Psst. Hello reader! Yup. You. Like writing and coffee? Or tea even? Come and join in.

Welcome to The ADRICULOUS Life. I’m Adrianne, your host for the day.1 First time visiting me? Haven’t been visiting me for a while? Still, welcome to my non-niche word home base.

I have been blogging since late 1999 when Blogger used to be its own platform and that no huge company2 has bought them yet. When I saw other early bloggers blogging, all they wrote about are just random stuff that they found interesting or that they talk about a day (or a moment) in their life. Some bloggers were just too revealing back then too, writing about a very private matter, mentioning people’s names in between, and then just being a horrible, attention-grabbing drama queen through words. However, blogging also became a therapeutic method for those who just have the urge to have their voices heard. If people (in real life) would not listen to you, why not the entire interwebs? The latter was the main reason why I started a blog. Well, that, and a few of my online friends also encouraged me to open one so that people may get to know the person behind some creations (whether a fansite, a shrine, or a fanfic or (fan)art) now existing in the web and ended up being well- loved.

I’m not quite your typical female blogger, unlike today’s “standards” of what constitutes a female blogger throughout social media nowadays. I’m a female blogger because I’m a naturally-born female. And I blog too. I don’t just live as a female while blogging about it, but I also built up this blog from the ground up. Yeah, that includes the look, layout, and function of this blog,3 and not only do I write about female stuff, but I write about stuff that many of us females do that dudes are mostly known for doing, such as writing about video games, watching anime/manga, and… programming, oh my!

So, why am I writing this blog entry this way? It’s 2018. Brand-new year. 2017 and all the years before that have gone by. Time to live this new year with new hopes and perspectives. So, I’m re-introducing myself again… and everything else in between.

Following @FemaleBloggerRT

I recently established my new Adri Mars INK Twitter account sometime last month as a corresponding social media account to my newly rebuilt fiction/fanfiction writing blog. I went back to my own Twitter account and checked the other accounts I’ve been following. Then I realized that I have been following the Female Blogger RT Twitter account all this time and I may have forgotten it. I don’t normally recall stuff that’s happened in the past, but seeing Female Blogger RT on my Following list did make me recall something regarding why I decided to follow it.

It was to spread awareness on my blog. Well, all of my blogs anyway.

The definition of a blogger nowadays means that you own a blog or two with a particular niche. A lot of them are becoming more business-related and that you earn money just from blogging, just like how some content creators are also monetizing through YouTube. For females, the term female blogger nowadays seems to fall under the following categories:

• Fashion
• Beauty/Health
• Motherhood/Children
• Food/Cooking
• Making your blog “pretty” (graphic/web design, mostly)
• Entrepreneurship and “solopreneurs”

And what I realized from the RT-ing Twitter account is that if your entry falls into any of the categories above and you tagged them with the hashtag, they will RT it throughout the Twittersphere. I remembered because I did that once with one of my old blog entries from a few months ago (I believe it was even from The NINPOJineous, talking about attending a tech-related job fair), and then adding the RT hashtags on the generated tweet directly from WordPress. Awhile later, I did not see a single RT.

So, I started to wonder if I just missed it or they missed it or they just simply ignored it altogether. It didn’t fall in any of the categories mentioned above, and yet I am both a female and a blogger. I’m starting to wonder if the term female blogger has become limited to a fashion blogger, beauty or health blogger, mom blogger, food blogger, or any of those categories. Whatever happened to other wonderful blogs of wonderful female bloggers that talk about their talents and interests that don’t fit in any of those said categories?

I write about my art, web development, self-learning, video games, fiction/fanfiction writing, books, reviews of a few things, and even some of my travels. Whenever I think of it, it’s quite disheartening of what the real definition of a female blogger should be like. Are we just going to be recognized by some masses for loving and talking about the “typical” female things and not about the work that we do and love? I hope I’m misinterpreting this and not a factual definition, because if it’s the latter, then that would mean that I’m just a blogger who happens to be female but not a female blogger. Who would have thought? 🤨

Why not expand the definition of a female blogger, and have that definition open to all female bloggers who don’t necessarily always write about fashion, beauty, the “girly” stuff? A number of fields in STEM back in history were considered “girly” stuff after all… 😏

Or, why not just redefining the term female blogger? You know, a female who blogs? Just a female who blogs, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be blogging about the “girly” stuff. Right?

Girl Gamer Adri in 2018

Final Fantasy XV was pretty much the only video game I played the entire 2017 that I put more focus on. I started playing Tales of Zestiria late of 2016 when my brother moved back home with his PS4, but that was only because I was waiting for FFXV to get released. I barely even passed the first three chapters. I even tried re-playing Final Fantasy Type-0 PS4 version (they were having it on sale back then for PS Plus subscribers) because I never got to finish the PC version and it was still slow as hell on my new laptop, but like ToZ, I couldn’t pas the first few chapters. I decided to save those two games for the future because I can’t keep both of them in the same PS4 hard drive since my brother has his own games over there as well.

But, I’ve got two new games to play, and will still continue on FFXV, because more DLCs and other special stuff will still be on the roll for this year. Can’t wait!

Destiny 2

This year, I started playing Destiny 2, just because I have played the original Destiny some two years ago. I quit playing the first game because of one reason. Their final DLC, Rise of Iron, was decided to be locked for PS4 and XBOX One players only. I had a PS3, and this really upset me big time. It may have forced some of my friends to “upgrade” and buy a PS4 or XBOX One just for that one particular DLC. I personally just lost interest and quit altogether, that is until my brother came back home with his PS4. I tried to revive my love of Destiny at that time, but when FFXV came out around the same time I re-purchased the PS4 version of the game, I just simply lost interest in Destiny altogether and gave my main focus towards FFXV.

Why? Because I love adventure, puzzles, and real deal storyline. Plus, a lot of the gamers in multiplayer were beginning to act like self-centered jerks who act like the game is a matter of life and death to them, and if you’re not doing well, even though you’ve given all of your best efforts, you get kicked out of their party. Luckily Destiny lets you play as yourself and you get randomly matched by other players because in this case, I still prefer playing alone. I do like playing raid missions though, especially if you are teamed up with a good set of players who don’t care about your skill level, as long as you contribute as much as you can.

I only purchased the vanilla game itself and didn’t purchase the DLCs because I want to get the feel of the game again. I don’t want to waste money on everything, only to end up quitting and never return to it (saving money, of course). The friends I made over the first Destiny game are barely online anymore, and so, I play as a lone wolf gamer once again.

Dissidia Final Fantasy NT

Tuesday is Final Fantasy Day. When there’s something new and awesome about the Final Fantasy series, it’s always on a Tuesday.

I don’t remember the last time I’ve played brawler-style games. I think it was back in the Super Smash Bros days? It’s been way too long.

I know there were other earlier versions of Dissidia Final Fantasy all-out battle games, but I didn’t have any portable platforms aside from my old Nintendo DS,4 which means, the newest/latest DFF game, version NT, will be my very first time playing in this sub-series under the long-running Final Fantasy series. I pre-ordered the deluxe version early last month along with the season’s pass, because, well, it’s Final Fantasy. It’s what longtime FF players just do with an open mind and an open excitement. Some will be remembered, some will be forgotten. Still is one of the greatest series in the video gaming history. FF is pretty much my childhood. Kind of. The first FF game was released in Japan in the late ’80s and it didn’t arrive in the U.S. (for the classic NES) until early-mid 1990s. Around that time, I was in the 8th grade preparing for my upcoming graduation to high school. The first FF game was my reward for finishing middle school.

The open beta for DFFNT came out last Friday (1/12) and the open beta period will be open until Sunday this week. The actual game will be released in two weeks on…

TUESDAY (1/30).

I think I’m becoming a lot more familiar with Square Enix’s scheduling on new releases on their games and the new content/DLCs. Playing FFXV for almost the entire 2017, all the new content that SE releases for the game were always on a TUESDAY. FFXV was released on November 29, 2016, which was a TUESDAY. The DLCs and the new updates for the game also were released on a TUESDAY. And then, with DFFNT coming out on a TUESDAY, it’s safe to say that Final Fantasy Day is ALWAYS on a TUESDAY. ☺

There were characters I remembered, characters I’ve forgotten, and characters who became my favorites. I was so happy to see them again “in the flesh,”5 and having a chance to play as them once again. The characters in the image above aren’t all of the characters you can choose. I got this from a gaming website somewhere and these are the characters that are included in the Asia version of the open beta. The U.S. version of the open beta had Jecht (instead of Tidus), for example.

When I heard about the open beta last month, I got excited. There were four characters I had in mind that I was excited to play as. They are: (not in any particular order)

• Squall Leonhart
• Lightning
• Zidane Tribal

… and of course, him.

Sadly, he is not there in the open beta. I wonder how they’re going to portray Noct in the game because, in comparison to the rest of the protagonists, he’s a bad ass prince whose naturally born powers were derived from ancient kings and gods and pretty much can take on any class. He’s categorized under the Assassin class,6 but he can go as a Vanguard (can wield and use broadswords), a Marksman (can wield and shoot pistols, machine guns, even sniper rifles), and a Specialist (hell, he can use any weapon you can lend him, he creates his own magic too. He’ll still whoop yer ashes…). I read that a lot of the beta players were upset that the closed beta did not include him.

I hope they don’t nerf Noct or anything because he’s pretty much a god compared to the rest of the characters in the lineup. But personality-wise, he’s also the type of guy you’d wanna be BFFs with. ☺

T-Shirt Design Project

My parents will be heading to the Philippines next month. I don’t have the means of going with them because of my very limited part-time job that doesn’t really pay you when you take a few days off, so instead, I’m contributing by creating some t-shirt designs for the upcoming family reunion for my dad’s side. There were already suggestions from some relatives (who also knows some graphic designing here and there) but I also shared mine.

Here are my proposed samples. Just drafts. Not the final design.

Front design – the rice grass represents the roots of my family— growing up from a family of rice farmers

Back design – vector tree created with Illustrator – represents the family tree with six branches (representing my dad and his five siblings)

Yes, I’m aware that the images are blurry but that’s because they’re in PNG format, not SVG format. Knowing WordPress’ problem with both JPG and PNG images, they’ll always come out blurry-ish, optimized or not.

Awrighty, I gotta get back to my daily online classes, back to mastering Javascript, get back to my drawing drills, and go through my skincare routine before bed.

Till next time!

1. The day you visit my blog for the first time [↩]
2. Google was only less than a year old then… [↩]
3. using WordPress and some plugins here and there, of course… [↩]
4. which still works perfectly by the way… too bad there aren’t any more new games. Ah well… [↩]
5. in 3D form instead of the 8-bit that I used to see them as, like with the Warrior of Light, Onion Knight, and Cecil Harvey [↩]
6. expected, because his powers (warping and ability to use whatever the hell weapon he can find) and his unending love for Assassin’s Creed should make him Assassin class by default… [↩]