New families : The Sims 4

I've been lagging with the character development post (I have a draft that is just a headline sitting but I doubt I''ll get to it too soon) so I'll post more about games. This time The Sims 4 since with a new computer, comes new experiences. Mostly the custom hair looks nice and loading times aren't abysmal so I can enjoy get to work and going to festivals.

The twins indulging in creative activities - Veronica plays the piano while Tobias paints. None of them are all that artistically inclined canonically but whatever. Technically Vera would struggle with playing an instrument since she's blind but in Sims 4 land is "anything happens" AU!

About time for an upgrade : iz dzīves

So, as a graduation gift I bought myself a new PC, my mom bought a new monitor for herself so I got one of her "old" ones - it wasn't old but it's a widescreen one and it doesn't  work well for her type of job so I got it.

Phone picture in the evening was probably a bad idea because the pc box and the monitor vanish into the general background, you can only see the outline of the actual screen.

As you can see, I love clutter in real life and order on my desktop. Truth be told my pc is a full-on gaming computer - I only have games on it so far and also Fraps. Maybe will get video editing software or something else.

In general I'm happy about the computer update - finally can play games in decent framerate and not have infinite loading times. Well, except some games, and then I can't figure out if it's the game being "old" (like 2014 or older), windows 10 being a shit or maybe my graphics card or something else. 

Other than that, this week I started working at my new job, I'm an assistant at the institute of horticulture. Mostly doing garden work right now - picking cherries, cutting stems for mass producing. I don't know how it's all called in English so pardon if it sounds dumber or more convoluted than it should. Since my supervisor works with pear trees I got a patch of pear plantations to maintain too. Mostly weeding and cutting branches. 

I'm pretty tired at the end of the day but at least my responsibilities change day to day. At least for now - I'm sort of "on call" so I just get sent wherever and help out my colleagues. I'm also part-time so I won't have to work all week. This is my first job ever so I have to get adjusted. Mostly to the smaller amount of free time. 

Me every day after work, especially after lugging around buckets of cherries and portable stairs.

Ps. the tag for everyday blogging is "iz dzīves" which can be translated to "from life", I like that phrase in Latvian but not sure if I will blog much in my native language

Tobias : from priest to witch to start athlete

Decided to continue my character building posts, this time I will focus on the protagonist of my story - Tobias Nevermind. I think recently he turned one or even two years old as an OC, but his history and inspiration goes deeper. In his inception, the prototype for Tobias wasn't even an original character but a re-imagination of an existing character.

Image from here

As some might know, a few of my Granado Espada characters had off-canon backstories, Valeria was one of them - I genderbent her and gave the recruitable character the name "Tobias". I also made it so that Valeria Vendetta wasn't Valeria's "evil" side but the third sister, alongside  princess Gabriela.

Wiike, from one to another : character building

So, I promised I'd make blog posts about my original characters, so I shall start with Wiike. Ironically, she was a minor character that has recently piqued my interest. I will start from the beginning.

Here is Wiike in her first iteration - an asura from Guild Wars 2. She is one of the characters I made in a game with the intention of staying within that universe. In fact, GW2 Wiike is vastly different from OC Wiike, I can't even call it an AU, it's like character evolution that leaves footprints.

Since I had no warriors and no asura I made Wiike. In universe a warrior asura seemed a bit odd to me - they're an inventive race, not really brutes. I know, Vigil asura exist and so on but I still went the "warrior asura are not common" route. So Wiike was made into a "runt", I even wanted to make it that she has a learning disability that put her behind her peers, but since she was a minor character I never actually looked into such characterization. She has her own story alongside Lieire, a charr, in the Vigil. They went to Orr, got stranded in the Maguuma jungle, lost many friends and so on. Wiike's story was stuck in limbo because I focused on other characters I actually played, warrior was simply not for me.

So I decided to turn Wiike into an independent character. An original character without a trace of Guild wars 2 (you now, to avoid copyright infringement among other things).

I seem to post once every 6 months : GE and some other things

Due to my inability to stick to one thing consistently, from time to time I come to blogger to simply blog. Also to show off my constant relapse into certain things, however, I will cover many things in this blog, sort of starting with most interesting and then turning to rambles as the post goes on.

Right now I'm messing Granado Espada Europe since there was a an event that gave all sorts of gears, got several evil weapons. As you can see I also got cadet Lionel, who's pretty cool. At this point I have better gear in GE Eu than in GE Online, so after the event ends and I lose interest in GE again I will probably return to the European server if anything. 

I'm doing all the quests which is honestly a pain in the ass only because I hate redoing things and also some things have changed significantly. Some quests are obviously nerfed so even experts can do this but for Grace's return to Bristia quest you had to fight a really strong Cherlyn for some reason, I put the quest off because she would simply decimate my team but with patience I did it. 

Here's Grace posing next to Heyran with a constellation shotgun because that weapon series in now quite affordable and accessible. A lot of low-tier weapons are now that they're basically baby-tier.

Doesn't bother me since I will never be a full fledged player - won't join any factions and farm for high tier weapons anyways, will leech off events.

Here's a picture of my current team: Emily, Battle smith Idge and Cadet Lionel. Emily is just an old favorite of mine and I'm most used to her. Battle smith Idge is a pretty good melee character, considering the fact I don't have any other "good" rare melee characters or regular characters. Cadet Lionel simply is a good addition because getting Punisher for regular Lionel is a pain in the ass, even if now it's cheaper and all. 

I should work on getting all sorts of characters, especially since recruitment quests get nerfed too, or changed and then I screw myself. Apparently for Ion's quest you can get a quest version of the instance, but it's solo and actually quite difficult and you can't cancel it. So I get to about 10-20 % of the boss' HP and then get decimated. I even got a fighter to Master and got her a shield that adds together 4 DR and still when the Rose spirit summons her little minions it gets too spicy... Maybe I need the fighter to have a slightly better weapon. Or racials for Lionel. Whatever!

I think this is all about GE, I'll put the rest of my ramblings under the cut, it's mostly about my original stories and some semi-personal stuff I suppose.

Sims 4: New year, new game, new impressions.

So, haven't updated this blog for about half a year. Now it's 2017. Needless to say I drifted off from Granado Espada again and sorta stopped having a reason to write in this blog. I'm mostly playing offline games now or watching play-throughs. Though sometime around the beginning of January I got into sims 4 - the game had a huge sale so I get the digital deluxe version for like 25 euros which was a catch for a 60/70 euro game.

Anyways! Nobody cares about pricing, everyone cares about the sims.

So far I've made three households, first was a random character for trying out. Then I downloaded some mods/custom content and made my OCs.

First family was my newer characters, Mikhail (Misha), Cecilia, Ben and Sebastian.

Misha is childish, mischievous and a slob. He is actually my favorite dude of the bunch because he turned out handsome and also because I love his goofy personality. His hair looks a bit bad in this picture as I can't play on high settings and the custom content waters down on lowers. His hair should be a deep red! 

Other than that, he is in the criminal career and brings the big dosh home. 

Looking for frogs.

GE: New $tuff

All my masters and my piggy pet. Decided to upgrade in some departments - get a better looter, get some costumes. Wanted to see what I can get from shelling out some cash. 

I toyed around with the Letizia Feso shop which is mostly a useless gamble but I got a Vigilar pistol (36AR), completely blank, that I sold for a billion, so I bought three +5 ELNs with 3DR for the characters pictured and a clean 32AR metal armor which I chipped with 2AR but am planning on rechipping for 3. I shelled over 100 chips on that armor so I feel like it's a cursed thing. 

I went down to like 60 million but today I noticed a White Tiger pet for 25mio so now I'm down to over 25. I don't really have set goals so I'm impulse spending.

Gonna get new weapons then I will try and save up for permanent ET rings. Perhaps will gamble more in the future, or just buy growth stones for enhancing. It costs like 800k feso to attempt once at +6ing, let's hope the RNG gods love me.

Actually managed to break some 31 and 32 AR weapons going to +6 the other day so I guess the first strikes of several +6s was luck. So I guess trump weapons are the cheapest alternative I won't feel bad about breaking. Might buy some +6 serpents but the market is pretty empty.

Idge fighting the Rabbit King.

Training the characters I have to lvl 100 for family level, got Calypso to Expert, will get Idge to expert too and then together with Cathy the three will level their stances. 

Those girls need costumes too. Everyone needs costumes! I'm gonna be piss poor one day. It's like Guild Wars 2 - fashion is most important, who cares that I need to figure out how to get high tired weapons. I hate Valeron powders anyways. :3