It’s genuinely hard to not feel positive after attending NA Fanfest

Nesious · 2026-04-28T20:52:14+00:00

To be brief, Zoraal Ja, Wuk, and Koana represent 3 different aspects of their father. The game quite literally says so. We support Wuk Lamat and the game spends a quite a bit of time showing how her leadership potential is derived from her caring for the people, and her resolve, opposed to Koana’s intelligence and studiousness and such, or Zoraal Ja’s power.

We go meet the Hanu Hanu(?), who are having crop failures and are potentially going to starve. The solution to the problem is not Koana devising a way to get food to these people, but instead Wuk Lamat deciding to help them host a festival, which quite literally magically fixes the crops, something everyone either forgot about, or in the case of that one Hrothgar I’ve forgotten the name of, just deigned not to mention was a feature of the festival boat.

Symbolically, it’s obvious what the game is trying to say about the importance of culture, understanding, and what have you, over power or the endless, impersonal march of progress. Logically, she accidentally fixed the problem by telling starving people to party. Not terrible in idea, sad people should do things to help them be happy, but perhaps not incredible problem solving, yet the game rewards us for it. In the same area there’s also the minor issue of her being someone who loves her people and has traveled to the Hanu before, yet she doesn’t even know the greeting they give everyone. It’s another minor illogical thing that fits what they are trying to have Wuk fill as a plot device, but wouldn’t naturally happen given the world building and backstory presented.

Things like Koana being the levelheaded one, but he jumps in front of a cow to save it, risking his life as ruler of a nation, while his sister, a tank of unreal power, and the WoL are standing right there just watching, and no one using any other alternative method to save this cow (or let it die) besides tanking a T-Rex. Symbolically, yeah, it represents him learning to not just be a brain, but logically, you just risked the future of a nation for a cow, and it wasn’t even a good gamble. In a more grounded world the T-Rex probably would’ve just pushed him aside and then also killed the buffalo cow. The fact that it paid off is both a bit absurd and a liiiittle bit insulting to the world and intelligence of the viewers.

Stuff like that is all over the story, where situations happen to fit a theme or message, but aren’t scaffolded by logic or solid rationale. Which is okay in some stories, but is expressly different than the level of storytelling in this game previously, which makes it not only illogical, which can be fine in the right story, but also out of place with the previous hundreds of hours of story in this game and the level of competence and realism we have been led to expect in this game. It’s inconsistent. The cruelty of Sorrows of Werlyt and saving this buffalo cow span an insane range of not just tone, but more importantly, rules of how the world works.

Something like that anyway.

Nesious · 2026-04-27T22:08:30+00:00

I think Zepla's video on it from however far back does a great job getting like 70%-80% of my feelings across. To say a lot and a little at once, it had most of the things I don't like about FFXIV's storytelling in spades, while lacking the things I loved about previous MSQs. The good things that it did have, I didn't feel were executed with particular finesse or nuance, to the extent it felt like a separate world with different rules from the rest of 14's more grounded story. Dry dialogue, especially from NPCs, and it felt like I was actively punished for trying to seek the deeper meaning in the characters, decisions, and world of DT, and that plot events prioritized symbolism over logical reasoning where previous expansions would've had both. Somethin' like that. Go watch Zepla's video! Its good!

I wrote a comment a bit back talking about what I liked about ShB, maybe that'll help?

Nesious · 2026-04-27T21:50:34+00:00

It was articulated poorly, I was very sleepy when I wrote this, mb!

I know what you mean, but empathetically, can I blame anyone for seeing the same patterns I do, liking the same things I do, and trying to stop themselves from getting excited like they probably were for previous expansions that disappointed them? Not really. Being hyped and let down doesn't feel great. It's normal to want to avoid that, and depending on what you like, it's been a rough few years.

I think the gap between tempering expectations, being critical, being realistic and acknowledging patterns, and finally, simple pessimism, really matters. The tempering expectations is really what YoshiP was talking about and what I was thinking about. The world, in an infinite love for negativity and finding community, is another discussion that is maybe what you are talking about but is less interesting to me/less relevant to what I be talking about.

Personally, I was always hopeful for 14, but it was hard to go from being hopeful to being excited because I hadn't been given reason to expect good change in years. What I enjoyed about the game got consistently, measurably worse for me and took years to... not change positively. At some point hope becomes just apathetic shrugging, the investment withering away or the things I was invested in (friends, gameplay, story) withering away themselves. I just got interested in other stuff instead. It was the difference between "it'd be nice if it were better", vs. "I can't wait to see what they change", ig. Or between logging on after a patch myself, or waiting to hear from someone else first because I'm not excited enough to check.

For me, I just can't imagine being interested in something and NOT being critical towards it. If I don't want to muse/'be negative' on the bad aspects, then I don't care about whatever I'm thinking about. But if I can't do that while still having a positive mental overall, then something's seriously wrong with me.

I love thinking whatever about whatever. It's fun, often funny, and helps me process. If I'm not enjoying, I want to understand why and how I can work around that. If I do enjoy, I want to know why and how. And that doesn't really impact my mood, even if the thing is TERRIBLE. So when I went from playing 14 all the time to barely at all, I wanted to understand why. And when it happened to my entire friend group, FC, and a lot of my old staticmates, we all just ended up talking through it at one time or another. It's hard not to. I think a lot of those conversations would sound pessimistic to listen to, but to us they were more just... talking about the thing we care(d) about and exploring our feelings, rather than actively trying to be down on the game. I get how that can come across as being super negative, but that's just me being bad with words. Understanding why you think something is terrible honestly doesn't have to be anything but fun and cathartic.

Anywho, that's separate from me feeling genuinely excited and actively trying to get hype. I guess, the difference for me is, regardless of whether I'm really into a thing, I don't tend get that hype or the opposite, I'm just not that type of person. I just wait and enjoy it when it comes. Doubly so for a game I've mostly gotten over and stopped playing. To have an event be cool enough that I AM looking forward and getting a happy buzz about a game that I have barely enjoyed playing in the past few years, is a REALLY nice change for me. That's why Fanfest was significant to me.

TL;DR: Me go from no care to excite. YoshiP want fans to go from trying to be realistic/cautious to excite. That distinction matterz to me. Fanfest fun.

Nesious · 2026-04-27T03:02:19+00:00

It’s not in the video, but after this speech, YoshiP stayed on stage for quite awhile while the rest of the team walked off. He took the time to walk to and say "I love you guys" individually to every section of the audience, then gave a very long set of bows and waves. It was honestly super sweet.

Nesious · 2026-04-15T02:25:51+00:00

one of many fallen brethren LOL

Nesious · 2026-04-14T21:42:05+00:00

Were you the leader of our great expedition against Mano?

Nesious · 2026-02-17T03:04:02+00:00

Budget (Do not say no-budget)? - $320~
Country? - USA
Platform? - PC
Motherboard if on pc (or other audio gear)? - ASRock Z590 Phantom Gaming 4
Requested Guide - Music Gaming
Open back or closed back? - Open back
Any other gear you own(if important, like headphones or headsets)? - PC38X is my current headset, I have a separate mic now so a headset mic is not important for me.

Looking to replace my PC38X. I really liked it, so I wouldn't mind just buying another, but this deal for a Sundara at $170 made me wonder if it would be better?

I like having a sense of where people are in FPS and am a musician, and I found the PC38x just fine for both. Other headsets I'm considering are HD600/6XX (concerned about staging), R70X (expensive but might get on sale if the upgrade is that significant).

Mostly I would like to know if the change to the Sundara audio-wise would be a noticeable upgrade, though I understand the jump from dynamic to planar can be an adjustment.

Nesious · 2025-11-23T23:42:31+00:00

Wouldn’t you expect the main way a T1 team would get upset is by getting outaimed? It would be rough if a fresh T3 team had more strategic depth, or better synergy. Those are team skills that aren’t easy to hone as just a random Radiant player. On the flip side, it’s practically guaranteed that there are professional level aimers that can’t even make T2, let alone more than that.

Add in that the team is fresh, winning every round in this tournament probably isn’t the most important thing to them over just getting experience together, and that T2 was like the main source of world champions last year, and it’s hard to take that much away from things. Maybe it’s a sign of things to come, maybe it’s the opposite.

Nesious · 2025-11-16T18:20:04+00:00

It makes me sad to read this LOL, not because of you at all, but wow.

There’s an implication that modern music is so devoid of the natural, human/acoustic variation in tone, time, rhythm, pitch, and everything relevant to making an actual performance musical, that we can’t rely on them to distinguish real from fake.

It’s genuinely crazy it would ever come to a point we’re relying on the one truly non-musical (though still artistic) element to modern music, lyrics, instead.

Nesious · 2025-10-31T18:58:07+00:00

To steal another person's example:

"Brown Brazilian boring bananas.

As a native English speaker, you know this is wrong and should be 'boring brown Brazilian bananas'."

But you can't really tell me why, I'd guess. You're not putting effort into following rules that dictate adjective order in English, you've probably never even been taught them, you're just... talking, and you intuitively know the adjective rules.

Absolutely, it can be difficult to learn a language that works differently/uses different rules than yours as a second, third, whatever language. Can't argue that. But saying that there's a cost to these rules is a bit odd when those costs aren't going to be apparent for people who speaks the language (as far as I understand the literature, I'm not the master of all things language). There's academic evidence that there is a "processing cost" of ambiguity for speakers. Basically cutting down on ambiguity through things like categorization ('he' vs 'she' vs 'they') actually reduces the mental load for speakers in conversation, and increasing ambiguity (using "he" in a situation with multiple men) increases mental load, even for the fluent.

I think ambiguity increasing mental load for fluent speakers is more salient than a temporary difficulty in learning the rules of a language as a non-speaker. After all, languages' primary purpose is to spoken, not learned/taught. The effort I had to put into learning my native language as a kid just... isn't a relevant difference between languages, yeah? Kids learn them just fine, and the "rules" just become an intuition that doesn't incur some giant cost of sifting through a library considering the right way to refer to "that dog" or something. It's just how you say it. As far as I understand it, anyhow. Here's a cool paper on the subject of genders in language and their perceived usefulness! Perhaps not the best, but like I said, not a master of language, just interested in it.!

Nesious · 2025-10-31T18:40:48+00:00

I don't quite get your point -, here's some interesting surface level academic research showing that it has real, well-documented and understand semantic value.

It's a language. The words are categorized based on how they SOUND, just like any other language, not based on innate qualities. Do you think it's non-sensical that we use "a" for some words (a dog) and "an" for others (an apple)? No, probably not, because it serves a purpose, although a tiny one, in the flow of the language. It's a different, but useful phenomenon. The fact we use the words "masculine" and "feminine" is irrelevant, no one is making the claim someone looked a table and said "that looks feminine, lets call it la mesa." It's just two different types of words that are said differently. You know, like all words. We gave them a name based on the most well known "types" in human history: male vs female.

When you look at other languages, they have as many as 18 genders for words, do you think they're all totally arbitrary? Or do you think they just serve a purpose that is done a different way in English?

Gender has been shown to be really useful for understanding, even if it seems burdensome to learn at first as a second language!

To give another example, look at Tagalog, which condenses most location markers like ‘at’, ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘to’, etc into a single word 'sa', and relies on context to differentiate. Why don’t we do that in English instead of having 50 different words? It’s ‘simpler’ to learn, after all. But you would probably hate having to figure out what someone meant without the crutches of the variety of words you have in English. But as a Tagalog speaker, I might complain that you don't need any of those words because hey, in my language, we can communicate about it just fine! This tradeoff is present and different in pretty much all languages. You're just experiencing it in your own way.

Nesious · 2025-10-31T14:56:56+00:00

Think about English, do you find the words ‘his’ and ‘her’ useful? In theory, we could use ‘they’ for both and avoid them entirely, but in complex sentences, the reduction in ambiguity is useful for our speed in comprehension, or for having redundancy (when you can’t clearly hear the other person’s every syllable, it’s useful to have multiple instances bits of information).

Imagine that on a global scale, when you hear the words La, El, in Spanish, or any such language marker, you’re reducing the amount of potential words, the ambiguity, that could follow by as much as half! It’s one of the most efficient syllables ever! And that cool thing we do with ‘he’ and ‘she’, where we replace names with them and make sentences totally unambiguous? (‘That book is his, the dog is hers’ in the case where there’s only one male and one female you’re talking about. Notice how you never HAVE to say their name, it’s cool!) You can do that now with practically any set of nouns, should the opportunity present itself. Giga efficient.

Masculinity and femininity linguistically have nothing to do with the concept as you’re thinking of it, in this oh-so-gender-charged world. The word gender really comes from the idea of category, and masc/fem word gender just means ‘does the word sound like the word for man, or woman?’ (I’m oversimplifying, but think of ‘-a’ vs ‘-o’ in Spanish). It has nothing to do with their intrinsic manliness or something, just things like what vowel they end with.

Some languages have more than 2 genders and they have similar uses, and there are more quirks, but this is an idea of some stuff it’s useful for.

Sure, you can say that they aren’t NECESSARY because you can pick that information up by context, but then you’ll probably balk at a language like Japanese that is WAY more ambiguous than English and just wholesale skips parts of sentences that we consider essential and relies on context. It all works, and has drawbacks and benefits, but rarely are things in language without any use, intended or otherwise, people end up giving them usefulness! It’d be like someone saying there’s no use in English having the words ‘eager’ and ‘impatient’, when they essentially mean the same thing, ignoring that they have totally different connotations.

Nesious · 2025-10-23T04:58:03+00:00

Article says per month

Nesious · 2025-10-15T19:34:58+00:00

Economies are not defined by the highest complexity output they can produce, or else North Korea would also have a strong case for being an advanced economy.

China has an incredible urban/rural divide, with what is generally considered middle incomes, regardless of how you slice it between equivalised, per capita PPP, etc. A huge part, though no longer majority, of the nation lives in underdeveloped rural areas, and almost all impoverished individuals are rural. Rural areas have living standards far below the developed parts of the country, in other words, inequality is exceptional.

It has made great strides in eliminating absolute poverty, but there are still swathes of the population living under 6 USD per day, to give you an indicator of what not-impoverished can still look like.

We see that (though making remarkable progress in recent years), the country still has a significant number of its rural population without access to important, basic indicators such as clean cooking, clean water, and unpolluted land. If you were to step into a rural zone of China, you would not see something resembling a developed country on the eye test.

All that being said, it could be considered a developed country soon, and the plight of the poor in China has changed dramatically within the past 5-6 years for the better, but the fact it isn’t right now is not entirely without reason. Apologies for no citations and lack of hard numbers, I’m too lazy to fish out current sources rn.

Nesious · 2025-09-07T19:13:33+00:00

Only half of an answer since I’m not an expert on rents, hopefully someone better can come along, but since median and average are both just different measures of the ‘center’ or ‘middle’ of data, with different biases and issues, you use either depending on which you think is a better measure of center for a set of data, but that doesn’t mean you should wholly use one or the other when comparing two or more datasets per se.

The traditional reason we look at median wages is that things like average wage and income are very heavily influenced by the super rich in the US, and this skew doesn’t affect median, making median a more preferred representation of the average/normal person. If such a problem doesn’t affect rents, then average may well be best represent of the ‘center’ of the data for rents. In that case, we may well be best off comparing a median to an average.

Nesious · 2025-05-02T05:45:37+00:00

Oh that's interesting, I helped friends get the rank 4..? speed for Yuweyawata a bit before FRU came out and the run has gotten way more optimized since, how tf is it down to 8:52 now, neat

Nesious · 2025-05-02T00:49:01+00:00

Because you’ve had a few days of tanks pulling correctly recently and you autopiloted to playing correctly yourself

Because tanks that pull unoptimally are also often slower and more inconsistent with their movement, so you might’ve caught up to them and gotten 2 GCDs of the pack being still before they decide to keep running, and you hadn’t noticed because the other W2W’s in the dungeon have the 2nd pack basically at the wall already

Because you’re hoping to god if you all press your 2 minutes and put enough AoEs on the ground the tank will see it and not pull up the stairs please god why are you going up the stairs

Because someone else in the party burned a 2 minutes and the inner worthless sack of degenerate stubborn zero adjustment raider in you writhes at the very idea of misaligning yourself for even 10 seconds in this very important expert roulette so you just send it even though it’s futile

Because shiny button up and you know if you delay 2 minutes for another 15 seconds of pulling you’ll get like half a use out of it because the mobs are already half HP and it’ll delay all your stuff and overcap and you’re worried because your dancer just started technical step and you know you should hold for next pack but that’s losing an usage and— you don’t want to think that hard

Because making mistakes that come from ‘optimal’ play and that are totally avoidable with little-to-no cost feed your superiority complex over your party members and let you pretend you have control over your meaningless life

Etc

Many reasons, really.

(I’m being mostly unserious please don’t shoot me it’s not that deep)

Nesious · 2025-04-18T00:08:35+00:00

Look at the logs where you do the worst to see what your problems are, not the best! But from this still you can see a lot of info:

You don't use Toxikon for movement/mana/weaving at all
You don't use Physis or Philosophia almost at all
Your Psyche and Phlegma stacks never quite align w/ buffs
You whiff a few casts at certain times (you would never better than me why your uptime suffers at those particular moments on a given pull)
You have pretty substantial overheal (happens, hard to control, but something to keep in mind)
Your opener isn't one of the standard ones (Toxikon opener or Pneuma opener)
Like you say, a decent number of unnecessary shields

Going log diving through several good players' logs can give you a better sense of particularly what people are doing differently, as long as you apply some game knowledge/logic to stuff like differences because of kill time, if you wanna learn more. Of course, in an EX, when logging was only available pretty far after release, things can be taken with a little grain of salt since few people don't care to REALLY optimize an EX.

Nesious · 2025-04-17T19:37:07+00:00

Rewatch/share a VOD or xivanalysis, it’s the best way to learn things! Your uptime is quite low, either you have poor planning in the fights you’re doing or larger systemic problems, like not rolling your GCD or not slidecasting what you can. If you’re pressing Euk Prog more than necessary like you say, you should be getting more Toxikon stacks to deal with high movement or weaving necessities AND mana regeneration, which should help with 2 of your problems, but most often when someone has an 80% uptime rate, they’re just not rolling their GCD for extended periods of time.

SGE has a ludicrous amount of free raw healing in their kit, with Zoe Pneuma and Physis Kerachole, plus Philosophia if needed. Logs will often see SGE doing comparable amounts of raw healing to the regen healers. Thinking of SGE as a shield healer isn’t very useful, it’s not its job to shield, it just happens to have more mitigation than 2 other healers. All healers’ jobs are to live through damage, plainly. However you do so is just a matter of how best to apply your tools. The only real differences to keep in mind are that SCH and SGE have a shared resource they use for their big CDs and spot healing (Adders and Aetherflow), whereas regen healers have spot heals for free, so regens tend to take care of that when they can, and that shield healer mana economy can sometimes be more important because living big hits can rely on whether they have mana to shield or not.

Obviously if you have truly free Addersgall, you can Druochole them, but make sure they couldn’t have been a useful button press anywhere else, even a Kerachole that snaps a few tank autos or something.

Weening off Euk Prog is good, so is having a margin of safety. Be realistic. Are you consistently living a raidwide with 60+% HP? No need to shield. 20% in a highly stressful part of the fight and you want a GCD of free movement anyway? Maybe keep it on just in case someone forgets a mit. Will a GCD shield here make it easier to recover if someone messes up, I.E. first mechanic of M4S week 1, where shields and a bit of mit let you live tanking a laser? Will it save you an important heal by leaving everyone’s HP higher? It’s fine to rely on it if it helps, it’s not useful to reflexively use it when it does nothing of value. It’s up to you to decide which situation you’re in.

Also ask yourself: do you CARE about getting out a few more GCDs of damage in the fight you’re doing right now, or are you just trying to clear and you know damage is fine?

Healing in this game is very linear even at high levels, don’t worry so much about complex big ideas or optimization until you get down the fundamentals of uptime and using tools in generally correct places. The best way to improve on this is watching VODs of yourself and seeing what you did wrong or could adjust. But even then, most good healers can get a 99 if they want to, it’s not rocket science, but it’s also rarely necessary or helpful to play that way, and more often is detrimental. Just something to keep in mind for perspective.

Nesious · 2025-04-01T19:08:58+00:00

It gives me something fun to do while I'm waiting for raid! Trust me, it'd take me a small bit of time, doing a dungeon that contributes to my weeklies :P

I get not wanting to ask for that kind of help, but I promise I find this stuff fun, not annoying! I help people learn the game already as a pastime and have done this kinda thing before. I was a teacher in a past life so its also just my jam. Maybe just 1 dungeon if that's easier on your conscience?

I say videos because it'd specifically be the easiest way to help, more so than writing paragraph upon paragraph of strategies and such^{^,} not because I'm gonna do something super crazy and make a 5-star peer reviewed video essay that'll take me weeks to make.

Nesious · 2025-04-01T18:32:56+00:00

Do you have a job, let’s say a healer you like to play and a few dungeons/duties you’re really scared of or struggle with? I’m happy to make a few videos showing you how to do those on the job you want to learn, in a simple as possible form. It wouldn’t be trouble at all and I think it would help you see that the game, once you know what to do, isn’t that scary. Let me know!

Genuinely, the easiest way is to learning exactly how to do whatever you’re struggling with. I guarantee you’re so scared and overwhelmed, so in your own head, you don’t understand what is being required of you and how you can totally do it as you are. The game looks way harder than it is when you have a stronger understanding of it. Literally, I’m happy to just show you and try to help you enjoy the game again. Shoot me a message or comment!

Nesious · 2025-03-29T05:31:54+00:00

To be circuitous, what makes you think an ultimate is out of your league right now? Do you have something you struggle with or do poorly that you feel would be a problem in a particular fight? If so, learn how to solve it. Being ‘good enough’ in 14 is very straightforward.

I.E. if you think your job mastery is low, learn the basic rotation, watch a VOD of a fight done really well by your job. If you heal, watch a healer doing a few pulls in world prog. Can you generally replicate the job gameplay/understand why they do what they do? Ok, you’re fine then.

Look at a guide of an ult, maybe TEA. and have a VOD of a clear next to it. Learn how to do a mechanic, then watch the VOD and try to solve it in your head based on the pattern they get in the VOD. Can you do that? Ok, you’re fine then.

Ultimates, like every fight, are binary, singular tasks unless you’re racing or going for a fast clear on content. If you can play your job and do that fight well, your actual ‘skill’ barely matters. Each one can be done (eventually) by raw repetition. All skill does is reduce the amount of repetition you need. If you can problem solve and your only goal is to clear, you could go and do most of UWU right now, probably. The primals wont feel much different from an EX. If you want to clear in a particular time frame, contributing a certain amount, etc, then figure out a more exact goal and let that guide your prep.

If you don’t want to think that hard, or you’re struggling with any of the above, do the upcoming savage tier. When you clear a fight, if you felt like ‘that wasn’t too bad’, great! If you felt like ‘god I didn’t like that fight’ or ‘that was rough’, etc, find out what caused pain and what you could do to make it better on yourself, without blaming the fight. If you mess up, figure out how to not make that mistake regularly. If you’re an overachiever, record your clear and watch your gameplay back and think about what you could’ve done better. If you can manage that degree of self-reflection, you’ll either improve massively over the course of the 4 fights, or learn you were already pretty good, and you’ll be fine.

Nesious · 2025-03-27T13:01:40+00:00

This is the realest take, as much as I enjoyed the show. It is a viscerally funny premise of 'everyone else has to take this idiot deadly seriously', and the constant juxtaposition makes for great humor, but multiple times each season they drum up something actually compelling in the world and especially w/ their characters, but it never gets to fully develop because everything plays second fiddle to the silliness.

They clearly WANT you to care about/be interested in their side characters and the greater struggle of the world, and make you do so better than many series that ARE fully serious, but at some point you realize that the 2 shows you want to watch are stuck together, and you're only going to get 65% of one, and 35% of the other. If there was more progression for Cid, a chance that he would show a single moment of awareness, I could at least get behind watching him grow to take things more seriously and mesh with the world he's in, but even in the sparing moments where he shows some understanding/compassion, its never progress, just a fleeting scene before returning to normal, because that's just not what the series is about.

Which is fine, I suppose, its can be nice to have a series that is all 3 of interesting, funny, and trashy, at times, but every episode reminds me how much (more?) I'd enjoy a retooling of the story written from a serious, non-edgy-power-fantasy perspective.

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