On Tuesday, James Mielke put up the 44th article in his ongoing ‘My Life in Vana’diel’ column. I’d like to expend a few words talking about the series, which is far and away my favorite ongoing column. Milky never fails to entertain with the tales of the Roundabouts.What I enjoy most is his ability to sum up the community aspect of Massive Gaming. A lot of the conversation I read about MMOGs centers around the technical, the player whine, or the academic. Milky does a little of all of that, but primarily he is getting across what it’s like to be in a place and in a time. What he offers is a slice of life, in a community inside Final Fantasy XI.

In the presence of dozens of Dynamis veterans, learning the ropes of a successful Dynamis in both San d’Oria and Windurst (Windy is considered the hardest of the initial four Dynamises) proved to be insightful, rather than frightful. These guys are all business and it shows in the clean and efficient manner in which they dissect each instance. Dynamis-San d’Oria can be tricky, especially when you run into the flotilla of Summoners with their avatars out. Any one of those avatars has the ability to one-shot the whole alliance with an Astral Flow, but with Makkini at the front along with his pulling party of BLMs and mages, sleeping them was little trouble. Slowly but surely we made our way through the thoroughfare of South San d’Oria, dispatching the various Vanguards we encountered (Hawkers and Dollmasters - BSTs and SMNs - were the most important), and blowing up the time-extending Serjeant Tombstones and Voidstreaker Butchnotches as we needed.

I highly recommend reading along with the series, which begins a long, long time and many, many levels ago.