All right, it didn’t quite turn out as I had expected. This post wasn’t “soon"as I predicted originally. The reason? The fact that the video card I bought died after three days of usage, and getting a replacement took a while. Finally though, I have a functional system. It’s a Core 2 Duo CPU (7200) with 2 Gb of RAM and an ATI Radeon 3870 HD video card. I installed Linux on it, of course, but instead of Kubuntu I gave openSUSE a try.

Sadly (for me) I’m back from the holidays. For those of you who wondered why the updates on Japan stopped: when I got back to Tokyo I didn’t have an Internet connection, so I had no means to update. The whole holiday was a blast, though, and we’re considering getting back in two years. Aside from that, work has picked up a really fast pace immediately (why on Earth journals don’t accept LaTeX-produced PDFs?

(Note: I should really start posting more often nowadays) Last monday, for one of my group, I re-did one of the hardest missions of the whole Chains of Promathia expansion: PM6-4, better known as “One to be Feared”. I was looking forward to redoing it, mainly because I wanted to see if the adjustments that came after I finished the expansion (Sentinel modification, shield blocks modification, etc.) made the job easier.

I haven’t posted anything in a month or so. Quite a long time, considering I used to write at least once per week. The reasons are mainly two: first of all, my work schedule has taken a turn for the worse, which means I have to do my job a lot harder than before; secondly, there wasn’t much interesting stuff to report. Let’s resume from the hiatus by writing about my latest Final Fantasy XI session.

For a change, my brother has found a place (DLsite.com) that sells dojinshi even to non-Japanese people, and also found three non-hentai Final Fantasy XI dojins, which I’m going to cover in this post. For reference, they are available with these prices:

• FFXI-URUSHI-Chaos: 01 - ¥ 735;

• FFXI-URUSHI-Chaos: 02 - ¥ 735;

• FFXI-URUSHI-Chaos:03 - ¥ 945.

Despite the utter lack of content in Wings of the Goddess my brother has managed to create a movie clip (inspired by the opening of Wild ARMs The Vth Vanguard). You can view it below (streaming) or obtain a higher quality version. [googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8316261647217076877[/googlevideo] (apologies for the lack of updates. I’ve been quite busy. I will probably post more in during the Christmas holidays)

While I’m waiting for KDE 4.0 to compile, I just wanted to share a small clip of my brother’s character doing the Drain Samba animation. A bit of background: he has leveled Dancer up to level 7, and now he stopped because there is no artifact armor available yet (probably out in February) and because he’s also leveling another job, monk. Given how people rushed to get Dancer to 75 in less than a week (comments are left to the reader) it is a nice change.

[]({{ site.url }}/images/2007/11/pol-2007-11-30-14-56-28-86.png)

Finally my copy of Wings of the Goddess has arrived. It was just a matter of putting the DVD in the drive and let install the measly 350+ Mb of update (rather low for a DVD). As usual, Square Enix’s installation program is greedy with regards to information. Once it was installed, I enabled the expansion in PlayOnline and was good to go (save a 20,000+ file check).

With the new version update, these strange portals have been appearing throughout Vana’diel. They’re supposedly the gateways to the past, but since I don’t have Wings of the Goddess yet I can’t really see what will they do. Nevertheless, I was curious and went to take a look at them. They’re **huge. **I estimate at least twice the height of my character. For those curious, here are two photos (one is of my brother’s character, the other is mine):

And so, with yesterday’s update, FFXI has gained a windowed mode. This has been a much-requested feature from the playerbase, especially from people who didn’t want to use the “unofficial” windower.

However, being the first major touch to the rendering engine, I think something got broken along the way. Mainly, I’m talking about a 20% performance drop of the engine (which didn’t shine before, but that’s another matter).

And so I’m reading that the FFXI Fan Festival has kicked off yesterday (I wish I could have been there). Naturally, reports have been flowing. The FFXI Encyclopedia has a good report of what has been said so far. 1up, the online branch of EGM, has also covered the event, but the article is only focusing on the new jobs (talk about explaining something no one else will ask… not to mention the attitude of that “journalist”).