JakoJakoJako13

If you see my saying ‘God Damn’ as I’m looking at items it means they expensive as fuck.

About 0.00001% of my worth as a human being. Wait till you venture out of the DE world and into the WM world. i3, BSPWM, Openbox. Go even farther and try Wayland with Sway, Hyprland, Niri, MangoWC. Make your own bars. Configure your own keybindings. Cuss a lot. Pull your hair out. Feel the pain. When you come out the other side you’ll wonder why you ever bothered with so much bloat to begin with. And all of a sudden you might know some CSS and json.

It rings true but it’s not. It’s highly dependent on your upgrade plan. You can get a new CPU without a new mobo if you aren’t changing architecture like jumping from AM4 to AM5. The idea that only the cheap parts last the longest isn’t true either. I’ve been on the same GPU for nearly 7 years. It’s getting long in the tooth but when I do decide to upgrade I’m not forced to upgrade anything else. The GPU is the bottleneck but the bottleneck isn’t noticeable unless I’m playing some new AAA game that requires everything under the sun to run it.

That last paragraph about parts being 5 to 10 years taking up close to 0% of your build just isn’t true for me either. The newest parts in my PC are three years old at this point. The case, the CPU and Mobo, Ram and an NVME drive. The case was purely for vanity reasons. I got an old GPU, and old PSU, 1 NVME drive, 2 SSD drives, and 2 HDDs that are 10 years old. All those parts are older than 5 years. The argument that most people are using PCs that are less than 5 years old sounds like some phone FOMO shit. I don’t buy it.

How to get PTSD flashbacks in an instant.

Nope. This is my spirit telling the story.

I drove 150 miles at highspeed on a highway at night through a thunderstorm during a nervous breakdown. That was just the return drive home.

I still regularly play PS1 and SNES games. They’re just better too me.

Go outside. Interact with real people.

By hand. I’ve only lived in a place with a dishwasher for 1 year. During that time I felt like the dishes never got truly clean. Like if shit was stuck to a plate or bowl it would need manual intervention. If a pan sat for a day and shit got really caked on it wasn’t even worth putting it in the dish washer. I don’t see how it saves on water either. Like I don’t leave the water running while I wash the dishes. I don’t fill the sink. I rinse a plate. Turn the water off. Scrub it down. Rinse it again. Water is on for maybe 5-10 seconds a dish. Scrubbing does all the work.

Mentally, it’s kinda like taking a shower in the sense that my mind goes to a completely different place and all things that bothered me before are flushed out. That change in activity or environment really lets me process shit in a way that meling in front of a screen doesn’t.

I walk my dog.

About 3.5 minutes probably.

You trying to start a war?

Seriously though, I am heavily biased towards this game. I’ve always liked FFVIII the most. It was my first FF so there’s that, but I hold it in highset regard compared to whole series. Second, Cid Kramer is literally my dad’s name just spelled Cid instead of Sid. When I first discovered that when I was a child I fell in love with the game instantly. When people ask me about FF8 it all comes down to the junction/leveling system. Everybody complains about it being too complicated, but it’s really just a case of picking and choosing abilities to make numbers go up on certain characters. The real hardest part is gaining abilities and certain junction slots by leveling up GFs(summons).

FF8 provides probably the most robust leveling system in the the whole series. It really lets you build characters as if it’s a ttrpg. It revolves around the GF leveling system, and that can be confusing the first time around because the game emphasizes the junction system more in the tutorials. When you get a new GF it comes with a large list of abilities you can learn simply by battling. When you give a GF to a character, that character gains all the learned abilities. GFs have shared abilities but you have to learn them separately on each GF. So if you got Elem-J on one GF but not another, that other GF also has to take the time to learn Elem-J. Whichever character has the GF without Elem-J won’t be able to junction magic to Elem-J either. There’s no real order to learning abilities but some things are “required” to make life easier later on in the game. Some GFs have abilities only they know, so now you have to pick and choose which character you want that ability on. It sounds really complicated, but it really is just like DnD leveling when you break it down.

The actual junction system itself is modifiers you set to magic. So say you want your attacks to do a bonus of Thunder damage. A GF learns Elem-Atk-J. That character equips the GF and sets the Elem-Atk-J slot to Thunder/Thundara/Thundaga. Now your normal attacks do bonus Thunder Damage. If the NPC you are fighting is weak to Thunder damage it helps take them out quicker. There’s a whole list of stats you can junction magic to that boost your characters in any way you want. It’s a true build system and not just gain xp and levels to make everything stronger. You have to pay attention to what’s junctioned and when. Use Scan aaaaaaaaa lot.

It can lead to grinding but it’s not the worst grinding in a jrpg. Generally you don’t want to min/max FF8 because the game scales with your average party level. You can do low xp runs. No junction runs if you hate your life. There’s a million ways to “play the game,” if you know what I mean.

Another hard part is grasping how much Triple Triad(the side card game) is embedded into gaining new abilities and powers. When I was a weeee lad I never touched the game. I made it all the way to disk 4 and unbeknownst to me I missed a lot of content by skipping that crazy little gem. Now I’m like a fiend trying to get every card so I can get such and such abilities later down the line. Good thing it really is the best side card game in any video game. A lot of FF8 fans will say the real game is Triple Triad and the story is the bonus content.

Speaking of, the stories are so different between the three that it’s not worth comparing. Character wise FFVII definitely has the stronger cast. If you’re into moody Emo teens then Squall is gonna be your boy. If not then I can see him being a downer. He’s definitely worth his weight as a main character though. Aesthetically, I like VIII the most. The sci-fi aspect is lighter and not as in your face with the existentialism of dying planets and eco terrorism. The second time around doing 3d really shows. Musically I think it’s the best soundtrack in the whole series.

I live and die by saying FF8 is the best game in the series. VIII grabbed me in a way that proved video games are art long before I would ever understand what that meant. Being an 8 year old and really being captured by the story for the first time in any video game changed me. I’m no longer just mindlessly playing these things. I’m paying attention to the story beats and the characters emotions and motivations. Then to go backwards and play VII with that in mind, it just didn’t grab me the same way. I enjoy it. I love playing VII now, but VIII is thee game for me. Poor IX is just the redheaded step child of the series to me. I love FF games beyond the PS1 games. X is right there with 8. 12 is up there. VI and IV are excellent. IX is the one I put the least amount of time in and my opinion of it suffers for that. Play 8. Use a guide if you have to. There’s no shame in that. If you like Final Fantasy you will be better off having 8 under your belt.

FFVIII Disk 2 trying to get Tonberry then off to Shumi.

When I was a wee lad my little brothers were playing with matches in Mom and Dad’s room. All of a sudden Mom bolts upstairs with a pitcher of water and yells, “CALL 911, SAY FIRE!!! RUNNNNNNN!!!” Then like the flash I was on the phone in 2.98813ms. 20 minutes later I’m playing in a fire truck and a bed is getting thrown out of my house. That was a fun day.

Ok. Back to Mednafen I guess.

I go out with my dog and kick a ball around. We both use some energy. The day doesn’t seem as slow any more. I actually have more energy to want to do something after. It’s not much but it works.