Aside from forgetting the whole ‘go to bed’ ordeal on Saturday night, it was overall a pretty good weekend. I got SimCity 2000 Special Edition, which is a CD I’ve had for years, to fully run properly under Windows 11. A feat that I didn’t think was even possible. SimCity Classic Deluxe on the other hand worked right out of the box (albeit I had to install it within a Windows XP virtual machine first). Classic is a hoot, but I much prefer 2000 or even better 3000 to it.

I watched Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 as the weekend movie, and that was good. It was a little slow in places, but I enjoyed it. Onwards to 3 whenever they decide to create and release it. A dash of playing Genshin and Date Everything to round it all out, just aside from getting a smidgen more sleep is all. This week is a 4-dayer, so I’ll get some bonus snoozing in for certain this weekend. I like to take a day or two off in the spring here and there since it’s such a long run from January 1st to Memorial Day in my industry.

I do have a page (not a post) that I will be writing either this week or next weekend about how I lost a friend on Friday evening, heading to the Astral Plane and he will be direly missed. He was a friend that I [Aikirees] made in Final Fantasy XI, and we were pretty close, so his absence will be missed and I want to put up a page so it can be read and linked to instead of part of these posts. Rest in peace, Hykiri, you are and were such a wonderful friend to me, my RL friends, and everyone from Vana’Diel and beyond.

Have a wonderful week y’all! Kick tails, and hug a friend.

Well yesterday was, it was the spiritual anniversary of Eorzea Cartographers alongside when I first got involved with the (now dissolved) Aether Event Center that started off this wonderful adventure six(!) years ago. It was right after the Saint Patrick’s Day Murder Mystery show, that I look back on very fondly, when this all started.

I had planned something a bit bigger in terms of a post, and eventually the entirety of the EOCA story will be written and finalized, but I took yet another deep dive into technical tinkering last night and undid a lot of the weekend’s rest. This week just ramped up tenfold too, so have to keep moving forward kicking more tails.

Y’all do the same and have a wonderful Tuesday!

This weekend was almost darn near perfect in regards to how things used to be. The only difference is how Saturday morning went, and that in itself was massively productive. The replacement part worked perfectly and now my main office PC is up to full power, as it was immediately put to use finishing up the disc backups.

The caveat is that did take the vast majority of the day (albeit I did sleep in a lot since I was overtired as usual), so I just let that roll into the evening routine. I changed movies from what I was going to watch: Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, to Zootopia 2. I can see why it was applauded as a wonderful movie and it certainly was, now if I can just get the song out of my head. It’s a great tune, don’t get me wrong, but a really potent earworm.

Sunday started really late, partially on purpose, but I kind of wish I 1) went to sleep a bit earlier on Saturday, and 2) didn’t get sidetracked on a small technical fidget. It worked out but caused a minor crunch last night. So what little I did want to accomplish last night, I’ll just nudge to tonight before retreated to the living room and getting a bit more rest in before the usual weekly routines kick back in on Tuesday.

Still on a decent track for Patch 7.5, but still need to check on the Inspector again before that. With weekends getting a little lighter, at least until the next Garage Project Phase, it shouldn’t be too long now to continue that investigation.

Aside from that, and getting some pretty decent rest, that really was the the weekend for the most part – sprinkle in some Genshin Impact and fidgeting with some PS5 items, and that rounded it all out. This coming weekend is a bit more lighter, so it should feel like it was before all of these side projects came up, even if it is for a fleeting amount of time before the next one.

Happy Monday y’all! Kick tails! Y’all got this!

The replacement part arrived safely the other day, it got a smidgen lost out there but it has made it. I’m worried that this weekend will be a repeat of last weekend, for in which I do not want (or need anymore lack of sleep), so hopefully this new drive works out well and I can finish up some loose ends in my home office.

There is the alternative concern about the big project being delayed even further, so that will have to swing back around by next weekend at the latest; otherwise it’s going to be a really hot one when I get back to it. That in itself is fine, but it will just take a little bit longer – ideally, however, will get to rest a bit more over this weekend and plan what I can on a more relaxed pace.

With 7.5’s date being April 28th, that helps plan out things as well, and we should either be fully ready for it or mostly since there’s been a few weeks here and there where we haven’t completed a weekly circuit. It’s still a good amount of time, so shouldn’t be a big concern yet. The plan for that is after 13 weeks, we’re basically done aside from some loose ends like Class Quests, but 7.5 looks to be a pretty good sized update, and we’ll be looking forward to it.

Y’all have a wonderful weekend ahead!

Part of what I’ve been backing up is a lot of old disc games, which I might have mentioned prior, and has gone off with about a 95% success – depending on DRM and/or disc rot. Paralleling that was creating two virtual machines as a test bed for all of these old games/software to see how they would work coming from those enviroments into a far newer one, or even Wine for that matter.

The restults have been pretty positive aside from having to deal with the DRM discs. It’s just been a hugely nostalgic feeling playing some of these older games, especially under Windows XP. Max Payne, Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Tiberian Sun, Rollercoaster Tycoon, the SimCities, The Quake Series, my first original Half-Life discs, it just goes on from there. There’s a lot of old warm fuzzy feelings and I could just lose myself for hours if I allowed myself to (for in which I cannot since time is very much a luxury I cannot waste), and it’s been a good alley to revisit.

It certainly gives me an idea to resurrect one of my old Pentium 3’s or 4 PC’s I still have lying around, but that’s a project for another year. A replacement part got delayed arriving, which I’m hoping will show up prior to the weekend, and that will help finish off this little side-tracked project and get back to the far meatier one that I really want done by the end of this year.

I wanted to talk about this last week, but everything got ahead of me.

So fairly recently, I upgraded my PS5 M.2’s SSD with a larger sized one. Now, I didn’t pay the absurd ‘AI inflation’ price for it, but this adventure may have been why. So, I’m telling this tale to help out anyone that gets into this predicament while installing a new SSD into their PS5.

Initially I placed the new SSD, a Samsung EVO Pro 990 with Heatsink, formatted it like the PS5 wanted, and was greeted with a ‘to slow’ error. The benchmark the PS5 placed it at was ~3307mbps, which was oddly slow. After some research, it appeared I needed to upgrade the firmware to fix this issue. My first thought was to just used an external USB adaptor, but come to find out, one cannot do that since it masks what the SSD actually is. Okay, so the next thing was PCIe to M.2 adapter; which I didn’t own. Finally the last option was to just place it into an open M.2 slot on a PC motherboard with one available – this is what I ended up doing.

I didn’t think I had an available slot on my newest PC, but apparently this board has a bonkers 3 slots for M.2’s to pick from and two of them are easily accessible. So, I turned off the PSU, and installed the new SSD into said slot, booted up, installed Samsung Magician, and it noticed it immediately stating it needed new firmware.

Perfect, I let it update the firmware, force shut down the PC per the software’s request, and then decided to reformat the SSD so Windows could see it and I could test it. The tests came back beautiful, and I shut it all down to put it back into the PS5. Now, during all that, I did boot up the PS5 with no SSD so it would rebuild the database noting it did not have one installed (supposedly this is to keep the PS5 from not booting). All those steps being done, it booted up and formatted it like before, but this time the speed jumped up to a whopping ~6608mbps – perfect!

What about the old one? I did the whole process over again, but this time formatted it as exFat to use as external storage for PS4 games, and that worked out great/a lot easier.

So, if anyone out there has an issue with a new Samsung EVO 990 with heatsink; plop it into your PC – whether with a PCIe or on the motherboard directly, run Samsung Magician, and hopefully y’all should be good to go! Just, probably do all this before trying it the first time to save some extra hoops and loops to jump through.

Aside from a very lack of sleep, this weekend went pretty well overall. I got a lot of software backed up via ISO’s (except for one very stubborn one!) and got to watch Wicked: For Good. I must say that the Wicked adaptation has got to be one of if not the best adaptations of a Broadway play I’ve seen thus so far. The only caveat is that it’s just absurdly long, so definitely pace oneself.

Next weekend will be Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, and hopefully a lot more rest preferably. I do have one more technical repair, but that should be done as early as tonight depending on how I feel. The timewarp was about as rough as usual, but being up late burning the midnight oil did not help at all fighting with technical issues. I really just want it all to slow down back to the days of old when I could casually work on whatever (or nothing) like before. Soon I really hope.

Little Ladies’ Day this year was a lot of fun – the quest itself was really quick, but the FATE involved to partake in a concert was a lot of fun even if a bit silly (in all the good ways!!) This week should be more normal as last week was heavily truncated to work in the home office for a lot of it. Not much aside from that, so y’all have a wonderful week ahead and kick lots of tails!

Nothing like major, but just lately there’s been either issues or items that need to be addressed/repaired. It’s starting to delay bigger projects since a few of them have been necessary to prioritize. RL’s usual craziness has just compounded it all.

It kind of just hit me when I heard last night that Patch 7.45 dropped; it’s been getting a lot more difficult lately to keep up with it all (and the motive to be around is diminished), that I’m kind of at a crossroad for what I want or need to do. If this was the lull of 7.55 to 8.0 then this would be a no-brainer: take a long break and come back and get ready.

I enjoy it, I really do, but yeah I really need to think about where and what to do going forward sooner than later. It may just be a long break which has happened in the past for previous MMO’s around this time as well (8th year will be next Febrary). Even the projects have been generally good and/or a learning experience with one being downright a hoot upon resolving.

I don’t know, but I’ll try to post here when I can to keep everyone up with it all as it unfolds.

Kick tails y’all!

Not really a ‘weekend recap,’ but kind of is. Overall it went well with some inanely infuriating technical hurdles that kind of worked out in the end. Nothing disastrous, just a lot of trial and error in the very early morning hours.

Saw family, and got some major RL tasks done – well one, but it was an important one. Caught up on the last of weekly tasks, and played a bit of Genshin Impact really. Kind of quiet, even with having to run around a bit. Next weekend is a lot more quiet with just planning and maybe some more blog scheduling.

I haven’t intended it to thin out to 1-2 posts as week; just need to survive this huge project and things can start to feel more like they used to.

Y’all have a wonderful Monday, and stay warm out there!

I actually planned on purpose a weekend to just take it easy and not worry about projects.

…Only for a project to happen to be done as an emergency as something needed to be repaired. The good about it is that Saturday was for the most part just that: a planned day of really just doing nothing, but then Sunday became the repair project that led to being perpetually behind on just about every other aspect of how the day was supposed to go.

So, while yes it was a bit frustrating (and costly), the overall could have been a lot worse. I’ll probably try again this weekend with a little bit of home office work that’s required on Saturday before seeing Mama K in the evening. We all did finally do the Valentione’s Day event, and that was a lot of fun – was nice to do a smol instance event again with little to no stakes. Weekly tasks went fine, but whatever warmth I felt before was dashed away again.

Might take another week off from Final Fantasy XIV to do other things – like trying to finish Horizon: Forbidden West as I think I’ve reached the final Story Quest for the base-game, and I feel like this is going to be a doozy!

Y’all have a wonderful Monday and week ahead! Y’all got this!

I was planning a morning recap the other day, but hooooooeeeeeyyy that leg of the garage project took EIGHT hours to do. Aside from that, and the result being a bit less than anticipated (they do function and look overall fine – especially the bottom shelf), the weekend was fairly uneventful. More Fallout Season 2 and I did start Starfleet Academy with mixed feelings so far. I think this weekend concludes the 2nd season of Fallout, so I’ll pivot over to Startfleet Academy for a bit logner.

With that leg of the project done, now it’s on to the larger piece and that is a lot more outside work. The temperature out is a smidgen too cold, so will have to wait a bit and honestly I have no idea just yet how to accomplish the step. So, I’ll give few weeks rest, see family, and maybe finally get the trains working again before delving back into all this.

There’s really not much else to update on; more progress in Horizon, and dabbling a bit back into Genshin Impact (a breather from Sea of Stars), and we did take an entire 8 days off from Final Fantasy XIV which really didn’t make me miss it all that much. Returning to that however and with taking a few weeks off from (big) projects, should be a good time to catch up on a bit more rest.

Y’all stay warm, it really is a doozy out there right now!

This actually might be the first full week I don’t adventure around Eorzea – like at all. We all might do the bare minimum of weekly tasks over the weekend, but for the most part I’ve been either pre-planning this leg of the project for Saturday or playing Horizon II: Forbidden West, which is now reaching the 100th hour at ~65% complete. This game is huge to say the least, but it’s been really good and a lot of fun to be going through.

Hopefully it all goes (relatively) well with this part of the project, then it should give me at least a few weeks to rest up before the next phase, and that one is a doozy.

Y’all have a wonderful Thursday! Kick tails!

While I’d have liked to have a bit more active week here, this past weekend was just sideways progress all around. Parts of it were nice and relaxing, but a lot of it was trial and error with an emphasis on error. With the temperatures being a lot lower right now it’ll be good to do some more outside work this weekend, so probably a quieter week until I can get settled back further into a weekend routine.

This’ll happen as once this project is all paced out and done with, that will really help things, but it’s just a big undertaking. Aside from that, more Fallout Season 2 progress and a bit of the usual weekly routines.

Y’all stay warm, out of the weather, enjoy a nice roaring fireplace with a hot drink, and kick tails!

Finally got some home office work in, and it felt good. This week has some scheduled appointments, but it should be fine once it’s all done. One of them being an eye appointment that is well overdue as it’s getting a bit difficult to see accurately.

It really wasn’t a hugely eventful weekend for once, but that’s going to get back to it either this coming weekend and/or the following one: there’s only so many more cooler weekends that I’ll have access to before it starts to get warmer again. The bigger part of this project will have to be planned out and ideally done before April, otherwise it might be postponed again until 2027 – this project really needs to end this year as it’s been 9 years in the planning. Once it is done though, even if it’s the biggest/only project of the year, it will conclude the first decade’s planned projects; that alone will feel line a great milestone.

Aiki, Lizz, Laureine, and I having completed all of Arcadion late last week (and into the early hours of the weekend), it’s mostly just back to the usual routines until 7.5. That’s not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing and if we did address the eternal 9002 issues (I am really hoping) then we can also get back to working on more side & fun tasks like decorations and a certain submarine that’s been sitting in the workshop for I think a year or so now.

The Leporines, meanwhile, are having a far more interesting and adventuring time while attempting to finish up a lot of side-quests within A Realm Reborn before the two of them move on to beginning Heavensward together. They still have a bit of a ways to go in that regards – primarily to a certain Mail Moogle – but it’ll get done eventually. However, there was a pause to all that over the weekend for them to finally tie the knot and make it official (to the surprise of Reinylla that she accepted to begin with!)

One of these days we’ll actually do the new Monster Hunter trial and the class quests, but I think we’re going to do that closer or well into the 7.5 lull. Beastmaster we are still curious about as well, especially Aikirees coming from her first live in Final Fantasy XI.

Technical-stuffs-wise, some audio work and system work. My oldest PC has mysteriously lost some RAM, which seems to be the fault of the sockets themselves; so that’s going to be another Saturday afternoon to go and aggressively try and fix. Worse case I can’t due to age, but it’s worth a shot. Trains still idling, but that I’ll just plan for another weekend to fix and get all moving again.

That’s all for this morning, y’all have a wonderful Monday and kick tails! Y’all got this!

The cousins went and crushed the final tier of the Archadion last night, and it was excellent. This was a solid tier as all four battles didn’t feel oddly harder than the other. It tends (at least to me and my experience) that the 3rd one of all tiers tends to be the ‘cursed’ one which is either more difficult for some reason, or just always rough to get through. I’d rank Arcadion as a whole probably 2nd or 3rd favorite set thus so far – I mean, nothing is ever going to top Alpha and Omega. Battle-wise, I’d say and easy 1st, but for story, 2nd or 3rd. Give them a go if y’all haven’t the whole tier (overall) will not disappoint.

Aside from that, been dealing with a whole lot of perpetual disconnects, which has been a battle in itself. I know the onslaught of DDoSes has probably had SquareEnix put up some sort of defenses, which is great, but I think it might be affecting players just trying to play the game. Trying something out as a recommendation, so we’ll see if that helps (really hoping). Some more net upgrades are happening next week, so we’re hoping that helps a bit too. It has(had?) gotten to the point where I was just going to hang it up and go back to Horizon: Forbidden West full time for a while.

Which isn’t to say I’m still chipping away at the titantular game and its story. Hitting the 90th hour now at max level with only 55% of the base-game done so far. It’s been a grand time there for certain. This weekend will be a lot less work-intensive so I can rest, but still more office at home things to do ideally with more Fallout Season 2 as well so should be good.

Y’all have a Happy Friday and kick tails this weekend!