Back in October, when I set aside everything else I had going on in Final Fantasy 14 in order to get deep into crafting (in order to avoid thinking about my relationship with my biological family), I didn’t realize that it would take me three months to get through that and everything that sort of just flowed out from it: two rounds of intense combat gear crafting, numerous rounds of crafting and gathering gear crafting (largely free of charge because I don’t like making people pay me for the ability to make/earn money on their own), the start of a workshop that has largely fallen into stillness now that the major demand for new gear and consumables has passed (though I imagine it’ll tick up again when the raiding members of the workshop run through their current stock), and starting progress on one of my alts. I thought it would be a few weeks of work and then I’d just go back to leveling other jobs, digging into older parts of the game that I brushed past in my drive to finish the Main Scenario Quests, and puttering around. Instead, I wound up getting carried away by all that, changes to my weekly activities with my FC, the slow start of a new season of roleplayed wrestling (busier now as I am the official cinematographer for the federation), and the thought of starting up a workshop within my Free Company to help give everyone the means to make some money while the thing we used to do is on indefinite hiatus. Only now, as I’ve settled in to the realization that none of my groups are going to become high-end content groups in any kind of a hurry and started doing stuff “to make sure I’m not missing out” rather than in preparation for a specific thing, have I returned to the slow, plodding tasks that fell by the wayside in my fervor to accomplish all my very specific goals.
Continue readingMonth: January 2026
The Return Of The Polar Vortex
Once again, the Polar Vortex has returned. I am writing this the day before it arrives and brings wind-chill temperatures into the negative fifties to my area, thinking about how long it will be before we get another day where the high temperature is in the upper teens like it is today. It’s not a big deal for most. We’re used to it at this point. I even had some people make wisecracks about my shorts and how I’ll need to find some pants or whatever (I won’t be outside in the wind long enough for it to matter tomorrow). Just another normal week of incredibly low temperatures made worse by heavy wind out of the north to make the further collapse of the jet stream that once kept these polar winds north of the Canadian border ninety-nine times out of one hundred. The rest of the country, from Texas to the distant northeast, is preparing to mountains of snow. They might be relative mountains–a couple inches in texas and multiple feet, potentially, in the plains and new england–but they all promise far more snow than the area is used to. Which I’m kind of jealous of, if I’m being honest. Where I live, all we get is temperatures far too cold for it to snow or precipitate at all and occasional snowfalls. I mean, we’ve had maybe a foot of snow fall this year so far, which is up from previous years, but most of it melted after the first round and the subsequent rounds have all been relatively light. This is not an opinion I voice anywhere that people are expecting to get slammed by snow because most of those places don’t have the infrastructure required to handle it (though, to be fair, judging by how miserably any of this year’s snow has been handled, I’m not sure my home has the infrastructure to handle it anymore either) and I don’t want to come off as insensitive, but I really do miss the days of heavy snowstorms and large amounts of snow accumulation.
Continue readingDorohedoro Is The Weirdest Anime I’ve Ever Watched And Enjoyed
Lately, I’ve been making an effort to get into watching more stuff. Mostly because I bought a month of Netflix a few weeks back to watch Frieren with my siblings when they came to visit, but also because I need more variety in my life and watching something while doing a bunch of mindless crafting in Final Fantasy 14 makes the time pass better. It’s also kind of nice to not eat all my meals at my desk and instead eat some of them sitting on my couch, outside of my office, in a much more relaxed manner. Most of my meals at my desk are quickly consumed in order to get things out of the way so I can focus more completely on FF14, so being able to eat relatively laconicly while watching a TV show or something on my nice, 4K TV is refreshing. I haven’t had a Netflix subscription in a few months and I spent most of last year in a weird mood about watching things by myself, so I’ve been building up quite a list of things to watch on Netflix (a much larger list than I’d accumulate in a few months on account of not feeling like watching stuff for more than a year at this point). It took a bit to pick something since part of me wanted to dive back into the old familiar stuff, but I was brave (this is a joke) and pushed myself to watch something new, which is how I got started on the only (currently, at the time of writing this) available season of Dorohedoro. It’s a bit of an odd show, overall, and that weirdness starts with the show’s title card on Netflix. It claims to be about a guy trying to find the person who turned his head into a lizard’s head, and while that’s weird, it’s a pretty normal kind of weird. Once you start the show, though, it immediately ramps the weirdness up.
Continue readingWhen The Wind Changes
People will tell you that they always agreed with you hours after telling you that you were wrong. You can return to a conversation after taking a break to let the heat die out and find the person you were arguing with suddenly agreeing with you. It requires that they believe (or at least pretend to believe) that you two were just arguing about two nuanced positions that are ultimately aligned, but if the opposition that caused the arguement is suddenly gone, it is pretty clear that someone’s thinking or position changed. Which is what it feels like so many of us are experiencing now that the winds have shifted, the tide has changed, and suddenly it seems like everyone agrees that the various parts of the Department of Homeland Security, a troublesome organization from the first, have gone too far. There’s this phrase that I see get repeated a lot lately: “one day, everyone will have always been against this.” This is the title of a book by Omar El Akkad, itself a paraphrasing of a tweet by the author in October of 2023, and is directly about the genoicide in Gaza, but the idea is such a powerful one, and so reflective of so much of Western culture and politics (which is part of what El Akkad discusses in his book), that it’s easy to apply it widely (ow things played out with the invasion of Iraq is the one I see most often used as evidence that this statement is true). After all, as we are seeing today following the execution of a white man–a veritable angel by all accounts–by DHS agents, suddenly everyone is pushing in more or less the same direction, from those with their boots firmly planted in the ice and snow of Minnesota to those with their heads so far up their own asses that there was a popping noise as they suddenly changed realigned themselves.
Continue readingWaiting For Something To Change
Hell is anxiously checking for a response to a message you haven’t even typed yet, much less sent. It is having made a decision that you haven’t followed through on yet, essentially forcing you to make the decision over and over again as your mind picks at it. It is knowing that you have to keep making a decision every day for years if you want it to ever pay off, despite how far away that moment might be. It is knowing something and being unable to act on it, not now and probably not ever. It is all these moments of anixety and powerlessness and more besides. These days, I find myself steeped in such things: conversations I don’t know how to start, things I feel foolishly compelled to heavily qualify before sharing, decisions made long ago that I must stick to because nothing’s changed enough to reevaluate them, and recognitions of problems I can do nothing positive to resolve. All my other choices are worse than whatever I’ve picked, acting on anything will most-likely return bad results, and no amount of practice is going to make it any easier to start conversations I feel weird for having because I was trained to ask nothing of people and still struggle to ask for anything that might require other people to put in effort on my behalf. I hate being in these kinds of no-win-but-the-long-run situations and even my therapist agrees that my life is pretty much entirely made up of them these days. I just want problems that are easy to handle, a society that doesn’t feel like it is on the verge of collapsing, and the ability to ask things of people without feeling the need to preempt all the potential negative directions the conversation could go if I was misinterpreted.
Continue readingFighting The Tide So Current Events Don’t Sweep Me Away
It’s all kind of a lot these days. The invasion of Minnesota, the planned invasion of multiple other cities, Trump posturing to stake a claim (likely violent) on Greenland, Trump’s government trying to manufacture consent for the invasion, the ever-present spectre of the Epstein Files looming over everything, and all of the patently obvious politically-motivation prosecutions of democratic-run states, democratic officials, and any of Trump’s perceived enemies. There’s just no end to it. I’ve been trying to rest, to get away from the constant churn of misery and awfulness long enough to unwind at least a tiny bit, and every time I go back to the internet or social media, I discover some fresh hell has been unleashed. More killings by cops or feds, increasingly violent rhetoric meant to justify the invasion of Greenland, cops and feds attacking protesters, some new neo-nazi has decided that it’s their turn in the spotlight, and so on. I can’t even remember everything that’s happened this week because it’s just so much all the time and I’m certain I didn’t even see all the most viral of this week’s events. The media environment is too fractured by all the big names joining Trump’s side or attempting to rehabilitate the bullshit he’s spewing as more and more of how we communicate and learn about the world beyond us gets consildated into the conservative grasp of a cadre of malignant billionaires. Our would-be leaders throw up their hands and repeat a bunch of out-of-touch bullshit about prices being too high and citizens being unable to afford groceries like it’s a mantra meant to summon donations or an additional term, all while people are yanked out of their homes and kidnapped out of their cars in the violent blitz that Trump has brought down on various cities in the US. And the pace seems to only be increasing as this desperate attempt to break Trump’s political opponents begins to turn the neutral parts of the country against him.
Continue readingBurgeoning Burnout And Undeniable Exhaustion
It has been a difficult week. Following my therapy appointment a couple days ago, I spent the rest of that day and all of the next at home, taking time off work. Today, the day I’m writing this a week before it goes up, I’m in the office for a normal 10+ hour shift and mentally prepared to not go in to work at all tomorrow since I’d only need to spend two days of PTO at that point. If I’m not going to get any overtime this week because of how acute my burnout is and how exhausted I feel from coming face-to-face with said burnout, its causes, and the things keeping it the same size at best or growing at worst with each passing day, I might as well give myself an extra day off so I can maybe get enough rest to tackle next week without needing to cut my days short. I also just don’t want to be here. I have described, in detail, how much things at my job have wrecked me over the past two years and I can’t pretend, even for a little bit, that I’m okay with this, comfortable with what’s going on, or happy about any of it in the slightest. I mean, it’s not like I’m being actively tortured or anything, or abused by any meaning of the word. I’m just being taken for granted and have Hard Work’d my way into an untenable position where my entire team not only expects me to do a great deal of organizational labor that isn’t at all a part of my job, but will actively make my life difficult if I’m not doing it by complaining to my boss that I don’t seem to be working much at all. It’s not a great position to be in, especially because my boss agrees with them, or at least he did six months ago when he brought it up during my yearly review, and I’m not entirely sure what to do.
Continue readingPokémon Legends: ZA Was A Lot Of Fun, If Not Anything Terribly New
As of a couple weeks ago, I have played through almost all of Pokémon Legends: Z-A. There’s some battling left to do, the constant siren-song of shiny hunting, and enough research tasks to keep me busy for a while yet, but I’ve caught all the Pokémon I can, cleared all but the last shreds of the story which are locked behind an “endless” battle royale that just isn’t super motivating to me. I’ve also got a few side quests centered around using specific Pokémon in battles and training up Pokémon I don’t use to accomplish specific feats, but the rewards are small and there’s really nothing left for me beyond the grind, at least in the base game. There’s a DLC out that looks interesting and adds a lot to the game, but I’m in my “financially recover from Christmas” phase right now and not buying things. I definitely will buy it either later this month or sometime next month, but right now I’m content to take a break. Pokémon ZA was a lot of fun and maybe the most… “situated-in-the-world” of the Pokémon games I’ve ever played, but there’s a repetitiveness to it that makes it difficult to play beyond reaching your chosen goals. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, since the loop you’re stuck in is a fun one, but you eventually wind up doing the grind for the sake of the grind and I can only do that for so long before I need to do literally anything else. You might argue that this is true of all Pokémon games and while I’d have to admit that you are right on a certain level, most of the games don’t really pretend to have some kind of ever-running Thing To Do within the world itself. Most of the time, Pokémon games require you to invest your time and approach them from outside the game to experience those kinds of features (online challenges, Player versus Player Pokémon battles, The Battle Tower that makes you play outside the normal format of the game), but ZA has one built in as a part of the plot and while it’s not a huge deal to keep doing it, it is asking me to do more of these nightly “royales” than I’ve actually done prior to this point in the game to get there.
Continue readingA Recipe For A Better Year
After more than a month of thinking about it and nearly three weeks of sitting on the (frozen) supplies, I finally took the time today (a week before this gets posted) to make a little recipe one of my friends prepared for us when I was visiting over Thanksgiving. It’s a relatively simple chicken dish that is basically a simple stir-fry, but it’s a recipe without a card or instructions beyond what he told me since it is entirely of his own devising. You see, over the recent years, he has taken to cooking not like I do (starting with a recipe card and making alterations based on smell or taste until the recipe becomes my own enough that I don’t need a recipe card or instructions any more), but by learning from professionals on YouTube. There’s a lot of great channels out there that cover quite a variety of things, but the best ones aren’t how to prepare a recipe and the background of the recipe, but how the various components of recipes work. Fats/oils, aromatics, various techniques: that sort of stuff. He’s had to rely on them since he lost most of his sense of smell when he caught Covid a while back, but knowing the basics, how things eventually taste, and why it all works the way it does is clearly the superior method to winging it by nose as I do. It allows him to put things together in new ways without needing a starting point like I do and it seems to be working out really well for him and his wife. And, now that I’ve recreated one of his recipes at home, me too.
Continue readingAt The Heart Of My Desire To Run TTRPGs
As someone who has more than a passing interest in tabletop games, scholastic pursuits, and reflecting deeply on things, following Dr. Emily Friedman, a professor studying games with a focus on tabletop roleplaying games and the Actual Play media created using them, on social media was a no-brainer the instant I first came across her posts. I also wound up following a bunch of people she communicates with regularly for their insights on these interests of mine and, after the fall of Cohost, saw the tabletop scene of that website merge with the growing one on Bluesky, such that it isn’t uncommon for me to find someone proposing an interesting idea and them mutliple other people examining the idea or thought through different lenses. Lately, this has been especially important to me because Dr. Friedman has been writing more and more about how being a Game Master (or Dungeon Master) is a form of labor, how the labor of game-making happens falls so heavily on them, and what that means for the community that exists in the form of players and GM. It has given me a lot to think about as I reflect on what I want out of running games, why I care about games, and what am I actually getting out of all the time and effort I put into running games. This, itself, has sparked a lot of thought about the various games I’ve run over the years and the one lingering campaign I still have these days, even if we don’t play that often, and all of it came to a head when I read a follow-up post to the latest idea proposed by Dr. Friedman (that a specific corner of the hobby that is tabletop gaming is likely comprised almost entirely of poeple who did all the work in group work assignments to make sure it all got done right): RPGs are, in a sense, an unwelcome activity even while doing them.
Continue reading