Way back in 2015, I went on a pretty hardcore diet. I was trying to pick up running (long story) and having issues because of how hard it was on my legs (from knees on down), so I thought I’d try to lose some weight and see if running worked better. I took a severe, rather limiting approach that drove a significant lifestyle change I was hoping to maintain (that lasted until I went to a convention, slacked off on the severity of my limitations, and never picked it back up again), and it was all I could think about for a solid month. I had cut down my calorie intake to an incredibly low number and was fighting through the feelings of hunger that plagued me as my appetite slowly shrunk and my body adapted to burning stored fat rather than recently consumed food, so it was kind of at the forefront of my mind whenever I wasn’t focused on something else. It was all I talked about with my friends, in my group chats, and around my D&D group, so much so that I eventually realized it and (unsuccessfully) tried to stop talking about it. This past week of recovering my executive function has been kind of like that. Getting something back that I’ve been missing for so long–years and years–has consumed my mind and attention to the point that I’ve written about it every single day this week. I’m sure I could try to jog my mind away from this topic, but I’m not sure I want to yet since, well, this is a part of my lived experience and very important to me.
Continue readingMonth: August 2025
How To Not Have An Opinion About Something On The Internet
Just don’t talk about it!
Now that this… I don’t know, fakeout? is over, I’m here to actually talk about Final Fantasy 14 and my suddenly rampant and runaway focus. I wrote out most of a blog post talking about not having an opinion about something and fell into the ancient trap that is talking about not having an opinion is still having an opinion, so I decided to delete all that but wanted to keep the title and the new opening “paragraph” because, really, this is advice that a lot of people out there need (myself included, clearly!). Thankfully, I managed to avoid contradicting my own advice since pretty much the only thing I think about these days is trying to get into some kind of actual loop in Final Fantasy 14 now that I’ve got the energy to do other stuff and have changed how I’m playing the game. My whole “take a relaxed approach and just do whatever” thing doesn’t really work anymore since my once-forgotten default (relaxed puttering) for that kind of approach is slowly morphing back into “just keep doing stuff without end” and keeping me up way too late at night. I need to create and enforce some structure on myself so I can still do fun things but maybe do them without also staying up past two in the morning–which I need to stop doing so I can actually take advantage of how much more potential energy I’ve got these days rather than my recent usual status of having a willing mind and soul but an incapable-due-to-complete-exhaustion body. Structure and a list of goals has helped with similar problems in the past–though they were coming at this from the other direction, of being so tired that I could barely push myself to do anything–so I’m hoping they’ll help again with my video game time so I can maybe return to getting a decent six hours of sleep most nights.
Continue readingI’m Recovering My Executive Function And All I Got So Far Was Less Final Fantasy 14 Time
In perhaps the least-expected twist of what increasingly seems like an effective antidepressant, while I am actually regaining my ability to do things at what feels like a nigh-miraculous rate, I’m actually doing a lot less Final Fantasy 14 stuff than I expected to do. I mean, I’ve spent so much time on the game lately that a lot of my considerations for what I might do more if I had the energy was stuff like “get back to my daily level-grinding work” or “finally work through a bunch of the job quests for fishing that I’ve been ignoring because fishing isn’t fun” or “return to my old days of constant resource collection.” Instead, my apartment is (mostly) clean, my dishes are done, my laundry is folded, work is less productive than ever, I’m more tired than before, and I’m sleeping less than I should. Turns out that stuff piling up on your mental to-do list starts to reassert itself pretty heavily when you finally stop reflexively flinching away from the thought of doing any kind of extra work because even considering the act of thinking about it made you so tired you wanted to lay down on the floor and not move for a week. So now I fill my “spare” evening time with cleaning tasks around my apartment, spend more time preparing myself decent food, and then realize I had a list of Final Fantasy 14 chores I wanted to get done such that now I’m staying up even later to do those as well. I’ve spent so much time over the past few years (and probably even longer) so incredibly tired in body, soul, and mind that now I’m starting to mistake the mental drive to do things returning for the physical ability to do things. Wanting to do stuff is unfortunately not the same as not being tired, much less actually having the energy to do stuff. Which is a mistake I’ve made three nights in a row.
Continue readingStaggering Over The Finish Line After Today Kicked My Ass
Some days just kick your ass and all you can do at the end of the day is stick to the list of chores you gave yourself and hope that tomorrow will suck less. Today’s one of those days for me. Got to work a bit late (but no big deal, I’ve got no obligations so I can just stay late) and immediately got plunged into the shit. Catching up coworkers who were out, starting on things that I’ve been waiting for people to get back into the office to do, having to chase people down to get my testing setups fixed, losing hours and hours to a problem no one can figure out, having my boss skip our one-on-one meeting when I’ve got stuff to talk about, and finding out that my coworker who has been out a bunch will be out even more (and I can’t even just feel angry at him because he’s getting surgery to fix his knee, so I’m also a little scared about what this will mean for him since he’s nearly sixty and this could have a huge impact on someone who is, sure, a frequent source of frustration for me, but also someone I care about since I’ve worked literally side-by-side with him for the last eight and a half years). It’s all been a bit much today and yet I’ve still got to go grocery shopping since I won’t have a chance to do that again until thursday, I’ve still got to do my chores because I’ve got other ones every single day between now and when my friends show up (which I’m very excited for), and I still have to find time to eat dinner and have at least a little fun somewhere in there so I don’t go to bed hating my existence as much as I do right now.
Continue readingPumping The Brakes On Optimision In The Name Of Due Caution
After a few months of trying slowly increasing dosages of an anti-depressant, I might have finally found one that works. “Might,” being the operative word. I’m only a week and a half into this new dosage as I’m writing this, but I actually have had bursts of adequate executive function in the past few days and while the biggest bursts of it could be attributed to the common early side-effect of “manic energy,” I find myself wanting to feel cautiously optimistic about it. Well, cautiously willing to consider that this might be the medication working. I’m not sure I can call myself optimistic if I’m essentially trying to prove to myself that something other than the medication might be responsible for my buoyed mood. I mean, there’s been all kinds of studies in recent years about how eating a reasonable amount of ice cream every day can have positive effects on your health, so maybe my recent little treats of just a little ice cream every couple of days is responsible. Maybe it’s my improved sleep. Maybe it’s the fact that absolutely nothing horrible happened last week and all I have to deal with was the normal stress of a very busy work week. There’s a lot of things it could be. But its still probably the medication taking effect, even if I’m nervous about whether this feeling will last, grow, disappear, or whatever else could happen. As a teen, I had a really bad experience with mental health focused medications and my experiences so far this year have done little to resolve the general trepidation I feel at the thought of altering my mental state with outside chemicals. A trepidation I’m willing to forcefully overcome since that effort is so much less than the effort it takes to not look and feel miserable constantly that I’m spending just about every single day.
Continue readingI Just Can’t Make Myself Care About KotOR 2
The first roleplaying game (RPG) I ever played was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The second one I played was the sequel. To say that they have had an impact on me would be underselling the truth. Recently, I’ve been trying to replay KotOR 2 alongside A More Civilized Age and haven’t been able to really stick with it, despite enjoying my recent playthrough of the original KotOR, and I was at a bit of a loss as to why this was the case. Why have I been struggling with KotOR 2 when I’ve got such fond memories of both games and, in my memory, clearly preferred KotOR 2 over the original game. Despite there being plenty of opportunities for me to play KotOR 2 without even interrupting my Final Fantasy 14 time, why have I been unable to even force myself to play the game? I went through all that trouble to mod it for the first time ever and while I’ve been keeping up with A More Civilized Age’s coverage of the game by following Austin Walker’s Let’s Play of it, I keep internally rebelling against how much stuff he’s got rattling around in his inventory that he will probably never use to the degree that I keep thinking about playing it myself just to scratch the “hyper efficient playthrough” itch that’s been growing. In theory, I should be spending all of the time I’m not paying attention to Final Fantasy 14 playing KotOR 2 and yet I’ve gone back to playing Wildermyth instead. Only last night, as I was staring at my computer screen without doing anything while Final Fantasy 14 sat untouched on my monitor following some encouraging personal news, did the answer occur to me.
Continue readingFire Drill Flight Risk
Every place that has some kind of fire alert system has a policy for what to do when that system alerts people to a fire. We start practicing this stuff as kids, in daycare or preschool or kindergarten or whatever you call your first educational experience, and continue into our adulthood. I missed a few years in there, since I was homeschooled. My mother tried to do a fire drill once, back when she was convinced that she could just have “school” happen at our house the same way it would at the local Catholic school that she would have otherwise sent us to, but it went poorly and she never tried again. We did get “fire escape ladders” to hang out our bedroom windows though, in case we needed to get out of our bedrooms and the door was blocked by fire, but I think the only one that got used was when my brother snuck out of the house using it, breaking the screen he dropped in the process. Anyway. I did fire drills in high school, in college (in various places: once while in class, thrice while in different dorms, and then yearly at the theater I worked at but that was a very different experience), at both my post-college jobs, and even at a couple apartments. They’re all basically the same, with a few important differences. In every single case, you get out of the building, attend to any people who might be on fire (to a degree), get away from the fire, wait for the all-clear signal, and then go back inside where you have to spend the rest of the day pretending your whole day has not been turned upside down by this disruption. Or, in my recent case, stare longingly at your car as it tempts you to just drive away since it’s unlikely that anyone will notice your absence.
Continue readingTreading Water At Work While Trying To Manage An Intern
The week I’m writing this, I am the only tester on my team who is in the office. The other two are away on multi-week vacations, coincidentally overlapping during what could be described as the busiest period of the summer so far. I’m sure neither one of them did this on purpose. It’s not like any of us knew this week was going to be busy until Thursday of last week and it was far too late to do anything about it then. So, to make up for the lack of other testers and the large amount of work that needs doing every day, I’ve been strictly managing my time at work and bouncing between a large variety of tasks. It is incredibly exhausting, I’ll be honest, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be have gotten less done than if I’d been able to just do my own thing rather than constantly need to reprioritize as something new crops up. Still, I’ve managed to keep on top of everything so far, for three days in a row, other than the testing intern. He’s supposed to be running some tests the senior tester gave him before he left, but I think he’s not actually doing that, given the lack of questions and how the two times I’ve gone to check on him, he’s had to wake up his computer and log back in to show me what he’s supposedly been working on. Since the first time that’s happened, I’ve been keeping on eye on him from the lab or my office, wherever I’m working, and noticing how little time he’s spending looking at his monitors and how much time he’s spending looking at his tablet. I’m not one to bust anyone for taking a break or not looking busy, and I can understand that he probably doesn’t want to have this job but is kind of getting forced into it since his relatives work here (they’re high up in the company, too, so there’s quite a lot of nepotism going on here since he’s been given the most nothing job assignment), but this work needs doing and all of us testers are counting on it getting done, so I’m going to need to figure something out for his last handful of weeks.
Continue readingThe Impending Disaster That Will Be The End Of Windows 10
Over the past few years, I’ve become incredibly familiar with the work of a lot of tech reporters. I am a worker in the tech industry, after all, so it makes sense that I’d be interested in the goings-on of the industry as a whole, but the primary reason I’ve added this to my interests is because of Windows and the rise of LLMs. I’ve had access to a computer of some kind or another for my entire life and have always enjoyed them. The first big thing I ever bought myself was a laptop I could use for computer games that ate up all of my carefully horded babysitting money when I was a teenager, and I’ve been spending a lot of time on a computer ever since. Most of the time, it has largely been a device I took for granted–something that I largely ignored except as a vehicle to deliver other things: video games, my writing, digital access to my friends, and so on. A few years ago, as I became isolated during the first summer of the pandemic, my relationship with my computer changed drastically, turning from the aforementioned vehicle into the portal through which I accessed all of existence other than the physical place my body occupied and the grocery store. Since then, it has shrunk somewhat, but computers still loom large in my life and I can say no cloud has darkened my horizon quite like the appearance of LLMs and every software company’s attempts to shoehorm them into everything. This capitalistic and ruinous desire, the appeal of these plagiarism and theft machines, is actively driving me away from everything to do with computers and would maybe even drive me back into being a console-only gamer except that I know for a fact that the console companies will also shoehorn that shit in if they can ever figure out a way to do it.
Continue readingTrying To Take My Time In Final Fantasy 14
Over the weekend, after about six or so weeks away from doing any kind of Main Scenario Quest progression in Final Fantasy 14, I’m back at it again. For the first time in my seven and a half months of playing the game, it ACTUALLY feels like I’ve been away for a while when I meet back up with the main cast of NPCs and they all remark on how well I look like I’m doing (and I look GREAT, btw, since my main glams all got updated renders in the latest patch) and how nice it is to meet up again after all this time. Generally speaking, there’s usually at least a few months between an expansion and each of its patch updates, so people playing the game as it came out got to experience the passage of time that the game softly implies–albeit usually a truncated version given the way people talk about finally seeing each other again (the game’s actual timeline is incredibly unclear, but I’d guess it’s maybe a fifth of the real-world passage of time if I had to suggest something). When you play through almost the entire main story arc of the game that exists today, you don’t really get the same breaks and breathing space that the game was (eventually) written to reference. It was interesting to see the way they went from tightly-spaced events with a degree of implied continuity that mmade it feet like there wasn’t much time between each major event to events spread out by gaps the characters suggest were significant when they reconvene. They took the nebulousness of in-game time and went from ignoring it–which implied not much time passed at all–to doing enough soft framing around the start of each expansion and certain patches that it implied a moderate passage of time. Perhaps most notably, this was a major component of Endwalker’s conclusion and, given my own feelings at the time, it felt like it would be doing myself and the game a disservice to once more dive into the plot immediately.
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