Entries tagged with gaming

Crossposts: https://canadiandiamond.insanejournal.com/51678.html

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Oh hello there~

How many times have I opened a journal (GJ waaaay back in the day, LJ also way back now I guess, IJ, and now DW) and said 'hey it's been a long time but I'll try to write more often!' and didn't follow up on that? This may end up being that many times plus 1 but we'll see.

Life goes on; work is work. Nothing new on that front and I've never been one to talk about work stuff online anyway, and that hasn't changed.

As for pastimes, they still come and go too. Currently I'm trying to jumpstart my writing with another writing class... I did several pre-COVID, found a group online shortly after the pandemic, but it died off again about a year or so ago. I did more online classes in April or so, and another round that's happening now and ending in a few weeks, which has been helpful. I'm about caught up with my WIP to where I was before, with revisions and edits, and the goal is to finish an extremely rough draft in the not-too-distant future. How far into the future, you ask? That's to be determined, but I'd love to be optimistic and say by year's end. Time will tell.

Reading usually goes along well with reading, and I've been doing more of that this year. I'm currently enjoying the first of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which just put out its seventh and (I think?) final volume, so that's a lot to work on. Not to mention the 3427623847 books kicking around the house, but as someone once told me, book purchasing is a completely different hobby from book reading. Guess which one I excel at the most?

Gaming is still a big part of things for me... Final Fantasy XIV is the largest part of that too. I've finished all the main story quests, but haven't gotten into the raiding scene and never will again I don't think. I roleplayed there pretty hard for awhile, but that's pretty much died off these days too. I still play it daily, working on leveling up jobs and things like that, which is still fun at least. Other than that, I enjoy Fortnite too and collecting skins / doing battle pass things there. Marvel Rivals comes out December 6th and I think that'll get some playtime from me too.

Guitar playing has almost ceased entirely, and I stare at my acoustic almost every day but still haven't changed the strings on it yet. My brother-in-law Nik was the last to do so in... 2015? Eep. I do have a newer electric from ~2-3 years ago but haven't taken that out in ages either. Maybe during my Christmas break, as I'm taking a few weeks off at my boss's insistance (he may be retired this time next year so he suggested I take the break while I can, haha). We will see.

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Before I forget

Making a quick entry now, as the subject indicates, before I forget. Or more accurately, before I go to bed and then get all caught up in work tomorrow, then come home and lose myself in a game or something before going to bed late and doing the same thing again the next day.

Work has been pretty overwhelming lately and while it's not going to be quite as rough in theory for the next while, it'll be busy. I had two major trials set for mid-May and early-June that both went away for different reasons, which was good but still resulted in a lot of work leading up to them. My boss is also leaving to run for politics again, we won't know until the end of this week if he'll be back or not, and if he isn't it'll make things a major headache as we try to absorb / send his files out (hoping if it comes to that we won't have to take them all as he has some really seriously complicated things but we'll see, no good to worry about that just now).

As a result I've been horrible with writing in general, which is why I wanted to spit this out now when I should be sleeping instead of waiting for later when I likely won't do it. I come home, play Heroes of the Storm (HotS) or Diablo III (D3), watch TV (sometimes at the same time), then go to bed. That's pretty much it. I really love HotS and play it a fair bit, though that's giving way to D# lately as a friend of mine who hadn't played it at all tried it and bought it like, what, almost 2 months ago now?

I started playing D3 a bit as a result of an awesome HotS YouTuber I follow, MFPallytime, who plays D3 as well and has some videos I watched and wanted to try. I bought D3 when it launches like 3+ years ago and finished it way back then with a Demon Hunter who I only got to like level 30 or something. You could get to 60 back then, and there was an expansion maybe a year and a half back or so that increased that to 70 and added another class. I bought that too but never played it until a few months ago, thanks to Pallytime's vids.

Also, to go back to HotS a bit, I love Pallytime and his group, Squadron, who stream HotS (and other games too I think but they're all about HotS now) on Twitch and YouTube, and even Sara watches them with me now (we're also been enjoying making our way through 30 Rock and Geek & Sundry's Titansgrave: Ashes of Valkana series too which is worth watching fyi). There are a ton of them and they're all fun and awesome streamers, and if you're at all interested or curious in them or HotS you should check them out. Their YouTube stuff is at youtube.com/games which is such an easy URL to remember haha.

Anyway, D3. I started messing about with a Wizard build that Pally was using, and rediscovered a love for the game and grinding it I guess, hah. I mentioned it to my friend and he bought a copy after trying it out, and we leveled our characters to 70 together. There's a gem in the game you can get which, when leveled itself high (I know, I know, I just like mindless grinding and min/maxing I guess XD), allows you to slot it in a weapon and reduce that item's required level to 1. What does this mean? It means you can get an amazing level 70 weapon, slap this gem in it, and give it to a newly made level 1 character to powerlevel them to 70 haha. It's so much fun that I know have almost all 6 classes leveled to 70, with the last one being at 60 because even I get a little tired of grinding sometimes. XD

My friend has put WAY more hours into it than I have and as a result has a lot more paragon levels. Paragon levels are the ultimate expression of grinding to me - once you hit 70 you can still get XP, it just goes to additional levels that let you add points to any character you own in the form of, like, +armour %, +attack speed %, things that scale with your character so they're not straight overpowered but really do add a lot. Those paragon levels can go on forever I think, and right now I'm at 210 or so, and my friend is over 300 haha. That's an account wide level though which is nice.

So yeah, grind grind grind. I like it though, and it's exactly what my brain wants after the craziness that's sadly become a regular fixture at work these days. My apologies for not writing here more, or for being slow to reply to e-mails as well. I'm really hoping things get better, and they have slightly but we'll see what happens with the boss. For now I'm still happy to grind things out as a digital panacea, and just wanted to check in with y'all for what it's worth.

And now I sleep before work tomorrow. Hope everyone had a great weekend and that this week goes well! :)

Current Mood: happy

Entry tags:

changes

Things have been very busy as of late, but it's been going well. I've officially got one month punched at the new job (as does

believeitup with hers) and last week consisted of four days of training, from Monday to Thursday. They actually had me booked for two weeks of training, which was just ridiculous, and they shortened it to only one, which in turn became four days. Two weeks might've been appropriate for someone just starting out, perhaps the second week would be shadowing a senior solicitor around to all the different courts and whatnot, but I didn't need it. Neither did the other two trainees with me, one who had 12 years at the bar (I'm just shy of 9), albeit mainly in NS, and the other who used to work with Legal Aid before, as well as the Crown, and who was also a judge, haha. It was great information though, for the most part, and it was really nice to put faces to a lot of names. I learned how to input my hours into the computing platform we use, and consequently have to backtrack and figure out just exactly what I did in order to post it, heh, but it's good to know going forward it'll be easier.

I've also replaced my desktop, which broke a few weeks ago or so now. At first I was looking at online sites to custom build my new rig, but I was unable to build one for less than $1,500.00, and that was before delivery, haha. So instead I checked out the local stores and got a nice little mid-level machine that was on sale for only $549.00, a huge difference, and it'll be more than capable for what I want to do - surfing, writing, playing the odd MMO or game. My old machine, which was 5+ years old I think, could do all of that, on lower settings for some games, but the point is this is still a huge upgrade and I'm happy with it. The one MMO I've been playing lately, Marvel Heroes, ran fairly slowly on the old one with all low settings but this machine can handle the highest settings with no problem, which is awesome. And with the money I "saved" I picked up a new Xbox 360 for $100.00 off at Best Buy, since my old one is completely dead, so that's something too. Just need to get a special hard drive transferring device to move my old data onto the new one, since I can't do so via USB with the old one being completely dead now, d'oh.

There's not much else to report at this time. I'm hoping to have a good chat with my boss about a Christmas / early January break, as I still want to go to England with my buddy around that time. Before I go booking any tickets though I need to be sure I can go. I know I have more than enough vacation time, I just need to make sure he's going to be around, since I won't be. It shouldn't be a problem but I think I saw his calendar mention something about holidays around that time. Here's hoping he just meant holidays in general, for Christmas / New Year's, and not that he'll be going anywhere himself.

Writing is going well, but I've been pretty slow with it for the most part. Which is ok, since I haven't had a looming deadline for awhile now, but there's some new challenges I'll be signing up for that'll fix that, as well as Yuletide time coming up very soon. Having a desktop should help with that too, I'm hoping, so we'll see how that goes. :)

Current Mood: okay

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new ways to fall apart

I haven't been updating this as much as I should, but will try to cover everything that's been going on lately, with convenient LJ cuts and everything. :)

( On Work )

( On Writing )

( On Hockey )

( On Reading )

( On Movies )

( On Gaming )

( Misc. )