(for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)
Good morning insomniacs and narcoleptics, welcome to Day 457 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
I am rapidly running out of words relating to sleep to open things up with, which is not surprising considering I have written around ten reviews where the topic of sleep, either too much or too little, is brought up as the main body of the article that day.
Today is in the latter category of “too little”, as I was up till around two in the morning stuck in a thinking pattern, alternating between having my brain slow down in the hopes of finally giving me the blessed sleep I crave before suddenly thrusting anxiety into the forefront of my mind once more giving me about ten minutes of feeling on edge with rapid thoughts running through my mind before it calms down again.
Usually in those moments would be the moment I reach for a CBD gummy to help quiet the mind and allowing myself to sleep, but I have been holding back from taking them recently for a handful of reasons:
- I am halfway down my last jar and really do not have the funds to restock myself at this current moment in time
- I had a bad experience with one a couple weeks back and have been hesitant ever since
- And I want my system able to receive the blessed relaxation as best as possible for Vexpo sleep next week because I will certainly need it
Thankfully the day is not too stacked for me, though I do have some more job applications at the local council I need to work on before my time away. Local government has been the main focus of my applications since being laid off three months ago, primarily in pursuit of acquiring better benefits – especially a more robust pension benefit because whilst I do not fully believe I will be able to retire for one reason or another, it would be nice to actually care about my future rather than be dismissive.
I definitely have some amount of savings in my pension, although it is simultaneously nowhere near what the guidance says it should be for my age and also looking damn fine if I start to run low on funds if this job search gets more protracted than I would like it to be.
Plus there is the fact that writers never usually fully retire from work, as our bodies fail keeping our minds sharp is more important than ever, meaning we will be working on our own things even long past the age of any physically or mentally demanding work, though it would still be nice to fund being an aging writer considering that making a living off writing is still as hard as ever.
Admittedly it has been nice to start writing again, even though I know for a fact Vexpo is going to completely derail any notion of a schedule as I will be out of action from the 17th to at least the 22nd due to how much I have in my itinerary and that I will be writing the sequel last year’s Vexpo post as quickly as I can once my energy returns to me.
For now though, it has been nice to get back in the groove, and remind myself of why I enjoy writing so much. It came back naturally to me, and even on today when I feel as if I am struggling to write, it feels good to get my thoughts down and make everything feel less heavy if only for a wonderful, fleeting moment before my reality kicks me back down.
I love writing. There is nothing that would make me happier than getting to do this every day, and who knows? Maybe I will make it there someday.
Until that point, I will keep rambling about all the things that make me happy, which today includes showing off one of my proudest gaming achievements to date: my collection of endemic life in Monster Hunter World.
Due to a friend wanting to go through World on their PS5 and myself having a PS4 Pro with a physical copy of the game, we have arranged a regular game night to play through things together. Even as the franchise marches on towards Ascendance, I think there is great value to be found in the fifth generation entries of World plus Iceborne and Rise plus Sunbreak, especially on sale for stupidly low prices given how much content is packed into each game.
Returning to World felt satisfying as all hell, and whilst there are several gameplay decisions I find myself questioning both on their own and when comparing it to the quality-of-life packed Wilds, I still consider it a nine-out-of-ten experience that any newer Monster Hunter fans should experience at least once.
Not least because the endemic life collection system and the way you are able to display said endemic life might be one of my favourite side activities in the entire franchise.
Once you progress into Master Rank in the Iceborne expansion and unlock the new hub area of Seliana, you also unlock a personal room area that can be decorated with ludicrous amounts of microtransaction DLCs to make it fit your taste, but more importantly it features several areas to place any captured endemic life, including both a fish pond and an aquarium.
Particular creatures of note in my aquarium include two Petricanths, extremely rare endemic life styled after ancient coelacanths, and the Sealord’s Crestfish, an even rarer endemic life that took me so many soft resets during expeditions to find but was one of my proudest achievements once I did… oh how little did I know how hard some of the others were going to be.
When you enter the room from the main hub area, you start on this upper balcony area that can contain endemic life both on the bannister itself and on the floor. My floor is filled with Moonlight Geckos, not particularly rare creatures compared to what else you can see in the room, but still pretty hard to find. The guest on my bannister is the far more interesting exhibit though, a gorgeous bird called the Blue Diva, an endemic life I did not even search out for and found purely by chance when on a hunt one day. Whilst I would love to find more to fill out the bannister, I think there are more pressing matters for me rather than grinding it out for multiple rare creatures.
Especially when you take into account I have six out of seven Molys from the endgame Guiding Lands area – or as I prefer to call it, the Grinding Lands because this area is so shittily designed in terms of how you have to progress each zone for mining, monsters, and the rare endemic life of Molys and there is very little that can change my mind on this being the absolute worst way to build an endgame I have seen in any of the Monster Hunter titles I have played.
Ahem.
Still, the majority of the Molys is not bad at all.
In front of my fireplace is a small family of Arrowhead Gecko, another rare creature but one with a guaranteed chance of dropping in one of the early Master Rank event quests, so I took the opportunity to grab a many as possible.
One creature that took an absurd amount of grinding on my part is the Tsuchinoko. This illusive snake only spawns in Kulve Taroth raids near to the cannons or on the slide to area two, or in the little corridor before the optional quest of the final boss of Iceborne which is where I found it. A little fat bastard wiggling along my floor is a worthy addition to my collection.
And finally, we come to the fish pond outside alongside the hot spring. The latter holds the singular Goldspring Macaque I have been able to find, and again whilst I would love to fill an entire spring of these, that sort of grinding is not in my cards. The former holds my pride and joy, but not for what is in the pond… although there is a second Sealord’s Crestfish in the pond as well which was so cool to find after grinding out the first one.
Flying high above the fish pond is the Wintermoon Nettle, a rare creature that can only spawn at night in the Hoarfrost Reach locale and requires full on scaling the mountain in order to have a chance at capturing it. It may not even appear, and whilst it is possible to catch a glimpse of it from the ground I often found it quicker to run up the mountain to try find it, not wanting it to turn to day and have it despawn after taking the effort to get up there.
This thing is massive, and floats around in the sky so elegantly. I remember when I first saw it after scaling the mountain for the god-knows-how-many’th time and knowing my quest to find the rarest forms of endemic life were at the end.
World holds a special place in my heart for many of its mechanics, but currently no game in the franchise does creature collecting better than this one.
Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are sleeping well. Losing sleep is never fun, and I hope to sleep better tonight myself.
Rosalia Rambles 