Endgame Viable

Contents

Morning!

Happy Monday. It’s officially the start of a new chemotherapy cycle for me. We’re back right where we were last time. Today it’s steroid pills at home, tomorrow it’s a trip to the infusion center for pemetrexed and bonus bone strengthener zoledronic acid. Then, if all goes according to schedule, we can look forward to feeling tired, sick, dehydrated, and malnourished Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and back to normal by next Tuesday.

Yesterday I mowed the front and back yards. I tried to beat the heat by starting at 10 o’clock, but it was already plenty hot enough, and the grass was still wet from dew, so it was all around an ineffective strategy.

I lathered up with sunscreen and wore my big floppy hat and N95 mask, so I must surely have looked like a circus freak out there, but I had no sneezing from grass and dust and got no sunburn on my delicate, shriveled, dry, chemo-altered skin. I listened to a Glass Cannon TTRPG podcast.

EverQuest Legends

Over the weekend I played a bit of EverQuest Legends. I’m not an EverQuest afficianado so I know nothing of optimization. I made the funniest-sounding character combo I could think of: A Froglok Monk/Necromancer. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone starting out in EverQuest and not picking the Froglok as your starting race.

I started in the tutorial, although I would have sworn I’d picked the option to skip it. It was quite boring but I got a quick refresher of the basics: Find and Hail and Give.

I ended the tutorial early and came out in Gukta, a tent city of frogloks in the Rathe Mountains. All new to me. Never heard of any of these names before. I commenced trying to find any NPCs who would actually talk to me and give me a quest (it’s surprisingly hard to find quests in a game called EverQuest), and managed to locate exactly one at first, an Exterminator looking for spider eyeballs.

For all the talk of using Find in the tutorial, none of the quest givers were in the list of NPCs in the Find window. Only the merchants and guildmasters and tradecrafters were there. Inconvenient.

Eventually I found some other NPCs with stories to tell and quests to give. As far as I can tell, there’s no quest log, so I had to write them all down in a document. As I was reading out this one NPC’s story about a sword broken in three pieces, I quickly learned that the word “Guk” is not a word I want to prounounce out loud on a video. Whoopsie. Guess nobody thought of that back at EverQuest lore headquarters.

Ultimately, the main thing I accomplished was killing skeletons and kobolds and spiders and mosquitos to reach level 3 in a couple of hours of gameplay. Seems to be the main activity in the game so far, along with running back and forth. Typical 90s MMORPG game loop: Walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, fight, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, sell loot.

I was particularly interested in finding “the lore” in EverQuest, because I know nothing of it. Unfortunately it’s not exactly overflowing with lore in Gukta at level 1. It’s hidden deep among the NPCs and you have to work to find somebody who will say a single word to you. And when you find someone, it’s only a couple of sentences like, “We don’t like those trolls.” There’s no town elder standing around waiting to share the rich history of Gukta and its people with you. I guess that’s what the Internet is for.

To my eye, EverQuest Legends plays exactly like regular EverQuest. I know there are significant mechanical differences with the multi-class thing, but it’s not immediately apparent at levels 1-3.

A bare minimum of effort was made to make it more playable on modern computers, but not much. If you were hoping for a font size selection, you’re only going to find integer UI size multipliers (x2, x3, x4) and barely-adequate anti-aliasing, for example. There wasn’t even a display resolution selection for me; it just used my desktop resolution.

Anyway, it was kind of fun for a while, but I can’t imagine a world where I’d get hooked and play more than a handful of hours. Was it worth buying? Probably not. The regular EverQuest seems perfectly adequate if I wanted to experience that world.

Final Fantasy XIV

After the world of 90s MMORPGs, last night, I went back to Final Fantasy XIV and finished two more Endwalker quests (No Job Too Small and Wise Guides) in the endless Main Scenario Quest railroad, now at the level 88 stations. We’ve just unlocked the rest of Labyrinthos and are in the “let’s tour the new area” phase of questing, while waiting for somebody to find adamantite for the Space Ark aetherburners.

The Loporitts are back in Wise Guides, pushing my vocal cords to the limit, as they all sound like Mickey Mouse. The Loporitt-focused videos for Endwalker, incidentally, are among my more embarrassing rank amatuer voice acting efforts in FFXIV, but we push them out to the channel anyway and continue on with our life as if nothing happened.

Bathtub Robot

On Saturday, I built some AWS Lambda functions to detect new posts in my RSS feed and post a notification on my newly-resurrected fediverse GoToSocial instance. It worked perfectly on the first try.

I call it Bathtub Robot. (I use a random word generator to name my projects.)

I, of course, used Antigravity to build it, test it locally, and deploy it in a little over two hours, but it was seeded with code that I had written a few years ago. I documented my conversations here if you somehow haven’t yet experienced “pair programming” with agentic AI.