Wednesday, May 24, 2017

[Off Topic]: Shiny Shenanigans!

    Well, there's a new patch today, which shouldn't really surprise anyone since Wednesday is always patch/reset/weekly goody bag day. But this week we get a special treat! And it's right up my alley! That's right, it's all about shinies this week! It runs until the 24th (today), until next Wednesday, the 31st! Here's the details on what's happening with this shiny extravaganza!

     Trion awknowledges that artifact hunting is one of us Ascendeds' most beloved pastime. I mean seriously, who DOESN'T like shiny hunting, or spends sometimes hours at a time poring over a zone so they can complete a set?? Or maybe that's just me...? I absolutely love filling in my artifact sets and when they complete it's sooooo very satisfying! I'm so proud of myself that I was able to finish off most of Silverwood and Gloamwood just by patiently spending hour upon hour in those zones, looking for those ever elusive shinies I need to complete my sets! Of course I'll admit to spending a pretty penny on the AH as well for the few left that I couldn't find. But 95% of the artifact sets I complete, I do myself! And I'm so proud of that! I love shinies and I love when I discover new ones because there's the potential for a tiny tidbit of story to be revealed to me to better understand my beloved world of Telara! Telara is like a second home to me, but at the same time I'm a stranger to it still. There's so many things I really want to learn more about, and the artifact system definitely helps with that!
     That being said, now we have a chance at getting our sets completed this week! Log in between now and next Wed and you have all kinds of treats and bonuses to help find shinies! For instance, all the "draw"'s are going to be 50% off! I've never used the Draw feature before because 1. It's wayyy too stupidly overpriced for just artifacts you can hunt for yourself if you dedicate enough time, and 2. It doesn't seem as fun that way to cheat and have the system give you a shiny instead of putting in any effort yourself and finding them the old fashioned way! I still won't be using this feature, even with the 50% off sale, but it's there for those who can't spare the time for shiny hunting! Also, all artifact tracking vials are 25% off too! That's totally awesome for those who need to do some poison, burning, unstable, twisted artifact hunting! For me, I've always been lucky enough to come across one of these and thus end up with a 5 min buff of being able to find more. Sadly, I always forget that it takes a toll on your health and I've shamefully died a few times while searching for poison or burning shinies! Don't forget to keep an eye on your health while searching for these ones!! :)

     Also, there are going to be new artifact pinatas! Woot, I loved those!!!!! I never got much of a chance to do them during Summerfest because that event happened to be horribly timed for me. I literally spent that weekend moving into my new place and then ended up with no internet for 10 days, so I got kind of screwed over there. Pretty sad about it, but oh well...life goes on I suppose? Hehe. Still, Summerfest and Fae Yule are my fav holidays and I'm kinda bummed I missed it. So I'm so happy that there are going to be more pinatas around Telara for me to break! And there's going to be all new artifact sets to complete too! Interesting ones! Like for example there's the ones depicting the stories of "Kiki Kookoo", a young sleuth who solves strange Telaran mysteries! I don't know much about it yet since I haven't logged in yet, but it sounds almost like a take on Veronica Mars, which I absolutely LOVED watching, so I'm very eager to collect these sets!!!! Maybe a new fanfiction story will spring up from this eh? Oo. Another set is Violet and Pimpernel, which is apparently about two incredibly illusive and hard to find Fae who are talked of as nothing more than children's imagination because they are hardly ever seen. We all know that children see what we sometimes miss though, don't we! And they even have artifact sets for us lore hounds, wootsies! There's one titled "Deep factions of the Planes" which apparently explains that Telara isn't the center of the cosmos. Interesting!!

    Also, there's something called "artifact eyes" you can get to make your eyes glow a creepy eldritch color that matches the artifact color that you completed. Say if you completed a poison artifact set, they glow green, for a twisted they glow purple. If you complete the meta achiev for them all, you get rainbow hued eyes! How neatso is that!!! I want rainbow eyes!!!!!! :)

     And to top it off, there's a special artifact piƱata that only DeadSimon can spawn, with it's own special set of 7 artifact sets. Completing them gives you special rewards like artifact beguiled pets, who have artifacts for eyes! There's an owl among others. To learn more, there's going to be a livestream on Friday with details all about it! So excited because I get to actually see this livestream for once since it's in the am, and I work at 5pm!!!! Usually the time for me for livestream is at 4:30 which really sucks, because I have to leave for work and I end up missing the entire thing. :( But not this month! So far I've watched 2 of them because they decided to change it up a bit this month to see if peeps like this new time better. I can see that the number of people watching the stream dropped, which makes me sad, but I'm so happy it's finally at a time that I can watch since I work night shift!

     Well that's all for now folks! Time to dive into the game and check this new stuff out! So excited for Rae to start collecting these! Happy Rifting!

Dark out

Friday, May 12, 2017

[Off Topic]: Moved back to my apartment!

     Thank the gods, I'm so beyond happy that I was finally able to move back to my old apartment last week on Friday. I've been waiting 9.5 months to move back here. MONTHS man. What happened, you wonder? Well in August, there was a flash flood and my apartment got ruined. They went in and while assessing the damage they realized that the asbestos insulation they used to line the walls had been damaged, which means asbestos exposure and poisoning for me. Yay me...so I had to be evacuated, along with everyone else on my floor, and they shoved me in some horrid little temp apartment across town. And I walk to work. Ugh! So frustrating. My landlord assured me it wouldn't be more than 2 months to get it fixed up, but when the 2 months passed and I asked, they said it wasn't ready. They kept putting it off and not giving me information and taking forever about it. I was about to give up! But I had a lease with them sadly. But it's all good cause I'm finally back. And I gotta say, it's much improved! Like a brand new apartment! New wood flooring, tile in the bathroom, walls all repainted! Very pleased! It looks overall much nicer, and with the new design it also looks bigger, more spacious! Which is definitely what I need with a 1 bedroom shared with 2 cats and lots of cosplay! I spent the week unpacking all my stuff, putting everything away, redecorating, and buying groceries and things to fill my cupboards. Now I can't wait for payday haha. Also it sucked that when I moved, I of course had to move my internet as well, and they had to send an agent to hook it up for me, but there wasn't one available until Friday (today) so I had to wait one whole week to get my internet. I thought I was going to die of boredom, I swear! You have no idea how much you miss your internet until you don't have it anymore! So sad!

     But on to other news! Rift has....for rather flakey reasons, renamed their expansion. It's now called Prophecy of Ahnket instead of Starfall Prophecy. They said it was because they didn't want to get it confused with a new charity program they signed on for, which has Starfall in the title. Rather an odd charity name, dontcha think? Also this weekend, you can grab the expac for free! For those of us who didn't pre order it anyway....cough cough. For those who DID already have the expac, and paid for it too, we got a box of things in the rift store. A pretty white fawn pet, a 20 sided dice for dimension, upgrade parts, dungeon charges, a few odds and ends. It's appreciated, but doesn't equate to having an entire expac free. Of course, there wasn't much of an expac to look at anyway when we did buy it since it was missing a good chunk of its end game! I got my internet just in time to log in and claim this reward, as well as my weekly and daily rewards today. So pleased to finally be able to log in to Rift and WoW and see my beloved characters again! <3 I missed them! Yes I know, I'm weird...but I did get a bit of things accomplished in this dry spell before I got my net back. I finished sewing up my Loque'nahak plushie! (He's a very rare, very beautiful kitty pet you can tame as a Hunter in WoW) and I also started on making a custom Barbie doll figure of my second fav female character in WoW: Tyrande Whisperwind. I'm making her out of a monster high doll I got online. The doll already came with bluish green skin, which was perfect, since Tyrande is a Night elf. I just uprooted all the monster high doll's hair and added my own wig wefts, punching it in with a needle in aqua blue. So far I'm pretty proud of it! For pics of my finished art, see my art section, and for progress pics of what I'm working on currently or in the future, check out my facebook cosplay page! Links for that are also in that tab of the blog. Please, go look and let me know what you think of my hard work! It's always appreciated to be complimented!

     I was also FINALLY able to get the next chapter of my Warcraft novel uploaded online, a whole year later. I feel so horrible for taking so long, but it just seemed like time escaped my grasp, what with the flood and the fires and the conventions and the move and xmas and working so many hours! It just never ended up on my priority list. In fact, even my priority items never got finished. It took me a whole year to finish my kitty stuffed animal, after all! But I have plans to better manage my health and time, and I'm hoping I can accomplish my goals for this year. I'll write them down here in my blog to provide some inspiration for myself!

2017 Goals:
  • Complete an armored Onyxia cosplay for BlizzCon in November
  • Create a dog plushie for a friend who lost her pet
  • Start an RRSP account so I can actually retire at a reasonable age
  • Save up money for a trip to New Zealand next year
  • Save up money to go visit my mom in early fall
  • Eat healthier and lose belly fat for my cosplay
  • Make a Tyrande, Onyxia, Alexstrazsa, Ysera, and my 2 main character dolls
  • Make druid cat plushies
  • Make a moonkin kigu for my sister
  • Get out the next chapter of my WoW fiction
  • Work on some art projects
  • Get my blog up to date to this year
  • Get my Rift characters to 70 and prepare for end game content and next expac
  • Organize my cosplay space and start keeping things in designated boxes
  • Break some bad habits
  • Be more responsible about my finances and life
  • Practice patience, respect, honesty, and remaining silent in social settings
  • Help others whenever I can
  • Start using the microwave and my phone less
Those are just the top ones that come to mind right now. I'm sure there are other goals I'd like to accomplish for this year, but I haven't thought of them yet. I think those are very noble goals, but I need to get cracking on them since 2017 is already half over. Yikes! So stressed about a lot of things right now, but all of these items are easily fixed starting now, and I've already started on a lot of them! I'm excited to get started on all my projects and finish them all in time before the new year! I think it's a good motivation to have these goals, since I turned 30 this month and I'm feeling the middle age creeping in like a creeper. I don't wanna be old, waaaaa!!! It helps that everyone assures me that I don't look or act my age, although sometimes I don't think they mean it as a compliment haha. Ah well, can't please everyone!

     Okay, I'm done for now. Going to go catch up on all the things I missed in Rift, then WoW, then work on my Tyrande doll some more and have a shower for the night. Have an 11 hour shift to get through tomorrow! Dark out!