I've recently become motivated to start over, and the New Year is the perfect occasion for it, though I began revamping my website a little earlier. I managed to update the look without relying on tables, and I replaced all graphical design elements with CSS and font files. I'll probably end up using a lot of different fonts, but that's what I like, and my site is supposed to reflect my personality. As for content, I'll slowly rebuild my three main sections bit by bit. Until that's done, the previous version of my website will remain available.

I'm very much looking forward to finally upgrading my outdated PC, and a powerful gaming rig should help me stay motivated. I already got new peripherals, but some of the components I want are in short supply, including the case. A quiet desktop is a necessity for me, so I'll have to wait a tad longer since there aren't any good alternatives that I know of. The real problem is getting a new graphics card, however. The fastest passively cooled card seems to be completely sold out, and I won't settle for anything less. I'll just have to continue using my current one for the time being.

I'm obviously doing somewhat personal posts again, but this isn't meant to be a serious journal. Still, I'll write about whatever I feel like sharing, such as the fact that I weighed less today than in the summer, which might be a first. I don't have enough energy during the winter months to exercise regularly, making it very hard to avoid gaining weight, so it was a total surprise that I actually lost a small amount. I was so happy I had to celebrate by eating a tiramisu! I'm only half-joking because I had planned to ring in the New Year with my favorite dessert.

My site was apparently pretty messed up, probably due to a PHP upgrade. Took me a while to fix it, but everything should be working again. Furthermore, I discovered that I can't use font files after all. I do everything on my local server and then just upload whatever has changed, which can sometimes be tricky if my host is configured differently. Since I'm mainly using Google Fonts, I was able to simply link to those instead. The two cutest fonts were from a different source, though, so I had to replace them.

Wait, it's a new month already? Well, I had planned to have my new PC up and running on my birthday, which was on the nineteenth. The last component for it arrived about a week earlier, and I diligently assembled it. It booted up fine, and I installed Windows 11 on my new HD. I spent the rest of the day setting up the most important stuff and was happy everything worked out so well. Then the next day happened. My PC didn't start up at first, though it seemed to run fine after it finally did. It crashed a few times in the evening, however. At this point, I still didn't want to accept that something was seriously wrong with it.

The following morning, I barely got past the login screen. There were so many freezes and bluescreens with different error codes that I could no longer delay searching for the cause. I started to run different tests, and everything pointed toward the RAM, mainboard, or CPU being defective. I tested the RAM for a few days, during which I switched back to my old PC. The tests were inconclusive, so I tried to run my new PC with a single module, and it worked flawlessly with either one. When I attempted to run it with both again, it didn't work at all, which made it clear that the mainboard was faulty.

Getting a replacement was easy and didn't take much time, but I didn't enjoy having to disassemble and reassemble my PC. One week after my birthday, it was finally running as it should. Switching between two Windows installations wasn't fun either, and I still have some reorganizing to do. Among other things, I want to use a notetaking app instead of a word processor as I have been doing. The one I liked apparently can't handle large amounts of text, however, so I looked for an alternative. I've found one that seems even better, but I'll have to transfer a good amount of text again.

When I installed the latest version of the local server I use, I encountered the same problem with fonts as on my host, so I was forced to look into the issue again. The solution turned out to be incredibly simple, but then I don't really know much about server configurations. Besides my design now looking like I wanted it to, I also don't have to maintain two different versions. At least that worked out well in the end.

I got caught up in MMOs again after the previous entry. It happens occasionally since I feel more comfortable there than in RL. A significant amount of new stuff I was interested in came out around the same time, so I was occupied for quite a while. I intended to create an entry about what I've been playing, but I had to update my image viewer first because I wanted to include some screenshots. Although it was unexpectedly tricky to get it to work the way I wanted it to, I kept at it until I was happy with the result. I still had to figure out how to organize my galleries, though. I'm very indecisive, so that took some time as well.

It seemed like spring was well underway in March, but there was a lot of snow on the first of April, funnily enough. My amusement didn't last long, however. It was pretty cold and frequently snowy the entire month, which really did a number on me and put me into an uncommunicative state. I wasn't even able to write a journal entry like that. Weird but true. May was a little better because of the warm weather, but I developed serious sleeping issues in its second half. I was so tired at one point, I took two naps in one day. I wasn't very sleepy at the end of it, so I stayed up til well past midnight. Much to my surprise, I felt a lot better the next day. I haven't gone to bed before midnight since then, which has helped considerably.

I'm still going to write about the MMOs I have been playing, but I'm going to make a separate entry for each one when I finally get around to it. This update lays the groundwork for my chronological journey through video game history, however. For my new version, I went even further back in time and added Spacewar! as the first game. I'm going to include all games that I think are important enough, even if I haven't played them for various reasons, which should all be listed in my expanded game plan.

Long time no update, but there should be more this year.

I was never quite happy with Nightflower. I assumed it was because of my writing, which I'm rarely satisfied with, but it turned out that the actual reason was the setting. As I got further into the story, I noticed that some things just didn't make much sense. While not everything has to make sense, there were some fundamental issues with it that caused it to be too different from what I wanted it to be. It wasn't something that I could fix quickly as I wasn't sure what exactly I needed to change to achieve the desired result.

I let it gestate until I was certain about my reimagined version. During that time, I figured out that I cared too much what others might think about my fiction. Nightflower in particular is about expressing myself, so that wasn't easy to overcome. The setting was supposed to reflect my nature, but it was too influenced by RL conventions to be true to it. The protagonist was a good representation of myself already, but she's not early as awkward now due to harmonizing with the setting much better, which is as it always should have been.

For this new version, I switched to a chapter format. It took me a long time to rewrite the prologue because I get frustrated easily and then tend to get distracted by other stuff, namely MMOs. It finally feels right, however, and I hope that I'll be more motivated from now on. Due to some changes I'm going to make to episode 1 and 2, both will be combined into the first chapter. It might be a while until it's finished since I want to create some game entries next.

I realized that I have no interest in doing reviews, so my game entries are going to be almost entirely descriptive. They'll still include my personal ratings, however, and I'll also list my likes and dislikes, if any. I like this format much better, and I've updated my game plan accordingly. Since I still want to give my opinion on the games I've played, I'll just do it here. This way I can write about my experiences in general as well as rant to my heart's content when I feel like it while keeping the entries neat and tidy.

Video games were barely even in their infancy in the 1960s, and that decade had nothing else of interest to me except for Hamurabi, which was the first entry on the old version of my website. One variant of it is only available for the Commodore PET, which is why I chose that platform. I use VICE to emulate old Commodore systems.

Playing it again didn't change how I feel about it. Once the numbers have been figured out, all that's left to do is react to the random results each turn, which isn't my idea of fun. Besides a randomly occurring plague, there's nothing that breaks the monotony of the limited gameplay. Although half the population is wiped out when it happens, it's not as detrimental as I expected, especially when it comes to the ending. Due to the way the score is calculated, a few plagues actually help to get the positive assessment, which I find absolutely ridiculous.

No plague occurred during the game shown in my old gallery, which got me the negative assessment despite not letting anyone starve. This was very off-putting and lead me to rate it a 1. I gave it a 2 this time because I decided that the lowest rating is reserved for games that are basically unplayable or critically flawed in some way. When I replayed it, the initial game always had three plagues, pretty much ensuring success, and it's the game that can be seen in its updated gallery. My improved image viewer does proper scaling now, which I totally failed at with the old one. I might be made of math, but math certainly isn't one of my strong suits.

When I looked up Computer Space before, I only found a browser adaptation. I didn't like that one much, and it wasn't suitable for inclusion. This time, I also found two Windows variants. After trying both, I decided to create an entry for Computer Space Simulator since it seems to be a fairly authentic recreation of the original.

I didn't change the default settings, which are slightly different from the original. A game is a bit longer, and the saucers are prevented from respawning close enough to cause an instant collision. Nevertheless, the random placement of them and my ship frequently created unfair situations. It was especially bad at the edge of the playfield where it's possible for the saucers to disappear from view as seen in the last screenshot of its gallery. I liked the controls, however, and still had some fun before the randomness became too annoying.

While the right gameplay can be fun on its own, a big part of my enjoyment comes from progressing through a game and seeing its ending. Games like Computer Space that lack a winning condition therefore don't appeal to me much. After reaching a decent score, I was done with it. Although it wasn't very entertaining overall, I'm still glad that a nice recreation of it exists, making it easy to experience what the first arcade game is like.

Unplayed: Galaxy Game
It would've felt wrong not to include Galaxy Game along with Computer Space. Both projects intended to bring the experience of Spacewar! to a wider audience and laid the foundation for the video game industry in the process.

Galaxy Game has a single-player practice mode, so I wanted to play it for the old version. However, I had trouble running it in MAME, which I use for arcade games and the console systems that it emulates well enough. I took another look at it, but nothing had changed. The AI opponent apparently isn't broken, there simply isn't one. The graphics still flickered, and the controls didn't make me want to do any practicing either.

This The Oregon Trail is an improved version of the original and not the much more well-known later iteration. Since I don't feel strongly about it in one way or another, I don't have much to say about it. It didn't annoy me, but it's also not memorable. That's enough to make it better than the previous entries, though.

The Oregon Trail is the first entry with several levels of difficulty to choose from, so I'm going to give my opinion on that topic, which I feel quite strongly about. I consider a regular single-player game seriously flawed if it can't be completed by the average gamer because I believe all content should be accessible without too much effort. A game that's easy might be boring, but at least I can experience it in full. A game I can't complete is unsatisfying, and I'm all about satisfaction. A range of difficulties is ideal, but only if the harder game modes are identical in all other aspects.

The gallery for The Oregon Trail contains some animated PNGs. A screenshot just seems inadequate for many animations, including simple ones like the alternating colors of the title screen.

And that's it for 1971. There are no games of interest to me from 1970.

Kingdom kinda baffled me when I originally played it. No matter what happened, I fell behind sooner or later and lost. I wasn't sure what I was doing wrong, but amassing a total of one million resources was daunting, and I gave up after a while. The same thing happened when I replayed it, and I was about to give up again. However, I just couldn't believe that there wasn't a way to beat the game, so I did the math. Yeah, I probably should have done that earlier.

It turned out that without constant rain, which is a rare occurrence, it's pretty much impossible to get ahead via seeding land. So what else is there? Trading. I tried it again, using the same amount of grain each turn to feed the population and using the rest to buy and sell land for profit. Although this strategy worked, people starved, so I played it once more without letting anyone die. This worked even better, though the random results were probably in my favor because the population never really recovered after a plague. The gallery shows this successful playthrough. As in Hamurabi, plagues make it easier to win, which I found both funny and sad.

Overall, I liked Kingdom a little more than Hamurabi. The events make it less monotonous, and I prefer a clear goal to simply playing for ten turns. I didn't like that I couldn't play it normally, however. Completely ignoring part of the gameplay feels a tad wrong to me, but that seems to be the only way to win.

Unplayed: Pong
Pong was the first commercially successful video game and spawned a myriad of clones. The original is multiplayer-only, so I didn't play it. It doesn't appeal to me anyway due to its simplistic gameplay. But since it was instrumental in establishing the video game industry, its inclusion is a given.

No other game from 1972 interests me or is noteworthy.

I found conflicting information about 280-ZZZAP. That's a bit annoying as I try to be as accurate as possible. It may have been released as Midnite Racer first, but the only concrete references to it I found were flyers, one of which already mentioned the Datsun-branded name. It's consistently listed as a 1976 release, though.

As for the game itself, it has a nice driving feel, but speeding along a track with randomized curves for a high score just doesn't provide much entertainment to me. I screenshotted all five ratings again, and I was a little surprised that I got a better final score than before because I only played it for a short amount of time.

There are a bunch of arcade games from 1973 to 1975 I'm interested in, but none of them are currently playable in MAME. Although I expect that to be true for a lot more, I doubt there will be another year without any game entries since the amount of annual releases is only going to increase from this point on. I'm keeping a list, so I might add some of them later on.

Revisiting Adventure was a chore since I'm so fussy about the screenshots in my galleries. For games with a text parser, I prefer it when the commands look at least somewhat like proper sentences. Typing "west" would occasionally cause the game to point out that it can be abbreviated as "W", spoiling my current series of screenshots. I'm not sure if that tip is specific to the version I played, but I liked it better than the others I looked at, so I stuck with it. Since I wanted to capture a largely continuous playthrough, the randomly appearing dwarves made it even worse.

I was really annoyed after a while, so I searched for a fork of DOSBox with snapshot functionality. DOSBox-X was exactly what I was looking for, even though the saved states often failed to load. Still, it made it much easier overall. Snapshots are very useful in general, and I plan to use DOSBox-X for all DOS games. In addition, its default letter spacing is a bit wider, which improves the readability of the text.

The gallery shows every single action except for repeatedly moving north until the final puzzle triggers. Using the in-game save function is also not shown. There's a serious bug with it that puts the player into the pirate's maze when loading a game. This only seems to happen after having been there and doesn't affect games saved in the building. Due to the way save states work, manually saving was still very helpful, but I only did it if it didn't break up the text flow during my excursions.

The bug made me figure out a new route, which I actually like better than my old one. It's not an optimized playthrough, however. I performed some unneeded actions for a more natural progression and also visited a few locations merely for their descriptions. This way, it feels more like an adventure than just an elaborate digital puzzle, though the ending seems to indicate that it's the latter. Except for the buggy save function, nothing I've written about so far influenced my rating of course.

I'm basically a fair-weather explorer, so I enjoy it as long as it can be done comfortably. I already mapped the game when I played it previously, but I can still remember how tedious it was to check each location for secret paths. The often non-linear connections between them, while realistic, make moving around unnecessarily difficult. The only purpose of one of the two mazes is to recharge the batteries of the lamp, which is essentially useless. It really adds nothing to the game, and exploring it felt pointless.

I like puzzles, but my ability to solve them varies widely. I'm much better at straightforward logic puzzles than the type found in a lot of adventure games where I might not even be able to figure out what I'm supposed to do. Two of the magic words used to teleport between places are easy to discover, but the third is simply the name of a room without any hint for that, which isn't something I'd ever think of. Using a black rod as dynamite to escape the final room is also something I would never have figured out. One point is awarded for dropping the dwarvish magazines at a specific location, but I have no idea what the reasoning behind that is.

There's also the issue of the instructions costing five points to view, which isn't mentioned anywhere as far as I can tell. It really irked me when I didn't get the highest score at the end of my very first playthrough, especially since I had no clue what I had done wrong. I couldn't even find any information about the missing points, and I was dumbfounded when I finally discovered what caused it. It's just stupid, especially without a warning.

It has no real story, which I don't have a problem with. The setting is a mishmash of fantasy elements and doesn't appeal to me, but the ending reveals it's just a simulation of an adventure anyway. If that's what it's supposed to be, I honestly can't tell. It's really weird no matter what. For me, the negatives far outweigh the positives, and I rated Adventure accordingly.

Amazing Maze is just a basic maze game and not entertaining at all. I only won eight mazes through sheer luck.

Bigfoot Bonkers is more or less a clone of Blockade. The single-player mode is underwhelming since the AI tends to play rather poorly after it's done mirroring the player. I didn't enjoy it, but the light cycle gameplay doesn't appeal to me in general.

Unplayed: Blockade
Blockade is the original light cycle game, though that label didn't come into use until much later. It also introduced the concept that would be used for snake games, which is why I'm categorizing all such games as snakelike. I didn't play Blockade as it lacks a single-player mode, but it made sense to include it.

I was surprised how fast I managed to hit the upper bricks when I played Breakout this time because I remember that it took me quite a while to do the same when I played it originally. To get some nice screenies, I used save states to the point where it can be regarded as cheating. My final score isn't much higher than the one I achieved previously, though, and I don't think it would be beyond my ability. I even considered clearing both screens that way, but I came to the conclusion that it wouldn't be worth it, especially since I realized that I didn't really like playing it. It's just too repetitive, and I lowered my rating for it by one star.

Although the gameplay of Cops n' Robbers is more complex than the other arcade games I've played so far, it's only marginally entertaining. It's a timed high score hunt, which I'm not fond of, but I was in the zone when I played it this time, and my new score is a fair bit higher than my old one.

So I suffered from chronic fatigue for like a year. It wasn't extremely bad but still fairly brutal. Doing anything physical exhausted me rather quickly, and I couldn't get through most days without taking a long nap. It even affected my mind, and I often felt like I was in a haze. Doctors were useless, but I fortunately saw something on TV about Echinacea, which supposedly strengthens the immune system. Since I suspected I had a long-term infection, I gave it a try, even though I was skeptical that it would help. Well, it actually did work, and I got rid of my illness. Pretty amazing what a plant can do.

During that time, my motivation was really low and my creativity basically nonexistent. I watched a lot of movies and almost exclusively played Guild Wars 2. Although I don't like to compete against other players, I had been regularly playing World versus World to get legendary armor. The large scale and objective-based gameplay made it more palatable to me, and as I understood it better and improved at it, I actually found myself enjoying it quite a bit. Except 1v1s, I still hate those and avoid them whenever possible. I was a bit obsessed with it for a while even and got the rest of armor as well as the backpack from there. I almost made it to mithril rank, but I got tired of it when I started to feel better, and I haven't been back since. I could still use the legendary rings from there, though, especially if the next expansion doesn't offer them through solo play.

My birthday is later this month, so there will probably be some more MMO-related entries around that time. To make navigation easier, I implemented some changes that were almost ready before I stopped caring. Well, that's all for now. Happy New Year!

My interest in MMOs has been higher again this year, and I thought it would be fun to write about my history with the genre. However, even the first entry became really long, and I wasn't able to finish it before my birthday. I decided to finish it later, and writing about my MMO past is now a long-term goal. As for my future MMO adventures, it's going to be largely the same for now. Just like last year, I re-created my main characters for both Guild Wars games on my birthday.

Since I never even played my GW main, it was more of a motivational thing. I want to get the title Legendary Defender of Ascalon for her, which requires reaching the highest level while staying in the tutorial area. I already got it on a different character but only because a friend showed me how. Most foes there stop giving experience at some point, and I doubt I can efficiently farm the ones that still do on my own, so I'll be relying on the daily quest that becomes available at the halfway point of level ten. Acquiring that title is my goal for GW this year.

I did play my GW2 main from last year for a while, but I wasn't entirely satisfied with her appearance and also hadn't figured out the right settings for video capture yet, so I stopped playing her. She's still in the turorial area as well and will remain there until I'm sure which dyes I want to use for her armor. I do have alts to play, which are also fun. After more than a decade, I finally managed to settle on most of their designs and personal story options!

Conveniently, Final Fantasy XIV had a free login campaign right around my birthday, and I used the opportunity to create a new character without having to subscribe. I really like FF14 but hate having to subscribe to it. The free trial is nice but too limited. I'll play it almost exclusively when I do subscribe, but I have no idea when that might be. I'm still busy with other stuff at the moment, so there might not be another update until next month.

I was busy with other stuff for much longer than I'd anticipated, but I really want to get back into things here. I haven't done any gaming outside the MMO space, which had two nice surprises for me earlier this year, though I've also had a bit of a main character appearance crisis once again. I intend to make an update about my MMO activities once a month or so, at least as long as my interest in them remains high.

When I wanted to play some Defiance again after a fairly long time of inactivity, I was taken aback to discover that it was gone. I didn't keep up with MMO news at the time, so I totally missed its shutdown. At least I had recorded all of the cinematics. The first surprise was that Defiance was being brought back by a different studio.

It didn't bother me that the old account data was gone since I'd pretty much been done with the game and had entertained the idea of starting over at times. After going through the story content and maxing one's EGO, there really isn't much to do except trying to get better weapons. My original character did have some really badass guns. When the server came up, I only snagged my name. I plan to create a slightly different version of my former character on my next birthday and redo my videos in higher quality.

My catgirl's skin tone might be a bit too dark as well, so I'm gonna do some more comparisons until I'm absolutely sure which one to use. Since I've never played her, recreating her wouldn't be an issue, except she's on my regular account and therefore behind a paywall. I also have a free trial account which I played on a while back and have since been using to test different character options. The trial offers a ton of content, but I find two of its restrictions quite limiting.

The first is not having access to retainers, making it much more difficult to work on crafting classes due to the limited amount of space. The second is not being able to use the market board, which means I'd have to get all the gear appearances I want myself. The same applies to crafting materials and anything else I might need. On the other hand, I can play whenever I like without having to subscribe, which is a huge plus for me. I should be able to work around both restrictions, so I've decided to play the trial version instead. I still need to set up my UI, though, so this recreation is also scheduled for my next birthday.

Once I'd finally settled on Jenny Nightflower as my full gaming name, I logged into GW to create my ranger with it only to discover it was already taken! Cue another naming crisis. I eventually decided to use Jenny Flowers as my character name with Nightflower as more of a nickname. Fortunately, that one wasn't taken.

And now GW has done it again! When I wanted to start leveling my character in pre-Searing Ascalon at long last, I noticed that her skin tone looked a little too dark. It seems I went too far in that direction the last time, probably influenced by my Rift character, who's quite a bit darker than myself. Now I really like how my Rift character looks, but in general I want my main characters to be closer to myself in that respect. I'm going to find the right skin tone for my GW character and recreate her on my next birthday.

I play mainly GW2 still. I usually do a bit of daily farming for legendaries, which are rather expensive. I'm still missing a good amount of weapon types, so I'm going for more first and second generation legendary weapons. I prefer crafting precursors by doing their collections, which require a large amount of materials. The collectibles from fractals were one of my bottlenecks since I don't like doing group content unless I'm familiar with it. There was an unexpected fractal bonus event, however, that introduced automatic matchmaking for some of them. I didn't really care about the legendary gloves that could be earned from it, but I got quite a few of the collectibles I was missing. I crafted several more precursors, but I need a lot of additional materials to progress the rest.

My main bottleneck now is gifts of exploration. The only way to get them is map completion of the original zones, which rewards two of them. Somewhat ironically, I've been using the wizard's vault starter kits to make and sell legendaries in order to have more money to turn my crafted precursors into legendaries for my own use. The starter kits have some expensive components in them but not the one that needs a gift of exploration, so I've recently run out. It's not a high priority at the moment, though. For one thing, I still haven't finished the latest expansion, and I want to do that before the next one comes out at the end of the month.

The new expansion will finally make legendary aquabreathers available and also have a legendary ring that can be acquired via open world gameplay. Assuming the ring can be created twice, I'd have full legendary armor and accessories with those, so I decided that my future long-term characters will be in full legendary gear from the start. This makes it impossible to accidentally mess up their appearance while playing through and recording their personal story. I still haven't finalized all of their designs yet, though.

One of the fractal bonus event vendors offered one armor set for each weight class, and one token was enough to unlock all the skins of an otherwise cash shop-exclusive set, which was really nice. My engineer will most likely wear the medium armor set since I didn't like anything else for her so far. The heavy armor set isn't bad either, and I might use it on my guardian. As for weapons, I think I've found the right black lion weapon set for each class. My warrior is the only exception and will use the luminous set obtained from birthday gifts. For a consistent look, I want the classes who can use an aquatic spear to use the spear skin from their set for the underwater scenes.

Since regular spears are a recent addition, older black lion sets didn't include a skin for them, though a handful of sets have gotten one since. Not only does the set my new ranger uses not have a spear skin yet, her leggings cause a seam on her back which I doubt ever gets fixed unless I report it as a bug, so she remains stuck in tutorial area limbo for the time being. In case she isn't ready by the time I have the upcoming legendaries, I'm not sure which of my other characters I'll start instead. My warrior is the only one who doesn't need anything, and my revenant and elementalist lack just a few more things, so most likely it's going to be one of those three.

I played LotRO for a while back at launch but had trouble choosing between hunter and champion as my main. I also remember it feeling quite grindy, and I don't think I got very far. After it went F2P, I started fresh on a new server. At that point, I hadn't decided which version of my name to use for my main characters going forward, so I tested both. Since I wasn't fond of the diminutive at first, I deleted the character with it. However, I ended up liking it better after all, but by that time the name had been taken of course. It was enough to spoil the entire game for me, and I quit it altogether.

The announcement earlier this year of the switch to new 64-bit servers was the second surprise and revived my interest. If I could get my name on one of them, I wouldn't mind playing it again. Subscribers got a head start to reserve a limited amount of names, but it wasn't that important to me. And then I even missed the opening of the servers, or so I thought. It turned out that the large amount of character transfers was causing issues, and the servers would open a bit later. I was there that time and, much to my surprise, did get my name. Just in case, I also reserved two other names I've been using in MMOs.

I didn't play right away since there were reports of some issues I wanted to avoid. There's a deed for reaching level 20 without dying that my completionist nature demands I have, and I'd hate to have to restart my character due to an ill-timed lag spike or crash. To avoid potentially missing anything else, I looked into other things that could become unavailable. The LotRO wiki has a dedicated entry for the topic, and there's an even more extensive forum thread.

Landscape difficulty has apparently been nerfed quite a bit since I played it way back when, but a landscape difficulty setting was introduced that has deeds associated with it, which means I'll have to play it that way until level 130. To be better prepared, I decided to test the higher difficulty setting with a different character first. Since I like to have access to all trade skills, I'm glad it was changed so crafting professions can be freely chosen, making it possible for three characters to cover them all, though my main will need the extra crafting slot from the cash shop. I chose a guardian and lore-master in addition to my hunter to have one of each armor type.

I've only been playing my high elf guardian so far, and I had one really close call despite being very careful. Leveling is really slow this way, but it'll help to be familiar with the quests when playing my other characters. Once my guardian is level 20, I'll do the same with a lore-master, then use both to craft gear for my main to make it easier for her to safely get to level 20.

I wasn't planning to recreate this main. Character appearance can be changed at a barber for in-game money, though I didn't know that at first and tried in vain to find some sort of makeover token in the cash shop. However, I'd rather not play her with the default appearance until I have access to a barber, so I've added her to the list of characters to recreate on my next birthday, especially since I won't play her anyway until my two other characters are level 20, which should happen around that time.

While LotRO looks pretty good in 4k with maxed settings, the lack of scaling for certain UI elements makes it impossible for me to comfortably play it that way. It's really annoying having to change resolutions every time I want to play it, and I hope the UI will be updated in the future to have proper 4k support.

I haven't done much in SWTOR for quite some time. I still consider it one of my favorite MMOs, but I've played it so much that the only thing that matters to me now is recording cinematics. I have one character of each origin for that purpose, including my Jedi Knight main. I recorded a lot of videos with her but stopped eventually, mainly because I wasn't able to capture certain raid cinematics without unacceptable stuff in them. I'll definitely skip cinematics in content that can't be done solo if I ever get to that point again, though the only other character that would apply to is my Bounty Hunter, who'd cover the content on the Sith Empire side. The other six characters are for their class stories and possibly additional things exclusive to them.

It took a while to design all of my characters and get the items I wanted for them. By the time I was happy with their appearances, a road map for the game had included the intention of graphically updating the starter planets, so I waited for that since I want my videos to look as nice as possible. Eventually, the updates began. However, there were still some issues when I looked into starting my bounty hunter's story, and I decided to postpone any videos until I could be sure that it was as polished as possible.

Then late last year, character modernization happened. It was completely unexpected, but a graphical update for my characters sure sounded like a nice surprise. However, the changes turned out to be so bad that they made the game unplayable for me. Since then, updates have been made that improved things a lot, so my characters look mostly like they did before, and I can log into them again without feeling bad.

A lot of hair colors were added, which I appreciate, but there's still no dark brown that I like. It's also annoying that the same color can vary quite a bit on different hairstyles. I was never completely happy with my main's hair, and it looks like that won't change. Complexion is another issue. I like my main to have freckles now, but only a few complexions have them. Eyebrows can't be chosen independently either, so I can't get the look for my main I really want.

I'd still like to record my characters' stories, but I'm gonna wait until I can be certain that no further appearance changes of any significance are going to happen and all planets involved in the origin stories have been properly updated. I'd actually like to replay the story on my main the most, but the name Jenny is invalid now, even with a last name added, making it impossible to recreate her even if I wanted to. Oddly enough, names starting with 'Jenn' were blocked in WoW for the longest time before that restriction was lifted. If only SWTOR had some sort of New Game Plus mode, but that seems very unlikely to ever happen.

I'm done with WoW retail unless it gets a free-to-play option in the future, in which case I'd play it casually. I don't think that'll ever happen, though. A Classic Plus version would definitely be interesting, but I'd only play it under one condition: humans can be hunters from the start. An expanded Classic progression server with that option would be fine with me too. But yeah, the only thing that would get me to subscribe to WoW again is being able to play a human hunter from the very beginning.

My mom wrote that in one of her photo albums about the death of her mother. I feel the same way now that she's gone. Although I didn't want to include such personal stuff here, I'll make an exception in this case since I don't keep an actual journal but still want to put it somewhere. It also explains why there haven't been any updates.

Life fucked me over in rather subtle but no less debilitating ways. My mom helped me through the worst of it, and I'll always be grateful to her for that. My dad passed away when my problems were still overwhelming, and I didn't realize until now just how difficult everything must have been for her.

I got better as I got older, but some things never go away. At some point, I gave up trying to find a partner as it didn't seem to be worth it to put so much effort into something that had such a low chance of success. I also resigned myself to never being happy. Having a reasonable comfortable existence would have to be enough.

I mostly kept to myself and did the things I enjoy. When I was in a really good mood, which wasn't that often, I sometimes felt love for my mom, though it never lasted long. I always thought I should have felt that way more often, but I just didn't. I was unemotional most of the time, which was just fine with me.

Last year, my mom's cancer started to affect her more, which coincided with my chronic fatigue. Fortunately, I managed to get rid of my ailment and was able to do more again. I convinced my mom to go on vacation with me because I knew it was the last opportunity. It was one of the best things I ever did.

I'm so glad my mom's condition wasn't that bad yet on my birthday. We'd even baked my birthday cake together, and it was one of the best. I also did my MMO birthday stuff. My interests were still a high priority for me.

Soon after my birthday, my mom's condition worsened even further. I'd always thought I wouldn't be able to care for her as it's not something I'm comfortable with, but instead I couldn't not care for her. That's when I found out just how much she truly meant to me.

The next few months were the most taxing and stressful of my life. I had no idea I was even capable of doing that much, but I was in really good shape, possibly the best I'd ever been. Not only had I lost the weight I'd put on during my bout of chronic fatigue, I was also as fit as I had been before it. Moreover, it had started to feel nice just being alive. And for the first time in my life, I had a real purpose.

I listened to music to cope with the stress because music I like directly affects my brain in a positive manner like nothing else does. I was also still playing MMOs since I needed time on my own. When my mom died, however, my interests suddenly seemed so trivial. It was like a spell had been broken.

I couldn't help but think that I should have done it differently, spent less time in virtual worlds and more time with my mom. That I should have shown more interest in other things. And not only for my mom but for myself. So I would have had a somewhat satisfying life instead of a moderately comfortable one. And now it was too late. That realization broke me, especially since it was most likely my only chance at it.

It took a few weeks until I was able to enjoy music again. I logged into some MMOs but haven't actually played them, or any single player games for that matter. I'll probably get back into the latter before the former, as I did keep up with MMO news. Guild Wars allows single-word names now, but I was too late to get mine, which annoyed me despite everything else going on. Not being able to use the names I want is so stupid.

I'm feeling a little better again, but I really need to secure my standard of living somehow. I don't think I could acclimate myself to a new home, so if it comes to that, there's a good chance I'll prematurely join my parents in the family grave.