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 readingAuthor: Wren
Wearing 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.
Burnout And Fridays Off
I’ve been taking Fridays off of work lately. I probably shouldn’t, what with rising costs, but I’ve been so burned out that I needed to. Three weeks in a row, I was so worn out by Friday morning that I couldn’t make myself get out of bed on time or I slept through my alarms or felt so awful that I went back to sleep until I stopped feeling bad. It’s not great, to be quite honest. I really do need the money from my weekly overtime if I’m going to survive the upcoming financial crisis (in whatever form it takes) and while I haven’t spent vacation time to take my days off so far, I really need to find a more sustainable way to get through my weeks without entirely burning out by the end of Thursday. Work is demanding, sure, but I’ve also been taking a lot of burdens on myself that I don’t really need to, so maybe I need to dial it back there, or maybe I need to make sure my free time is spent better, in a way that is more rejuvenating or enriching. I really hope it’s the latter because I don’t want to do less stuff and I feel kind of like I’m on the hook for all of it anyway, considering it’s all commitments I’ve made. I could take breaks if I need to, I’m sure no one would begrudge me a week off, but I worry about the precedent that would set for myself. And that taking the time off wouldn’t actually fix things, only let me recover from them, since that means I’d be right back in the shit again the instant I went back to doing things. Work certainly isn’t going to slow down. It’s going to speed up, if anything…
Continue readingDigital Impermanence And Fading Memories
To have any experience with the internet is to know that there has been no greater lie told (mostly by accident) than “the internet is forever” (or it’s popular variant, “if you put that on the internet, it is there forever”). That was always what I was told when I was young. It’s what many of my friends were told. “Be careful with what you put on the internet! There’s no such thing as completely taking it down!” Nowadays, we know better. For things to exist on the internet, they have to be stored somewhere and digital storage is not as eternal as we were led to believe. Servers go down, backups get deleted, “AI” agents delete entire environments and then back that nothing up over the backups, and sometimes Amazon just deletes your account and all it’s digital licenses for no reason with no chance of recovery. Digital ownership is ephemeral and while nothing truly lasts forever, the half-life of things on the internet might be much shorter than everyone was led to believe. And sure, just because you can’t find it doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. There’s so much data tucked away in advertising companies, various archival efforts, and forgotten, dusty hard drives in some abandonded warehouse or server rack, so it’s difficult to tell when something is truly gone forever (like a video game I played via SNES emulator that I cannot find any mention or record of anywhere that I keep thinking is Secrets Of Mana but learn it isn’t when I go play SoM). I’m sure this game from my late childhood/early double-digit-years exists somewhere and I’m sure the version I remember is some modified ROM or a translated version of a game and that it is sitting tucked away on someone’s computer somewhere, forever out of my reach other than the few hazy memories of it I hold onto.
Continue readingGrowing Up Along But Outside The Internet
I’m in kinda of a weird position in regards to pop culture and the internet. I did, in fact, grow up in the 90s. I’m a millenial without a doubt. I got all the hallmarks of the generation save the avocado toast, expensive coffee drinks, and exposure to era-defining pop-culture and internet spaces. I was homeschooled, you see, so the only kids I interacted with were the ones from our monthly “co-op” days where all the affiliated Christian families would get together to socialize their children with other god-fearing families and hold regular meetings about permissable skirt length for adult women and if a sleeveless blouse was too scandalous to allow into a building with their children. So I missed out on all the kinds of pop-culture stuff you get by being exposed to a school’s worth of children. Instead of that, I had the kids of half a dozen incredibly conservative families (even in comparison to my own family) to spend time with and one thing I will say about having escaped that kind of life is that they’re all so boring. I’m sure plenty of them went wild as teens eventually, but as kids? We just talked about whatever christian films our parents let us watch, VeggieTales, and our school work. I didn’t know what a forum was until I was in high school, in the late 00s, even though I went to gameFAQs all the time when I was younger for game guides. Somehow I missed the entire forum part of that website. And even when I did get online for other stuff, it was only for the super-niche things I got pre-approved by my parents since the computer was in the family room and going to websites that weren’t pre-approved was asking to get your computer privileges revoked.
Continue readingRunning A Raiding Party In Final Fantasy 14
I’ve officially run my first raiding party in Final Fantasy 14. Technically twice. The first time, I was mostly quiet and just the nominal party leader, letting people figure things out and act according to their own wills just avoid being too controlling. The second time, though, it quickly became clear that we needed someone to pay attention to the mechanics that were happening and make calls about what to do. I asked if anyone wanted to do it, fully prepared to do it myself, and someone immediately cracked the joke that it sounded like I volunteered, so I started doing it. It wasn’t that bad. Took a bit of practice to be able to split my attention between my role’s needs in the battle and the mechanics everyone else needed to be warned about, but most of them were for everyone, so it wasn’t splitting my attention too much more than usual. Especially because I’m almost always looking for this stuff anyway, even when someone else is calling the shots, so I don’t become dependent on that specific person/voice. My goal is to figure out fight mechanics and find the balance necessary to perform them perfectly while also keeping my rotation going as much as possible, not just get through the fire enough times to never go back, so it’s a pretty natural fit. Except, of course, for the fact that I have mild aphasia (specifically “anomic aphasia”) as a side effect of my antidepressants, so sometimes I have a difficult time producing a noun I need in a moment and that’s a bad thing to run into when trying to call shots in a raid. Thankfully, I managed to avoid the problem during my shot-calling debut, but I’m going to continue to be the shotcaller as this group carries on and I feel like it’s only a matter of time until I can’t produce the word I need and everyone dies as a result.
Continue readingLike A House On Fire
It feels like the world I live in (my sphere of influence, my ability to perceive and participate in areas I occupy, etc) gets radically altered every week or two despite how little changes in practical terms. I still work the same job, do the same tasks, entertain myself the same ways, and haven’t had to make many changes to my life as a result of the last two years of stuff. And yet it feels like everything is different. Democracy in the US is being shredded in front of our eyes by a partisan, extremly Republican supreme court, various political bodies that are failing to constrain the attempts to undermine any of the principles that this country once suposedly stood for, medications are flipflopping between being legal and illegal, and all while the ostensible opposition party can’t mount a defense to save anyone’s life, not even their own, such that it is not unreasonable to look out at the current political climate and wonder if it’s too late to fix things. I don’t believe it is, not yet, but it is going to take a lot more radical action from people currently elected than we’ve seen from any of them up to this point, and while that is definitely within the realm of possibility, I’m not sure how likely it is, at all. It would require them, all Democrafts really, to stop backing down without a fight over literally everything and yet they keep capitulating on every front.
Continue readingTrying To Recapture The Joy In Old Hobbies
Once upon a time, just about four years and change ago, I enjoyed little more than spending some time muttering to myself while listening to a podcast or two and putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It was very fulfilling, incredibly engaging, and a different kind of mentally taxing than literally everything else I was doing at the time. It was mostly refreshing to be quite honest, and while I would definitely make my back, elbows, and shoulders ache with how much I’d hunch over my table to participate in this diversion, it was still a net positive that fell by the wayside when I moved into my current apartment. I still have the table I used, complete with padding I’d place on top of the puzzle so I could keep using the table without needing to carefully move the partially-finished puzzle around, but I just don’t spend much time on that floor of my apartment when it comes to my own entertainment. I should spend more time down there. I should stop committing myself to my upstairs area with my video games and office and start finding ways to be more comfortable in the downstairs area. Clean off the mail couch and vaccuum the chair next to my bird’s cage more often, perhaps. Move some books from my to-be-read pile to somewhere downstairs so I’ve got stuff to read and no longer need to feel like I’m making a choice I must commit to every evening. Dig out those puzzles. Maybe even just build a lego set. Anything to get me out of that office and away from my computer. I really need to stop spending so much time in there.
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