One week into the Final Fantasy 14 crafting workshop for my Free Company and things have mostly settled down. I still have to do some amount of administrative work every day to keep things rolling, to keep paying out people who bring me stuff, and keep making stuff I need to sell in order to keep my profit margin positive, but it’s getting less and less as I’m figuring out some organizational systems to manage my day-to-day activities. Unfortunately, my storage situation is currently completely borked and it is going to take a LOT of work to unbork it. A lot of work and a lot of time since half the stuff I’ve got is stuff I’m saving for specific projects, is a rare drop needed for one item I’ll want eventually, or is just crud i’ve accumulated over the past year because I thought stuff would stay relevant longer than it has. I also thought I’d go back and work my way through my entire crafting recipe catalogue at some point and while I still want to do that eventually, I don’t think that I have literally anything in such quantities that keeping it until I eventually do that work is going to save me any time at all. It’ll be drudgery whenever I get to it and having half-a-dozen ingots I think I’ll need but maybe won’t need isn’t really going to save me that much time and effort. It might be easier to just pick up what I need and then throw it away when I’m done rather than try to cycle it in and out of my storage. All of which is rather beside the point of my current efforts, other than needing to get my storage cleared out and organized so It can actually be useful for me again.

The rate of my income has slowed down since last week as well. I’m not sure I’d be making more if I had more stuff to sell or if I was working more actively on things, but it certainly feels like my income has been reduced to a steady trickle rather than the intermittent floods of the week and a half prior. I’m not certain if this is a shift in the hot products on the market or if this is just the rise and fall of the markets over the course of a week. Hell, there might even be a larger cycle I haven’t been watching long enough to see yet since much of what I’m selling is consumables and those don’t necessarily run out from one week to the next at the quantities I’m selling. Regardless, a little market diversification and a shoring-up of my solid-sellers would probably do me some good. Only problem is that the people bringing me stuff either realized their stuff will probably sell for more in the local markets than I’m paying (which is fair: the appeal of the buylist is that I will pay out immediately and there is no need to try to ride the shifting price lines of the market but the downside is that I’m setting my price based on what I can find in all the markets available to me rather than just the world we’re on, so it’s often much lower) or they’re just not interested in acquiring things in the low quantities that are all that make sense for the kinds of things I’m doing. I have to be careful not to flood the market with stuff or else I’m likely going to wind up causing the price to drop and that could quickly put me in the red for some of these crafting projects.

I don’t think I want to spend more time crafting than I already am, though. I really stressed myself out with how busy and hectic things were last week and I want to get back to enjoying myself in this game. I mean, I have weekly obligations and stuff I have to keep up with if I want to stay relevant and involved in potential current content and the regular grind of the various weekly reset activities, but I really want to get back to leveling jobs, digging my way through all the sidequests, and even doing the various Big Activities I haven’t made time for up to this point. There’s plenty I’d like to do if I had the time and the focus, but my need for rest and on-going discernment about what I’m okay with doing–how hard I’m willing to push myself for labor that might primarily benefit other people, such as organizing group events–are making it difficult to make any real progress on those things in the scant time I’ve got most evenings. Especially scant if I’m trying to force myself to get in bed earlier as a possible counter to my current insomnia. But I’m finding a few things that, through rigorous self-examination, are coming into focus as activities I can either impose boundaries on to ensure they only involve people as committed as I am or that will benefit me enough that they’re worth doing. Now I just need to get the time and energy together to push some of them forward. Eventually. Once I’m no longer struggling to get enough sleep.

It’s difficult to be in the middle of all of this. I want to get back to the days when I was just endlessly enjoying myself in this game, when I have activities all the time that felt enriching and rewarding, but I don’t know if that’s actually possible. I mean, even from just my own end, I’m so burned out that it’s difficult to do anything that requires more than modest effort on my part. On the other end of things, I’m really not having a great time with the last two activitiy groups I’m still a part of in my FC and while I’m not necessarily having a bad time in one of them, it consistently fails to meet my expecations for even the bare minimum of effort beyond showing up. It certianly doesn’t help that even the people I’d casually spend time with in-game aren’t really showing up in-game as much anymore. I don’t know if we’re in a post-holiday lull, if this is a regular rise-and-fall of activity, or if people are just slowly drifting away from the game like poeple do, but we haven’t had many people online at the same time since the holidays and it’s a bit despiriting.

Only a bit, though, because I’ve been making friends outside the FC and trying to fill up my schedule that way. I even steeled myself and started soft recruitment for a new high-tier content group. Ultimates and Savages and Extremes and all that. Get back into the difficult stuff that I’ve missed out on and am no longer getting in my FC group because it stopped being an FC activity to get members through this stuff and just became this one guy’s weekly event that is just filling up with randos when FC mainstays (myself included) can’t make it. My attempts to get the group to go back and clear stuff that I missed because they cleared it on the one day I couldn’t attend have largely faltered do to a lack of interest on most of the groups’ part, so I am taking the proactive steps to make a new group willing to do all that stuff with me. We will see if it pans out as there is a large pool of people I have access to that seem competent and interested in this level of content, but it remains to be seen if they’re interested in actually doing it all.

So now all that remains is to keep trying to make progress on the fun stuff, balance the draining work stuff, and hopefully get enough sleep that I can recover from this latest and worst bout of exhaustion. Small tasks. Simple things, really. No problem at all. (I am obligated by the internet’s inability to detect jokes to say that this is sarcasm). We’ll see how it goes by next week, I’m sure.