't see much of a point in having a character that's been as developed as he has over the decades in such a minor role, much less a role that showed most of his screen time in the trailers.

A few plot points that ended up being purist shout-outs:

- Sentinel Prime has always been somewhat of a background character until lately, when shows like Transformers: Animated or games like War for Cybertron develop his character. Prior to that, it had always just been mentioned that he was the leader before Optimus.

- Ironhide getting wasted, and rather brutally, by space rust and his actual death lines are reminiscent of some of the various ways he's been killed in other continuities.

- Megatron's line "All Hail Megatron" is more or less a direct shout out to the IDW Comics series by the same name. That series was very popular with G1 purists as the writers for that series managed to capture why the war was being fought and why it will likely never end.

- Rosie Huntington-Whitely's character name of "Carly" was the name of the woman that eventually married Spike (Sam) in the G1 series. This was who fans wanted to see portrayed from the start, but for whatever reason, Bay decided to go with "Mikaela Banes".

- Leonard Nimoy voices Sentinel Prime in this movie. Nimoy also voiced Galvatron in the original G1 movie. A number of Spock references were seen throughout the movie. The first was literally an episode of Star Trek and Spock being referenced as "going crazy". The second was Bumblebee using Spock's line "I am and will always be, your friend". The last was Sentinel Prime saying "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." The last two are obviously a little more obscure than the first, but they're Spock references nonetheless.

Conclusion

Go see it in IMAX if you can. Otherwise, make sure you see it in 3D. The vast majority of the things that made TF2 suck are gone from TF3 and I dare say this one was actually better than the first. It drags on a little bit, but for the most part, the story is fluid, the action is breathtaking at times and it's probably most violent of the 3 films. I wouldn't expect a sequel to this, but I would definitely expect another director to take a shot at a series reboot.

Spielberg coming out of that Executive Producer chair perhaps?

MOAR JOB UPDATES/ADJUSTMENTS

I'm not exactly sure what the current dev. team is thinking. They're actually working, and mostly in a good way. Unfortunately, they still seem to keep missing some of the bigger points about job balance.

I get all jobs need to be unique. I get there has to be a certain level of work you have to put into a job to get it up to an acceptable level from a gear and skill standpoint. What I don't get is how a select few jobs can keep getting mega-buffed while others that have needed buffs for a very long while have continued to be ignored or just get a bone thrown it's way from time to time.

The cyclical nature of this game is pretty funny to watch. The first few years, it was all about dual wield burns anywhere you could keep a chain going. Then it became all about 2H'er burns. Now it's obviously about Abyssea burns, but the common denominator in all of that is the relevance of a couple jobs in comparison to the rest.

Those jobs? WAR and WHM.

The game has been changed to a point where if you have a NIN, WAR, WHM and BRD, you can pretty much tackle the vast majority of the content. You don't even truly need all 4, but from an Abyssea standpoint, any other healing or melee jobs just come up on the short end of the stick if you're trying to low man things. The name of the Abyssea game is KI acquisition. Want to cover all the red staggers? Bring a NIN and WAR. Want to attempt to farm up fast gold chests? Bring 1 or 2 Fell Cleavers (preferably WAR cause DRK GAxe just doesn't cut it). Want to keep them alive? WHM is pretty much your only option. That or an army of people with Cure 4.

Sure, other DDs can dump out some damage that's on par with some pimped out WARs, but why fill up a slot in an event with a job that's only there for a potential blue stagger? Why claw your eyeballs out watching a PLD tank something when a NIN can bust out so many different staggers, avoid getting hit most of the time (thus drastically lowering your target's TP gain) and dish out exponentially more damage?

So, to address this, here's what I would suggest to the dev. team:

Give all jobs access to the elemental trigger skills 175 and below. Energy Drain, Tachi: Koki and Blade: Ei are the only 3 that wouldn't be covered. You can still leave other potential WS like Penta Thrust (150) with their current job-specific traits and it's not like these weapon skills do a shitload of damage to begin with short of using a brew. Even then, the truly good brew-skills (jinpu aside...) are all upwards of 300 skill anyway.

Toss in some Lv.1 weapons people can carry around. Hell, make them available through dominion credit purchases since there's really nothing else useful out of those. Between people being too f***ing lazy to actually skill the weapon to begin with and the potential for 3 out of the 13 current staggers to not be covered, I don't think game balance is going to be thrown completely out of whack.

As for specific job adjustments...a lot remains to be seen. A true balance in a specific role (which I define as Tank, Healer, Support, Front-Line DD and Back-Line DD) means a player's skill and equipment are what set them apart from their team members. Right now, a completely pimped out BST can get trashed by run-of-the-mill MNK or WAR. I get there are niches for each job, but really...it kind of sucks when you need X job because it's just so far superior to dishing damage and not because there's a JA or Trait you need to win.

A DRG, SAM or WAR don't need anymore adjustments, but one or more or all tend to be in the notes when it comes update time.

...well, I personally would love for a DRG to have actual pet commands, but that's a story for a different day.

RDM and SCH both need Cure 5. WHM has had the ever-loving shit buffed out of it to the point where RDMs, outside of Abyssea, are simply there for Refresh II and barely considered within Abyssea. SCH doesn't even have that and I'd contend the main benefits of SCH main are the same things you can get from subbing SCH, but then again, why would you when subbing RDM for Convert and Refresh would probably trump it?

Anyway, I could go on for hours about this, but I won't. I'm going to wait until Lv.99 comes about before I truly pass judgement on SE's job adjustments. All I know is, I'm sick of having to make sure there's a NIN, and WAR for every event we do.

When the Cat's Away...

Earthquake in Japan has provided for some unusual circumstances in the world of FFXI the past couple weeks. Namely, the lack of it. SE shut the servers down by request of their power company while they worked to deal with the ongoing nuclear matters to their north.

For me, that decision was a no-brainer. Do your social duty to your fell countrymen in the face of one of the worst disasters to ever happen on the planet, let alone Japan. As a result of the service being interrupted for an undetermined amount of time (despite SE announcing today service would be restored on Friday), they've given us the entire month of April for free. I donated the $25 I would have normally spent to the Red Cross.

The forced break from FFXI has actually been refreshing to me in a lot of regards. It's felt rather nice to come home after working and not have to feel like I'm going to spend the next 3-4 hours catering to linkshell members by organizing events. I've managed to make a little bit of a dent in the pile of games I've had sitting around for a while as well. God of War II, God of War III and Bioshock have all been played through now (yes, I know they came out a long while ago...).

What hasn't been refreshing to me is the doom and gloom expressed by a number of people on various forums regarding FFXI. I expected a few asshats to complain about the servers going down, but the sheer number of threads that have opened up on the new official forums about it and the number of semi-flippant remarks on other community forums is just absurd.

SE getting compared to Blizzard seems to be one of the more common complaints. Blizzard has a number of data centers around the world. Not many people have looked at the math involved in it though. For starters, Blizzard has 10 data centers to support it's 10+ million user playerbase. That's approximately 1 data center for every 1 million users.

SE hasn't had more than 500k users for at least half a decade, so why someone would think SE would have the money and time invested in a second data center is absurd. If one is going to use Blizzard's set up as the standard, one likely needs to do a lot more research into the cost and maintenance of a data center located on a different continent. It ain't cheap.

Again, assuming Blizzard's set up is the "gold standard", here are some other ridiculous numbers to think about from that article.

- 10 Data Centers on 3 Continents.
- 4 in the USA, 3 in Europe, 3 in Asian regions.
- 20,000 Systems
- 13,500 Server Blades
- 1.3 PETAbytes of storage. Note that is the level above Terabyte. Also note, most of your standard home PCs come equipped with 1-2TB of storage if you want an accurate idea of just how much space that actually is.
- 75,000 CPU cores. (Which means a lot of their "20,000 systems" are likely dual or quad core CPUs)
- 112 Terabytes of RAM. 100x more RAM than most home PC's have in hard drive space.

And that's Blizzard as of that article's 2009 publishing. SE's playerbase is 5% of that. I can bet you a year's salary as WoW's membership numbers fall (and they will eventually), those data centers will be shut down. As far as I know, SE's userbase never really exceeded a million users and thus, never really required the use of more than one data center. I can also guarantee you Blizzard didn't set up 10 data centers at the onset of WoW being published.

Here's another article to shed some more light on what data centers actually cost to build and maintain. Feel free to click on some of the links to further educate yourselves on the matter.

Bottom line is this.

SE's decision to shut down the servers was forced. People don't typically build their business infrastructure models around the notion a huge natural disaster will occur on the scale of the one that hit Japan. Aside from hardware maint. and updates, this is the first time in EIGHT years of service this has happened. It took a 8.9-9.0 Earthquake (only 5 have occurred that high since they started recording earthquake strength), a Tsunami that literally wiped entire cities off the map and an ongoing nuclear crisis to make that happen. I mean seriously...that's about a step short of the second coming of Christ on the "What could shut us down for a while" scale.

On top of that, I haven't found any other example of this happening elsewhere to any other MMO except during WoW's beta testing phase when a tornado directly hit the Virginia Data Center.

Crying about it happening is just completely selfish. Crying about SE not having a backup data center is just ignorant as the costs simply aren't met with SE's current subscription base. People suggesting the playerbase will suffer because SE didn't have a backup server in place might be right as MMO's generally work on addicting players to content, but I'd suggest anyone who actually quits FFXI over all the stuff going on in Japan...good riddance.

Long Time No Blog

Tons of changes in my life since my last post. So let's get right to it.

"Job" Finale

My full-time "job" came to an end. It was essentially a consulting gig through my business that ate up a lot more of my time than it needed to. While driving home from the Thanksgiving trip to Maine, I pretty much came to the conclusion that I needed a different direction in my life. What I had been brought into that company for was not coming to fruition.

The primary reason I was brought in two years ago was to eventually replace their main IT guy when he retires as he is 60+ and pretty much the only guy there that knows anything about the database and IT infrastructure he has set up over the years. They all knew they weren't just going to get a guy right off the street and have them step in to take his place. They need to start training someone and sooner was a lot better than later.

The specific skillset they needed was someone with rather extensive database programming skills along with the ability to create various forms of media. Media being books on various programs they're selling and whatnot along with videos for various shows they attend. This was something I knew going into the initial sit-down with the powers that be. This was also something I made abundantly clear: My skill set does NOT include either of those.

Y'see, I'm basically an entrepreneur. I've owned my own business for the better part of 11 years now. My skillset is mostly confined to the typical issues a small business or residential end-user runs into. That doesn't mean I wasn't capable of learning what they needed, but they had a choice to make when they sat down with me.

Do you have the time to invest in training me or would you rather find someone who already has the skillset you're looking for? Odds are, the latter was going to cost them a lot more than they were willing to pay, especially after this fiasco.

Anyway, in typical fashion (wasn't typical to me at the time, amazing what you learn), they decided to do in-house training and give me a shot. I was happy because it basically meant my monthly business expenses were covered and then some, so I wasn't having to chase down every single penny to make ends meet. They were happy cause it meant my "boss" was freed up to work on more meaningful stuff to the ownership rather than having to spend a lot of time on bullshit like "can you change my desktop background?" or "this entire section just lost power because someone plugged in a jet engine to use as a space heater and we're too f***ing dumb to go flip the same breaker it trips every single time this happens."

So we're about two years after the hiring and I'm at a crossroads mentally. I'm tired of the politics and 15 chieftains who all have less stinky shit than the other ones, so therefore their request takes priority over someone else's. Very little training has taken place between my boss and myself because of constant changes, most of which were reactionary and caused huge ripple effects in the way things were setup system-wide. I'm not against change mind you, the problem with change and their ownership is that one tells you to do it one way, another tells you to do it differently, then you get them together to figure out a solution and they change their minds the next day and want you to do something totally different. If that happened every now and then, I'd be slightly frustrated, but I'd accept it. This wasn't an every now and then type of thing though. This was basically an every day thing.

I come back from the Thanksgiving trip to find the following:

- Owner has retired effective immediately.
- They've decided to merge two of their companies together.
- They've decided to create a new company in one of their old company buildings.
- They've decided to open a new company in TX.
- They've also decided to open a branch extension in the same location in TX (2 companies, one building).
- The accountant that fired me on April Fool's day via word of mouth was now the president.

My initial inclination was just to give them the finger and walk right then. One of these days, I'll learn to listen to those a lot more closely. I opted to stick it out because I knew how much crap it'd put on my boss' shoulders if I left. His Dad was about to pass away at the time (ended up passing away about a month later) and he already had a ton on his plate from the sweeping changes that were taking place thanks to the new leadership.

So as the holidays progressed and we got into 2011, I made up my mind to leave. Just was a matter of finding the right moment. I had it in my head that I wanted to finish the setup of the major stuff, then walk and I was probably about two weeks from it. Apparently, the accountant/president had similar thoughts and decided to go ahead and release me the day after my last blog post. The logic behind this release actually made a little sense, but...

...the part about "not having to pay IT consulting after 90 days" was simply ludicrous. What they don't realize is that while they may get someone with a skillset that's better suited for their needs, the notion that they won't have to pay an IT guy after 90 days with the new guy is based in fantasy and the reason why is because their structure is set up for constant change. Constant change means the need to redo various aspects of the company's IT infrastructure. Constant change means they bring most of the need for an on-hand IT guy on themselves.

The writing was on the wall when I got back from Thanksgiving. I knew it, but opted to stay to help my "boss" get through what was undoubtedly going to be one of the most tumultuous times he's had there. I was "Fired" back in April cause the accountant was allegedly watching out for the bottom line. A short while after this, I realized the accountant was basically just playing favorites and trying to figure out ways to line his own pocket better. His son was hired on as a broker for a sister company. He failed. Instead of releasing him like everyone else, they moved him to the main building to do...the same thing. Anyone care to guess what the result was? Yep. Failure. Again, instead of releasing him as they do with anyone else, they moved him over to a different company to take care of the accounting, all while remaining on the payroll for the company he had essentially failed twice.

Once these changes had been decided, the guy that was figureheading the "new" company was basically a guy that had been doing accounting work. The guy taking his place?

If you said, "the son", then you'd be correct. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against his son. The dude is actually really nice, he's just not a salesman. There's nothing wrong with that, some people just aren't cut for it. The problem is his father basically letting him continue to suck money from the company while contributing nothing to it while firing people who were actually making contributions.

Anyway, we're 45 days out since I was "fired" and apparently a lot of the same issues I was dealing with when I was there are still there. Case and point:

Their phone system was down per a former co-worker I ran into at Wal-Mart a couple days ago.

So anyway, I'm happy and basically done with that company. I'm back to running my own business full time again and making plans to return to school and expand my skillset during the fall semester. While a lot of people have made a point of telling me that I'll probably be called back in at some point, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. All I know is, right now, if they called, they'd have to pay me a lot more money, offer up some guarantees and actually treat me like a person. I have better shit to do with my time than coddle and massage huge egos.

FFXI

They really should rename this game to "Abyssea".

However, I do love the new approach to development they've taken with FFXI. They're making a much more concerted effort to communicate with their playerbase. Is that because FFXIV is a huge failure at the moment and they're trying to do everything they can to retain the FFXI player base? Possibly, but I don't really care. I'm going to enjoy it while I can.

Chest-bitching jobs is a lot of fun and a great way to create a lot of flexibility with our group. Been trying to ween us off PLD usage lately by having people volunteer to chest-bitch MNK or NIN. Normally, our runs consist of 18 people all concentrating on one thing. While we've had huge success doing that, I think it's getting close to time for us to start splitting up into 2 or 3 groups. PLD tank isn't the best way to go about this, so I'm basically working to position ourselves better to handle this.

As for my own in-game accomplishments, I've managed to do the following:

- 5/5 DRG AF3+2
- 2 BRD AF3+2 pieces (head and legs)
- BLM to 90
- MNK is on the way to 90.
- On the way to finishing Caladbolg.

Still got a few other things to round out, but time has started becoming sparse for me again. Maybe another blog post in the near future about that, but who knows really...

See you soon. :)

Random Murmurings...

The November-March time period for me is growing more and more hectic. Typically, the holiday family shenanigans would eat up a ton of my time (and rightfully so) during Nov and Dec. That generally rolls into the busiest time of the business year for me in the form of tax season.

This holiday season and the start of tax season has been especially bad for me from a time standpoint. There's been very little down time at all when there was usually at least one day/week where I could just sit and decompress from all the stress that has built up. It'll make me sound old(er), but it truly seems like people don't know how to slow down anymore.

That or I can't keep up.

Take your pick.

Anyway, part of the hecticness (is that a word?) is related to FFXI. After undergoing a renaissance of sorts with Abyssea, level cap increases, etc, a lot of transformations have had to take place within our linkshell. Seems silly to me that helping lead a linkshell, which I had always viewed more as a hobby than a job, was eating up so much of my time. It has though. At this point, we seem to have most everything in place with a few minor tweaks to debate out as we find someone trying to figure out how to get a leg up on someone else.

That's one thing I've never understood. I get that it's human nature to be self-serving. Most decent humans can figure out how to cooperate and meet their own needs through a combination of teamwork and patience. There's always those one or two people though, that, no matter how much effort the leaders or team members put into making them better, they're always trying to figure out a way to game a system that's in place.

It's probably utopian of me to think that everyone on a team should be working to help each other out when they can. It's an MMO, not everyone has the same play schedule, so it's hard to gauge just how much effort one is putting in when they typically are on about 1/4 of the time as others. I've always operated under the idea that "You get what you put in."

And yes Jess, if you put in penis, you get penis.

There's so much new content in Abyssea that it's hard to apply some of those principles to it. Some NMs, like Hedjedjet or Fuath, are regularly camped and can be taken down with a small degree of difficulty in low man groups. Unlike Scars, and especially before they dropped the respawn time of NMs to 10-15 mins, these roaming NMs drop items for the +2 stuff, so it becomes an issue of time invested vs. reward gained. Camping NMs is never fun and I've always been opposed to spending mass amounts of time camping them. At the same time, you want to figure out the best and most efficient way of knocking those NMs out to progress through your linkshell's wish lists. "You get what you put in" really only applies if you're working to take other people who share similar interests from the linkshell with you.

Tough to balance and easy to manipulate.

Also on Abyssea, man it's tough getting new people up to par for it. You almost need a damn minor league system to help push returning/new people through to get their basics down, but even then, cause they missed the main push, you always end up with 1-2 people who "don't have X atma". I started compiling a list of what people need to get before they really start actively participating in Abyssea events. A lot of it can be picked up through the course of normal activity, but...

...sometimes not for a few weeks.

Anyway, the list:

1. Fluxes, all zones, no question. You show up and say "I don't have this flux", booting you from the run until you're 100% certain you have all the fluxes.

2. Celerity Abyssites. They're all solable. Get them, maximize your stone regen time.

3. Sojourn Abyssites. 4 of the 6 require NM kills. 2 are soloable. Strongly suggested to simply watch for when your linkshell is heading to a specific zone one of the NMs that drop it are in. 48 mins/stone as opposed to 30 mins/stone will go part and parcel with the celerity Abyssites.

4. Fortune Abyssites. 4, 5 and 6 will generally be lumped together. These particular ones aren't going to be soloable for the most part, but can be picked up typically through normal LS runs.

5. Kismet Abyssites. 2/3 are soloable. The last, not so much, but that chariot isn't a huge deal for a group to take down during a Grauberg run. I point these out cause it really fkn sucks building lights. The less time you spend doing this, the better and having those 1-2 people getting killshots w/o max lights just irritates and slows down everyone else.

6. Abyssites of Furtherance and Merit. A lot of these can be soloed. More HP/MP/Stats from cruor buffs = more better good.

On a side note, why does SE still have the individual options for cruor buffs?

7. Make a beeline for Razed Ruin, Voracious Violet, Allure and Minikin Monstrosity atmas. Sure, there are other atmas that are important, but odds are, no matter what job you play, one or more of those 4 atmas are going to be infused.

Lv.90 Gungnir

Finished this up last night. I'm still pissed I wasted so much time grinding out Lv.85 Gungnir only to have SE knock out 80% of the requirements. I'm halfway expecting they'll knock out a couple of the Lv.90 requirements in the next update.

At this point though, I get 2-3 months to not worry about a relic magian trial whereas before, I was typically up against the clock right up until update day finishing my previous ones.

I speculated before that the Lv.95 version of Gungnir will end up sending us to Xarc to knock out our respective fragment NMs. Still haven't swayed much from that thought process, but I'm starting to entertain the possibility that this whole attestation NM thing is an aberration to the killshot pattern as a whole and we'll be back to killshots for lv.95.

As of this writing though, Kreoss and I have finished our Lv.90 relics with Gawayne and Junin both sitting at 4/5 as they weren't finished with their trials when we did the first couple runs.

It took us 6 runs to get the 5 kills. The first run we attempted gave us a few sore reminders about how the attestation NMs worked. Also put a spotlight on the fact that not everyone knows where the extensions are in the zone. With a few tweaks and repositionings, we got these runs down to the point where we could get in, kill the 3 NMs necessary and get out in under 2 hours.

Last night, we ended up knocking out 4 of the 5 NMs. The 4th one being the BRD/BLM/WHM for Teysa's Dagger paper. Obviously this means we have a new wave of relics coming up behind us potentially, but I suspect that's not going to happen any time soon.

Many, MANY thanks to the guys like Kaylea, Kaelis, Drakus, Milie and a whole host of others who were there every run they could be to help push us through. These things aren't the easiest in the world to Duo or Trio, much less attempt to nail down 3 of them in one run with 2-3 people. It's rather amusing to watch these NMs take down a fully buffed, Lv.90 PLD in the sac process in a matter of 5 or 6 swings (lolgawayne).

We got one more run to do for Gaw and Junin, then hopefully I can just put this behind me for a while. In a lot of ways, this trial was worse than 2000 killshots given the amount of man hours invested from everyone involved. 2000 killshots could basically be done whenever with about 40~ hours. Dynamis could only be done every 72 hours and when you figure about 10 people per run investing 2-3 hours at a time over the course of 5 runs, you can see it easily trumps the killshots trials.

Even though I can't say everyone in our linkshell is always helping other linkshell members get their stuff done, I can say when the major stuff shows up, we got a very solid group of people that pitch in and help, so again, thanks to everyone that pitched in and got us through this.

Lancer's Plackart +2

As a b-day present, a few of us got together to knock this out. I wasn't really expecting to finish it, and it looked like I wasn't going to thanks to Shaula being stubborn on the Lancer's Body seals, but it happened. I had picked up a few Ardor Cards from NMs like Bennu and Alfard. Going into this impromptu event, I was sitting at 6/9 cards and 8/10 seals.

I rounded up everyone I could who was on same tier with me (our prio system is tiered based on 1st-5th priorities and grouped by what +2 items are required) and we headed out. Got Hedjedjet first thing. He somehow went unclaimed during the fight and we weren't sure if he had to deaggro or just go unclaimed for the whole restaggering bit. We erred on the side of caution and just killed him. Our reward?

One Thunder Belt.
One Card of Ardor.

So we figured we needed to restagger. While waiting for repop, we knocked out a few Shaulas, which had managed to drop a shitload of RNG and WHM body seals, but only one DRG body seal.

Second Hedjedjet comes along and we killed w/o having to deal with the unclaimed issue. The drops from that one were:

2x Card of Ardor.
1x Jewel of Ardor.
SoulScourge.
Thunder Belt.

So, I was done with the +2 portion of the body, just needed that last, pesky body seal. Back to Shaula we went. Nada. More RNG and WHM...

Not that Mav minded all the RNG body seals...I think he started from scratch and finished his +1 and then some...

More linkshell members came out to join us and we got Hedjedjet again. We ran into the unclaimed issue and, thinking back to the first, we grellowed it again. Our reward?

Thunder Belt.
1x Jewel of Ardor.

So ok...one of those kills we just got unlucky on, which was it...

Back to Shaula, who finally dropped the last seal I needed. Awesomely enough, pretty much every Shaula since has dropped 1-2 DRG body seals...

My luck is seriously weird sometimes. There's no question I'm lucky most of the time. My bad luck tends to manifest itself when I'm || close to finishing something.

One objective to go in a relic trial?

Geirskogul whiffs 7 times in a row.

One more item to finish a +1 or +2 piece of armor?

Need at least 10 kills before I'm done.

.1 away from a new WS?

Usually takes an hour or more before I see it.

But up until those points in each of those scenarios, I'm lucky in how fast I get there.

At any rate, I've got +2 head and body now on DRG and +1 everything else. The +2 legs and feet might take some more time given the NMs that drop the cards in Qty. 3 are T3 VNMs...and getting those abyssites suck to begin with. Really wouldn't surprise me if I finished the lower gear priorities on my wish lists before I finished those 2 particular pieces.

I'm torn on what's better for WS though. Lancer's Plackart +2 or Ares Body. I'm of the mindset that in Abyssea, Ares is better, but out of Abyssea, the plackart is better.

Acc is more or less wasted on me given the sheer amount of it I have on my relic and various other pieces of gear. So it's really a question of what's better? 15 Dex or 10 Att? DRG only has a DEX mod in Penta Thrust, which I rarely use anymore. Obviously DEX helps Drakesbane potentially reach another crit tier, but in Abyssea, I'm likely well beyond the crit cap from cruor buffs and atma like Razed Ruin.

Testing must be done!

Testing must also be done on the whole "Set: Damage occasionally varies with wyvern's HP". I whacked a lady bug with a 2600 crit melee swing shortly after I got the body. My wyvern's HP was 100%, so I'm wondering if it's just a straight 1/1 percentage boost to the damage you would have normally dealt as most of my relic crits are in the 1200-1300 range.

That's all for now though...

Benji: 1995-2011

This isn't an FFXI related post, so if you come here strictly for that, then sorry, you'll have to wait another day.

Today I woke up with a long list of tasks to do. I ended up getting none of them done and had to bury my dog.

My sister found Benji as a puppy in the parking lot of a nearby Minit Mart about 16 years ago. She was out for a drive with Dad practicing for her driver's test. Benji was so small that my sister feared she would get run over cause she was hard to see. This resulted in her being brought home with her with the intention of being taken to the pound the next day.

Most people know how that story goes.

The part that was uncommon was that she managed to win my mom over in that one-day moratorium. Y'see, Mom hates dogs. She was attacked by one as a little girl and has hated/feared them ever since, no matter the size. The second Benji showed up in my sister's arms, she was pretty much ordered to take her back. Dad intervened. The dog was staying at least until the next day. It was getting dark out and the pound was already closed anyway.

Naturally, my sister and I are playing with Benji. So full of life and energy as a lot of puppies are. She's a little skittish naturally due to her size, but once she warmed up to you, she couldn't get enough attention.

Later that evening, Mom is sitting on the couch scowling at Benji. I'm not sure what possessed Benji to try, but she walked right up to the couch and started trying to hop up next to Mom. Benji was so small though, that she couldn't make it. Mom, being undersized herself, seemed to empathize with that. She ultimately helped Benji up onto the couch and seemingly from that point forward, Benji was officially part of our family.

Benji was you typical dog. Couldn't get enough attention. Definitely couldn't get enough food. Randomly left "presents" around the house if we didn't get her outside in time. Some of her more endearing qualities were:

- Yapped at anything that came into the yard or if the doorbell rang. Her bark could actually wake Dad up from a deep sleep (Dad's legally deaf).

- Fiercly protective of people she loved, even if someone she loved was acting like they were going to harm someone else she loved. It was a fun game to play at times to get her stirred up. You could simply hold your hand out and move a little bit towards another person. If you had eye contact with Benji, she'd rush toward you, teeth bared and barking. She would never actually bite you, but she'd certainly let you know she didn't approve.

- She never played fetch. No matter how many times I tried to train her, she'd just look at whatever I threw as if to say, "Dumbass. Now you get to go get it."

- Tuft of hair on the top of her head that was the only indication she had some poodle in her. Benji was mostly terrier. That tuft of hair was basically like pipe cleaner. You could bend/style that in any shape you wanted w/o having to use anything to hold it in place. We commonly had her running around with a mohawk.

- She had a snaggletooth. If you whistled for her, sometimes her upper lip wouldn't be covering said tooth. So the expression you'd get when she'd look up was one that looked like sheer befuddlement when it was supposed to be one of attention.

- She was scared of her collar clanging against her water bowl. Never really understood why this scared her, but it did. We tried using plastic dog tags, changing her water bowl to a plastic one, etc, but nothing worked. It wasn't until the past year or so when she started going deaf that she seemed to not care if her collar hit her bowl or not. Otherwise, she'd stand just far enough away to lap the water with her tongue outstretched.

- Loved baths. A lot of dogs do and she wasn't any different. She'd get a bath and then run around the house like a crazed animal rubbing up against anything she could.

For the past year or so, her health had been failing at a rather rapid pace. I'm about as anti-euthanization as it gets and felt if meds could keep her from suffering, that was the better option. She had a whole host of problems due to age. Irritable bowels, arthritic joints, kidney failure (which required dialysis every couple days the past few months), and most notably, going blind and deaf.

Most days, on all of her meds, she seemed fine and about as alert as a blind/deaf dog could be. She could hear you whistle for her still and my guess is could still make out shadows, but you'd catch her running into things she normally wouldn't. She found it harder and harder to walk and even harder to control her bowels.

A couple weeks ago, we had to take her in for an emergency visit due to some blood being in her urine. One complete set of tract infection meds later, the problem hadn't really cleared up, so my folks made the decision to go ahead and have her put down.

When they called me this morning to tell me the news, I rushed over to the vets office hoping I could say bye to her. On the way, my sister calls me to tell me they're holding off until she and I got there.

It's rare that people get to say goodbye to their pets in this manner. Sure, pets are euthanized all the time, but typically said euthanizaton happens after a pet has suffered something traumatic or has generally lost all sense of self. Benji was still completely coherent of her surroundings.

I got to the office and found Benji waiting for me. She was so weak, she could barely stand up, but she tried. I just held onto her for the longest time waiting for my sister to get there. Once she did, she and I just started sobbing. Even though I knew the decision to have her put down was the right one, I never imagined it would be so hard to let go.

I've lost pets before. Most infamously, my cat that had congestive heart failure She managed to hop up onto the couch I was laying on and headbutt me one last time to let me know she was leaving. She was dead the next morning. In that case, I had a sense she wasn't going to make it to the morning and I did get to say bye, but she got to die her own way. Benji really didn't.

What Benji did get to do though was have her family around her to say bye. Sitting in the vet's office with Benji in my lap shortly after she was given the tranquilizer shot (the precursor to the final euth. shot), she let me know things were ok. She let my sister know too. The dog that was unable to stand moments before managed to paw at both my hand and my sister's hand before she passed out. It was a weak paw, but we both got the message. Soon enough, she was snoring loudly in my lap.

Shortly after that, the final shot was administered and we ushered Benji off into doggy heaven.

There aren't many instances in life that will cause me to sob uncontrollably. There are plenty that might make me well up a bit, but nothing like that. After she was pronounced dead, I picked her body up to place in her box for carriage home. I didn't realize how limp she was going to be and I broke down uncontrollably, missing her box almost completely.

The vet offered to place her in a bag for me and put her in there, but there wasn't any way I was allowing that to happen. I get that vets do this sort of stuff on a daily basis and having the owners in there likely makes their job a lot more difficult. I just didn't want Benji's body to be shaped by the bag. As morbid as this sounds, every pet I've buried up until this one had been through the bagging process and the positions their bodies ended up in was just horrifying to me.

Working through the sobs, My sister and I managed to get Benji curled up in her box, placed the lid on it and proceeded to come home with her.

What Benji has meant to our family over these years can't be worded. Most pet owners will just understand. We've had a lot of pets and, while most of them ended up being taken from us way too early, the one constant that touched every single pet we've ever owned sans one, was Benji. Up until the past year or so, we would be greeted through the door by her barking and her coming up to greet us when we walked through the door. Again, this isn't uncommon for most pet owners, but most pet owners wouldn't think of it a second for other pets. However, their own pets doing this ends up being taken for granted.

We were fortunate. We knew the end was near. Even as far back as 5 or so years ago when arthritis set in, we knew. So our family simply did their best to enjoy what time Benji had left here. Sure, she aggravated us at times, but even if she got in trouble, it wasn't long afterwards that she was right by our sides getting loved on.

Benji's life was one of incredible luck and circumstances. Most can read her story and see that given where she came from.

What most won't see is that even though she was that lucky, we were infinitely more lucky to have her.

R.I.P. Benji. You were loved and you will be missed greatly.



P.S. The decision to keep her alive vs. put her down over the course of the past year has come up quite a bit. Meds generally kept her happy and moving around, but as time wore on, they weren't having the same effect. One of the biggest things that came out of our decisions was my oldest niece being old enough to remember who Benji was as she gets older. Around 2.5-3 years old, not many memories stay. Since she's over 4 now, it's far more likely she will remember and that does nothing but positive things towards Benji's memory.