I am working without a buffer now. Between building a new free company in Final Fantasy 14, work kicking my ass for a project that wound up having its due date moved back only after I’d done all the hard work in a record-breakingly short time, collapsing in exhaustion, and struggling to process all of my emotions from all of this and more, I just haven’t had the time or energy for writing much of anything. Everything else has felt like a higher priority than personal blogging and while I do not like writing the day before a blog post goes up, I don’t think I made the wrong call about how to spend my time these last few days. I wish I’d had more time, I wish I’d been less exhausted, and I definitely wish things hadn’t played out the way they did (but again, I don’t think I made any bad choices), but I’m here now, still absolutely wiped out and trying to write a post while forcing my eyes open so I don’t fall asleep at work or standing at my desk. Which I’ve done before. Woke up in time to stop myself from falling down, but it was quite startling, let me tell you.
Continue readingAuthor: Wren
Desperately Grasping For New Games
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 readingTime 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.
Continue readingSo Much For Resting
As it turns out, it is not that easy to take a week off. Any other week would have been easier, since this last week involved the in-game bonding ceremony between my dearest friends’ Final Fantasy 14 characters (now they are married in real-life and in this video game) and I was as involved in that as I had the energy to be. Plus there was another wrestling event to record and edit, all the busyness of a “normal” workweek, the sudden extra busyness of this past week, and then the complete screeching halt of all of the work stuff for at least a day due to me twisting my ankle. And while twisting my ankle sucked, it did actually force me to rest in a way I couldn’t make myself until I actually had an unavoidable reason for it. But there’s still more celebrations tomorrow (as of the day I wrote this), the imminent return of my delayed obligations and plans, and now the exhaustion of painfully hobbling around my two-story apartment to contend with, so I’m not out of the woods yet. To be honest, given everything I’d done this week, I’m not sure I actually took a break the way I meant to and maybe just… Stopped doing as much. Which definitely counts for something, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not exactly what I was looking for with this decision to step away from things for a bit.
Continue readingWearing Out My Shoes Just To Feel Something Change
I go for daily walks. Longer ones, now, thanks to a bit of an accountability push from a friend. But I go outside daily, at around more or less the same time every day. I drink the same number of cups of coffee every day. I work the same number of hours pretty much every day. I eat the same lunch every day. I cycle between one of five meals for dinner every night. Breakfast is the same almost every day of the week and then every weekend when I bother to eat it. I drink the same amount of water, take the same medications, eat the same snacks (thought the quantity varies), walk through the same rooms, drive the same places, do the same things, and on and on and on and on. Nothing changes. Sometimes I eat cereal for breakfast instead of a banana, but I still eat the banana eventually. Sometimes I have a can of soda instead of ice cream for desert after dinner on the rare days I feel like something sweet. I write at almost the same time every day. I stand the same way. Even my speech falls into similar patterns from day-to-day, given my relationships and the people I talk to. And sure, my clothes are different and while I often do wear different shirts on different days, sometimes I just wear the same shirt on a given day of the week. The only thing that really changes to make the passage of time is the weather and how worn out my shoes have become.
Continue readingTaking A Break From Almost Everything
I hit a point last night where I just…. couldn’t anymore. Between my two workshops, my raid group farming for wings, the roleplaying wrestling league, and my two dearest friends have their characters get married in-game, I just… don’t have any more. So I spent two hours staring at my computer as I tried to figure out something fun to do last night after logging out, gave up and asked for recommendations, and didn’t get much from that, so I just hung up and… stared into space for a while. I’m so burned out, but even that doesn’t explain the depths I sank to last night (as I’m writing this, but at least a week ago as you’re reading it). Something just caused my depression to spike immensely, to the point of withdrawing from people, and I couldn’t push through it to do anything because even the stuff I normally do to stay occupied during those times felt just as pointless and boring as everything else I considered. So I moved to my couch and started into space for half an hour, intermittently crying as I tried to figure out why I felt so bad and why stuff that I generally liked doing suddenly felt so odious and awful. Because that was the thing. Minutes before this happened, one of my other friends asked how my day was and I told her “good,” but then I’m suddenly crashing and feeling like even doing the small tasks of normal preoccupation in Final Fantasy 14 were going to rip my soul out of my body if I forced myself to do them.
Continue readingResting Once Again
I’m taking another couple days off. I wasn’t going to, originally, but then I hurt my ankle on Thursday and kinda missed out on the chance to do all the cleaning and everything I meant to frontload on my weekend, so now I’m taking some extra days off of writing so I’ve got one less thing to worry about for a little bit. Back on Wednesday.