In my doldrums, I’ve been trying to find new things to play that aren’t Final Fantasy 14. I’ve mostly succeeded, thankfully, but it’s still kind of rough since all the stress and everything of the last few days makes it difficult to enjoy things [and, as of editing this after everything blew up two days after I wrote this, I now feel compelled to be logged into Final Fantasy 14 and Doing Something To Fix This]. Thankfully, Pokémon Violet (a revisit, now on the improved Switch 2 hardware), Avowed, Ghost of Yotei, Pokémon ZA’s DLC, and Grounded have been there for me. Pokémon to fill my quiet idling hours, Avowed to bring me in, Ghost of Yotei to give my something else to do when I run out of this stuff, and Grounded for a survival building game with a friend. I’ve got everything I could need and I only feel a little panicked every night as I turn to this little collection of games and try to figure out what I’m going to do with myself. Which, lately, is mostly Avowed. The whole premise of it didn’t super appeal to me, especially considering everyone calling it an adventure game like Skyrim, but thankfully I looked past those statements (Skyrim was fun, don’t get me wrong, but I’m very tired of it now) and I’ve been enjoying myself. It’s actually been a fun alternative to FF14 rather than something I embrace out of a desperate need to do anything else.
Continue readingMonth: June 2026
Time To Breathe
The last week has sucked monumentally and I’m just not going to have blog posts today or tomorrow. I need one less thing to do. I have too many. I’ve spent too much energy. If you want to know what’s going on, you can read about a stupid argument that made it clear I couldn’t keep ignoring what was going on, the listless days following that as I chose to do nothing while taking stock of how I felt and what I should actually do, and then what happened when that choice got made for me. So I’m going to take the time I would have spent writing blog posts and either rest or focus on being in community with my friends as we try to put ourselves back together after someone’s actions threatened to rip us apart.
The Consequences Of Our Actions
I originally had a post about trying to find new games to play, other than Final Fantasy 14 (and succeeding), but then the last weekend happened so I shuffled my posts around a bit and now you get this. Turns out the officers in my FC were preparing to do something about the complaints they’d received. Turns out my silence was noticed. Turns out doing something isn’t better than doing nothing every time. Sometimes fissures and cracks split open into yawning chasms. Despite my attempts to take some time to calm down and keep up my personal obligations to the group, the leader of said FF14 player guild decided that he did not appreciate the officers trying to change his behavior, did not appreciate people he viewed as dissidents, and decided to just remove people and lock things down rather than listen or open a dialogue. That’s his choice. He owns the server, he owns the Free Company (the player guild) and he can do what he wants. Everyone he removed, all of whom were pillars of the community we’ve been ejected from, have decided to go on and do our own thing somewhere else. An era of my life is over and all we can do is try to put the community back together, such as we can, and move forward from here.
Continue readingAimless In Final Fantasy 14
I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore. I mean, if you told me to fill any number of hours with Final Fantasy 14 stuff, I could do that easily. There’s so much to do. But now, after severe burnout a couple weeks ago and the discord silencing of last week, I just don’t feel as directed as I once did. Which sucks, because I do still care about it. I do still abstractly consider it fun and interesting. I’m just… caught in a period of heartbreak that’s impacting my ability to enjoy the game. Now, when I log on, I often find myself thinking about the stuff I should be doing “just in case.” Leveling alts (alternate characters), preparing my personal Free Company (player guild) for my alts in case I no longer have access to the workshop I currently use to make a bunch of my money, and the endless nebulous grind of daily and weekly tasks. So much to do, but nothing my heart is really in right now. There won’t be a new stage for my relic weapon any time soon. There’s always more crafting that needs doing for one workshop or gathering for the other, but I have enough in-game money that I can’t really make myself care about earning more. Which means maybe I should spend it since there’s a lot of specialty mounts that are expensive for no other reason that to brag about how much money you spent to acquire them. There’s leveling, side quests, society quests, and infinitely so much more. I just… My heart isn’t in it right now.
Continue readingPointless Arguments And Untennable Silence
I got into an argument in a discord the other day. I didn’t want to, but someone (the server owner) was being very pro-“AI” in a way that was frankly kind of insulting to the people who didn’t share his opinion, so I lightly weighed in and lent emote-based support to the people arguing against him. He kept shifting his position, arguing on behalf of “AI” being inescapable and a forever part of our future now while also hedging every time someone confronted him about its various issues with some variation of “I never said it didn’t have issues!” So, when he tried to pull me in following a comment where I said I completely agreed with someone’s lengthy, well-reasoned statement, I tried to disengage and my attempt do so only led to another branch of the argument forming since he turned to trying to pin me down to saying “AI” is impossible to remove. I can’t agree to that statement because I think that Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist and might never while the algorithmic bullshit that is modern ML-based “AI” is bad enough that I think it might be worth doing whatever it takes to eradicate completely. Other than the programs modern “genAI” are built from, which always had a use and still have a use in their very specific contexts, of course. So I tried to split the hair because my stances requires it and he didn’t like that. Then things took a turn for the worse between him (as he continued to shift his position such that no one could ever tell him that he was wrong without ever really engaging with the arguments other people brought up) and another person (who was much less polite in his arguing than the rest of us were and has a bad habit of dismissing viewpoints he disagrees with) and now a friend of mine has been demoted in that server for doing their job as a moderator and forcing the argument to end by deleting comments after the final two refused to stop.
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