I'm grinding mogtomes on Luna until 6.2 drops (August 23 baybee 
), but the Moonfire Faire is also going on! When I first started playing Final Fantasy XI 18 years ago (
), I happened to join during that game's version of the summer event, but the systems for messaging "limited-time event" to the player weren't in place like they are now. But as a young baby gamer taking their first steps in the online world, it was fireworks in the city and surrounding starter zones every night! Holy shit!! And that was an impressing moment, because 2004 FFXI was slow as fuck and I was in those zones for a long time!
Those fireworks and festive night-time tracks stopped after a while and I learned about the event (now unavailable until next year) from my first linkshell. I've seen a lot of these events since, but anytime the event rolls back around in FFXIV, I still get a little misty-eyed when I stop to watch the fireworks. I'm willing to go so far and say that these are the Only Good Fireworks because of their set patterns on rotation and a volume control. Anyway, mogtomes,
Last night I invited my raid static's Monk to join me on some runs of the Stormblood "Return to Ivalice" alliance raid series, which mix some story elements from FF12 and Final Fantasy Tactics into the established FF14 world lore. Across the board probably some of the best casual large-scale work they've done - the fights are hard and many of the bosses have fully-voiced lines which elevates the whole experience. Grinding difficult content for extra rewards is like catnip for speed freaks who want to optimize the fastest time possible (myself included) so I went Dark Knight for short queue times and covered my friend with my mitigation skills so they could ignore mechanics for more DPS.
The fireworks came on while we were winding down at the FC house, so we climbed on to a nearby roof and kicked back for the rest of the night. It felt like a great opportunity for a picture and I'm delighted at how they turned out. 
FFXIV's group pose toolkit is really amazing! I wasn't too good at night shots until I read some of Freya Bloodmourne's articles on the GPOSERS website:
- The Photosmith: Lighting Your World
- The Photosmith: Let There Be Light!
- The Photosmith: Eorzean Nightlife
There's a lot of post-processing that people do with shaders and photo manipulation tools, but The Photosmith's guides focus on the basics of shot composition and showing off the power that you get with the built-in GPose tools. They helped me a lot in getting to the point where my night shots look this nice 
Thinking back on that first summer, I'm not sure if I would have ever imagined a world where I get to take pictures this nice 😅 All of the old screenshots I found were 512x382 and mostly featured people standing around with their arms at their sides. The memories from that time are much richer and come back every summer, so I'm fine without the little bits.