Trolls, they scare me but not really.

The image says it all. A few weeks ago I was looking around profile images on a FFXI site, called Final Fantasy Players. I had a pic posted there ages ago back when I was new to MMO and wanted to get a peek at what others looked like behind their characters. I haven't used it in years then. Looking back, and how many people deal with jerks online, both on the game and on forums or whatever, I remember some of the pictures I seen and I gotta say, nobody's got nothing to be threatend nor afraid of. Its true, the internet is where you can literally be someone else and use it, also, as an extension of bringing out your true colors. However, behind the keyboard and without a computer some of these "trolls" are less than ordinary and really, nothing to be afraid of.

Foulei once told me, "Don't feed the trolls". A good example was when I made a post on one of the forums pretaining to FFXI and I made it clear to people that i did not want any aruguments amoungst themselves when they answer a question I've made. Sure enough nobody made a single post, whereas prior to the post I made one before that without the warning and tons of people answered and argued between each other.

So really everyone don't be annoyed or angry at the internet trolls out there. They're nothing but hot air, and is it really worth getting angry at someone that could be half a continent away, let alone behind a keyboard? Really.

Samurai. Shinkenger. Stress Test.

Samurai Sentai Shinkenger



Yes, yes. It looks "Power Ranger" esq but you know what, that's how Disney bastardized one of the best Tokusatsu series. I knew of Sentai long before "Power Rangers" kicked in the 90s during one of my channel surfing days as a kid, bored out of my mind after Godzilla Hour and Kung Fu Theater were over on a typical Saturday afternoon. Anyway, I watch the fan sub japanese originals every year, thanks to a good friend of mine who's into the same thing and told me of a group who fansubbes Tokusatsu shows like Sentai and Kamen Rider.
This year, finally with a Samurai Theme after all these 30+ years of sentai, this is Samurai Sentai Shinkenger (above)!!

As a kid I've always been fascinated with the ways of the Samurai of Japan. I've studed whatever I could find to understand more of Samurai and so on; the traditions, famous Samurai Warriors, etc. So when this came out last week, I was more than happy to see both something I've admired and watch a tv series on a yearly basis at the same time.

Ironically, I don't think i'll ever level samurai to 75 like I intended. I know, its strange and its got nothing to do with Foulei "stealing" the job I wanted to level first; yes, we kinda had a competition thing going to see who would surpass whom in levels for a while :-P. Honestly though I think its because there's so much competition and demand with the job in terms of gear, use and events that I dont want to stress myself out with it. Besides I got one melee job at 75 anyway.
The good side at least is that I have been leveling Samurai and will continue to do so this week to finish getting it to 37, with it now being around 33 so I'm close. I also managed to try it out as a subjob with Warrior and I gotta say, I'm impressed with the results. I can do weaponskills much quicker now and do more damage. So while my desire to level Samurai to 75 waned over time, I will put it to some good use with my current main job, Warrior.

Part of the reason of it progressing from 24-32 this week is because I took off from work for two days. I was having a lot of chest pains on Monday night for about 3 hours, barely having any sleep. On top of that I've been having these pains for almost a year now in some occurances. So I stopped ignoring this issue and went to the doctors on Tuesday. Given my family medical history of prone to heart problems, the doctor inisted upon me taking some tests; blood work, chest/heart x-rays, stress test. So I have my work cut out or me there on these tests in the next week or two. I just hope its nothing serious.

Xanathos' Wedding. Return of a friend. Appreciation of Level Sync and friends.

While last week had its ups and downs-from the cancellation of the Nyzul run to CoJ's victory over Omega-some good things came in the direction of my adventures and others on the game. Just last tuesday, before attending Xanathos and Ororodos' wedding held in South Gustaberg I "paid my respects" to a rock mount on Vomp Hill. I needed to do this, strange as it sounds, to give thought to friends and aquaintences who are present and those who've quit the game.

It has been, as of this coming March, 7 years playing FFXI. Though I don't have as many level 75 jobs or experienced the game to its maxium potential (Salvage, etc) yet, and though there have been some rough scrapes socially to the brink of wanting to quit the game I still keep going. I want to give it my all even if i don't finish everything 100% on this game. I do it for those that have left the game. I do it for family and friends who have passed on in real life. I do it for myself most especially. I've learned that life, yes, delecate and short. So you want to give it your best. A few of my friends who have quit the game have no regrets that they had not finished thier goals; because while yes, its good to have goals one thing is certain: the game is just digital....the friendship and good times are real. That is more important. Everyone, never forget that ok?

After Vomp Hill, I headed over to the base of the lighthouse where I ran into the rest of the wedding party.

(The wedding party meets up with Syrynx, the chaparone and Best Man *me*)

This has been the 3rd time I've attended a wedding and the 1st time experiencing one outside of a nation city. Everyone was assembled when I arrived, and a few others followed. Surprisingly half of them I knew so it was great seeing old friends. It stunk that Foulei couldn't make it but only because he had to work the day of the wedding. It couldn't be helped since it was arranged by the Weddingmaster GM of the specific day. Syrynx, a long time friend of many, gave us instructions on what we needed to do once we were taken up to the top of the lighthouse. Afterwards she provided us with drinks and fireworks so when the ceremony was over we could celebrate and take screenshots, which are below.

(Wedding party *left*. Bride, Groom, Best Man and Lady *right*)

(Left: Happy Couple;Xan and Orodos. Right: Xan, Luriel, Ororodos, Syrynx)

















(Left: Ororo and myself. Right: Me, Syrynx, Xanathos)

There's more screenshots where that came from which I still need to aquire from Xanathos and the others so expect more images in the near future.


Oh shoot, I should've added this first. Prior to the wedding marked the return of yet another longtime friend; Scarlette!!

( Bumps into Scarlette in Windurst (s) area; brings back old times!)

When I last saw her last summer, she was leveling Dancer. Seems she's picked up where she left off once she returned and is having a fun time with the job. Its good to see her again. In fact she's joined the ranks of CoJ, mostly just to mingle with the rest of us on the linkshell. Currently she's really not into the whole endgame aspect of things right now, which is understandable because, like me, she wants to work on her character progression for a little while.

Progression, the word, has been ongoing lately this week. Last night Foulei, myself, and those who needed completion of Dynamis-Quifim acheived that finally! After about a year we finally got completion. Some good drops came about during the run which I do congratulate the dynamis ls members who aquired them, though I never said so directly. I tend to be rather....quiet during events mostly, as strange as that is.

After the dynamis run was over I hopped on to leveling Samurai. I gained about 3 levels on Thursday, but shockingly enough, I gained 7 levels last night!! Arathas, Envytaru, Dorion, Kirby and Massive invited me, with Foulei as our PL*powerlevel* (prior to the invite Foulei PL'ed me a bit), to join them to level on Quifim Island.
I kinda wanted to keep to myself for the evening but with convincing from Foulei I then graciously accepted the invite to level with them. Sure enough I had a wonderful time and thanks to them I'm now about 3/4ths of the way to getting Samurai to 37 for my warrior! I have to say, Level Sync is a blessing. It really is helpful especially if friends want to get together to acheive a goal such as leveling a job even though the level ranges are so far off. Level Syncing fixes that so there's no limitations to that matter. We did so well and got some fast exp that it was even hard for Foulei to keep up with us as far as healing us goes and I had to ask the group to slow it down to fighting 2 mobs at a time, not 3, haha.
Guys, thank you for the invite and the help. I really appreciated it in the end :)

Well, time flies when one makes posts. It's now noon, on Valentines Day. Its time for me to get ready to spend the day with a special someone after lunch with family first. Have a good day to you all as well!

-Rusty.

Nyzul Frustration and Update.

Good news. Foulei and I saw the long-awaited Underwolrd 3; Rise of the Lycans on Saturday. It was a good movie, and probably the best werewolf special effects movie yet to me. The plot is more of a prequal to the first two movies, if nothing else.
It felt good to actually not be on the game doing something else for a change. We really haven't gone out much since the holidays. I'd like to think that Foulei and I still have lives outside of the game, which we do.

The bad news. Our Nyzul static didn't go through this today. Again. That's almost three weeks now :(. Two of our members, whom have been off and on the game due to thier college semester studies, haven't been on lately. I've been feeling frustrated because of this. While real life priorities take precidence, which I myself respect, the downside is we're not progressing like we should. So I've come up with a proposal to possibly recruit two new members into our group but we would have to see where our two buds game time situations lay before we come to an agreement. I would like for us to actually progress, not constantly cancel. And I for one certainly don't want to quit doing nyzul. Despite what people may think of my opinion, obtaining assault gear is a great substitute as opposed to obtaining the hard-to-obtain stuff out there from land gods and sky gods.

Anyway. Since our static run was canceled today and I felt frustrated I decided to just log out for today. It think it was for the best. It made no sense for me to get this way over a game so I used the best old fashioned method when dealing with a game that frustrates you; I turned it off.

Ultima; the annoying Macy's Day Float. WaWa. Update.

As you can see, CoJ faced up to Proto-Ultima. Every time I hear that name I feel like i'm fighting a really tough Mega Man X boss (damn you to tell Sigma!!). The old days! Foward, we took on Proto-Ultima twice and lost to it twice. Boo! While our first time at fighting it was rather rocky-to be expected for first timers-the second time went extreamly well to us getting it down to 1% vs. 45% prior. That's a really good feat in my opinion.
To the linkshell members who've attended so far, please, please don't give up and don't be discouraged. Keep in mind that we're starting out on doing big events like this ourselves rather than sign up with other groups. That's a good thing. Yes, were going to have tough losses, yes we'll have to repeat stuff over till we get it right. Other groups had to start somewhere and do the same thing, trust me.

The 2nd fight ended rather funny for good ol' Rusty though. We were trying to go all out to finish it off at the 1% mark so I went and did a SATA+Warrior's Charge WS on it. I sure got it's attention because it did Antimatter to my FACE; 2130 pts damage 0.o

As far as some of you know, through chats on Skype with me and Foulei and even on game chat, him and I have mentioned WaWa on countless times. I noticed many of you asked "what's a WaWa???" Well, look no further! I promised you cats some pictures. So, here you go!









And that's the grand tour of Wawa!

The past week or so have been productive online. I completed all of the Ninja scroll quests. Yay! I'm so happy I got my gilz back from when I was leveling Ninja to 37. I was rather lazy in questing them at the time and Foulei had given me his Utsusemi scroll that he had extra of anyway. It's good timing that I got the scrolls and some gil back because, franky, Limbus has left a lot of people strapped.

("Unemployment Line")

I also got thief to 68, 7 more levels to 75, whoohoo!! Frankly in this, I want to thank SE for the wonderful Level Sync and Foulei for the go-ahead to level on further just for the fact that I can Level Sync down to his Dancer, which I want to do. It would be great to have his Dancer leveled. He's worked so hard on it! I was, at first, very jealous that he surpassed me on Red Mage, I admit. But now I'm proud that he's done so.
He was right in saying that I should focus on one job at a time, but if possible only work on two, no more than that; hence Warrior and Thief for now. I had wasted time trying to level multiple jobs when I first started playing but not get any results with my Warrior, which now I have to finish leveling Samurai to 37 for the sake of better Damage Dealing. Lesson learned.

(top image: lvling thf with static, guest starring Xanathos, Limbus LS leader)
(bottom image; Me and Foulei Campagining. His RDM looks spiffeh!!)

That's all for now folks. Untill next time, peace out!!

Kamen Rider.Update. Weblink update.

This site has been lacking a few things so what I did was add some website links of some of my favorite things out there as far as information and entertainment goes. I hope its of interest to you viewers out there. One of the links is a fansubbing site i go to download and watch Kamen Rider (japanese translation "Masked Rider), a 30 year old TV series. I remember seeing a few shows when I was little and people thought I was crazy because it used to be on a really obscure tv channel on a really obscure time; we're talking 11pm on a weekend! The one I saw was poorly translated, kinda like those Kung Fu Theater type of translation :-P

Anyhoo not that many people knew about Kamen Rider, well my peers anyway. The series was off and on from the 80s to the 90s then stopped in the mid 90s. Then a few years ago a friend of mine introduced me to the fansubbing site who picked up the Kamen Rider series from 2000 to present day. It seems that the series took off then, and sure enough its been out every year ever since!

So, to share with you readers what I watch on my spare time, of many shows, here's a little clip of various "henshin" (transform) through some of the Kamen Rider Series in the past several years. Hope you enjoy it.



Aside from "geeking out" on the Kamen Rider goodness, all has been well. Offline I've been busy with work, with also being busy online as well. Between Dynamis, Limbus and doing static runs on monday's as usual, I really have not had a chance to do anything else. There have been days where its frustrating as all get-out and there are days where I just roll with the punches and deal with it. Limbus has been leaving me broke of late in gil so what I have to do is put time aside to farm my tail off, which I'll do in the coming days ahead. I need a break from all the activity on the game anyways.

On the bright side, CoJ (Childeren of Jenova) LS took our first stab at Proto-Ultima last Wednsday! Downside is we lost. Upside is we learned how to try to do the fight next time, tonight hopefully. We just have to rehash our strategy a little bit and hopefully we'll win this time.

No pictures of the fight and other stuff this time around. I still need to upload them but I promise I'll posts some later.

Also, a big congratulations goes to Foulei on his reaching to level 75 Red Mage. Go merit that puppy!!

Untill then, peace out.