WoW, Blizzard, Just WoW

At first, I was going to defy the minimal-cursing rule that I have to abide by in order to keep this blog up (note: if you want to write a blog here, you can curse all you want. But for my purposes I have to hold my tongue sometimes). I'm still going to curse a bit, but what I'm going to do originally would've drawn negative attention towards my blog. What I'm about to do might still draw negative attention, but it's the exact negative attention I'm looking for. I really hope people on the Internet see this. I hope somebody from Blizzard sees this. Ready?

BLIZZARD, YOU ARE ALL MASSIVE BLOWHARDS. YOU BLOW SO HARD IT LEAVES PENISES SHRIVELED AND BRITTLE AND WHATEVER.

I'm beyond angry. I'm beyond infuriated. The faun from Pan's Labyrinth was pretty pissed at Ofelia for eating a couple of grapes and waking up the Pale Man. I'm even more pissed than that. Batman in The Dark Knight Rises seemed pretty furious at Bane in their final confrontation. I'm more pissed than that. Donald Duck is pissed in every Disney cartoon. I'm more pissed than that.

My best friend has decided to give World of Warcraft another shot, and he told me he, his cousin, and our friend all got really into it again. I asked if they were playing on a private server, and he told me that they were playing on the original, retail servers of WoW. I remembered those good old days of spending so much of my time on the computer killing things and leveling up and checking out Blood Elves. As much as I try to avoid playing World of Warcraft again, I genuinely miss those days. I don't like what they did with Cataclysm's Edge, and I hate that they included this really silly panda race in Mists of Pandorica or whatever the hell it's called. Still, there's so much more to WoW than those things, and the game is definitely quite an experience. I've tried to replace it with this other game called Continent of the Ninth Seal, but that game has many shortcomings.

I would love to play WoW again, and I will. I'm going to make a trial, not free to play (more on that later) account and make a billion characters and level them up to 20. This should take a good half a year or so. Hopefully by then I will have what's called a disposable income to blow off on this game.

More desperately hopeful than that, maybe I can make enough characters to take however the hell long Blizzard needs to finally switch WoW over to a free to play model. In today's day and age, more and more MMO's are being released with the free to play business model. Valve is probably the cornerstone of success with that model, with Team Fortress 2 showcasing how excellently profitable a free to play game can be with an ingame market. Of course, TF2 was never subscription based. Still, many subscription based MMO's have taken the turn towards free to play. Take The Old Republic, for example. The thing they all have in common is that they all were losing subscribers. WoW is bleeding out, and Blizzard just don't seem to give a damn.

It turns out I didn't make the point I wanted to make on the day I started this post, so I'll get to that point now. Allow me to quote good John Lagrave, WoW's producer.

You know, we looked at it lots, we looked at whether Level 20 would give you a good sense of what our game is, and we think it does. There's also a lot of things in the game that are special that we want to reserve for our paying customers.

Are you stupid! You're losing paying customers! Who's going to enjoy those "special things" you are "reserving" for paying customers when most of them are gone? Besides that, what good is there in reserving these "special things?" He makes it sound like paying customers are going to lose those "special things" if they decided to make the game free to play, but the thing is, those "special things" are the game itself. When you play up to Level 20, sure, you are experiencing enough of the game to get a feel for what it is. But are you experiencing the whole game? NO! There's nothing "special" about being able to trade with other players. There's nothing "special" about being able to be in a guild. There's nothing "special" about being able to type in all of the chat channels. There's nothing "special" about having more than ten gold. All of these things are available to players Level 20 and below who pay for the game. Is there any difference between them and free to play players, other than restrictions placed on free to play players? Do people Level 20 and below who pay for the game say to themselves, "Man, I really hope Blizzard doesn't allow just anyone to yell, or else I'm going to fell like they went cheap"? NO! So do you think people who pay for features available to them after Level 20 are going to say, "Man, this raid dungeon doesn't feel fun anymore because anyone with Internet access and money to pay for the game alone just ruins that fun." NO! So what the hell is Blizzard's problem?

Well, it's obvious, and I said it before. Blizz don't give a shit. I read an article that said a great point. In today's world, there are three types of business models for MMO's. There are free-to-play models, there are free-to-play models that were at one point subscription based, and then there's World of Warcraft. Blizzard's insistence on keeping the archaic subscription based model is about as ridiculous as Rick Santorum's archaic beliefs of banning contraceptives, placing women in the low aspects of society, discriminating against African-Americans, and so on.

That said, I've decided to pay for WoW again. WHAT? AFTER ALL OF MY COMPLAINING AND WHINING? Yep. There is only one reason why I do so... well, two. First of all, paying for WoW every six months is easily exploitable, in a legal and good way. I don't have a job, yet, so how do I pay for WoW every six months? There are two holidays, one midway through each billing period, allowing me to just afford this game's subscription. So there's that, and there's the longstanding belief I have that Blizzard is going to have to man up, live up to today's world, and move on from archaic stupidity. It's like forcing our government to remain in the Bush years. So I believe WoW will be free to play, and that day may come sooner than anyone would guess. Therefore, I'm going to man up first and pay for the game, show Blizzard that yes, even the biggest crybaby can still be a bigger man than a blowhard. That's my "F you" to Blizzard right there. What are they gonna do? Ban me? Disable my account? Stop making money off me? Or are they going to man up and make the game free to play?

As for my time with WoW itself, it feels wonderful to be back... too wonderful. The last time I played WoW was in Ninth Grade. The last time I played WoW in general was in Eleventh Grade, but that was on a private server. Private servers used to be fun, but now that I've lived with the bugs and the donors and all that jazz, I've decided that playing retail again would be such a warmer and more balanced experience. Plus, I finally get to play scripted dungeons! Scripted dungeons, for some reason, never work on private servers.

So now I got all these things going on. I'm reexperiencing some things while learning so many new things. I stopped playing WoW around the time the Lich King was defeated for the first time. Now, with Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria released, I'm discovering so many exciting new things about the game, even with the stupid looking Pandaren race.

I haven't found much motivation for recording my time in WoW. I do have plenty of screenshots though, and to end this post on a note, I'll post some of those moments for you Readers.

My "montage" of stupid-looking moments with my panda guy, this and following.

Wow, such awful children.

LADY SYLVANAS ^^

My pride and joy, the Feline Familiar (cat on the broomstick) I spent literally twelve hours in total trying to get.

My paladin admiring another paladin's tier armor.

Minecraft Country, Episode 1: Pastoral Symphony and Cats!

Welcome to the start of my Minecraft series, Minecraft Country! Originally, I wanted to just upload a video of the Note Block Studio, but I decided it would fit nicely with everything else I added. No other intro in this series will ever be that long. In this episode, I attend a performance put on by none other than the Minecraft Chunkarmonia, and afterwards I learn the responsibilities and difficulties of owning a cat in Minecraft.

At last, I got it uploaded! Hopefully there will be more to come. I'd like to thank Akalron and JewsofDeath for being a part of the fun.

My Thoughts on Final Fantasy XIII-3 (Lightning Returns)

I really hoped I would put off Final Fantasy for a while so that new Readers and such won't think of this as a Final Fantasy only blog. I really hate thinking of this blog that way, especially considering how lousy Square's been with that franchise these days. Oh well.

Final Fantasy XIII is probably the most troubled game in the entire series. I'm even willing to say it's even more troubled than Final Fantasy XIV, which is an utter nightmare of problems. Still, Square seems to know what they're doing in fixing that abomination of bugs and interface screw ups. With Final Fantasy XIII, however, it's just one stupid issue after the other. As every fan of the series should know by know, Final Fantasy XIII was received horribly for it's ridiculous gameplay. I remember I tried to defend that game when it was the second one I played, and then after going through Final Fantasy III, VI, VII, VIII, X, and XII, I realize now how terrible that game is in the context of the series. FFX actually has the same linear gameplay as FFXIII, but somehow FFXIII somehow takes the linearity and amps it to a point that nobody could even imagine. Somehow, the linearity, while annoying, feels acceptable in FFX. I really have no idea why. I guess it could be because FFXIII has way more and maybe even longer cutscenes. In any case, that really crippled the gameplay. The developers explained that the linearity was meant to coincide with the story, but the story itself really wasn't as gripping or exciting as the others.

I liked the battle system in FFXIII, but that's all it had going for. Square didn't need to make a sequel to the game, but they announced that they would, so it then became a matter of fixing the issues with gameplay. So what happened there? Well, they certainly fixed the gameplay; they made the world widely accessible and their time-travel thing added many possibilities for sidequests and exploration and interactivity with the world and such. It was incredibly wonderful. So how is it that that game managed to fail so hard that I refused to buy it?

DLC. That's the answer to everything wrong with that game, as well as the reason why games these days can end up sucking badly. It's the reason why companies (I'm looking at you, Activision and EA) release games in pieces just for money, to eat away at the gaming community, rather than releasing what I call Gestalt Videogames. What is a Gestalt Videogame? Simply put, it's a video game before DLC was conceived.

I'll certainly bring up that term time and time again, but let's return to Final Fantasy XIII. So in XIII-2, the game ends with your main characters failing. It ends with an ambiguous, "To be continued," as the endgame screen. That is the biggest dick move anyone can pull in anything. If I wrote a short story that said, "To be continued," at the end, I would seriously have to reconsider having Creative Writing as my major. If a movie had a, "To be continued," at the end of the movie, they'd better damn well have at least summed up the main plot of that particular movie. Besides that, you can sort of get away with that in a movie since the audience has a passive role in the events of the movie. In a game, however, gamers are the ones who ultimately control whether the game finishes or not. They are actively engaging with the game to reach some form of closure by the end of its story. When you have someone do that just so that they can die in the end and have to wait for the next thing, you are being a moron. You are pretty much raping the gamer of his experience with your game.

Then, as I said before, a good one hundred and eighty five percent of Final Fantasy XIII-2 consists of DLC. Why bother paying sixty bucks for a game that's just in pieces?

So that ultimately leads me to Lightning Returns. Lightning was my favorite character in FFXIII for being awesome, well designed, well voiced, and well developed as a character. She was able to hold everything together when everyone else aside from Fang was being ridiculous in that game, kind of like how Auron keeps the group's shit together in FFX. The fact that Square has taken that and turned Lightning into a selling point for the FFXIII series just disgusts me in ways I couldn't have imagined. What they did with Lightning is essentially what presumably Activision did Treyarch's division of Call of Duty: they took the best character from World at War, Sergeant Reznov (a.k.a. a Soviet Gary Oldman) and turned him into the reason why you have to buy Black Ops and Black Ops 2. Who does that? Greedy companies who don't care about their games and only focus on what makes money.

So the fact that Square's gone on that road with FFXIII is pretty much the central reason why I try not to have anything to do with that game anymore. But, as much as I hate what they're doing with the game's trilogy, I can't ignore Final Fantasy XIII-3's fine points. I don't really know for sure what they are specifically, beyond making Lighting the sole playable character and increasing interactivity by like tenfold, but from what's shown, they seem like good ideas. But as Blue Highwind had put it, it's not a matter of whether the game will be good anymore. Rather, it's a matter of how Square will manage to screw up the game this time. Blue said he won't play the game unless it gets stellar reviews. I'll probably play it if the gameplay is good, if there's finality to the story, and, most importantly, if somebody says you can play the game without feeling like you were gipped by Square for whoring out the name.

From what I've seen, all I can say is that I like the level/concept designs, but do I really have to say that? Square is known for their detailed worlds and such, even when they are straight lines like Spira or Cocoon. Also, I find it really interesting that the game once again takes place way off in the future, and I would like to see how Square's managed to tie that in with all the characters and such. I also find it interesting that they are writing the game in the vein of Majora's Mask, where you have to compete with time before it runs out. After playing Majora's Mask, I wasn't sure how well that gameplay element could be replicated in another game, but if that isn't criticized too badly in FFXIII-3, I'll look into it.

There's a moderate chance I'll actually get this game. I guess not having played the second one has allowed me to take things into consideration. We'll see what happens when the time comes.

A Tweak in Language and Other Stuff

This is just an apology to anyone who reads my old posts. I needed to edit some of the profanity I've used throughout the blog, because looking back, I was really stupid with that. Unfortunately, this meant sacrificing the flow of speech, so if something reads awkwardly, I apologize for that. This also meant that I had to delete my written playthroughs of Final Fantasy X, XII, and III, because the language was just so all over the place and there was just so much stuff I'd have to edit in one sitting, and I have no time for that so I just deleted them. Yes, this is a very sad thing, but on the bright side, I have a FFXII video let's play in mind, which hopefully will be more fun and entertaining than the written one. I know for sure it will be easier to make. I can do that with FFVI as well, but I don't really want to at the moment. Also, I got Final Fantasy X, so when I can get the chance to privately record myself, I'll make a video let's play of that!

Blog news: I've got a Minecraft video in the works. Hopefully that will be uploaded by the end of the week, so look forward to that! Otherwise, that's all I got.

Actually, another thing. Ever since the horror that was FFXIII-2, I've tried to forget about its existence and move on with my life. Unfortunately, so much stuff about FFXIII-3 has been shoved right up in my face, so now I can't ignore the game. Perhaps I'll post my thoughts about it when I find the time to do so. Maybe I'll check the game out and review it on this blog. But I'm not promising anything, really. The only certain product Square is releasing that I will eventually talk about is Kingdom Hearts 3, and that's not until at least a couple of years from now. As for everything else, I've forgotten about Final Fantasy Versus XIII, ignored the FFXIII saga, and lost faith in a U.S. release of Final Fantasy Type-0, so until FFXV comes out in about five or six or whatever years from now, don't expect much from me about Final Fantasy.

As for other games, though, things are looking good. I've got video let's plays and such in mind, which should be loads of fun here. Right now, I've got that Minecraft video in the works. Again, look for that sometime by the end of this week, hopefully.

This Is Why Garry's Mod Rules

Scout's Day Off

Here it is, my first recorded gaming session, with my roommate Akalron. I'm pretty nervous about this, considering how stupid this video is and how massively flamed I'm going to get on YouTube. In this video, I check out the BeerHeads achievement server, where people pretty much just screw around and do weird stuff. I loathe everything about this video, though. Hopefully, when I decide to start my Minecraft feature, the awkwardness will dissipate.

The Fantasy Never Dies

Jesus, what a stupid name for a blog post.

I'm going to quote this blog's description here and add to it:

Originally my Final Fantasy blog, I shut down this blog for a few months before ultimately realizing I had a lot of fun with it, even though nobody read a single thing. Now, with the world of PC gaming fully open to me with Steam, emulators, FRAPS, and so on, I felt it would be awesome to take this blog and turn it into a general gaming blog.

Unfortunately, I lost the backup copy of this blog, so all of my previous posts are gone. In one way, this is a good thing because these posts featured opinions of mine that I look back on and realize how invalid they were. But for the most part, this sucks because I just had so many awesome things beyond the posts themselves. Thankfully, I've managed to salvage my playthroughs of Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy XII, along with my unfinished playthrough of FFIII. The FFIII playthrough might just get deleted, though, so don't expect that to remain salvaged for long.

Wait, BREAKING NEWS! I found all of my blog posts :D What I figured I'd do is post them before this post so that way this updated information doesn't get buried beneath my old posts.

Okay, now I can carry on with what I originally wanted to say. Going through my previous blog posts, I have one thing to say: MY GOD, ALL THE POSTS ABOUT FFXIII-2.

I guess one of the reasons why I shut this blog down was how much of a failure that game was when it was finally released, after all the damn hype I built up for it. Also, you might notice all these posts about Type-0 being released. Those were written nearly over a year ago. Look now, try as you might, you'll never find any information about whether that game will be released overseas or not. In short, Square Enix is managed by morons, and that greatly contributed to the shutting down of this blog.

As I alluded to in the blog description, I've gained wide access to the opportunities presented by PC gaming. In the case of Final Fantasy, I can now play FFXII and FFX on my computer, because I have finally found an emulator for PS2 games! In general, pretty much every Final Fantasy ever released is accessible to me, but I'm not going to bother with that opportunity that much. With FRAPS, I can make video let's plays of FFXII and FFX, allowing for a kind of entertainment that cannot be achieved through a written playthrough.

However, why limit myself to Final Fantasy? In my opinion, that was why my blog died. Therefore, even though my blog template and design runs on a theme of Final Fantasy, I want to emphasize this new factor of this blog:

I am not solely focusing on Final Fantasy anymore.

So there you have it. What does this mean? This means I will discuss any game. That includes my current library of games, which includes:

• Arma 2: Combined Ops
• Black Mesa (basically a graphical overhaul mod of Half-Life 1)
• Counter-Strike
• Continent of the Ninth Seal
• Day of Defeat
• Day Z
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Garry's Mod
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Episode 1
• Half-Life 2: Episode 2
• Left 4 Dead 2
• MicroVolts
• Minecraft
• Portal
• Saints Row: The Third
• Team Fortress 2
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• PlayStation 2 Emulator
• Dr. Muto
• Kingdom Hearts
• Kingdom Hearts Final Mix
• Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories
• Kingdom Hearts 2
• Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix
• Final Fantasy X
• Final Fantasy XII
• Nintendo 64 Emulator
• Banjo-Kazooie
• Banjo-Tooie
• Conker's Bad Fur Day
• StarFox 64
• Super Mario 64
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards (Can't get to work)
• Jet Force Jemini
• And so much more, my god
• GameBoy Advance Emulator
• Metroid: Zero Mission
• Metroid Fusion
• Final Fantasy VI

Whew. You never realize how many games you have until you count them all out. And I still plan to add more games to that library!

Beyond just the games I own, though, I'll still talk about games in the same sense as how I talked about Final Fantasy, by looking through videos and news and concept art and such. So this blog now has no excuse to sit around for long periods of time anymore. In short, I anticipate a very lively blog here, and to celebrate that, I will find a way to upload my first FRAPS video ever in the next post!

Final Fantasy III, for the iPhone!

I managed to find some iTunes gift cards and buy myself FFIII for the iPhone now. I left my DS at home since I didn't see myself using it for anything other than this game (if it were the 3DS, the case would be different). The game is beautiful on the iPhone 4S! Making this a game on the cellphone was such an excellent idea from Square. I read somewhere that there's no Mognet in this game, so supposedly you can get the Onion Knight Job without doing that stupidity. Still, I doubt I am going to have the patience to level up all the way to 99.

Overall, I am really excited to be playing this game again. As the great Blue Highwind said, it's "A wonderfully charming little game about kids who switch Jobs and wander around the world so lovely it doesn't need a plot." Plus, this means I can return to work on my playthrough for this game, though it'll be a while before I can continue since I have some catching up to do. Overall, I'm liking the feel of the game so far. The controls work wonderfully well with this game, and I am looking forward to using it on my dreadful eight hour bus ride.

FFXIII-2 Decision and the Future of Final Fantasy

I have decided not to spend my time playing XIII-2. Since I'm in college now, which is why I haven't been here often, I cannot find the time to play something unless I know it will be worth my time. Final Fantasy XIII-2 appears to be fantastic with the new and improved gameplay, but what about the story? Stories are what makes the Final Fantasy series unique, and unfortunately I have found out too much of this game's story to even wish to play it anymore. It's sick. It's disgusting. I am in shock, I really am. The original game's storyline was confusing, but it made sense and it had a sense of finality. This game's story is demanding that you wait to pay for a whole new game or for DLC, and I refuse to do that.

In Fallout 3, you die in the end as the main character, and you can't do anything after that point. It sounds horrible, but the good thing is that your efforts throughout the game resulted in saving the Wasteland, by purifying the irradiated water throughout America. Sure, you died, your father died, everything seemed like it was over. However, you still know that you completed the game, and that everything in the game's world will now be okay. You don't need to sit around and wait for an expansion.

Now, in another game, like Kingdom Hearts, this would be different, because that game is a series of games that are related to each other. Final Fantasy, on the other hand, doesn't relate to each other, and therefore each game should have a complete story. This is where XIII-2 fails. There is no ending for XIII-2, it was all just a lie. This has me fearing for the storyline of Type-0, because Square wants to make that game into its own spinoff series, and it seems to imply that there won't be a real ending to the game. At least it hasn't been advertised as a game of finality, and they say that the DLC is free, so there shouldn't be a problem for that game. I am keeping my hopes up for Type-0. I honestly must admit that I wasn't expecting XIII-2 to be all fine and perfect, it just seemed a little too good to be true. And where's Lightning? Why isn't she playable?

It's one thing to write an unfinished story. It's another thing to advertise it as a complete product, and what Square did is unforgivable. Maybe it wasn't all of Square, maybe it was just the writer of the story. Hopefully, we won't hear too much from him in the coming future of the series. A lot of people seem to believe that the series has gone to hell just because of one numbered title that has ultimately struggled. Sure, there's FFX-2 and Dissidia that are ultimately real nightmares as well, but they are spin-offs. XIII-2 is a spinoff as well, but it was Square's chance at redemption for the first game's bad gameplay, and since they ruined it, it counts against them. However, again we only have one game here. I cannot stand everyone saying that the series is going to suck forever now and that FFX will be the last decent Final Fantasy they ever release. It pisses me off that FFXII is overlooked and has been released relatively recently in context of the series's lifespan.

It's just one game, guys. Don't give me no nonsense about XIII-2, it still falls under the same production so it classifies as part of FFXIII. We still have Type-0 to check out, and we still have Versus XIII (which will probably be the best of the FFXIII spin-offs given that it's mostly Tetsuya Nomura's doing). FFXIV is another MMO, and I suppose that also has grounds for pissing off fans. It pissed me off, I'll give you all that much. If they were really going to release another Final Fantasy MMO, they could've at least made it several ways different from FFXI. But that's not what's important here. What's important are the numbered titles that you can actually place in your console device and play through without connection to the internet. We have the original five Final Fantasies that were as bland as a stale cracker, but in the end they're ultimately better and more well loved that FFXIII. We have FFVI and FFVII, games that cannot be argued with. Then you have FFVIII, which I hate the living hell out of, but enough people seem to like it. It certainly did not seem to portend that the series was reaching a state of hell. FFIX is loved by a lot of the fans, and I am still longing to check it out. FFX has some... mixed views. People seem to be willing to admit that it was a decent attempt. FFXI doesn't count for being an MMO. And last, there's FFXII, which was one of my best video game experiences ever. A lot of people hate it for no reason; I assume they're just new fans whose first Final Fantasy was FFX (or worse, FFX-2). So maybe Square is being very greedy and disgusting trying to shell out money from the pockets of their customers. Personally, I don't give a damn so long as the game they release is a game I don't play, like FFXI and FFXIV. If they want to make people pay monthly to play an online game, fine, whatever. However, I have to care when they release a game with promises of being great, and then in the end it turns out that I had wasted my money and that I would have to waste more money for the finished product.

I was fine with FFXIII, but that was because it was the game that I needed in a time of despair over whether video games will ever be as good as they used to be (because I was playing all the first person shooters on the Xbox 360, all of which suck minus the Halo series). Anyway, so my point is that this game shouldn't worry people about the future of the series. When you look at FFXIII by itself, you will freak out and think that Square will never be able to get the next Final Fantasy right. However, when you take the game and put it in the grand scale of the series as a whole, it looks nothing more than a small blotch on a beautiful person's skin. For now, I want to see what Versus XIII and Type-0 will be like, and I am sure that they will be better games than FFXIII, allowing for fans to forget about the game and laugh it off as a silly mistake. When FFXV comes around, I am sure things will be different. My guess is that FFXIII's failure is attributed to the division of the company, since they divided into three groups to work on three different games at once (though I really wonder what the hell Nomura's been doing all this time with his group on Versus XIII). Perhaps the next Final Fantasy will have its story written by a different guy. Perhaps there will be different people in charge of the design of the gameplay. It seems pretty likely that that will be the case if the whole company returns to working on the game together and not split up.

I'm sure that, in the end of its run, the Final Fantasy series will feature more good games than bad. Only fourteen numbered titles have been released, and only three (the two MMO's and FFXIII) have turned out to be total wastes of numbers. I am sure that there will be quite a lot more than twenty numbered Final Fantasy titles in the future, regardless of what people think of that right now. So if you are a long-standing fan of this series hyperventilating over its future, calm the hell down. As I said before, ignoring the MMO's, it's just one game. We have a lot of previous titles to fondly reminisce of, and we have plenty of future titles waiting to be conceived. So just calm down, take a deep breath, and pop in FFVI, or FFXII if you are beginning to think that Square's greatness is lost in time. Then, when FFXV is released, we can all forget that FFXIII ever happened.

Now, shut the hell up about Final Fantasy's future. If you are a damn true fan, you would've already had in mind everything that I just said.