It’s been a minute, and with it just a whirlwind of RL stuffs along with it. Overall mostly good, but now we’re in what is simply dubbed “Hell Month” since one of the owners is out of the country to visit family for the next month or so. The other owner will be doing the same in a couple of weeks (but only for a week) so that’s really going to be rough.

On top of all that, last week I was involved (not the fault of) a 5-car accident. Everyone involved is fine and it was a fairly civil incident except for a couple of onlookers being brash asses – Florida courtesy, am I right? As a former traveler who’s been to 46 states all by road, if anyone asks me was the ‘worst city is to drive through’ my answer is always just ‘Florida.’ You’d be surprised how many folks are surprised by this as it’s surprisingly not L.A. Those are stories for another day.

So, with that whole accident, my car of 16 years was decimated beyond drivability and as of writing this uncertain as to how much the damage cost will be. I’ve been on and off with insurance phone calls the last few days so thank the Twelve for my earpiece so I can continue to work, but it’s been just another level of exhaustion on top of Hell Month. The silver lining is I already have a plan post-vehicle, so once this is all addressed, I can pull the trigger and move quickly into getting over all of this. Just… all the memories and traveling I did in that car make that vehicle worth as much as my house in sheer sentimental value and I don’t think any other vehicle I personally own will do such travels ever again and that makes me really sad.

I’ve been to all parts of DFW in that car, so many journeys with old friends, been to Austin and back multiple times, and even took it halfway across the nation to get to Florida for when I moved here. It’s been a wild ride with it and now it’s more than likely all over unceremoniously.

*sigh* Y’all kick tails this week and hopefully y’all have a wonderful 4th of July weekend ahead!

I kind of been “dropping the ball” per se with updates and posting, but I’ve kind of been redirecting my weekend energy/time to other things. I’m fine though, everything is fine just kind of par for the course right now. That in itself is a bit off since it’s supposed to slow a bit in the summer time, but there has not been any slowing of momentum – this is both good and bad, but mostly annoying as to how it has been handled.

I could go into a whole ordeal of a discussion about that, which in itself won’t make me feel better nor change anything so just best to go with it. it’s a paradox of a feeling as I’m at a point in my industry where I do in fact like what I’m doing, but if the projects were handled juuuust a bit better, then it would be darn near perfect. That being said outside of it all, there’s been other projects I’m starting to begin to focus on since my main big one for the year got shot down due to vehicle repairs.

Downtime has been consisting of the usual: working on some home office projects (server, some personal doodles, etc), a little Final Fantasy XIV, some Genshin, and a lot of Neverness to Everness. Final Fantasy XIV in particular I usually will return along with Aiki once or twice a week to maintain things as well as some minor weekly tasks, and that has been fine. We still have a long way to Evercold, and I’d rather be adventuring when I feel like it while in the meantime playing other things (like NTE in particular) that have been just oodles of fun. Last night tacking care of small tasks kind of felt… you know that feeling when you go back to a place you just moved out of and you’re there for the very last time and get that mixed feeling? It kind of felt like that.

It’s not all melancholy I assure y’all, and the Saturday evenings have been great (sans mistiming a certain galaxy bound plumber’s release date). Got a new catsuit and lived in that for a weekend. Also slowly getting able to have time to work on the trains after what feels like an eternity. Finished Cuphead and now on to Lucifer since I never finished that while waiting for Strange New Worlds to come back soon.

I think that’s enough rambly updates for this one. Y’all kick tails. Midweek~! Almost there!

Between last weekend and everything else happening, I just didn’t have time to talk about anything last week. I think I had a post window open at least twice during the week only for it to be squelched by interruptions. Mother’s Day Weekend versus this weekend were basically two sides of different coins. Mother’s Day weekend was bonkers busy celebrating both the namesake as well as Mama K’s birthday, so it was a great time overall but it did tire me out.

Whereas this weekend was a lot more relaxing working in the home office and catching up on things. Added some more music to the server and watched more of the Cuphead series, and that’s been overall enjoyable. Next weekend will be Super Mario Galaxy as I believe comes out the 19th so will be looking forward to that for the Saturday night main event.

In between it all has been roughly the same with slowly finishing out the last of acquiring the raid coin for the week with Aiki, and the slow plan of saying farewell to the cousins as we head closer to Evercold. There’s still a bit to do, but we’re going to space it out a lot more since we have so much time and I really don’t want to 100% burn out. NTE has got my attention on the other hand a lot more than I had anticipated with its rather dense little city (currently) that it has, and it’s been really enjoyable. There was one night last week I had all the intention of hopping around Eorzea with Aikirees, but instead settled (heavily sidetracked) into playing NTE for the entirety of the evening. Can’t really complain as it just keeps going!

I suspect this week is going to either be steady or just absurd depending on how many people forget that this weekend is a Holiday weekend. One would be surprised as to how many folks tend to wait until the last minute to put an order in for something, and last week was kind of full of that, so it doesn’t bode well. Got a pet project done before some new equipment arrives today, which is a mixture of excitement and displacement for the office. Once the dust is settled, it should keep the flow of things back on track for a long spell or so.

I think that catches everything up from the gap of posts, hopefully some blips this week before the holiday weekend, and we’ll see what that entails aside from a lot more purposeful downtime. Happy Monday ya’ll! Kick so much tails this week!!

I didn’t pre-plan this one, or anything really for the week. The big adjustment/update/fix/whatever this weekend was an incredibly long overdue router upgrade. When one crashed the entire network to download something, it was probably the omen that it was time to do so. Even the tech who came out to work on my line said that even the ISP might knock it off the network sooner than later.

While the process took A LOT longer than planned, the result was more understanding and control of said home network, which is a nice big win and it’s a lot quicker from what I can tell. I just wish it didn’t take ~6 hours of adjustments and corrections across the entirety of the network to do so.

Aside from that, kind of puddled along with the normal things a weekend offers. Dabbled at bit in Genshin Impact, but the big highlight was starting Neverness to Everness, or NTE for short, which feels very similar in terms of game structure to Genshin, but a lot more bonkers, flashy, and fighting styles. It’s a great time and the world (city) that it’s in is really pretty. The only thing I don’t like is the map, which reminds me of Saints Row IV’s map – all kind of gray scale with colorized icons which do pop very nicely.

It was a fun great time so far, even getting a little carried away Saturday night playing it. Got back to watching the Cup Head series (I thought I finished that??) as the dinner/evening routine too, and that was fun/perfect for how the router adventure went.

Back to it this week which is mostly normal with Mother’s Day & Mama K’s Birthday being this upcoming weekend. That’ll be a lot of fun. Still mulling and planning long-term projects and ideas out, and that in itself is nothing new. That’s all for this Monday; happy May the 4th, and kick tails this week!

Y’all got this~!

Kind of quick for this recap; weekend went mostly well, aside from near-instant hypocritical karma Saturday night that indirectly might have caused a health-related flare up (I think it was caused from an earlier incident but staying up late, or trying to, didn’t help). So that’s the end of attempting anymore Saturday late-nighters.

Finished My Little Pony: Make Your Mark (Gen 5), but I don’t think I can recommend it. The stand-alone movie: New Generation I certainly can, but if one is looking to enjoy ponies, I’d stick with Friendship is Magic (Gen 4). Not sure what to move onto now, might give something a rewatch or get back onto Studio Ghibli movies.

Not really much else, kind of restful and we did get that last little hurrah in before the chonker that is Patch 7.5 that’s out tomorrow. For the most part looking forward to it, and what it will entail to help lead us towards Evercold. Along with also seeing the end of the Vana’Diel raids (and crying through it again), so should be fun times. Throw in a smidgen of Genshin Impact for good measure and that rounded it all out for this weekend.

Happy Monday & Patch 7.5 Eve y’all! Kick tails this week! Y’all got it!

So firstly, Happy North America FanFest 2026 Eve, I know this has been something a lot of folks have been looking forward to, and soon thereafter Patch 7.5. Personally, I’m more interested (or kind of numb) rather than excited for it all, and that’s definitely more a ‘me’ thing than anything really. There’s upcoming things in 7.5 I am looking forward to seeing as well, and what it means in the grandeur future of Eorzea (both story and my own adventures).

Beastmaster looks to be really neat and a rather surprisingly big departure from what I was expecting, which was more like FFXI’s variant or WoW’s Hunter Class. I don’t think any of us will give it a go right out of the gate, but perchance the latter half of 7.5 we might give it a go if time allows.

I’m still kind of in ‘rest’ mode, trying to get my sleep on the weekends where it was way before I went on a project rampage (it’s better), but then there was the whole car breaking down and that ate up some time with Easter thrown into the mix. A small game room project was tossed in during a weekday for good measure (and a bad idea), but it really helped the lighting in there!

We have dabbled in returning to Eorzea before 7.5 to at least get back into the swing of it and attempt to get one more piece of equipment prior, and we’re looking pretty good there. I think we’re on track for taking a major break by June if everything goes to plan. As for 8.0, well it could be tough depending on the Expansion announcement, the community, 7.5, and RL – so there could be some shake ups with us or EOCA as a whole. It’s all speculative right now and something will form when the time comes.

Aside from an Eorzea break, been playing other games on the PS5, mostly a lot of Genshin since I kind of fell in love with the world/story/characters. Not so much the Gatcha part, albeit I have partaken a smidgen for the kicks of it (mostly to fill out elements I was missing!) This all in itself has been a really nice pivotal change and something I want to do more going forward, even into Patch 8.0 and beyond. There’s really old projects I want to get back to and I’m in my early 40’s now, so there’s the ‘Future Planning’ variant I’ve been thinking about a lot lately too.

Lots to ponder, plan, and enjoy, but for now back to the present – y’all have a wonderful Thursday and have fun enjoying both Patch 7.5 and North America’s FanFest if I don’t post anything before it’s all over. Y’all kick some major tail out there and y’all got this!

There’s been a bit happening behind the scenes the last couple of weeks. Easter Weekend was okay – there was a botched repair job done that is to be addressed this week sometime (not one I did personally), but it ate up a lot of my Saturday in the process. It was sideways productive nonetheless. Easter Sunday seeing family was probably the highlight as the evening was pretty enjoyable.

Last week I took off from Final Fantasy XIV for various reasons: power outages, sick, getting home too late, etc., but even with all of that I just… didn’t care? This is the second time in a patch cycle I flat out had no drive to want to play, which has never happened before. It is coming up on the 8th year playing consecutively, so I am really considering taking a full break for 8.0 and beyond – just skip the entire expansion altogether and see how I feel afterwards. There’s just other games & projects I want to pursue and that feeling of burnout is really starting to set in.

I do have a few small things that I want to post, including a new Fashion Report Adventure since the last one – that’s been a long while no less! – and I’ll get to them eventually, but it might just be quiet here for a spell until I can get some things sorted out and I can get a lot more rest like the old times again.

In the meantime, y’all kick tails, and y’all got this!

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.