Today (the day I wrote this), was the day that tickets for Final Fantasy 14’s Fan Fest went on general sale. I’d signed up for the pre-sale lottery (to get a chance to buy tickets early) but struck out there and then struck out again when I queued for tickets and got assigned the 8000th (and change) spot. I was not able to get tickets. Which, on one hand, is going to save me a bunch of money. On the other hand, I didn’t realize how excited I was about the idea of going to the convention until I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. It was a pretty heavy blow. Much, much heavier than I expected, to the degree that losing out on this opportunity has cast a bit of a pall over my day. After all, I don’t really have a lot of stuff to look forward to, most of the time, so any time one of those things gets taken away, it hits harder than it ought to, and there’s been a lot of it lately. A lot of stuff has not been working out. lately. Siblings cancelling plans, friends getting sick and needing to cancel, missed opportunities, and so on. All I’ve really had that’s dependable is my gaming, work, and the inevitability of bills. It feels silly for this to be hitting me as hard as it has been, to rather completely sidetrack me for multiple hours today, but I have spent a large portion of the last couple years not planning stuff because of how often people flake on me or cancel last minute and I’m probably just a little overly sensitive to this kind of disappointment. I just wanted it to work out, despite all the evidence it wouldn’t, and now I have move on from this. Eventually.

Normally, I’m not one for crowds or conventions. I’ve never been that interested in going to a large, sweaty, people-filled hall to wander around and spend money, and the rise of Covid-19 pretty much guaranteed that no convention I ever considered would wind up with a positive risk analysis. Until this one. It’s not like I can spend two thousand hours playing a video game in ten and a half months without growing attached to it and invested in its future. And sure, I can watch the streams now from the comfort and safety of my home while being in community with my fellow players over discord, but the idea of actually going there, of seeing it all in-person with a bunch of other people all united by our love for this game we play, really appealed to me. I don’t really fit in or feel comfortable identifying with a lot of communities out there. So many of them are barely-contained tempests full of drama and hurt feelings. Others are dead or exploitative or fanatically gatekept, to the degree that I’ve regarded any online community I’ve found with a heavy dose of suspicion by default. The only time I’ve been proven wrong to live this way was with Final Fantasy 14 and it’s community. Everyone’s been neutral at worst and so warm on average that I was actually interested in feeling like a part of this group.

I’ve only ever been to one other “proper” convention and I hesitate to even call it that. It was the ill-fated World-Con: Stories, and I attended its first year. It had a second year, but I wasn’t able to go and it apparently did so dismally that they couldn’t bring it back again. I’d probably still be going to that if it existed, but maybe not these days. It’s difficult to say, honestly, even if I could take Covid-19 out of the picture. I mean, I’m still struggling with writing anything other than this blog and my general lack of purpose and I’m not sure I could handle going to a convention all about telling stories when I’m in conflict between my own nature as a storyteller and the desire to avoid getting involved in the destruction of my craft and life’s passion. It would kind of ruin the whole event for me, to be honest, since I’d be forced to unwaveringly confront this feeling in myself and what it means for my place and actions in the world overall. I can’t even handle that now, much less when I’m surrounded by thousands of people and trying to avoid catching Covid by whatever means I can manage. I mean, I had a great time when I went back in 2015 and I’ve been looking for another convention to try attending ever sincem, but none of them ever tipped the scales over towards “go” until this one. And now all I can do is hope I still feel similarly next year and that I’ll have better luck that time around.

For now, I will wish my friends who got tickets well and mark off the days on my calendar so I can at least attend the convention remotely. Gotta be able to watch whatever announcements get made and try to scan the convention hall’s floor for any signs of my friends in the teeming throngs of people. And I need to make some more plans. I need more stuff to look forward to, even if it sucks how often my plans seem to either never materialize or fall apart. I need interesting stuff on the horizon: things to fill my evenings and to orient my future schedule around. I’m not exactly getting anything like that from my friends–though I did get a message planning a birthday trip for one of my local friends eight months ahead of time. I’m not sure what I’m planning to do about that, though, since I’m still dealing with my family stuff and all the offshoots from that. I haven’t really had much time and space to think about it, really. Been a little proccupied between the family stuff and the multiple attempts I’ve made at making plans that have gone unfulfilled. Really makes me want to just give up on trying to make stuff happen and just drift along until someone else shows up to do the work. I’ll get over the feeling eventually, but right now it’s difficult to even make myself focus on my work, let alone the kind of emotionally or intellectually draining activities required to make stuff happen.