i wasn't actually planning on staying up till 3am that day to do the elite wilderness clue, but the medication kept me awake long enough that i thought i might as well. of course this being RuneScape, a game where almost anytime i do anything at all i forget to bring something, i forgot to bring something -- a knife to cut through the webs. also energy potions. so i switched to a free-to-play world with 50 players online for a long walk of shame back to the mainland

in a cruel twist of fate the next clue required 75 Crafting (i had 70), probably the most painfully slow skill to level for ironmen. practically my only option is collecting copious amounts of sand to turn into glass to turn into orbs to turn into staves. i do like the unique freeform nature of progression in this game that turns everything into "do this so i can do that which will make this easier so i can use these more efficiently until i can use this to go back to that" but oftentimes the this (something mindnumbingly boring) will make me do that (log out and do something else)

got too drunk this weekend and woke up with runescape on my computer again. even woke up with it on my damn phone. i have custom firmware and have to jump through some hoops if i wanna put an app on there, so i must have really been yearning to click on some trees. i did also resub briefly a few months ago to attend someone's maxing out party which was a fun time. here's that

oh i was doing clue scrolls and crafting huh. well i'm not anymore, i have always simply done whatever tickled my fancy at a given moment. this is why it took me so many years to get my first 99, i'd say alright i'm gonna buckle down grind this out for however long it takes, then about 50k xp later i'm bored beyond belief. this weekend i said that about Woodcutting, and i managed to get from level 80 all the way to 81. "i'll just have it open on the side while i do other things" i'll say, thinking i can just switch gears that easily. i can care about work or video games, not both

i was low on food in the bank and needed to spend some time catching spiky jungle fish. but wait, there's a rare boss drop that doubles that amount of fish i can carry on me at a time, which i've convinced myself it's not worth fishing until i get it. and look, about video game hunting. i've definitely over time become more disquieted regarding the role it plays in normalizing the real thing. but i can go to Lumbridge and spend all day killing level 2 men and women with zero repurcussions. as long as i can also kill humans indiscriminately. that's all i ask video games

i've fought Tempoross 50 times so far trying to get this freaking doublefish barrel. it's funny i recently told myself, i think i'm done with games with heavily randomized elements, i would like a crafted experience please. and now i've come crawling back to this game where people will do the same thing literally thousands of times in the hopes of getting a specific item. at the rate i'm going i have around a 1-in-80 chance of getting it every 6-minute round

it's kind of enjoyable? maybe? solely because i'm always trying to push my personal best time or score a little. of course i tell myself this until i claim my rewards and don't see a barrel at which point i deem the past six minutes a total waste of my time. the experience and other rewards are alright so whatever. speaking of experience points i hit 50 million of them and 1700 total level. still plan on killing myself at exactly 69,420,000 total xp. ingame i mean, but we'll see

kill 51, i got the other 1-in-80 drop i don't care about. man

100 Tempoross kills, i've now reached what i like to call the "Screw It Threshold". i thought i'd use the point at which i finally get the fish barrel as a point to check in here again but now i feel like i'm gonna go insane. i did get a tome of water though which is twice as rare and probably good to have, but i am barrel-less and defeated. it's a barrel with a picture of a fish on it dude and all it's for is putting fish in it, why can't i just use a regular barrel. game's full of weird rare things like this. partyhats were the rarest most absurdly expensive items back in the day and it's literally some paper to which someone took a pair of scissors

i learned there's also one of these for Woodcutting now that lets me hold double the logs, and i GOT it because it's just a thing i can FARM for and BUY. i'm still switching things up whenever i get bored, which is often. 99 Farming but still doing my herb runs and contracts everyday, i simply enjoy tending to Produce. if you don't have real farming in your life you gotta at least have fake videogame farming in there, and if it's at level 99 the farming is real good, basic math. unfortunately i'm also interweaving birdhouse trapping in there which cancels out the good farm times with bad murder times

since i am the No Barrel Failure i'll take the time to chronicle something else instead. risky to mention but useful for context, in my early 20s i had many followers on you'll tube and after some time i retreated to my cave to escape the horrors of being known, then a couple years later in 2022 i came back for a RuneScape livestream. i didn't have a mic so hundreds of people would show up asking what it meant, if it was some kind of ARG when in actuality it was just me saying i've been depressed and doing nothing but playing a medieval point-and-click the past few months

i don't have access to that account or the archive anymore but i asked on bluesky if there was anyone following me who had wormed their way into my new life, who by any chance had a link to it. amazingly someone came through to whom i am thankful and also sorry for referring to them as having "wormed their way" into my life

the only 99s i ever got before this were Firemaking and Woodcutting on RS3 in like ~2014, which many would probably say "doesn't count" because of how much faster leveling is, even though OSRS now has things like Wintertodt and the previously mentioned doublelog bag. i saw a post the other day regarding getting 99s along the lines of "8-year-old me had a dream and adult me is going to attain it" and boy if that ain't all it is. if you introduced me to this game now i would quickly dismiss it as the ultimate waste of time. but now it's like completing a pokédex. small zephie wanted it so bad and i owe it to them, even though they sucked beyond belief

starting to realize how much of this diary i could fill with recountings of days long past. very useful for when i have a brief depressive period and only play for a few days, ending up short of being able to fill an entire page. i used to keep a journal back in 2022 as well and it's a nightmare to look through, but i found one entry from when i got the stupidrare Farming pet

i'm sorry to say i still be farming trees