yawnEXP

I picked up a collection of SF short stories by Ted Chiang last week and favored reading that on a few evenings, particularly on Thursday and Friday night of last week. Thursday evening greeted me with a Besieged event as soon as I logged in and it was getting a bit too late to hop into a pickup party by the time we repelled the Undead Swarm. So I logged out and read.





I was unable to log in until 10PM on Friday, and I was rather tired. A series of "/sea all" revealed a smorgasbord of melees seeking a party, so I figured an invitation would be slow... if at all likely. I went the lazy route and left my flag up, turned on the /tell chime, and went AFK to read more stories. By 11:30PM, all was still silent, and I logged out.

In case you can't tell, Ted Chiang is quite good. I highly recommend his collection to anyone who enjoys a good Borges-style brain massage. You can get most of his stories in one volume "Stories of Your Life, and Others." I can't wait until he actually writes a novel.

Rather than go the lazy route last night, I jumped on at 9PM and saw a paladin, white mage, and red mage all seeking. I immediately sent the /tells and worked for about 25 minutes to form a party. The RDM wanted a BRD and was too high-level for the rest of our members, so I eventually grabbed a level 70 BRD as soon as he hopped on (thank heavans), and relied on him for Refresh for the rest of the evening. I found Lurick (WAR) seeking and knew I could count on him to stick around; I grabbed a DRK because... I dunno, they seem to need invites, and I think they make fine DD.

Our setup became WHM BRD PLD WAR WAR DRK.

EXP in the mire was slow due to overcrowding, so we picked up the stakes and moved to Bibiki Bay, chaining Hobgoblin Alastors, Toreadors, and Blaggers for awhile until moving to the Hobgoblin Angler camp further south. The transition to the new campsite was messy, leaving Lurick and me to duo a goblin while the rest of the party was stranded at the old camp and the BRD, who had brought a /NIN sub by mistake, kept screaming at us to disengage so he could sleep it. -_- I'd 2-houred and was fairly close to killing the thing, but disengaged in the hopes that the mob could indeed be slept.

In hindsight, I should have gone down swinging. Lurick died as well, and the poor BRD followed soon thereafter.

Fortunately our WHM used Raise III, so the only significant penalty for the incident was down-time. Lurick bowed out around 11:30 and I found another WAR pretty quickly. This one was a Joyeuse-toting rank 10 with a Rajas Ring and was quite fun to watch in action. I complimented him on the sword and ring, and he complimented me on my damage as we proceeded to hack away the hours.

The DRK eventually disconnected but remained on my party list due to a glitch, so I was unaware of his departure until some other folks asked me about a replacement. Once the WAR dropped and I re-invited him, the glitch was fixed and we hobbled along with 5 until I could find a melee. I was favoring WAR/MNK/THF/DRK/SAM in my searches and had completely forgotten about DRG. -_- Shame shame on me. Once we got the poor DRG that I had been ignoring, the party cruised along, and the dragoon had the fortune of working on his latent in the process.

Sleepiness started to take hold around 1:30 AM (which felt like 2:30 to me thanks to stupid DST... you know kids don't really know about DST, so they don't sleep in that "extra" hour), and I brought in a Monk to replace me, passing the lead to the uber-WAR.

I'm currently 22K into level 72, and I'm effectively bored of EXPing again. That... didn't take much, did it?

Fortunately my friend Feon pinged me about joining up with a group to complete the ToAU missions. This was a fortuitous offer and I, of course, accepted with caveats about my limited time windows, which can shrink when my son refuses to go to sleep. I'll work my way as far as I can tonight, since I'm currently sitting at mission 7, and I assume they need help with one of the BCNM further down the line.