I wish there had been a call to action and a rise to meet that call like there often is in stories. A moment of clarity, of undeniable need, that drove the hero/community/leader to action against the foe that had appeared on the horizon. A series of events that would create a moment to inspire a movement. A tipping point where the imbalance was so undeniable that it inspired a mad scramble to fix the scale. Reality isn’t like that, unfortunately. Calls to action are usually ignored, excused, or defused, preventing the necessary rise in response in order to preserve the status quo. We’re all too tired, too poor, too scattered, to divided to respond to a call, for the most part. There’s so much between the people who need to rise and the thing they’re rising to meet that it often feels impossible to ever effect change. I know I often feel that way, like I’m fighting for a hopeless cause or that there’s no reason in putting up a fight because I’ll never gain ground, let alone win. Too much bad stuff keeps happening in the US unopposed by those who were supposed to safeguard against this kind of fascism and consolidation of power for me to seriously believe the idea that our current leaders will ever take meaningful action of any kind. It’s kind of devastating, to be honest, because of the things I was raised to believe about this country and people in general that I somehow still clung to after all these years. I don’t know what I’m going to do about these large scale things as they break beyond repair (but hopefully not beyond replacement).
Continue readingMonth: August 2025
Feeling Seen As I Do My Best To Be Ignored
Earlier this week, one of my friends (the friends-as-family type) sent me a playlist he’d been putting together of songs he thought I might like. I was a really nice experience, to have this sent to me, since he was absolutely correct on all counts, so much so that I’m still listening to the whole playlist over a week later. It was funny to immediately see that two of the songs on the playlist were songs I already loved and listened to regularly, but the rest were all new to me and all absolutely perfect songs. Well, perfect for me. It made me feel incredibly “seen” in a way that feels increasingly rare these days, especially as I’m often living in a conflicting manner when it comes to the various major portions of my life. At work, I do my best to not be seen and known in this way because I don’t trust my coworkers (which has gone from a general trepidation about being vulnerable with my coworkers and grown into an entirely justified mistrust), which is at odds with the way I live my life online or with the people I trust who I try to be as genuinely myself with as possible. Throw in a couple other places where the way I live as myself is different–the discord for my Final Fantasy 14 Free Company where I try to be myself but lightly and with little revelation of personal details for example, or my local friend group where I was forced to withdraw into myself in order to cope with last year’s pain and sleeplessness–and you can probably start to imagine how much internal conflict I’m dealing with most of the time. I have only one small space where I can be genuinely myself and it is in text messages I exchange with my closest friends, which feels incredibly stifling and makes me feel like I’m being ignored by the whole world.
Continue readingI Can’t Imagine What Final Fantasy 14 Would Have Like Without My Free Company
Aside from my very first month of playing the game, I have not experienced what it is like to play Final Fantasy 14 without being a member of a Free Company (the FF14 version of player guilds). The friends who got me into the game were members of one already, so I was already predisposed to joining that particular group from the get-go, but the warm welcome I received while I was still a new player on a free-to-play account solidified my decision to join. Since then, I have not regretted my choice. Almost everyone in the FC has been a warm and welcoming person who has done what they could, sometimes at mild to moderate inconvenience, to help me out as I’ve gotten further and further into the game. From free level-appropriate gear when I was reached the tough middle of my crafting journey to tons of free collectibles (music for the in-game jukebox, minions, clothing items, mounts, and more) more or less constantly, I would not have made the progress I have without the support of this FC. Nor would I have made as much money since everything I know about crafting to make money has been learned from people in the FC and almost all of the money I’ve made in the game has been made via crafting and gathering jobs for the FC’s leader (often as part of deals he has brokered with other very wealthy players). Joining this FC immediately upon becoming a paying subscriber to the game has irrevoccably altered my experience in ways I rarely stop to think about now that I’ve adjusted to it.
Continue readingThree Separate Heatwaves So Far This Summer
I’m writing this post as the tail-end of the latest heatwave slowly dwindles. Along with the cooler air and chance for storms this shift in temperature is bringing, we’re also getting a nasty shift in air-quality. All the cold air coming from up north is still filled with wildfire smoke, after all. Which means we’re all basically stuck in a position of “horrible heat” or “smoke-filled air” as the old, stable, warm-but-not-too-hot weather of post summers gets blown to and fro by the more extreme conditions to the north and south. It is just over a month into Summer and we’ve had three heatwaves in that time alone. I’m sure we had more over the course of the year, but they didn’t really register the same way these ones did since all they brought were unseasonably warm temperatures (like that time we had temperatures in the 70s back in February) and not actual heat advisories like the summer ones always deliver. I wish I could reliably say that at least this is it for the next ten days based on the forecast, but even tomnorrow’s forecast is no longer an acurrate prediction I can rely on [turns out that even this morning’s prediction for today was off by almost ten degrees and it looks like this week’s heat is going already be more intense than predicted over the weekend]. Today was supposed to be cool and stormy, but instead we’ve just drawn out the dwindling temperatures from the past two days to create a humid swamp of an atmosphere that smells of smoke to my sensitive nose. Tomorrow’s supposed to be rainy now, but I’ll believe it when I see it since I sincerely doubt it will cool off as much as the forecast claims it will. I find it difficult to believe it’ll go from a heat index of over one hundred to dipping down into the fifties in less than forty-eight hours (and barely more than thirty-six), but the weather is strange and largely unpredict able at this point, so who knows. Maybe it’ll happen [it didn’t].
Continue readingBurned Out Beyond Storytelling
It has been almost a month since I ran a TTRPG session. I’ve been so exhausted that I just haven’t had the energy to plan sessions or do even a modicum of prep work, let alone actually spend the significant chunk of time and energy required to hold the session. I keep going into each new week feeling marginally better at most, so putting in the effort to run a game would leave me in even worse condition. Love of the game isn’t enough to make it happen, as much as I’d like to pretend it was, and thankfully my players have all been very understanding. I’m just coming out of my third skipped weekend in a row, still exhausted, and wondering when I’ll eventually have recovered from this burnout. In the past, when things would get this bad for me, I’d do a work from home day or two so I’d be able to sleep in later, rest more during the day, and spend a day working in comfort rather than having to exist in the constantly draining and uncomfortable environment of my office. I’m pretty good at masking so I doubt any of my coworkers know this, but the environment I work in can be very stressful and overstimulating in a way that saps me of all my energy pretty quickly, and the insistence by my boss that I spend less time in my office and more time being visible by working in the lab is only making it worse. I can’t escape the noise outside my office. I have to wear my mask (literal N95 and metaphorical over-emotive-pretense-of-neurotypicality) while I’m out there. I have to constantly watch where my coworkers are so they don’t sneak up on me and clap me on the shoulder heavily enough that I have to restrain my fight-response. It’s not great!
Continue readingHousing Opportunities In Final Fantasy 14
After a relatively short time, I managed to win the opportunity to buy a house in Final Fantasy 14. I know people who have been trying for well over a year to get a house in one of the few player housing zones in the game, but I got incredibly lucky and won on a housing plot in what turned out to be a relatively unpopular area, based on how few bids there were. Personally, I think parts of that area are incredibly underrated, which is why I added them to my list of possible locations. Normally, getting a house of some kind wouldn’t be as big of a deal as it has been this past year, but there’s been a few events in the US that had the local housing market locked in a way that it normally isn’t. Typically, if you do not enter your home for forty-five days, your house will be automatically demolished, your things put in storage, and some amount of the house’s cost refunded to you. This is to prevent players from purchasing and sitting on the nicest housing plots long after they’ve stopped playing the game. Sure, it’s still incredibly easy to just log in every so often to keep your house occupied, but that means you have to buy a subscription every month and a half, at minimum, and Final Fantasy 14 loves that. They want your money. So, prior to the massive floods and damage to North Carolina last year, this process happened regularly and houses would go back on the market at a fairly normal rate. Once those floods happened and huge portions of the US (well, not that huge in proportion the the US itself but still huge compared to most parts of the world) were unable to access secure internet and gaming time, Square Enix decided to put the timers on hold. A decision they relented on in December of 2024 and them immediately put back in place during the L.A. wildfires. As a result, until incredibly recently, most houses only became available because people actively sold them or moved into new housing of their own.
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