Swordporn Senpai

She/They. Obsessed with Persona 5. Living for angst. Sometimes I play video games.

[xpiester333x]

Hi Tumblr

A little (re)introduction post for those that still follow me from ye olden days and those few I bonded with on Twitter.

I go by Marina these days. I'm going to keep my blog name the same for now, but you can call me Marina and hi :)

My personal post tag is #easy as pie, but I'll use #personal too for simplicity's sake.

If you're still with me from ye olde One Piece days, know that I'm very behind and haven't kept up on it in years. It's near and dear to my heart and I have every intention of catching up one day but it might be a while before I am.

My interests are varied but you'll probably see a lot of FFXIV, a lot of video game related stuff, I'm still into the spooky, stuff about the books I read, etc.

I tag spoilers. I've been kind of bad about it the last couple of FFXIV posts but going forward I'll do better. Better to over tag than under tag right?

And if you have any questions always feel free to ask! :)

[xpiester333x]

FFXIV tanks. PLEASE SPRINT. AT THE VERY LEAST IN ENDGAME DUNGEONS.

Benefits of popping sprint:

1. Its a cool down! Popping sprint means you take almost 0 damage running from one mob pack to the other.

2. You have less of a chance of losing aggro to spicy DPS. Your DPS will get less GCDs in as you sprint, meaning they likely won't rip hate off of you before you gather everything. So you won't have to keep stopping to regain aggro!

3. It makes everything faster! Your DPS and healers can use their bigger skills on a bigger group sooner and everything will die faster. Otherwise, your DPS have to either hold their skills or blow them early and lose using them on the second pack. Some classes, like WHM, can't DPS at all.

The downsides of using sprint?

None. Zero. Absolutely nothing.

Someone tried to argue they "didn't want the healer to fall behind" but your CDs are so efficient in dungeons right now that even if the healer was RP walking, you'd survive just fine.

They also said "but what if the healer dcs?" Moot point. If the healer dcs you'll likely notice before a big pull, and if you don't, you may wipe. But thats a silly reason. You're going to pass on all the above benefits on the CHANCE a healer dcs? And if you wipe to a healer dc, you're going to be stuck waiting for the healer to get back anyway so theres really nothing lost there.

So please, I beg of you, your healers and DPS beg of you, USE SPRINT.

And, slight disclaimer: if you don't want to pull big, dont. This isn't about going balls to the wall for the sake of speed. This is about genuinely using an important cool down that is being disgustingly underutilized.

[xpiester333x]

I have been REALLY trying not to swear as much lately. Which, if you know me, is a huge ask because I drop a curse word in almost every sentence. But my niece is a baby now but she's growing so fast and I know my brother and sister would not appreciate her learning to drop f-bombs before she can even read.

And honestly I think kids SHOULD know how to swear. I don't think there is really such a thing as a bad word. But I do know some words are not appropriate in some situations and that toddlers do not understand the concept of time and place SO maybe I'll try to at least curb my language a little.

That said, I've become unironically attached to the phrase "mother-trucker". I say it now instead of motherfucker because somehow it feels more satisfying. It's silly, but I like it.

Anyway if anyone has any other suggestions for replacement swear words, like "mother-trucker" instead of motherfucker, please suggest some. I've had a potty mouth since I was 12 and I think at this point in my life my best bet is to try and replace my swear words rather than flat out eliminate them cold turkey.

[xpiester333x]

I am left-handed, and I'm curious if anyone else left-handed has this issue.

So, say a mechanic in a fight or something has the boss cleaving left. If I am standing behind the boss, and the boss is cleaving left, I just move to the right. Simple. But if the boss rotates 90 degrees and then cleaves left? I have to mentally visualize myself turning 90 degrees and then determine which side is left. This takes just a fraction of a second too long for mechanics and I end up looking really stupid.

I'm still mocked too this day by my raid friends because of Shadow Doggo. Because in savage he spawns two clones facing random directions, and they cleave either left or right. That meant there were TWO directions I needed to reorient myself and figure out left or right, and I wiped us an embarrassing amount of times until one of my raid friends showed me an easier tell that had nothing to do with L or R.

They think I'm just a silly duck who can't tell my left from my right. I have long said its because I'm left-handed, and something about being left handed makes me prone to being confused about other people's left and right.

For a non-video games example, my coworker is a nurse. When she needs to give an injection to a patient, say in their R leg, she said she has to mentally visualize herself facing the same way as them to know which leg is their right. She is also left-handed.

It doesn't take like, an agonizing amount of time to do this. It really only takes a couple of seconds. In my case, many game mechanics just happen too fast for me to work it out that quickly. If you were talking to me, you'd probably at best note that I paused a second longer.

Do my other left-handed comrades have a similar experience to this? I have long theorized that this is probably something I struggle with because I'm left-handed, though I cannot for the life of me think of why it would be different for right-handed people. The only plausible idea I can come up with is that because 90% of the population is right-handed, society is very literally built for them. So directions like left and right have always been inherent in their lives. But left-handed people often have to adapt to living in a right-handed world so things that are inherently obvious to right-handed people just aren't to us.

[xpiester333x]

Man, Arcadion would have been the peak raid series... if SE knew how to balance literally anything.

Like, story-wise? So cool, we get to be pro-wrestlers. That's so fun.

Every fight has its own unique theme song? 100% lends to the pro-wrestling thing, and is just that little touch of attention that makes this game very worthy of praise.

But I will never ever ever ever be able to mentally recover from that second tier.

The first tier was almost too easy, and definitely made easier if you had a decent picto.

And then because SE fucked up with picto in the first tier, the second tier had to be made as unfun as humanly possible??

Dancing Green was actually pretty fun. But the concept of messing just one mechanic up costing you valuable DPS needed to beat the enrage? Thats third fight behavior in a first floor fight. It was scaled just a little harder than any first floor fight needed to be.

Don't speak to me about Sugar Riot because the rage I feel from this fight still burns inside me like a sun. Honestly, doing UWU was easier than doing Sugar Riot. The add phase was insanely punishing, made even more so if you had a party comp with any kind of DPS that needed to be in close range to their adds (melees, DNC, RDM, and even healer AOE for SGE, WHM, and SCH for that matter). And if you manage to finally get past adds, congrats! Now you get the lightning phase where one small mistake costs you the entire run and now you have to go through add phase AGAIN. Idyllic Dream gets dubbed the most complicated or hardest mech in FFXIV but thats objectively not true and I'd take Idyllic over Yans any day.

I really don't have as much of a critique for Brute Abominator or Howling Blade. Brute Abominator was about on par with how a third floor should be and wasn't really anything crazy. Howling Blade was challenging but objectively I dont think he was any harder than any other 4th floor boss. My only problem with Howling Blade was that after fucking around on Sugar Riot for so long, I was so fucking sick of playing this game I really couldnt enjoy his fight if I wanted to.

What I will say, is if you got through the 2nd tier of Arcadion but have some doubt that you could clear an ultimate, don't. I have done UWU and we are working through TEA rn and I can assure you those 2nd tier fights were closer to ultimate levels than savage.

So TL;DR basically: M1S-M4S were too easy so SE made M5S-M8S ultimate levels of difficult and then M9S-M12S were perfect.

All that being said, I know my raid group are my ride or dies because the fact that we can still get together every week to prog an ultimate after the last 2 raid tiers (because we finished HB like 3 weeks before the new tier) means we genuinely must love each other.

[katalean]

fun comic time!!

[xpiester333x]

I think the take of "Dawntrail's story didn't seem as good because it was a new beginning and didn't really fit with the story that has been going on since ARR" while well intended, is flawed.

ShB and EW were the outliers. Every expansion to that point just kind of told its own story. ShB did tie back a lot to ARR, but it also retconned a lot of the lore to fit the new narrative they were making.

But ShB was so big. It was a great story, it was COVID times, and WoW was shitting the bed at the time so FFXIV saw a crazy influx of players. As someone who has been playing since ARR, I can't really stress enough how big the game seemed to get kind of all of a sudden. So they kinda used ShB's story and the hype around it as the building blocks for EW. And EW, as a result, became a pretty much direct sequel to ShB.

But really, realistically, ARR, HW, SB were all fairly self contained stories. Of course you had connections in lore, and oops all Ascians, but generally the stories weren't like, the grand build up to EW that people act like they were. Even ShB felt like it had a pretty self-contained story for the most part, but it at least played on a lot of lore points from ARR.

So really, DT was just like any other FFXIV expansion. It just feels exceptionally different because we spent 5 years playing two expansions that WERE directly connected. And for a lot of people, ShB was their first expansion. Meaning instead of spending multiple years in each expansion and really feeling how different each one was from the others, they got to play straight through and got to the part of the game that DID finally tie them all together pretty quickly.

So, whether you did or did not really like DT is really up to you. But rather than seeing it as a "new beginning", you really just have to realize it was an expansion. Its a return to how the game told its story before. Evercold will likely be the same. A new expansion, a new story.

[xpiester333x]

I understand fountain pens, penmanship, and calligraphy are niche hobbies and so some of the price tags on things like that tend to be higher.

But I will be dead before a spend $300-$500+ on a pen made out of highly flammable materials.

Also some of those journals and notebooks are absurd. What do you mean you want almost $50 for 50 pages? I write like 25 pages a week, do you honestly think I'm going to pay $100 a month for paper when I can get a perfectly good 2pack of notebooks off Amazon for $15? With almost 200 pages each? And less bleed through even with my thickest pens and most saturated inks?

At some point I really think hobbies become trophies to people. And thats fine, don't let me tell you how to spend your money or find your joy. But as someone who wants to USE my hobby items, its insane to me that some people would spend that kind of money for... the prestige???

[xpiester333x]

So everything in the world of ff14 is comprised of aether, right? When people die their aether rejoins the lifestream to one day be reborn as another life. But bodies are not necessarily made of aether. We see corpses a plenty throughout the game. So presumably the aetherial part of you, the life within you, is aether.

And Y'shtola can only really see by aether, right? That's why in ShB she doesn'trecognize you at first (because you've absorbed so much extra aether), and why the Key looks like an insane firework show. She is blind, but manages to "see" via aether. And presumably if she doesn't recognize you when you're contaminated with excess light, then we can probably assume she recognizes her friends by the composition of their aether.

(Btw We're going to conveniently ignore the times in EW shes just like, reading books the same way the devs conveniently forgot she was essentially blind.)

So when Ardbert rejoins with your soul - do you think Y'shtola like squinted at that at all? Do you think she was like... "huh"? I mean I think she would have recognized you, because if the idea is that you are Azem but your soul has been fractured along with the shards, then probably your fragments don't look much different to you. But still, youre another soul fuller now. Surely that had to have made some kind of difference. Do you think she was like "WoL? But more WoL-y?"

[xpiester333x]

As a writer, I love angst. I love exploring the pain abd suffering with words. I love elaborating on pain. I like building up to the moment and then tearing it all down and standing over the ruins watching them burn.

As a reader.... I also love angst. But only in really small doses. And why does it hurt. And can it stop being so ominous? I have anxiety. Why are you building this up so much when I know its going to fall. I don't want to watch it crumble why would you do that.

[xpiester333x]

"The Great Grey Beast of February had swallowed Harvey Swick whole." Has to be the greatest starting line to a novel ever written because let me tell you what:

I have read a lot of books in my life, I haven't read The Thief of Always since I was like 12, and I have a very poor memory of my younger years but I still think about that line, word for word, periodically, 20+ years later. If you can write a single opening line to a novel that someone remembers for over 20 years, its gotta be a damn good one.

And, actually, I have never read anything by Clive Barker before or since, but I think that novel must have been fantastic because I usually remember books I've read by vibes. I don't usually remember exact scenes, characters, plot points. If you ask me if I liked a book and I say "yes" its because I remember enjoying it when I read it. I remember how it made me feel. But if you ask me what its about? I don't have a clue.

But I actually remember The Thief of Always. There are scenes I remember. I remember characters. I think about the cat with a question mark tail every time I see a cat with a question mark tail. It has stuck with me, deeply rooted. That book engrained itself into my brain like an old picture burn on a TV.

So, idk. What a book.

[xpiester333x]

I haven't shared him in a while but I am still positively feral for him.

[xpiester333x]

My latest episode of: my god I hate that I was born a woman.

2 Summers ago, my AC broke. We were in the middle of a heat wave, every day was above 100F. My AC was set for 70F, but the temperature in my apartment was 85F. And it was doing this thing where it would kick on, run for a minute or two, and then shut of for 30-60s, then kick back on. I didn't think that was normal. I called my building management, they called an HVAC company.

A young guy comes out, looks at my evaporation coil, looks at my filter, checks the refrigerant levels, and goes "everything looks fine, it should be working" and leaves. But it wasnt working. It was still 85+F and it was still doing that turn off turn on thing.

So I turn to the internet to see if theres anything I can learn about it. I learned what my AC was doing was called short-cycling, and its a very clear indicator something is definitely wrong with the unit.

So the HVAC people were called back out. An older guy game this time, did all the same stuff the young guy did, and said "its fine." I pushed back like "what do you mean its fine? You can clearly see its short cycling, and you can feel that its almost as hot inside as outside."

And he gave me this "listen, lady. Ive been doing this for 30 years and I know what I'm talking about. The "short-cycling" isn't an issue. I don't even hear it happening. The issue is these AC units are small and arent really meant to keep it that cool in here. You're lucky it's working as well as it is, honestly."

And I have lived in this same apartment for 14 years. Which means at the point of this happening I had spent 12 summers in that apartment with no issue. And I KNOW that AC is short cycling and I KNOW its not supposed to be running at 85F at best. But I'm basically being gaslit into believing this is normal and even though I KNOW its not, I can tell I'm never going to be taken seriously so I just kinda... give up. I turned my AC off the rest of that summer and just let myself sweat.

The next summer was pretty mild. The AC acted up a couple of times but the weather was generally cooler so it fought its best fight.

This year has been miserable again, and sure enough on the first major heat wave, it starts doing that thing again. It short cycles, it runs 24/7, the temperature is 85F. My boyfriend lives with me now, and he says "this isn't normal, shouldn't we call someone?"

But I DID call someone. Three years ago. And I remember the outcome of that. So I say "I don't think so. Last time this happened he told me this was normal and we shouldn't expect it to be cool in here."

And my boyfriend looks at me like I'm crazy but he's like "uh... okay".

So the heat wave persists, the AC is running in cycles of 1min on, 20s off, all the time. My boyfriend has timed it on his phone. I am talking to another friend who lives in Chicago and p much has the exact same weather as us all the time and he says "uh, isnt that short-cycling? Doesn't that mean the unit is like, dead?"

And now it's kind of hitting me that, yeah this ISN'T RIGHT. And I've always known that it wasn't, but I really let some crusty, old, ass-crack-falling-out-of-his-pants having MAN talk me out of my own damn common sense.

So I tell my boyfriend he needs to be the one to call this time. And this time when the HVAC guy comes, I skedaddle. I volunteer to go pick up pizza (cause lord knows we can't cook at home right now). And here's what happens:

The guy comes in, sticks from probes in the vents and opens up the unit and says to my boyfriend "yikes, this thing is running really hot."

My boyfriend tells him its been short-cycling, tells him if the temp is like, below 80F outside its mostly okay, but it really gives up if it gets any warmer than 80F.

The guy looks at the unit, checks the evap coil, the refrigerant, the filters. Then goes "let me check something out on the outside real quick."

I come home at this point. My boyfriend tells me all of this. The guy is outside for maybe 15-20 minutes. When he comes back he says "so you have 2 coils on a unit, the evaporation coil that processes the drawn in air and thats that manages the humidity. Then you have the condenser coil. Its on the other side of the unit so I had to go outside to look at it. Its meant to release heat. It was all jammed with years of leaves, dust, debris, and junk. So the unit would kick on, but since the coil was so impacted with debris, there was no where for the heat to go. It would almost immediately overheat, triggering the system to shut down. I cleaned it out for you, so it should work just fine now but if it doesn't, call me again."

And that was it. The effect was immediate. The air blew cooler, it didn't short-cycle anymore, it doesn't fight for its life to keep it cool any more it just runs as a normal AC would.

And I was so relieved it was working I kind of forgot about it, but now that I'm thinking about it, I am ENRAGED. Why is it when I point out OBVIOUS ISSUES I have to be gaslit, lied and condescended to?? It took him 15 minutes to fix it when a man asked but when I asked I was just some crazy bitch overstepping??

And I'm mad at myself. Why the fuck would I have just believed some sewer dreg of a man just because he flaunted his professional career in my face? Why did I just accept that??

But I know why. Its because I wasn't going to be taken seriously no matter what I did, and it was easier in my mind to accept that a professional would know better than me than it was for me to admit that as someone femme presenting, I was never going to be taken seriously a day in my life anyway.

I fucking hate this.

[xpiester333x]

"How's your savings looking these days?"

Well... I mean... they're great. I definitely did not just spend $100 on fountain pen inks, converters, and a frog shaped pencil case... at all.

[xpiester333x]

I know according to some Americans are solely to blame for climate change because we use air conditioning but in the last three weeks where I live:

- we've had higher average humidity than the rain forest. (85-95% during the day, 99% at night)

- our average temps have been between 95-105F (35-40C)

- the air quality rating today was 270 (the average for this time of year is 50-70). The sun is blocked out with smoke. I went outside for 20 minutes and came home feeling like I barely survived a house fire.

The only thing granting me the ability to breathe is that air conditioner. It keeps the air dry and filtered. Being hot is an inconvenience, sure. Breathing is sort of non-optional tho so unfortunately for the rest of the world, my AC is gonna have to run a while longer.

[xpiester333x]

Reddit may be a cesspool but I will 100000000000000% use it to answer all my stupid little questions before I use AI.

[rocksama24]

Don't follow me, Mina-chan. It's not your turn.