May 2022

May 3, 2022: Goodbye, Kitty

Around 5 years ago, I got really into early Queen. I loved their first 3 albums especially but I also listened to some of their later stuff. There was one song that I had trouble listening to, because it would always make me cry and I didn't like that. It's called "All dead, all dead". The song is about a cat, that as the name suggests, has died. At the time I couldn't bear listening to the song as just thinking about my cat dying would break my heart. But the day has arrived when I can listen to this song and cry freely, my cat has passed away. I was waiting to calm down to write this but it doesn't matter - I am crying anyway. I can't describe in words how dear this cat was to me. Once I return home, there will no longer be nights where I have to leave the doors of my bedroom open, I will no longer have to tend to her when she meows to just annoy me, I will no longer open the doors of my apartment to her, I will no longer have my floor and clothes littered with her hairs. She will not greet me at the bottom of the stairwell when I come home from work with my bike. There will be no reason to leave cardboard boxes laying around for her to jump into, I won't have to change my sheets before my sister comes to visit because they're full of her hair. I will no longer hear her snore, I will no longer have her cuddle up next to me in bed. For 16 years I've had that, but now it's gone.

My mom sent us a message this morning to tell us that she was put to sleep yesterday. Our neighbor, who we shared her with, took her to the vet. For the past few months she has been a bit sick with a respiratory infection, and sadly it got worse. She got a transfusion, some injections but it seems it didn't help much and she was greatly weakened. The vet said putting her down would be the best choice so she wouldn't suffer. She had an amazing life, she truly did. She was a happy cat, and the whole neighbourhood knew her and loved her. I found her, 16 years ago, when I was in the 3rd grade of elementary. I was out with my best friend that day, and we took her to my building which is why my neighbor adopted her. Since that day we've shared her and she spent an equal amount of time in our apartment and in her apartment. She did what she wanted, she visited whenever she wanted, and her life was truly her own. Ironically, she died on my friends birthday, the friend I found her with. I believe she was born in spring, and she died in spring. My little May Queen. Maybe at some point I will share images of her in my gallery, but right now I won't, as it is too hard to look at them. I love her so much. What hurts the most is that I am 2000 kilometers away. I just had a feeling she would leave me when I left her. It is killing me inside.

May 9, 2022

It's been a couple of days, and I feel better. I still get sad if I see a cat that resembles her but I think the worst part has passed. Or it's only about to come, when I arrive back home and the reality of it all hits me. Losing a pet sucks. Talking about it with my sister and mom really helped.

Don't want to stick around sad topics to much, so time to move on. I'm playing Tera (again), but this time on a private server. Dear god, it's so good. The whole community must be on some kind of a euphoria high, because the server seems to be well maintained, so many users came back and people even talk!! in dungeons. The last 2 years where I'd play on and off in the retail versions people wouldn't even say tyfp when done with the dungeon. Radio silence. Or they'd talk in russian if they were from the russian server. A lot of my old guild came back too, which makes me happy. A lot of dungeons are currently available and it's fun to relearn stuff with old players, honestly I'm having a blast. Gearing is easy, the main thing to grind for is the costumes and some mount buff. You can even grind for the premium sub. Fun times, honestly. Retail version is closing in a few weeks and I haven't even bothered logging on yet, I'll probably log on the closing day. The publisher messed up by giving this server wide cooldown reduction buff or something, so you can't even enjoy dungeons in a proper way the last days you're able to play. As a result of that, the game is totally deserted. I hope this private server stays for a while, because it's truly nice.

Yesterday my boyfriend had a day off work, so we went to the beach and to some fancy seafood restaurant my dad recommended us, because he saw it on some obscure tv channel he loves to watch lately lmao. We decided to order something neither of us ate before, which was kind of a mistake. You had crabs, mussels, shrimps and calamari in some kind of a coconut sauce with curry and something else. While I absolutely love seafood, I didn't like this because of the sauce. Ahhhh. The experience of having to eat and clean crabs is not something I'd like to do again, unless it's a bigger crab. These small ones were annoying to clean. Mussels were fine, I never tried them before, but the sauce overtook any taste they'd have lol. I realized I'm very picky with sauces and it completely makes or breaks a dish for me, which kind of sucks in restaurants because you never know what you'll get. But we're coping by saying "at least we gained a new experience". Next time if we go there, we'll just get some baked fish and fried calamari mmm. I'm still in love with an octopus I ate like 10 years ago, prepared in a proper Mediterranean way by the landlord of an apartment we were renting for the summer. Now that was the shit. Oh and I got badly sunburnt. I don't think I ever got so sunburnt, in fact. Funny because nowadays I'm a lot more careful and use good spf creams, but I guess I didn't put enough on my back when we were leaving. My neck is killing me too. At least my face isn't sunburnt at all, thank you La Roche Possay Anthelios Fluid (tm). Now I'm just slathering aloe vera gel and hoping for the best. It's funny because it was only 23ish outside, but the sun was just brutal. Despite that, we had a lot of fun walking around and people watching. Being near the sea is amazing too, it's funny that I haven't been to the sea at all since I came here and it's just 30 mins away. Bought some patterned socks for my sister, because I know she loves that. I'll mismatch them and give her a pair, and myself a pair. Now I have to think of something to cook for lunch today, gbye.

May 12, 2022: Discord

This post made by Cyuucat inspired me to write this diary entry so I recommend you read it first before reading mine. Interestingly enough, my experience with discord has been quite different from Cyuucat, and I wanted to write about it for quite some time anyway so this is quite convenient.

I've been using discord since 2015. The first discord I joined was a guild discord for an mmo I was playing. To this day, that is one of the top three discord servers I use and actively talk in. I've joined many servers, not for the purpose of socializing, but mostly game servers, guide servers, shit like that. I made many online friends that way, and I don't even really like making internet friends because I feel like chatting 1 on 1 is a bit of a chore for me, since my interests take up most of the time I spend on a computer. Every time I would try to join a "Discord Community" a la those type of servers you see on server advertising websites, it would be an absolute cancer fest. Even back then. I do realize that's a subjective experience though, judging by Cyuucats post.

The most important advice I would have for one looking for a good discord server to meet likeminded individuals in is: don't. You don't want to look for a Discord Community, you want to look for a Community That Happens to Have a Discord. Whether that be interests and hobbies like tech, videogames, weeb shit, books, films, politics etc. even imageboard discords can be decent (although I think discord does more harm than good to imageboards lmao, and it certainly depends on the imageboard because really, discord trannies are a thing). It's kind of like giving advice to men that are desparate for a gf. You won't meet a girl you like in a random public space, most likely you'll meet her through your interests or through friend's of friends.

What Cyuucat said about all good discords being private is true. Any decent discord will either be private or won't have a way of accessing it through those websites that advertise discords. Those types of servers are mostly aimless and populated by people that really are like.. discord users first and foremost. They usually just devolve into dating and grooming drama, meaningless shitposting and circlejerks. Ideally, you want a discord that's not full of seasoned discord veterans, instead it has a ton of people that are like "hey I don't know jack shit about discord but I like this community so I'll join". Ideally, you want to be one of the first waves of people joining because it helps with feeling like being a part of a growing community, but I know that's not exactly an easy task, and it only makes the whole search harder.

At the end of the day though, luck will play a large part. 2 servers I'm really happy with are 4chan adjacent for gods sake, how that happened it would be hard to explain. Pure luck that a group of semi normal and decent people joined those discords at a specific point in time when they were available to join. One of them being a discord for a group of people that look for private servers of an old korean mmo, that I don't even play. It's funny how things work out sometimes. Along with it being luck based there's just one more thing - when you open access to everyone, when there's a low barrier to entry, you're bound to have a bad time.

May 17, 2022

Haven't been doing much of anything past few days, aside from playing tera. I'm really happy to be playing an alive version of the game, but with it also come certain negatives. I said I'll be helping with gearing the guild once I'm done gearing myself, and that if any mods need fixing me and my bf can look into it. So far not many people took up the offer, and I mostly forcefully shoved mats and gold down peoples throats because otherwise they'd be too polite too ask. That's how it is in mmos. But one player, oh god. He took the offer and ran it into the ground. Every day I get a million discord dms asking me to fix xyz, to help him with xyz mat, to do this, to look into that, to edit ingame files???? Like shit. I don't have the will to do that much. Then he asks me to fix a version of a mod (fixing a mod usually entails just swapping some values to match the protocols of that certain patch, but it's very tedious having to do it manually) THAT ALREADY EXISTS, except it doesn't have a stupid ui. Take the working mod I already have AGHHHHH. I feel a bit mean for writing this because I did put myself out there in the first place... But I have my limits lmao. I was thinking of writing or copying and archiving some guides myself and putting it here, but driving in traffic from tera players would be an absolute nightmare. It sucks how a lot of old tera fansites with guides went down, and it sucks even more how all the old info got overwritten in all the class discords because people can't into archiving. So finding guides for old dungeons is kind of a problem at the moment. While I'm complaining, another thing that annoyes me is a specific type of Tera player that can be found on the subreddit. Not so quick rundown: back when Tera first came out, BAMs (big ass monsters you'd fight in the open world) were pretty hard. It took a whole party to kill them because they were tanky and they hit hard. While leveling it was worth killing them and farming them for xp. At some point, a couple years into the games lifespan something called avatar weapons came out. Those weapons were meant to ease and speed up leveling and they were OP, which kind of made farming bams really easy, they were not that hard anymore. Thing is, you'd only do that while leveling. It kinda sucks it happened, but let's face it, the main point of tera are the dungeons and the endgame. This wasn't that big of a loss. But this group of people, any time any tera discussion happens, whether it be mentioning private servers, classic servers, reminscing about tera, they never fail up to bring up the "will this version have hard bams?" question. It pisses me off to no end because you can fight even harder versions of those bams in dungeons! How was this the most important part of the game to them, I don't get it! I fought hard bams in the classic server, and I fought hard bams when world bosses got reintroduced and were impossible to defeat alone, I did. I kind of understand the appeal in an open world fight where other players can hop in to help, it's kind of fun but it can't possibly be -the point- of the game. What I hate about these players is this weird mentality that the game is losing a really valuable player, even though they'd just log on, kill a couple of bams, make a thousand low level alts and never participate in the community. And I don't judge how people play mmos because tera really is the only mmo I found reaching and staying at the endgame was easy and fun for me. But ugh this question in particular is just so annoying. If you want challenging leveling, go solo level in group dungeons. I've been doing this for years and the process never got too boring, it's quite fun and it can be even harder than the old hard bams. I think it would be possible to suggest hard BAMS to the devs of Menmas tera, and it could be something you could ask for in the future. I don't think that plopping monsters in the open world is hard to code in compared to other stuff, so it's definitely a possibility. But you have to ask for it and suggest it!! Not act offended as if that's the most important feature that's missing when 95% of the players don't really care about it. Also while Tera has some decent background music, especially when in the open world, boss music never stood out to me too much except for this one. It's a boss theme for one of the funnest (people would def argue with me for this) bossfights in the game lmao. It's so GOOD. This one also, it's a theme for a small town.

In other news, consquences of my own actions are catching up to me. The skin on my sunburnt scalp started peeling off and dear lord, I looked like I had the worst case of dandruff in the world. I was combing it out for an hour or so, what an experience. It was actually pretty fun to get it all out with a comb but my long hair made it a pain in the ass. It reaches my hips now, the longest it's ever been I'm pretty sure. I had a super realistic dream about my cat this night. I sniffed her fur and pet her lmao. At least I can see her in my dreams now, I guess!

I wanted to write about some funny beef between everskies and vp users but I ran out of energy so maybe next time. Time for yoga and a shower I think.

May 31, 2022

It's been a while since I wrote in my diary, but that's because I wrote a couple of entries I didn't finish, and now I failed to add them. I'll probably add them at a later date. In 3 days, I'll be back in my country. Can't believe it's been 3 months already. My bf and I will be apart for a month and a half and then he's coming to visit me and finally meet my family properly. He already met my mom, sister and my grandma. After that, I'll probably come back here but I need to finish my thesis and eventually defend it. I hate it, I hate that I have to finish it and I think I won't be able to defend it this year because one subject fucked me over and I might not be able to do it because of that. I can't believe I'm dragging my uni for so long, but at this point I do not care. I'm so tired of how messy it is, how you have to suffer so much just to get the basic things done. I envy people that had a smooth time in uni. Bureocracy sucks. I can't wait to meet with my friends and go to the river like I did last year. It'll be a nice summer, my thesis aside. I hate how time passes so quickly, I feel like I'm struggling with it a lot.

I've been reading manga lately, put books aside for a bit. Currently I'm preoccupied with the concept of travelling and... passages of time I guess. Aside from the stuff I reviewed I also read Rapid Commuter Underground and Kotonoba Drive with that theme. I also started reading Maki Kusumoto's works but even though I'm really enjoying the weirdness of it all, I don't think I'll be able to review it properly. Sometimes even when I think something is awesome and special, I can't really describe it properly or elaborate on my feelings about it. I finally finished DeDeDeDe (how many De's..) yesterday and I'm not sure how to feel about it. I made the same mistake I did with Punpun a whole ass decade ago. I started reading the manga before the last/last two volumes were published, and once they were finally out and translated, when I read them I didn't feel as connected to the work anymore, nor did I remember all the details properly. The ending of DeDeDe is more disappointing than Punpun, but on the whole I feel like the work is more positive and enjoyable. This is why I don't think I'll be able to write a review about it, I truly have goldfish memory when it comes to any kind of media.

Aside from manga, I'm still playing Tera, hardcore. I'm playing a sorcerer outside of my guild because frankly I sometimes get overwhelmed by my guildies and things they expect me to do for them. If I'm online and theres 2-4 more people on, they'll always expect me to do start a party and do things with them but they have to be easy comfortable things they want to do, so I end up doing dungeons I don't really feel like doing. Sometimes I just want to join random lfgs and not think too much about things. Another reason why I'm not in the guild on my sorc is because, well, I kind of suck! I haven't played sorc since 2015 and the class had I think 2 whole revamps since then, and there's a lot of nuance to it now. Oh and I have a funny thing that happened to me... When gearing up on this private server, one of the last pieces of good gear you'll acquire are a belt, brooch and a mask. The mask and belt being the more annoying ones to get. I was doing a dungeon with my guildie (the one that likes to spam me with dms) and a few randoms, and we were joking around saying how masks and belts break friendships because people want them so badly and they're so expensive that if you get the drop - even if you don't need it you'd rather sell it than giving it to your buddies. Which of course is ridiculous because this is a private server, and you should always have your guildies in mind right? My friend agreed, and he said he'd give me a physical mask (he needs a magical one) if he ever got it, completely unprompted. I don't really care much for it myself but it seemed like a kind gesture. Later on that same day after I went to sleep, he got a physical mask... and he immediately posted in the trade channel wanting to trade it for a magical one. He got like 50 offers from others that wanted to just buy it because physical masks are a lot more sought after and he even messaged me to brag about it, also complaining how he hasn't been able to find anyone to trade it for. So I just said if he doesn't find a trade he wants, I'd gladly buy it from him. Somehow his selflessness from earlier totally vanished which I found so funny. Funnily enough, later that day another guildie of mine got the same mask, and he's the type that loves to make money off the broker. But guess what, he gave me the mask right away, didn't even suggest selling it first. It's funny how people behave and get overwhelmed by greed, even in silly little video games.