Listen to the Rain

In addition to the actual making and eating of the dinners, I liked the farmer's market because it made sure that I'd always write something on a Wednesday.

The Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity (Jp: ゼルダ無双 厄災の黙示 zeruda musō yakusai no mokushiroku, "Zelda Unrivaled: The Calamity Apocalypse") demo surprise-dropped a couple days ago and so I've been spending some time playing that. The first thing I have to say that while Nintendo spent some time pushing this as a canonical exploration of the pre-apocalyptic past of Hyrule, but it's actually a gaiden game. The first thirty second of the opening movie show guardians destroying the castle town, Zelda summoning the power to seal the darkness, and a tiny egg-shaped guardian activating in her study before creating a swirling blue portal and jumping back in time to before Ganon's rebirth, to when Hyrule was dealing with rising monster populations and excavating the lost Sheikah technology because the prophesied time of Ganon's rebirth was at hand. That kind of makes me think that in this game, you'll defeat Ganon and prevent the Calamity at all, thanks to the heroic efforts of time-travelling egg. I'm pretty sure it'll go into the non-canon section of my Legend of Zelda reviews masterpost, though of course I've only played the demo so maybe it'll still end in tragedy.

So far it's a lot more Legend of Zelda than Hyrule Warriors was.

It's also good Japanese practice. I'd say I understand about 80% of what I read, rising to 95% when I pause the game and look things up. That's really good compared to where I started back with the first Legend of Zelda.

I've also been playing more Final Fantasy XIV. I've gotten almost all the way through the pre-patch Heavensward quests and then took a detour to start doing Beast Tribe and crafting stuff, but really what I've been doing has been getting rich. In the two weeks since my free company completed Housing (Savage), I went from having maybe 40,000 gil in the bank to having 4.5 million thanks almost entirely to selling housing items, mostly to weebs. The second expansion, Stormblood, takes place partially in a Japan-themed area called Hingashi, so it added a lot of Hingan (or "oriental") themed housing items, and once I realized my character could make them, I started making them and putting them up for sale. I've sold at least six 神棚 kamidana--called "Oriental Altar" in-game--at around 180,000 gil each, for example, and a bunch of kotatsu, "Oriental tables," tatami mats and tatami flooring sets, and so on, plus some non-Japanese-themed furniture like alpine chandeliers. I've even, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say, made money buying Hingan desks and Hingan pillars from the housing vendor and putting them on the market board at a 500% markup. I don't have enough money to do anything I want, but I have enough that I don't need to worry about most purchases anymore and if I found a small housing plot for sale, I could buy it. Though to be honest, what I really use the money for is minions and more glamour items. The true endgame.

Not much happening this weekend, though there's an outdoor Halloween I might go to. Otherwise, just games, anime, and tea. Lovely.