My players and I, minus one who was not feeling well, have met for the last worldbuiling session. We played a quick game of Sentinel (the second half of Sanctuary and Sentinel), that I ended without showing the full conclusion because I wanted to save that for the right moment in the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons 5e portion of this non-traditional campaign. We had a good few rounds of play before the end, thanks to there being four of us, but we still ended earlier than most of us expected. We were still building up to something bigger when the end arrived in the form of one of the deck’s joker cards, but it was just one pull before the random number I’d produced anyway, so we didn’t lose out on much potential build anyway. It just means the then-status quo will have to be significantly escalated in order for things to happen the way I envision. Which is possible! The danger of escalation was the constant backdrop of our game, so even if it never quite got there while we played, the idea was never far from anyone’s mind, so there are all kinds of crumbs and kernels that can be built into something larger. Plenty of ammunition, so to speak. I just need to take the time to sit down, work through everything we’ve built, and figure out how it all plays out. And how many years have passed. I did my best to draw out the time, to create a significant separation between the outside world and the life inside the dome that they characters will know, but we wound up less than three centuries separated and with some degree of contact for much of that. I will probably need to run the clock a while longer to really get the effect I want, but I’m also planning to toss a “long-lived peoples are rare” element into this world just to keep things a little less historically grounded. I want things to pass into myth and legend faster than they would if some poeple lived to be five hundred or whatever.
Continue readingMonth: May 2026
All I Want Is For My Coworkers To Do Their Jobs
I feel like asking my coworkers to do their jobs should not be something I need to do on a regular basis. This doesn’t apply to all of them, thankfully, but a few that I work with routinely make me wonder I’m expecting too much of them. I mean, I’m the most junior of my coworkers amongst this cohort of irresponsible adults and yet it often falls to me to make sure that they’re doing their jobs and not letting things slip through the cracks. It would be one thing if it was an occasional slip-up, but I’ve routinely had to go to one coworker for a foundational aspect of his job that I need him to perform so I can properly do my job and the way he reacts every time I do this is like I’m making some kind of horrible, unreasonable demands of him. I get it. It’s not fun stuff to do. He’s not passionate about the maintenance project. But it is literally his job and his job alone to give me the information I need so I can tell if the developers I work with are doing things right, if they’re actually solving the problem, and if they even know what the problem is. And it should not be falling to me to do that. Every single other person in this group is either a Senior rank in their role or promoted high enough that “senior” positions no longer exist. I shouldn’t need to be the person getting the group together to address problems or fill gaps or figure out how to proceed from whatever mess we’ve landed in because no one else did something about a glaring problem I identified months ago but couldn’t get anyone to take seriously because I have no authority and even 12 years of experience isn’t enough to actually get these people to take me seriously without concrete proof of a present and pressing issue.
Continue readingActions And Reactions: Choice And Consequence
It has been an exhausting set of weeks. Someone took another shot at Trump, this time a bit more metaphorically than previously given that he was stopped before he got close enough to even try to injure Trump, and the news is full of talking heads and Republicans repeating the same tired suggestion that this politically motivated violence is a result of the Democrats inciting violence. Which is incredibly infuriating considering that only one side of the current political “dichotomy” in the US speaks of action and violence and overthrow and it sure isn’t the Democrats. That’d be far too active for any of them to advocate for, even setting aside the moral decrepitude required to direct your followers to visit violence on your political opponents. All the Democrats have in them to advocate for, during the rare moments they actually speak in support of something, is forgiveness, tolerance, and passivity. Which sucks so much especially since all that means them just sitting there and taking it while the Republicans and every political consultant without a shred of conscience attempts to alter reality by insisting that the Democrats tone down the heat of their rhetoric literally days after calling on their followers to kill people, after attempting to designate multiple minority groups as some kind of sub-human population, and generally spewing the exact sort of hatred they’re accusing the Democrats of espousing. We’ve had many attempts on prominent Democratic figures, a few of which have unfortunately succeeded, and an increasing level of violence aimed at any group that isn’t a welcomed part of the Republican party. Which makes it extra sickening to listen to those hypocrites accuse everyone they can name of doing the very thing they’re doing, and that’s saying something given the base level of Republican hypocrisy I’ve adapted to.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14: Change On The Wind
Well, I was kind of right. I thought the next expansion of Final Fantasy 14 would involve going to all of the reflections (broken-apart pieces of a once-unified world) of FF14’s near-universe and doing the work of reuniting them/assimilating the broken worlds left behind by the series’ villains in the first few expansions (the Ascians). And while that might STILL be true, it seems like the next expansion is focused on one of them specifically and this whole next arc of expansions might be doing what I thought a single expansion would. So, yeah, I was kind of right. I just thought it might involve a bit more bopping around rather than picking a specific new place to go and having the whole adventure there. That, plus everything from the new patch content (all five missions of it) has me pretty excited for what all this might bring. Watching the presentation at the US Fan Fest and then playing through the new story content is really building up something interesting that is both pretty much what I expected and still feels new and exciting to me. It is going to be a long way, of about nine months, to before the expansion actually drops, but I’ve got plenty of stuff left to do before then (and rest to get, of course) so I’m not terribly worried about the wait.
Continue readingRest Day
Still dealing with a lot so even now I’m going to take another day to skip a blog post so I don’t get buried further than I currently am. It’s a lot to keep up with, between work and personal obligations, and trying to do work over the weekend to catch up kinda defeats the point of resting. So another skip, a small delay, and maybe I can dig myself out of this hole a little bit today.
Rest Day
I’ve been really worn out, to the degree of starting to feel sick, so I’m taking a day off of just about everything, including blog posts, so I can get some more rest. There’ll be a new post on Monday, but this is all I’ve got for today.