The Cost of Living

Warning: the following post is going to contain a lot of me complaining about real life.

I haven’t felt this bad about the state of my life in a long time. I try to act so calm, cool, collected, a fun loving guy always full of jokes, but with a fire in his heart and always standing up for what he knows is wrong. The past few weeks have just been pretty tough on me and I can feel myself breaking under the pressure. World of Warcraft and FFXI are my ways of escaping from it, but those become part of the problem when i don’t do my homework because I want to play. It’s a real problem, i have 3 or 4 assessments overdue in class, and I haven’t started any of them.

This doesn’t help that I have no drive to work, as I really need to pass this year with a good mark, i recently decided I wanted to go to University at the beginning of the next academic year.

Let me explain the situation:

I go to a local college, call it a stepping stone between high school and University, I have a HNC (Higher National Certificate) which isn’t good enough to get me into university, unless I got a B on my final grade and I have extra merits or credits, well I got a C. To get into University starting 2007 I need to pass this year which will give me a HND (Higher National Degree) and I need to get a B on that, so I will really study, as this is my dream. I can stay in college 1 year after this one though and do extra and get a degree, but I want to go to University, I want to live my dream, now.

I’ve been looking at apartments in the area of the university, and right now it’s looking to be about £250 (474 USD) a month for a room, even more, and that’s without gas, electricity, telephone, cable bills. I’ll need a job. I should have planned ahead. How can I possibly afford this.
I decided this year I would just apply to one school, the condition of me attending applies to just one thing, if my internet friend decides they will study there. They’d move here from the other side of the country, while it also fulfills my lifelong dream to live and study in my most favourite place in the world I’ll also be able to keep them company, it would be lonely moving a long way away, right?

If my friend chooses not to study here, I’ll stay in college for another year and plan ahead for University more, maybe even take a break before I apply, earn some money, get my feet on the ground, do things I want to

Last night I had an argument with a long time friend. I wouldn’t call it an argument. I’ve known her since she was 12, I was 15 at the time, essentially I’m 3 years older than she is, I always thought of her as a younger sister, we were close for 2 years, but the past 2 years have been awkward. We didn’t talk much for a year, mainly because I got a job and then I started to play FFXI, I didn’t go on messenger much, and i rarely called her.

She smokes pot, sorry if any of you who read this do yourselves, for years I’ve been strictly anti-drugs. Especially when it comes to pot, it IS a gateway drug, it just depends who takes it. Weak minded people tend to get sucked into other things like cocaine, crack, meth, strong minded people can smoke it and not get sucked into something else, and you know that’s cool, but I normally don’t associate with such people, it’s just not my thing.

Last night I messaged her over MSN, I mentioned to her straight out about a little problem i was having, and she asked why she should care, I said light heartedly I was using her to reflect on my problems. She accused me of ignoring her all the time, this was unfair! The past year or more I have tried to start numerous conversations with her, many times and I’m usually the last person to message, she either goes offline for no reason or stops talking and loses interest, and I’m left there wondering whats going on.

The night before her screen name was something depressing, she said her friends had upset her, i asked her what had happened and why she was angry at them, she said “hm” and I said “hm” back, that was the last thing that happened, an hour later or so I logged off. I got fed up with her attitude and her accusing me of making our friendship difficult when she made no effort herself, I told her to check her chatlogs and at least I was trying and I didn’t care anymore, she logged off and I haven’t heard from her since.

Was I wrong? Should I have been more patient with her?

I’ve been up all night because I didn’t want to sleep, i’m pepped up on a double dose of diet pills and my stomach is feeling it, i’m looking at this screen listening to Johnny Cash and everything feels a little warped, like i’m slowly falling forward.

I started watching an anime called Ergo Proxy, it’s rather interesting, the lead character looks like Amy Lee from Evanescence, the art style is nice, you don’t see many characters that look like this.

Lets talk FFXI shall we! Last night in Dynamis Windurst (which we failed for the second week in a row) Second mob, and second AF drop, I got my Assassin’s Bonnet, at long last I finally have something to show for my efforts!

Also, to any bloggers out there, sorry if I don’t comment enough on your blogs, I will try to comment more, I only really comment when I update my own, I’m not much of a blogger person, I barely ever log into myspace now too

SUBLIGARIA

Today I started work on my newest website, SUBLIGARIA

A work in progress, but if you can tell by the subject name, it’s going to be about subligars, a cross comedy / information website, with picture galleries, ratings, comments, interviews, and subligar related dat mods, because those are awesome.

Expect it to be done around January of 2007, I’m going to develop it offline and test it on my free webspace before purchasing a potential domain name.

I got NIN to 68, and I partied with Aeyze on her RDM, safe to say I think I did an upstanding job of tanking, I think I impressed her well! She lent me her Byrnie, I make this look good!

While helping Aeyze on a ZM mission she let me try on her Goblin Helmet thing, I think this looks awesome, no one else seems to think so though! =(

C’mon? C’mon? C’monnnnnn!

Dynamis – Windurst with Pantheon, I died like 5 times, we wiped, it was terrible, we got owned by avatars, what a pain in the ass.

I got the Relic Dagger and I’ve decided my ultimate 2 goals in FFXI are to get Mandau, and to get 100+3 Alchemy, I’m going for the Alchemy first to fuel my race to get Mandau, wish me luck!

I woke up today with a really sore stomach, been sick all day, I was mean tto go swimming but i think I’ll go tomorrow, Wednesday and Thursday to make up for it, I need to lose weight for Christmas, I’ve really let myself go, god damn I hate FFXI.

Harry Potter

On Saturday I did ODS some times, we had 2 THF, a NIN, a WAR, an RDM and a BST, we lost once but won the next 5 times once we got our act together. I tried to film some, maybe make a small film out of FFXI footage. I didn’t get any drops, i must have made 60k off the whole thing, my friend still owes me 300k and he didn’t get any drops either, looks like i’ll be waiting a bit til I get what I’m owed.

I missed a ZM14 run, I’m not sure how that went, I think they lost.

I got Oblivion, it’s so high end, the graphics are really good but i find that my PC is a little out of date playing it, 2 Ghz processor, AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 1 gig of RAM and a Radeon 9600 Pro graphics card, looks like I need another upgrade.

 

So.. uh, heh, I broke my glasses! Few days ago now, i was sleepy and i leaned too far and I broke the leg off, i taped them up for a few days, I took them in today and they need to “order” a new part and I’m going to have to pay for it. I can’t find my spares, they were nice too, a pair of Hugo Boss ones, sort of brown metal, very classy. The ones I broke were by a company called Retro, they’re the first kind I got that were kind of square shaped rather than circle shaped, which i wore for a few years. Now I’m wearing a really old pair but just so I can see, they’re not any particular make, they’re cheap, and they make me look like a chubby, older Harry Potter, who needs a shave. I think I’ll shave tomorrow.

Past few days I’ve just not wanted to get out of bed, I’ve been in a real slump about everything the past few days, today I crawled out of bed at 6 PM, I just didn’t want to face the day, but well here I am, I will have to try and make myself sleepy before 2 AM so i can get 6 hours of sleep before I go to school. As crappy as I feel about.. everything right now, I’m trying my best not to get sucked into a game, mainly because I have a 1500 word report to write for tomorrow morning and because if I go into FFXI and get an EXP party, I’ll never get it done, in-fact I’ll likely be up all night.

One good thing though! I’ve decided I’m not going to wait to meet a particularly special internet friend, I decided I’d take action and if my friend says I can visit, I’m going to go down there for a weekend, the one before christmas (December 22nd, 23rd, 24th) and give them my present in person, then hopefully they’ll come visit me for new years a week later, so that should be something to look forward too

Also, there’s a party this week at a friends for Halloween, and I’m thinking I might take my 2 bottles of Absinthe and get completely wasted and just drink my troubles of the past few days away, sounds like a plan, sounds like a great plan.

I’m not one to bitch about real life, but damn it, this is my blog and I’ll do what I want.

Here’s a link to the best thing from the past few days, Yotsuba!

Happy reading!

 

Edit: To the right you’ll see an extra little widget called Poetry, well I wrote a poem, if that interests you. Just things i need to whine about. As i write other things or want to talk about other things i’ll add it to the side there, so look out for that! 🙂

World of Fantasycraft

So the past 2 days I’ve been knee deep in my 10 day free trial of World of Warcraft, and I have to tell you if you never played this game before you at least gotta give it a shot, there’s a free trial you can get now and if you can be bothered to download the 3 GB client it is well worth looking into. The world is so imaginative, colourful and beautiful, the scenery is lush, forests stretch for miles and the world is seamless, no zoning!

In terms of interface, moving around, functioning like talking and getting in and out of parties it is quite different to FFXI and it took me a little while to get used to it, I still get stuck here and there but I think I have the gist of it.
So far I have a level 12 Night Elf Rogue (like most people probably choose!) named Vorador (after a vampire from the Legacy of Kain series of games) on the Dath’Remar server, I think if I like it enough by the time i get through my free trial I’ll purchase the whole thing, including the new expansion coming out where you can get Blood Elves

Now on to FFXI, I got my ninja to level 67, nothing exciting happens for a while til 70 when I get dual Fudo’s and Optical Hat.

I de-levelled 2 times after but left the party with my level, so all is good

Energetic Eruca popped near us, some gilsellers were trying to kill it, we allianced, they died, our RDM was getting chased, so I voked and tried to tank it, I lasted a whole minute before he snuffed me out like I was nothing, I did 0 damage to it! :O

I did do that before he killed me though 😉

This was weird, so many 35s

Now to see what bazaar comments I LOL’d at these past few days…

LOLWTFROFFLEROLF

{Party} {Can I have it?}

Now for real life, my Mum and my little sister and brother and my mum’s seriously annoying boyfriend who’s only 3 and a half years older than me are off on holiday to Spain, they come back this Sunday and I have the house to myself, I need milk and bread and some more juice as I just drank my last can of fizzy Vimto

Having the house to myself has been great, i moved my guitar downstairs so i could play to my fellow linkshell mates on Ventrilo, that’s right OSIncreveis has a ventrilo room, 25 people I think can fit in, and usually because I’m the only european who stays on late I’m made to sing songs and entertain, they had me doing quotes from So I married an Axe Murder, there are some great quotes in that, such as:

Charlie Mackenzie: Dad, how can you hate “The Colonel”?
Stuart Mackenzie: Because he puts an addictive chemical in his chicken that makes ya crave it fortnightly, smartass!

and my personal favourite

Stuart Mackenzie: Well, it’s a well known fact, Sunny Jim, that there’s a secret society of the five wealthiest people in the world, known as The Pentavirate, who run everything in the world, including the newspapers, and meet tri-annually at a secret country mansion in Colorado, known as The Meadows.
Tony Giardino: So who’s in this Pentavirate?
Stuart Mackenzie: The Queen, The Vatican, The Gettys, The Rothschilds, *and* Colonel Sanders before he went tits up. Oh, I hated the Colonel with is wee *beady* eye! And that smug look on his face, “Oh, you’re gonna buy my chicken! Ohhhhh!”

Last night I got into a really good performance of Bohemian Rhapsody, I put my heart and soul into it, I might just do it again if enough people come on the channel, that would be awesome, I can’t sing but It’s fun just thinking i can and trying my best, I like to make them laugh, I also sang other songs the past few nights but I won’t embarrass
myself.

Tomorrow my grandmother is coming round to help me clean the fish tank, poor fish 😦

I leave you with this, a picture of my beautiful mithra princess, Aeyze ❤ She’s lovely

Money Money Money Money

Why do I always get asked to loan money to people? One of my good friends, well I wouldn’t say good but we KSNM together whenever we can, asked me for 300k so he could buy a Hauby, of course I gave him the money not wanting to be an a-hole but then this isn’t the first time he’s asked me, it kinda annoyed me when I examine him and he’s wearing flame rings. Other people have asked me for money before, it just slightly bothers me that i get asked quite a lot. Anyways, if you ask me and I like you I’ll probably loan you it… I’m too nice sometimes, where did my a-hole-ish-ness go?! Just because I’m a Thief does not mean I’m rich, I mean I only got my own SH a few weeks ago and I had to quit Samurai to buy it…

Sorry Aeyze, i kind of copied your bar idea… 😦

So anyways, as you can tell I’m not much of a blogger person which is funny because I really need a place to put down my thoughts instead of shouting them at my fellow linkshell members with the CAPS LOCK key on.

Let me explain what has been happening in my real life before I get to the game. Well on Saturday we had a strange man outside our house on the telephone pole, we didn’t bother him and we didn’t see what colour of van he had, all we know is when he left our phone wasn’t working, worse still… my internet wasn’t working and I’d just gotten up too!

So on Saturday I watched The Chronicles of Riddick and The Fantastic Four movies and ordered in some chicken pizza.

I talked to Aeyze on the phone, I love talking to her on the phone, it’s always entertaining, sometimes her sister will ask who’s on the phone and that’s funny for me. She has a sweet voice, i think, she probably doesn’t think so but she just sounds so generally nice. She got the byrnie I bought her (well i bought it half with her money half with mine and logged out on her character wearing it so she could log in next day and get a surprise)

Sunday was a better day internet connection wise, i managed to connect for a little while and get Dynamis – Bastok flagged with one of my Dynamis LS’, Pantheon. Thank you so much guys, 3rd attempt at that one and my second flag, 2 more then I can go to ice. I disconnected soon after and promptly gave up trying to get online. The next few days were very much the same, my connection was very temperamental. Thursday! I get a man from BT to come out and check our phone line, he goes up the telephone pole, connects the wires up, 10 minutes and the job is done, phone and internet are back to normal.

During this period I also rid my computer of a virus known as Win32/Parite which has been infecting my PC and it’s backups for well over 2-3 years. For those that don’t know Win32/Parite comesin three forms, A B C, I had B which isn’t too bad, the damage is not extensive but it is a great annoyance, it embeds itself into your exe files and infects all your other exe files in the process, this will cause certain games to become prone to crashing, other programs will detect they’ve been modified and refuse to start at all (Nero did this, how would you feel having to reinstall Nero everytime you wanted to burn a CD or DVD? -_-) Well i finally found a tool that would repair the exe files and destroy the bug completely, and whaddya know, it worked! I haven’t been this happy about the state of my computer since i first got it. I also fragmented both drives and did checkdisk on them. Not like i was able to play any games without the internet, except for Doom3, but I’m afraid to play that one because of the zombies 😦

On to FFXI! Not much happened this week, I got an Evasion Torque and Ninja is up to level 65 now, I really think I’m good at Ninja, not just good but awesome really, I hold hate well, I do good damage and my spells stick, mostly. Infact I’m pretty sure I’m the best Ninja i’ve ever seen *smug*

This was the highlight of my week though:

Yeaaahhhh, look at those numbers

Also this:

I log in, 5 seconds later I get a party invite. I also logged out temporarily to check something, i came back and i got another party invite just as quick, but i already had a party, I guess people just love them ninjas 🙂

This person is a little full of themselves, huh? 😛

This made me LOL, my friend Kris from college would love this, he hates M$

And without further ado I present to you some little art worksy pieces I did in photoshop last night

And last but not least, a sexy picture for all you ladies out there to enjoy:

Thanks for reading my first real blog post, I apologise for the length of it, I had a lot to say

Oh and on an additional note, my personal site is ueda.somee.com/

Harlo, Friends!

Harlo, I am Ueda. Fenrir server, FFXI, 177 days, 4 hours, 6 minutes and 23 seconds at time of writing, I’ve been playing since February ’05 and I don’t know when I’ll quit.

75 Thief

75 Samurai

62 Ninja

These are the documents of my mis-adventures in Vana’diel!