FFXIV: So Much for Retirement

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The Alexander chapter! The story’s not bad but I don’t have any particular attachment to it, so let’s just focus on the kickass music! Every single track from these raids is groovy AF.

Chapter 41: The Fall of Diabolos

 

Chapter 42: So Much for Retirement

Aentfryn poured himself a mug of tea and sat on a simple wooden chair by a simple wooden table in a simple wooden hut he had built himself in the Dravanian Hinterlands. There was room and to spare out here, and it was a beautiful land. He’d carefully picked a spot on a little island on the Thaliak River, close by a gorgeous clear blue lake, not too near Idyllshire and the remnants of Sharlayan, but not too far from it, either. Continue reading →

FFXIV: The Fall of Diabolos

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It’s the Chuchupa chapter! And it’s really long! If Mhach is based on Gaelic, then the ‘mh’ is pronounced as v. I think. Although the Mhach wiki page shows the Japanese name translated into romaji as ‘Maha’ so I guess they didn’t know that.

I’ve been sitting on 95% of this chapter since the end of November, when Nanowrimo ended; I went on vacation for a bit to recover from a busy fall season, and then came back and things were even more busy (I got a promotion I don’t really want and it’s giving me insomnia whoo) and I’m just not that invested in either the level 60 24-man raids or the 8-man raids. Hence why I’m going to get them both out of the way before we continue with MSQ. This chapter is kind of fillery, tbh, but I can’t be bothered to work on it any longer.

Did you know that once you beat the 24-man raids, then you have 90 minutes to look around the level?? It’s really cool! You can see a ton of things that you’d miss otherwise! (Including some parts that maybe you aren’t supposed to look too closely at XD ) I went in to both Weeping City and Dun Scaith with Yllamse and we had a great time speculating on the design choices of the levels.

Also yooo my Vivienne cosplay blog post is finished!! (contains slight spoilers for her personal story after the main photoshoot)

Chapter 40: Il était une fois…

 

Chapter 41: The Fall of Diabolos

Achiyo went down to the drawing room the next morning to find R’nyath and Chuchupa waiting there for her. “How did it gooo~?” R’nyath asked in a sing-song voice, his ears perking up and tail curling into a question mark. Continue reading →

Vivienne Urselmert Cosplay Part 1

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At last I have gotten around to writing about the cosplay I created last year. I have just been 1) SUPER busy, and 2) still dealing with travel blogs until this point because those are more memory dependent than this. So hi, I actually had the fortitude to create a cosplay last fall! I wore it to the annual RCCO Halloween concert, of course, and to work for an entire week so as many of my students/choir people as possible could see it.

I knew that I wanted to do a cosplay of Vivienne Urselmert, my Dark Knight from Final Fantasy XIV in order to complete my trifecta of Hot FFXIV Ladies (the sweet one, the noble one, and the dark one), and having previously attempted to begin with creating the greatsword and failing, I decided to not start with that. (So there will be a Part 2, hopefully next/this year, when I build a Cronus to go with this outfit!)

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Belgian Christmas 2023: Utrecht

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Ghent

After Ghent, we didn’t go anywhere for like a week. There were certainly more touristy things to do in the Low Countries, but like I said before, my main objective was not to be a tourist. But we did discuss things we could see in the future, such as the Maastricht Natural History Museum, in relation to which I learned that the mosasaur is named after the Meuse (Maas) River which was absolutely shocking to me. Also shocking is the controversial history of the first mosasaur skull ever discovered, which French soldiers yoinked in 1794 and the French government has refused to return ever since, citing that someone was paid (though those circumstances are, from what I understand, dubious). Another place might be the historic pump Museum de Cruquius, the largest steam engine in the world, apparently.

So we read books, played games, listened to music, and cooked food, drank alcohol with the food occasionally. We watched the birds at the bird feeders in the mornings, Tharash has four bird feeders on his deck as well as a water dish. I did not get much creative writing done. That’s fine, I was in rest mode. Continue reading →

Belgian Christmas 2023: Ghent

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Antwerp

So to get to Ghent, as we did only two days after Antwerp, we did have to get up rather early because we had to take the train from Antwerp. We decided to go on that day because the weather was going to be nice. While I was in Europe, it was super windy pretty much every day, and it rained quite a few days, so if we were going to go places we wanted to go on not-rainy days.

We did not take this advice from the tourism website, but that’s okay:

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Belgian Christmas 2023: Antwerp

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Okay so you know I visited Europe last summer to see Germany, but I went again at Christmas. Tharash had come to visit me the previous Christmas (for some reason I didn’t take any pictures of that? I guess everything was too normal for me to take pictures of) so I was like “trade!”, and I had never been to Europe in the winter, and I just wanted to see both more in-person Tharash and more Europe. But this really was a vacation to unwind, not to sight-see. Still, I took a bunch of pictures.

First I had three flights to get to Schiphol, so I took some pictures of Canadian clouds. It was interesting to fly over Thunder Bay, but I wasn’t at a good angle to take pictures of it. But it was interesting to me when there were sudden edges to endless fields of cloud, for instance. And the first picture you can see the shadow of the cloud, I think.

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The Devil’s Holiday Special

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This is a little Christmas-themed one-shot about my Sith Inquisitor, Murlesson, who I previously wrote about in my massive Inquisitor-story-rewrite, Devil’s Due. This event was hinted at in the original epilogue of Devil’s Due; I ended up not keeping that epilogue, but the material in it I’m going to recycle later, as Murlesson/Aristheron/Akuliina fans may be interested to know that I’ve begun writing a sequel to DD called The Devil You Know. I will probably not publish anything for a long time as my writing process can be very time consuming (I started writing this holiday fic last April), I still haven’t played the game past Ilum, my ambitions for the story arcs are high, and my workload is as bad as ever, but hey some bits of the start of a draft exist (and even some snippets for a third fic to follow that!).

An important change: you may recall I had established Pyron’s family previously on Ziost. This was a mistake. I knew Ziost was important to the Empire, but I didn’t know it was the ice version of Korriban until I started writing this fic (back in last April, actually). : P And now that I’m determined to put them in a super normal North American-style suburb, that really doesn’t fit! How can you have a lovely cheesy special white Christmas Life Day if the entire planet is always cold? (suburbs are the city version of cancer but many people grew up with them, so I thought it would be neat to use them here.) But seriously, does the Empire have any nice planets?? (Besides Commenor and Kuat, apparently? Which in my stories I developed, not BioWare : P )

I keep putting Sith Lords in domestic situations because it’s funny. Hands up if you want a full-on coffeeshop AU where everyone’s still Sith? (Or a sequel to Something to Prove : P) (I’m kidding I don’t have time to write either of those)

EDIT: for more information on the pictures, check out my 2024 holiday season post!

 

 

A Sith Lord’s First Life Day

Darth Nox got out of the taxi cab and looked around at the houses surrounding him with an amount of trepidation that surprised even himself. For someone who was used to cities filled with skyscrapers, looming, impersonal, and seething with activity, he would have thought himself easily equal to this very simple environment. Continue reading →

The Netherlands 2012 – Part 4

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Part 3: Muiderslot and Madurodam

In this episode, we went to Amsterdam some more, to a nature reserve, to Marken Island, and to Texel Island.

Please note this is a coffeeshop, not a café. What’s the difference, you may ask? You get coffee at a café. At a coffeeshop you get weed. (This was not something either of us knew back then, but we weren’t interested in coffee either so we didn’t go in lol I just took the picture for the shop name)

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The Netherlands 2012 – Part 3

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Part 2: Vienna

In this episode, I went to the windmill museum Zaanse Schans, my First Ever Real Castle, Muiderslot, and to the tiniest Dutch city, Madurodam.

This is a boardgame called Lionheart and it’s basically Warhammer Lite crossed with chess.

Our next trip was to the Zaanse Schans, a windmill museum on the Zaanse river, the heart of the wind-powered industrial area in days gone by. There are eight restored windmills here, and a number of village buildings

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The Netherlands 2012: Part 2

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Part 1: North Holland

According to my salvaged fb albums, we went to Vienna next?? I thought it was later in the trip, but I don’t remember the order of anything specific. My friend Leslie had been at a summer piano camp in Salzburg, so we got a really good deal on train tickets to Salzburg through the Treinreiswinkel (which no longer exists and it’s really sad because they were super awesome), and then I found out that I had miscommunicated and she was actually in Vienna. So Tharash went and got train tickets for Vienna which was twice as expensive (being last-minute) and I felt guilty about it for years (that was a good chunk of change for us poor uni students, and he could have put that towards a new PC at some point). He, of course, forgot about it until I mentioned starting to get over it a few years ago. All in the past now.

Most of the pictures here are from Tharash, a turnabout from the usual picture ratio.

My first time seeing the Alps. We had taken a sleeping car on the way down and in second class that meant sleeping in a room for 6 people. I think there were at least four, including us. It felt a little weird.

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