I’ve been dealing with the worst depression spike I’d had in years these last few days. I don’t think I’ve felt this bad since I was twenty-four and I was bad enough at that point in my life that maybe two people in all of existence know how poorly I was doing back then. Because that’s what always happened when I get this bad. I got quiet. I stopped talking to people. I stopped writing about it in any quantitative manner and just wrote in generalities, if I wrote about it all (back in those days, I mostly just stopped writing entirely). I would never bring up how badly I was doing out of a desire to avoid worrying people, to avoid taking up their mental space, and because I’m aware that these kinds of waves, the ones that show up and worsen without any kind of trigger, will last until they’ve over and nothing I can do but pass the time will bring them to an end. Which isn’t to say that I had no ability to influence my well-being or the frequency of those kinds of events. Over the years of my adult life, I’ve identified a few factors that contribute to these ways and worked to prevent those factors from coming into play. That’s why I almost never drink and avoid drinking to excess if I ever do. I go on regular walks for a mixture of fresh air, exercise, and sunlight, all of which contribute to a base level of well-being. I regularly exercise in order to create a firm basis for my daily routines, hone my discipline, and get myself feeling physically embodied. I also try to sleep at least six hours a night. If that last one didn’t illustrate the problem I’m having right now, don’t worry since I’m about to explain it in detail.
Continue readingMonth: April 2025
The Rotten Labyrinth Reveals It’s Greatest Secret Thus Far: Steve, The (Not So) Little Guy
Sometimes, you build a little something for yourself into one of your games. A silly little thing. Something fun, perhaps even just for you, to keep things interesting and provide the opportunity for some levity. Sometimes that’s a fun little NPC, sometimes it’s a stupid pun you’re building towards, sometimes it’s a situation meant to catch your players off-guard, and sometimes it’s all three of those things at once. In my most-recent session with The Rotten Labyrnith, we talked as a group to get on the same page, in-character and out, about what to do with the player character who had been petrified in the session prior. After that, the party set out to continue exploring the labyrinth keeping in mind their stated hope of finding a cure for their petrified ally and ran into the player’s (potentially temporary) replacement character. Shortly after that, and what felt like an awful lot of distrust for some random guy who ran out of a deeper part of the labyrinth in a panic (distrust they didn’t extend to the wereboar barbarian who showed up, immediately transformed, and attacked them), the party carried on, found some more stuff, and ran into a strange figure crouched in a little, half-hidden corner of the part of the maze they were exploring. Just as things started to progress in talks with this oddly long goblin (who had the most “little guy” energy I could muster), my building’s fire alarm went off and I had to evacuate, cutting the session short and bringing our play to an end without me getting to deliver the joke I’d been building towards. I wound up sending it in the text chat once I was outside and knew what was going on, but it just wasn’t the same.
Continue readingThe Current Contours Of My Depression And Anxiety
I have spent pretty much my entire life dealing with depression and anxiety. I don’t remember a single time in my life that I wasn’t anxious (and I can remember back pretty early into my life) and the depression has been a constant companion since I was five or six. I developed tools to cope as a child, improved them in order to survive as a pre-teen and teen, worked to solidify them as a young adult, and then worked to heal in my twenties. I haven’t really struggled with them in almost a decade, since my mid-twenties, because I got so good at handling them that it took very little effort, at least as far as my day-to-day energy was concerned. Some days were worse, some were better, but I mostly averaged out to being fine. These days, though, that is no longer the case. Ever since last year, when I started the medication that would go on to cause me a great deal of constant pain, I’ve been fighting to keep an even keel again, in a way I haven’t had to since I left my parents’ house in 2009. Part of that is the accumulation of stress over the past five years of Covid-19’s domination of existence, a lot of that was the stress from being in constant pain, and the rest has been the gradual turn towards shitty fascism that has been really taking center stage in the US. There’s just been so much to feel stressed and depressed about and so very little I’ve been able to rely on to counteract those feelings that I’ve just had to make some kind of peace with living in this state of perpetual exhaustion, depression, stress, and anxiety.
Continue readingFriends At The Table Has Another New (And Delightful) Podcast: Side Story!
Once again, I am here to tell you about a brand new Friends at the Table podcast! I’ve written about Friends at the Table as a whole, with a focus on their tabletop gaming, and the second podcast they started in 2024, Media Club Plus, as it covers the 2011 anime Hunter x Hunter, but they just started somethig brand new a couple weeks ago (episode two came out the week this was posted). It’s a video game discussion podcast called “Side Story” and it is exactly what it sounds like. Austin Walker, noted video game journalist of quite a few places (perhaps most notably Waypoint back in the day), has apparently been getting requests from people for years to go back to talking about video games the way he used to before the career change that brought him to the now-closed Possibility Space video game studio. Now that he’s choosing to focus his time and energy on Friends at the Table, rather than continuing to keep it as a side project, he’s started this video game discussion podcast with a cast made up of other Friend at the Table folks. So far, he’s only had two other people join him for both of the podcast’s first two episodes (Jack de Quidt and Janine Hawkins, both people who have written for video games in the past), but Austin has been clear that he intends to have the rest of the Friends at the Table cast on at some point. Given that the whole premise of this particular video game podcast is to just talk about the games they have been playing, rather than seeking to provide stringent reviews or high-concept disucssions, it’s perfect for someone looking for a relaxing discussion of video games of all types (recent, older, indie, big-budget, etc) that ranges from the light “this was fun” to the critical “I played this but found the experience strange and possibly unpleasant” and even the hopeful “this game is promising a lot and seems to be actually delivering during its early access phase.”
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 34
As the last few late blog posts have probably indicated, I am still struggling. Turns out trying to find a good maintenance dose of a medication is actually a lot of putting up with changing and potentially miserable side effects. And sleepiness. Lots and lots of sleepiness. All of which means I’m just barely keeping up with the stuff I NEED to do every day, much less the stuff I don’t need to do but would like to do (such as this blog since it’s not like I’ll die if I miss a post or whatever). I’d get over it eventually, but I’m doing my best to avoid missing a post or being forced to take days off, even if it means posting in the evening and going back to edit it eventually (exact times TBD). So, to lessen the burden, and because I’m also definitely tired and sad, I’ve decided to write a little bit about the the statements Legend of Zelda games make with their stories. Or the lack thereof, since sometimes leaving something out can also be making a statement, just one that’s up to the reader/player to insert. Which, if you’ve read any of my Final Fantasy 14 posts recently, you know is a topic that’s been on my mind a lot. In my opinion, it’s better to say nothing at all than to present ideas but never say or ask anything about them, and the Legend of Zelda spent most of it’s franchise history saying very little at all. You can even go through the history of the console games and see this silence develop from a sort of incidental-to-early-video games to something masterfully orchestrated to eventually something entirely abandoned for a senseless cacophony.
Continue readingFaltering Redemption Stories In Final Fantasy 14’s Stormblood
I finally finished all of the patch content for the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy 14. Well, the Main Scenario Quest parts of it, anyway. There’s still plenty of quests, the raids, and who knows what else still available for me to do, but I’ve done most of the content quests (the ones that have their quest marker filled in with a plus sign on a blue background) and all of the story stuff, so I’m pretty much done with it other than slowly working through the other stuff as I have time, inclination, and enough friends online. I finished it just a couple days before my friends returned from Japan, actually, and had to slow down since I’d promised to wait to start the next expansion until they were back in the US and could get my reactions to it live. So, I’ve spent a few days noodling on the expansion as a whole and even spoke with some of my friends about it, to see what they thought. The general reaction to it seems to be pretty muted, since most people don’t seem to hate it or love it. I mean, the most common reaction was “you did the entire expansion in two weeks???”” but the second-most-common reaction was “it was fine.” More people hated it than loved it, but it really seems to have not made much of a lasting impression on people and while some of this is likely the result of how tired I am this week, I’ll admit that it is already slipping from my mind as well. It wasn’t bad and I enjoyed my time running through the plot, but it made it through the entire expansion without really making a statement about rebellion politics, reform, justice, or the particular cruelty of empire.
Continue readingDeveloping Touchstones For Something New
One of the strongest aspects of the campaign I’m starting up to run in place of The Magical Millennium (which I wrote about yesterday) is the feeling of it I had in my head. Sure, I could talk about the core themes and how I imagined the general story of such a game might play out, but it’s a lot easier to build a set of touchstones I can refer to in order to indicate specific things about the game. These often come up in tabletop games, at the individual campaign level or at the ruleset level for games that are seeking to convey a particular feeling no matter the specifics of the game. For instance, one of my favorite games that I’ve never played (though I hope to change that eventually) is Beam Saber and the rulebook starts out with a bunch of references to various mecha anime to use as a touchstone. The general purpose of a list of touchstones like this is to get as many people as possible some idea of what the game being played should feel like. Beam Saber is a game about struggling to live during a massive galactic war that you can’t hope to influence, with an emphasis on either coming together or doing what you must to eventually get out alive, so all of the anime the referenced point in that general direction. It’s a good way for specific genre games to indicate what part of the genre the game is emulating. At the campaign level, it tends to get more specific about aspects of the particular continuity of a game that you’re playing through. Typically, I tend to start out with strong ideas that don’t necessarily need touchstones, images to help paint a picture of the world, some music if I’ve had the time to figure it out, and also some of my own writing if I’ve had the time and energy to put towards it.
Continue readingStarting Something New: The Magical Millennium Is On Hiatus
After a hiatus following the departure of a player (though not caused by the departure of said player), four of the remaining five of us met up to play and quickly discovered we did not have it in us to play our usual game. Live’s been a chaotic mess for all of us and we lost quite a bit of momentum because of when our break arrived. It cut us off from any opportunity to build energy or establish story because we spent the previous full session going through a time skip and our last partial session doing some maintenance and upkeep, so there weren’t any existing strands of story or character to use to pull us into the game again. Additionally, due to some decisions I made while creating this game and building out the world, I’ve been struggling to feel excited about this part of the game we’re in. Some of the NPCs I’d made had begun to take up too much space in my mind because their real-world analogues have become dramatically more prominent in my mind as a result of how the world has changed in the year or so since I spun the bones of this story up. It stopped being fun for me to explore the ideas associated with them and while there was still space for me to shift things and make changes in order to avoid building the association any more than I already had, I was also struggling with how close the world was to our own. Which, it turns out, was also a bit of a struggle for some of my players as well. It’s difficult to enjoy fantasy escapism when we’re not actually departing from the world we are already familiar with. So, as our chatter peetered out and it looked like we’d be just departing rather than pushing ourselves to play a game we weren’t in the mood to play, I pitched an idea for a game I’d had just the day before.
Continue readingLooking For Reassurance As The World Threatens To Crumble Around Us
Despite being a part of the economy of the United States of America, both as a person producing value/wealth for others like a good capitalist cog and as someone whose retirement is largely dependent on it’s health due to the broken way that retirement is set up in the US, I feel a sense of satisfaction every time the stock market loses value. I understand this is the perversity within me making itself known–it is my one source of schadenfreude even though it is far from harmless–to a life mostly spent setting it aside in order to do what I know to be right (for example, I did actually vote in the latest election in Wisconsin despite wanting nothing more than to not vote at all because I was being harassed and hangued at all hours of the day, by phone and mail, about note just voting but how just ANYONE could look up whether or not I voted in any particular election by those messages that always feel more threatening than motivational). I understand that and do not set it aside because, for all the harm it does, it has a greater impact on those so wealthy that their “worth” is tied up in the bullshit confluence of imagined value known as the stock market. It is the only time I get to look at the world and know that while the actual impact on my life is greater than it will ever be on a billionaire’s, at least my changes are measured in four or five digits while a billionaire’s changes are measured in at least double that many digits. Cold comfort, to be sure, given that I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be able to actually retire in the modern sense of the word, but it’s the only comfort I’ve got as my country and economy shake a rattle at a scale beyond my ability to influence.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14’s Stormblood Is Full Of Big Ideas That Went Basically Nowhere
About a week ago, give or take a couple days because time is blurring together and I genuinely can’t remember how long it has been, I finished the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy 14. I’ll freely admit that I went into it a bit miffed and resentful because I’d just finished a bunch of storytelling about other worlds, the loss of balance that had a world being swallowed by light rather than darkness, and the sacrifices we make to see our vision for the future come to pass. The game took all that interesting, intriguing storytelling that it had been building towards for quite a while and tossed it all aside to focus on a popular rebel who used charisma and emotional manipulation to gather an army he could sacrifice in order to summon a god to unleash on not just the empire that conquered his homeland years ago but every single conquered people between him and said empire, including his own people. He was clearly cast as the villain in this moment, creating and then betraying a grassroots rebellion, but the story didn’t sit super well with me because, out of all the characters I’d met, his general politics matched closest to my own and yet the game was constantly casting him as a villain. All of which was further complicated by the fact that he was one of the few people of color in the game and had come to represent the resentful refugee who was not content to live in squalor and take whatever scraps he could beg or steal to keep himself alive, often in wars that defied logic and actual revolutionary practice just so he could be horrible and villainous in a way that advanced the plot.
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