Tag: Blaugust

What Does it Mean to be a Goblin

I don’t play World of Warcraft the traditional way it was meant to be played. I don’t enjoy raids, I don’t do group content. I do like collecting pets, and other pet related activities – but what I REALLY like to do in World of Warcraft, is make gold. If you enjoy making gold the term ‘goblin’ is often used. It isn’t a mean comment, it just means you enjoy making gold. It doesn’t even necessarily mean you’re any good at it (although I am). Right now in WoW I have 50,000,000 gold in liquid form (that means actual gold, not stock). That’s over 14 years of game time if I were to convert it all to battlenet tokens right now. I’ve been paying with gold for anything digital that Blizzard releases for years now, and I do that with my gold making. Diablo digital deluxe? Gold. Hearthstone packs? Gold. 2 WoW subscriptions and all the expansions? Gold. It allows me a certain freedom and also lets me feel guilt-free if I decide to take a break unlike other games where I’m actively paying a monthly subscription with my credit card.

This amount of gold is practically nothing compared to some of the bigger goblins out there – but time IS money, and the more time you devote to your trade, the more gold you’re going to earn. Right now I spend less than one hour a day on goblin activities and I’ve been established for a number of years which is what makes all of this easier. It takes time and effort to get set up and to learn the market and figure out your role in it. Once you’re there, it gets easier.

I started getting into gold making in BFA when the auction house mount was on a vendor for 5 million. My husband was away at depot for 6 months, and I was home with a newborn baby. I used gold making to get me through the incredibly long and lonely days, and it just sort of took off from there. Prior to that I had zero gold making knowledge. I used to ask my husband for gold to help me be able to afford to craft. Needless to say I no longer have that problem, lol.

I personally like to use my gold for good. I like to gift things to friends and family, help out guilds, and I never forget what it was like NOT to have that extra gold. It’s supposed to be a fun game after all, so I would rather help people have fun and not have to stress about an in-game currency when real life makes us stress so much already. Along those same lines, I also don’t enjoy making gold in a method that would bring harm to others. I don’t bait on the auction house or try to talk people out of their money. It’s simply not needed. I WILL spend time sniping auctions, but if someone messages me and kindly requests an item back without instigating an argument, I tend to give it back. After all, mistakes can happen.

My gold making habits tend to carry over into other games, but WoW is the only one I’ve managed to create such an extensive system on. Unfortunately, when I’m bored with gold making it also usually means I’m bored of the game, and need a break. Not necessarily a bad thing, but you don’t make a lot of gold if you’re not playing the game.

Anyway, there’s an introduction into my role as a goblin, and a bit of an explanation. As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself!

Learning to Spearfish!

I’ve been back in FFXIV for just over a week now, picking up with the beginning of Endwalker and meandering my way through the story. In my down time, I have always loved crafting & gathering jobs in the game, so it wasn’t too long before I learned that spearfishing had been revamped in 6.1 – and that I had not even picked it up prior to the revamp.

It’s a mini game that opens these days. You find a node much like you would with botany and mining, and you have to use your spear on fish that swim by. I thought the game was pretty fun, and a nice change from the regular fishing that I have all but forgotten how to do. I picked up a few hermit crabs that I needed for a provision mission, and a handful of other fish that I put on the auction house. I don’t have a lot of gil in game (probably one of the few games where I spend most of my time broke) but I’m trying to save up so that I can enter the housing market. We’ll see how that goes. My husband has also returned to the game, so he’s been working through the older expansions with a handful of friends, and I’m now waiting for him to catch up in Endwalker. Overall? It has been some nice casual gaming, and a perfect way to spend a few evenings.

Blaugust Day 2 – What’s in a Name

Week one of the 2023 Blaugust festival is a ‘Welcome to Blaugust’ theme, and while I’ve never really been known to write on any sort of schedule or adhere to any sort of prompts, I do think that what you decide to call your blog is probably one of the very first steps you take. My own blog name has changed over the years, and is now hopefully in its final form.

I started out as MmoQuests – because I was blogging about (you guessed it) quests. In Mmorpgs. Usually EQ2. Over the years this changed, and I started writing about games in general, and then I started writing about my art, and cooking, and life. I decided to switch the site to NomadicGamersEh. I’ve always felt like a bit of a nomad when it came to gaming, playing one thing or another until I grow bored and move on. I also had hopes of doing some TTRPG blogging with the family, but that didn’t exactly work out (hence the ‘S’ in gamers). Since I’m Canadian, I thought I’d be even MORE witty, and put ‘eh’ on the end. Why? I’m not even really sure.

Last night I realized I STILL wasn’t happy with the name. It’s difficult to motivate yourself to write on a site when you’re not in love with the name, it can demotivate you. I decided to finally settle on NomadicGamer.ca – dropped the S, and went with .ca for my Canadian nod. Plus .com is still being squatted on. I used to own that one too on a wordpress hosted site, but I gave up the name years ago when money was tight. Now they want $3k for it and .ca will suit me just fine, thanks. I also own NomadicReader.com where I do book reviews, though I don’t post on that site nearly enough.

Hopefully this name sticks around a while. Blaugust is always a great time of year to do some general blog maintenance, update those links, and just make sure everything is running as it should be. I need to design a new header, but aside from that I think it’s all looking the way it should.

Tomorrow, we get back to posting about games! Palia is on the menu for later today, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is in the works for tomorrow. Not to mention those 2 new books I just picked up.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Life Beyond Multiple Sclerosis

I don’t do a lot of real life posts, but this one has been in the works for a while now, so I figured there was no better time to hit that publish button than on the last day of Blaugust. It’s been a heck of a month.

For those that don’t know, I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis earlier this year. It’s an autoimmune disease that shows itself through a whole lot of different ways, basically no two people are alike, and that makes it hard to diagnose. For me personally, I have the type that goes away for a bit and lures you into thinking that everything is OK, and then randomly things are very not OK. I had some of the symptoms for years, but thought “oh I’m just getting older” and thought they were normal.

It started with pain in my hands and feet. Gaming some days is almost impossible. I had a bunch of tests and bloodwork done to see if there was any inflammation and there was not. All my tests come back clear which is what makes getting an MS diagnosis so much more frustrating. The pain in my feet is worse in the mornings after sleeping, or after any length of time not moving. It’s bad enough that I have to have support to walk around my house for a bit. A lot of the time I cannot control my hands properly, it makes things like opening containers, holding cups, and other mundane tasks very difficult. I can’t prepare meals easily, I can’t use a knife, and I struggle to do the basics. Since these symptoms are not ALL of the time, but only when I relapse, I thought I might be making them up in my head.

This year cognitive issues started. I often ‘lose’ my words right in the middle of talking. I have short term memory issues where I forget what I ate for dinner even though it has only been a few hours. I get frustrated when I can’t think of a word for something that I’ve said a million times in the past.

I also started getting vision problems. On relapse days/weeks my vision blurs, I see a white haze around everything, and it looks like the house is filled with smoke. My eyes will bother me, feeling tight or heavy. I started writing down all of these things, when they would happen, and tracking them. Sometimes I’m good for a month or two, then symptoms will come back for a few weeks, and then they’ll vanish again.

To say MS is frustrating is an understatement. It’s so hard to explain to people (including doctors) what is wrong when you can’t SHOW them. That’s the main reason why I started writing symptoms down – so I would have SOMETHING to show the doctors besides me saying “well, sometimes I forget my words, sometimes I have pains, sometimes this sometimes that, but not all the time…” Anyway. I’ve had to adjust my life and make some changes. I am a lot slower than I used to be at everything. Walking. Cooking. Gaming. I need a lot of sleep and rest. I need to recognize when my body simple can’t handle any more. I need to be gentle with myself. On the plus side, it is NOT a death sentence. On the downside, it IS (at the time of this post at least) a life sentence. There are medications and things to help slow down progression but there is no cure (yet). It hinders my ability to do very basic things, like drive. On bad MS days I have difficulty taking care of my kids alone. I can’t lift them up, or play outside with them. I always have to tell them to be careful around me. Living in an isolated post makes it even more difficult. It’s frustrating and annoying – but it hasn’t stopped me. It has just slowed me down.

Any way. Why write about all of this? Just to hopefully let someone out there know that you are not alone. That things go on, that you’ll go on, and it will be OK. Maybe not right away, but eventually I found my groove and even though things are really difficult they are manageable. I’m a billion times thankful for all of the support I DO have, and I’m grateful for those days where everything goes ‘OK’ instead of brilliant. Keep trying. Keep pushing forward.

Lessons Learned

It’s just about time to wrap up another Blaugust – and it’s been a great one. I have all sorts of amazing sites to read (I tend to refresh the ones I follow during this event and discover new and amazing blogs) and I managed to keep up to the best of my abilities (I say to the best of my abilities because I post date things to fill in missed days and I don’t see anything wrong with that). This week the topic was ‘lessons learned’ – and I’ve learned my fair share of them over the years.

The main one I learned is that you care more about what other people think of your blog / content than anyone else does. What I mean by this is I used to stress that the few sponsored posts I get would affect my site and I worried that I’d lose readers, and I was concerned that my audience would leave (what little I had) and all sorts of negatives. Turns out, none of that was true, and none of it mattered. I do accept sponsored posts from time to time, it helps pay for my hosting and in good years it gave me a bit extra to put towards game subscriptions or whatever other cost I had. Aside from people asking if I had been hacked or asking if I knew I had sponsored posts, it didn’t change much of anything. I know not everyone agrees with putting ads up on their blog, but for me it’s something I no longer stress about at all. I will always be more invested in my site than anyone else, and that’s probably how it should be. Stop worrying so much about what everyone else thinks / says / does and just focus on how you conduct yourself – be true to yourself, whether that’s monetizing your blog or not.

I learned that being consistent with content is more important than what you’re blogging about, and you will find your people.

I learned that people will like what they like. That means if I spend 3 hours putting a carefully cultivated post together – chances are the post that took me 5 minutes will get more traction. I try not to care about that too much these days, but it used to really bother me.

I learned that I don’t need a different blog to encompass all of my interests, but instead I make use of categories, tags, and other tools to separate everything. Maintaining a blog can be quite a task, and when I was first writing I thought that I had to keep everything in its own little section. I still feel that way, but I can do that within the total writing space instead of creating an entirely new one. This helps me keep consistent, and shows that I’m more than just abcxyz thing. Sure, I’m a gamer, but I also knit, and I spin yarn, and I have other interests. There’s no shame in that and it took me a long time to learn that it’s OK to expand my blog to showcase those other interests.

If you’re looking to blog, it’s never too late to start. If you’ve ever wanted to there are free tools out there to help you get started, and even if you don’t stick with it at least you gave it a try. I hope my posts have given a little bit of insight, and if not, welp, that’s OK too.