I should start an all-Relic (except me) Shantotto party...

FFXIAH.com has been updated with Mini-expansion progress info. Should make finding people for the Full Moon Fountain mission a lot easier by comparison to what it was before.

Like half the people on that list all have relics. O.o

Hawtness.

I'm smarter than Square-Enix. Which seriously isn't saying very much.

Despite being hilariously inept at finding employment, I did ace several courses in the Computer Science part of my BS in CS degree attempt. (My shit rhymes. In an Eminem sort of way. However he spells it. Fuck Eminem.)

Anyway, if you're a sorry bastard like me who failed a "write a decimal number in IEEE binary format" Class once, but motherfucking aced (high five!) Foundations of Computer Science which was all about Finite State Machines (aka the motherfucking computer in front of you) and Regular Expressions (aka...motherfucking regular expressions?), then this makes you fucking sad.Seriously, Square-Enix. "brogame" and "oosale", or whatever the fuck the second URL was that lasted about a day, can be pretty easily parsed from a /tell string with a Regular Expression. If a pathetic fuck like myself can figure out how to filter them, maybe the fucks you're paying stupid amounts of money to neglect FFXI for FFXIV could fucking spend five minutes to fucking implement a non-fucktarded chat filter?

Here's another hint. You could use Heuristics and flag trial accounts with WORldafjhksahdfkjashdfjhd names as probably fucking RMT spam cunts.

Just sayin.'

Ever Exciting Evoliths Emerge! (11/30/2009)

We're pleased to announce the Evolith System is available to all the adventurers of Vana'diel today!

Oh, wait, it's 5 hours and 30 minutes until December and this "Late November" update with Evoliths is nowhere to be seen. GG SE!

P3:FES vs. P4

I wrote up a rather long comment on Spoony's site earlier and decided to post it here as well:

P3 had an interesting desegregation of story and gameplay in how it had the player playing *only* the main character. It limited things like direct control over the other characters in battle, didn't allow you to directly make the other party members cast spells out of battle (Dia and Recarm mostly although you could request them to heal you), and you could only change a person's equipment by talking to them.

Although these things certainly make it more like the player is actually the MC immersed in the game's world, it also wasn't really that much fun. It also broke with JRPG conventions, and was not particularly liked by many gamers.

P4 changed all these things to the more expected traditional form. I think that's for the better personally, although it really didn't matter that much. It also streamlined and improved things a lot of people didn't like (square button fast travel, etc).

As for which was better, I played P4 before playing P3:FES, and have to say I liked P4 better. P3 definitely had a more "epic" story and darker setting. The Journey was interesting and challenging. The Answer was soul-crushingly difficult. The ending to both parts of P3 was pretty awesome as well.

Where I have to give P4 credit though is mostly because of the characters. It might be because you could form Social Links with everyone who joins the Investigation Team and get to know more about them, but for some reason they just really were awesome. The bad endings were genuinely sad, and the good ending was genuinely heart warming (as cheesy as that may sound). I also found the Social Links to be more interesting and better implemented in general. P4 is easier than P3 though on Normal difficulty because of changes to the battle system and because of the Social Link enhancements your teammates get though which for an SMT game is in my opinion a strike against it.

People complain about the repetition of Tartarus in P3 and point to the different dungeons in P4 as an improvement which is something I have to disagree with. The dungeons in both games were essentially just palette swaps of previous ones, and while P4 has shorter/fewer floors to climb there's really not that much difference between the two. If you don't enjoy dungeon crawling you probably won't like either game. If you enjoy it, or don't mind sitting through some, you will probably enjoy both games.

That's my take on it anyway. Atlus needs to put some more games out on something other than the DS already. :P

Also, I really need to get a DS. :P

So there you have it! P4 > P3, but both are good and you should play them.

75 Fishing!

Well, 75.1 actually. But it's effect is truncated to full digits, so that doesn't matter currently. :-P

Fast approaching 78! Now I just need for the GP fish to pick up and to get lucky with a Gugrusaurus. :-D

F#@&ing Seriously?

You need 94 of these fucking things for 1.1k Guild Points? How fucking stoned was the asshole who came up with that shit?

Spend three hours fishing to fatigue to get 1.1k GP? That's amazingly stupid.

Minor Update: The fish in question also DON'T STACK.

Also, on a mostly unrelated note, "fucktard" or "fucktarded" is a pretty widely accepted profanity contraction of "fuck" and "retard."

I'm thinking "fuckrendous" would be a pretty nice addition to the English language. It could be that I'm a cynical asshole, but I think there's lots of things that could be fairly described as "fucking horrendous" on a daily basis. Think of how much time would be saved with describing them as "fuckrendous" while giving some deserving person the finger instead!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope all my fellow US Americans enjoy their Turkey Day today/tomorrow! I'm looking forward to a day of tolerating my relatives and a delicious dinner. Hopefully, we'll actually have some leftover turkey this year.

The meal itself is going to be centered around the bird. I brined a turkey Good Eats style. It's soaking in a salty, sugary chicken broth seasoned with all-spice, rosemary, and peppercorn medley.

The stuffing isn't going to actually be stuffed. Well, not in the bird anyway, it's going to be stuffed into red bell peppers. It'll be composed of challah (Jewish bread made with egg in it so it doesn't fall apart) bread, roasted red onion, celery, and green bell pepper. Some parsley, garlic, sage, and thyme will round out the spice section in it. Stovetop can get fucked next to this stuff's level of awesomeness. The stuff will go into halved, stemmed, and seeded red bell peppers which will go into the oven. They'll probably end up cut in two for serving.

I don't know if there's going to be any cranberry. I don't personally care for the shit and who really wants to eat gelatinized fruit from a can anyway?

There will be some mashed potatoes and mashed sweet potatoes. I don't know if you're supposed to use an 'e' on the end or not and fuck anyone who cares.

Sweet potatoes will also make it into the desert with a sweet potato pie. The crust is typical pie crust, the filling is pumpkin pie spice flavored sweet potato, and the crust on top is an almond brown sugar crispy...thing. I bet it'll taste pretty good. There's also going to be several lemon sponge pies which are a family tradition recipe. Those will be lemony and rad.

And that about covers my Thanksgiving. I hope everyone else will have a nice one or have a nice regular Thursday if it's just another day where you live. Cheers!

Bonanza Ahoy?

Square-Enix is bringing out the Mog Bonanza early this year. They're going a New Years version.

The prizes are mostly similar to last time. Shadow Rings are apparently sooo rad that they're available as two grand prizes.The "Kupon" rewards are the usual Icelands Relic armors with the addition of all the Absolute Virtue drops (that are otherwise unobtainable what with Square-Enix nerfing all the ways to kill the fucking thing).

They also added some retarded to get NM drops like the piercing (or was it slashing?) hand-to-hand weapon from a Fomor NM in a CoP area and the Vilma's Ring which drops off an NM that only spawns when nobody kills the placeholder for half a day. The H2H would be more exciting if SE hadn't added these this update. Which drop off a mob that spawns in a random outdoors area every two or so hours.

I'm not sure whether I'll even bother entering this time. I've gotten absolutely nothing of value from it either of the past two. Somehow I doubt third time will be the charm.

Plus I don't really want 10 inventory spaces taken up for a few months.

Meh.

Awesomeness.

Now in monitor form:Click to enlarge the awesome.
Story about it over at Anandtech.