Some days, time crawls. There’s no reason for it. It’s a normal day as far as you can tell. Things are happening, there’s stuff to do, but the minutes refuse to speed up and each second must take its time in the present before moving to the past. This feeling is magnified, though, when times are not ordinary. When your days are not normal. When you live in the years leading up to the rise or fall of a facist government where at least an attempt at democracy once stood, you can wind up with some pretty extraordinary days in the worst way possible and time absolutely crawls then. In better times, your escapes might have brought you relief or a few moments of inattention that let the clock speed up. In current times, there is no escape. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about what is going on in the world and even taking a break from all that to rest isn’t true relief because how can you really stop thinking about that? As someone with a lot of experience with trauma, I’m familiar with how that dagger of an experience can stick in your mind and heart in ways that resists all attempts to quickly dislodge it. I’m not surprised that there’s no real chance at escaping it, but it is still so exhausting and, on days when there isn’t enough going on to distract me, causes every minute to drag out unbearably.
Continue readingAuthor: Wren
Cut By My Own Wit–These Familiar Horizons Stab Into My Heart
I find myself spending more and more time reflecting on the past. I suspect it’s a result of my burnout and the introspection I’m doing, what with all of my identity issues and the changes I know I need to make but don’t know how to make. I’ve avoided doing much introspection for a long time, so it is probably unsurprising that my mind turns itself back to when I made that choice–the choice to set my mind to other things, typically to the exclusion of the once-constant work of neatly ordering my mind–now that I’m shaking off the rust and trying to flex long-unused muscles.
I haven’t avoided all introspection of course, I would not have come to terms with my gender and sexual identities, as much as I can I suppose, or chosen to finally stop thinking about using a new name and actually try it out. But I’ve avoided doing much that couldn’t be contained in the moment I was in. No looking into the past in order to better understand the present. No looking to the future in order to better make choices today. I told myself that it was because, until something changed, there would be no need for it after I realized I couldn’t really make plans for the future. All I could really do was point myself in a direction and make the best choices possible as they came up.
The arrival of Covid-19 on the international scene made that clear, after all. How could I plan for a future I couldn’t anticipate? But now, six years later, nothing has really changed (my student loans still need paying, I’m isolated in order to stay safe from a disease that could impact my mental faculties in a way that left me conscious of their diminished status, and my job is still the same soul-draining effort–well, maybe a greater soul-draining effort than ever, actually) except for my increased burnout and I can’t keep wandering forward, undirected, hoping that something eventually changes enough that I’ve got some extra room to grow or act or change or anything at all really, because life has conspired to prevent that from happening thus far and it is not looking like that’s going to change either.
Back in 2020, when I was still optimistic about the potential of being furloughed from my job every other week and able to coast on unemployment benefits that had been amped up to allow for people to isolate as the spread of Covid-19 was deemed a pandemic, I sat in my armchair next to the unused fireplace, looking through our rear patio doors at the lingering snow covering the hill and forest behind my home. It was March 20th–four days after I’d shown up to work, determined to again make my case to my boss that he let me permanently work from home, to find everyone moving things out of their offices since the company had made the decision my boss had been resisting even as the death toll started to rise–and I’d just received my copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Everyone was talking about it. Everyone was buying Switches about it. We were all stuck at home, unable to visit each other, isolated, and struggling to adapt to our suddenly altered world, so we did what we’d been doing our whole lives. We escaped. We left our cluttered, suddenly-so-silent lives and escaped to a small island in the middle of an unspecified ocean that we were going to help noted entreprenuer Tom Nook develop into an escape for the people tired of their lives in cities and so on. We built our little camps, we got into debt to have a nicer house, and we visited each other.
Voice and video helped us all in those days, but none of them hit quite so effectively as visiting each other’s Animal Crossing islands. We created these digital lives as we struggled with the sudden metaphorical cessation of our physical lives (to say nothing of how we struggled with the literal cessation of life that became a part of every day’s routine), but unlike so much of our digital space, we could bring others into it in a way that FELT like we were going somewhere or bringing someone somewhere. We could actually walk around and show them our new home. We could put things on display, we could invent and play games predicated on proximity, we could move between spaces and homes, even as we sat in a lonely chair, phone to ear or headphones overhead, in order to speak with each other. It was the saving grace that we needed in that moment. It was the relief that kept so many of use healthy and sane during those early days.
It was a bright, sparkling connection in a sea of isolation, a glimmer of noise in a world that was silent of the susurrus I’d grown so accustomed to. It became our lives and we shared that space until we could tentatively venture into the world during the warmer months to meet carefully, oh-so-casually, at a distance. Masked, a double armslength apart, and forced to use perspective tricks to take pictures together, we often retreated from those ventures to the comfort and proximity of our digital spaces. Our refuge where we could be together without the looming specter of an illness that threatened us all.
When life makes demands of you, it is unlikely that pitching a fit is every going to work out. There can be some relief in the expression of the emotions involved, but screaming about the injustice of it all isn’t going to lower your rent, repair broken friendships, change stubborn minds, or bring an end to violence and persecution. Action and change will, sometimes, if you are lucky, well-directed, or part of an undeniable movement. I cannot rail against the bitterness in my soul to bring people back into my life. I also can’t reach out and put in the effort to repair things between us because I made the choices I did for a reason and that reason still stands. I can’t act to pay off my student loans more than I already am. I can’t afford to leave my job, take a stand in it, or do anything but carry on working as much as possible so I can one day leave for something less personally destructive.
With all that being true, with the best possible path picked out for me–something I’ve checked with my therapist about many times over the years and each time had my reasoning and standing choices validated once more–what is the point of thinking about it? Why should I put effort into thinking it all through again and again when I know that nothing has materially changed? Why should I force myself to, once again, confront the painful disparity of where I thought I’d be by the time I was thirty with where I am now as I am entering the back half of thirty-four? Why can’t I just stay the course when I know that no amount of individual, personal change or determination is going to help me get through this? What is the point in planning for a future I might never reach, no matter how much of my present I sacrified for it?
All of these are questions I’ve ignored. Life routinely reminded me just how much could change without my input, at a moment’s notice, and it felt (and still feels) like making concrete plans for the future is a waste of my time and energy. As a result, I’ve grown less curious. I’ve stopped paying attention to upcoming events since it’s not like getting around to stuff a few days or couple weeks later is going to change my experience. Why rush? Why spend the effort to anticipate things that are ultimately going to mean nothing to me in the face of the path I’ve put myself on and the effort it takes to maintain? And so I’ve stopped marking down video game release dates. I’ve stopped pre-ordering books. I don’t even check what movies are coming out anymore. What is the point of finding these things ahead of time when I can just as well enjoy them whenever I finally discover them after their release?
Developing my Animal Crossing island was the work of 2020. I would eventually rework it a couple years later, taking the base island design and altering it to suit my preferences and design sensibilities, but that first year was all about developing the island, finding my favorite residents, and turning the empty world into something lived-in. I spent the year playing it in between other games. Even when I moved, bought a PS4, and played a whole bunch of Play Station games I’d wanted but never had the console to play, I still returned to Animal Crossing. I’d lose entire weeks into Stardew Valley and yet Animal Crossing was the throughline I returned to. Even as I struggled to find the rest I wanted due to worsening relationships with my roommates, the need to move, and being the only one in that household who cared enough to take precautions, I kept going back to my island.
It was my final escape, so to speak. The one that never failed me. That never lost my interested or got so boring that I would rather start the game over again than carry on. It was the place that I fully felt like I could explore myself, express myself, and hold space even when I moved into my own apartment. I could change my avatar’s presentation however I wanted since there was no male or female choice, just clothing, hair, and facial features on the same round little body. I could bring people into a place I controlled, I could be lavish with my money and my gifts since hard work and studious effort actually paid off in the game, and I could just exist in a world that was meant to be appreciated and enjoyed without needing to ignore the deafening silence that used to be the hum of distant tires, the susurrus of neighbors just out of sight, and the steady hum of active life that mingled with the peculiar silence that always followed the occasional sad whoop of sirens that didn’t need to scream to clear the roads that were now constantly empty.
It was my home. It reflected me. Which means, in my own cleverness and desire to reflect my thoughts onto every surface that could take them, I spent an hour coming up with a clever name for my island back on that first day, on March 20th, that would continue to represent a world I had invested so much of my time and my self and my emotions into that I would never be able to change. To be fair, the game warned me. It cautioned me that the only way to change the name would be to delete it all and start over. But I was clever. I needed a little tongue-in-cheek joke to make, so I named it Tearniquan. It was a funny little thing–a private jest that most never noticed unless I explained it was an anagram–meant only to amuse myself as I so often did with my own cleverness. I named my island Quarantine and that was maybe the first decision I made in this period of fluctuation that ignored what the future might hold for me.
Quarantine. Tearniquan. I remember texting a friend I no longer speak to as we set up our islands that I’d come up with a silly little joke. I remember smirking about it whenever someone realized what I’d done. It was clever. I was clever. Why not name it after the dominant part of my life? Why not make the metaphor into something more literal by naming the digital space I’d occupy for years to come after the thing that made it so incredibly important to me in the first place?
A day largely unexamine stretched into weeks and months and has become a life of unanticipation. I do not look forward to things. I think of them, sometimes. I make what plans I can. But I do not think of them with anticipation in my heart. There are exceptions, of course. I haven’t become unfeeling stone as a result of this internal silencing. I haven’t lost my capacity for joy or love or excitement. But I do not look to them in days to come. I open myself to them as they arrive and cherish them while they are present, but I do not look back for them again when they’ve gone or forward to when they might return. What is the point of making plans that, oh so often, were dashed by the circumstances of life and the people in it?
But this cannot hold. I can’t keep this up. I do not know how much longer I can live in these conditions and I know my present well enough to know that no amount of wild effort will change anything. Only luck of the sort I can’t help but feel bitter about others experiencing: lotteries, inheritences, things that can only be found by the right person at the exact right moment. Only things beyond my control or ability to influence as anything other than the way one tiny grain of sand in a dune influences the coast.
All that is left to me is the thing I’ve avoid for so long. All I have left to me is my mind. All I can do is sharpen my vision, hone my attention, and look for every tiny thing I could turn to my advantage if only I was prepared for it. All I can do is find the strength to carry on by reinforcing myself through lessons from the past so that I might better act whenever the future and all its potential arrives. I must dust out the cobwebs, waken those unused skills, and return to the constant tuning and maintenance I once kept up like it was a religious obversation key to the health of my soul. Which, to be plain, it might have been, considering how heart-sick and soul-weary I’ve grown since I stopped tending the garden of my mind (though, to be entirely fair to myself, have you SEEN the world this past decade??).
I can’t ignore the past any longer. I can’t ingore my self any longer. I can’t ignore the demands of the future any more. I have to find the time, find the energy, find the willpower, to return to my interiority.
These days, almost six years into my quarantine, the joke is old. Tearniquan tastes stale and bitter in my mouth. It tumbles through my mind like a boulder hellbent on becoming an avalanche. My stomach roils at the thought of booting up the game and being forced to face the conflict between a place I built a digital heart to live inside and the pain of having this clever little joke, sharpened into a steak by the intervening years and my continue isolation, plunged into it. Could I get rid of this place I once loved so dearly? That hosted get-togethers with people I no longer speak to? That was the first place I felt like I could look anyway I wanted and that had become the staging for all my best memories of those dark years?
Can I stand to be poked and prodded by the name that mocks me now? Tearniquan? Quarantine. Do I have the fortitude required to stand up to the brunt of this blow to my very soul every time I see the name pop up on screen and am forced to think about what this place means to me even as it is named such?
Because that space empty now. It is dusty, long-left unattended save for the ghost that is my avatar. Like myself, it is the only one still in Tearniquan. Everyone else has gone. They’ve left their islands, their homes, for the wider world. Only I remain behind. Only I chose to stay apart and safe, in quarantine, despite the mounting evidence that Covid-19 can permanently shorten your life, reduce your mental capacity, and even change your personality. I mean, why would they stay isolated? They have lives to live, places to go, experiences to have, and work to do.
They don’t come around, anymore. To Tearniquan or to me in quarantine. It was my choice, after all, to isolate. None of them are obligated to join me. I cannot require them to follow the protocols I wish they would, to mask up and avoid unnessary exposure, in order for me to feel entirely comfortable with leaving my quarantine behind. I still live in it. I carry it with me, even, when I go out. I inconvenience myself in order to stay safe as I watch the world beyond me refuse to do anything of the sort even when it is convenient. Only I am still stuck in this place of safety, looking for the signs of someone come to visit despite knowing that no one will. Looking for someone who cares enough to share in the effort. And, just like my island, empty now for years save for my avatar, I cannot shake the feelings of empty sadness that pervade it.
It was a gradual thing. I never really decided to cease introspection. I just realized that I’d stopped one day and that the reason I’d given myself, that it did not serve me to put in the effort, was undeniably true. I think that it took until 2021 to really be true, though, and was cemented in that first month of the year by the easily anticipated bit of treason then-President Trump spurred on that went unpunished. Why look to a future full of only the dire consquences brought on by the failures of those in power? Why spend my energy on a future that was only ever going to keep getting worse?
Just like my island. First we stopped having weekly visits. Then some of the group dropped out entirely, stopped playing at all. Then it become something for special occasions: in-game events or some means of representing the self amongst our friends or family over the holidays. Then long stretches of silence and isolation as I carried on as best as I could by myself. And, much like my introspection, even that began to fade. Every couple days. In bursts of a few days a week. Maybe five days out of a month. Then a year of silence and inattention followed by a brief burst of energy and interaction that quickly burned itself out.
Now I am here, three years later. Shocked into attention by the arrival of a major update to this old game and the sudden return to it by people from all corners of my life. Shocked into awareness by the irrevocable truth that I do not know how much longer I can keep this up. Finding myself a mess that will take real effort to clean up with no guarrantees that this will stave off the inevitable, even, much less result in any kind of positive output. And so, as my mind wakes and I restart the long-silenced machine of personal evaluation and consideration, I think of the island I left behind all those years. Tearniquan. Quarantine. A dagger in my heart that I’m not sure I can bear to dislodge because of how much it meant to me once. That it still means to me. All the carefully arranged flowers. The villagers who were more affectionate with me than my biological family ever were. The success in life and personal economics that I’ve always wanted but been denied in this primary world of ours by constantly rising costs. The home I made myself. All the accouterments of a life I’d built for myself that I could preserve forever or chose to destroy.
Why does this matter so much to me? I have a new digital community, one that cares about me, uses the name I prefer, and that will remain digital as long as it exists because we’re so far apart that there’s no other choice. I am making friends again, expanding my horizons, finally doing the things I mean to do in 2020 before isolation prevented me from making more friends and developing new and better relationships. And yet I built my life on that island. The thing is crumbling and something I dare not lean on at any point, but it holds a version of my heart from back before the years turned worse than ever. I’m not sure I can bear to lose it when I’ve already lost so much else that was a part of my life back then.
I had hoped that this little essay, bouncing back and forth between two mirrored topics, would help me figure something out. No such luck. I am just as mired in the mess as I ever was. Maybe even more so, now that I’ve given words to the once formless thoughts and feelings that plagued me. But I’ve never been one to seek answers as my goal. I’ve always taken what I can get when they show up, but my real pursuit is questions and maybe now, with all of this laid out for me to read and consider, I’ll be able to find some useful ones. Threads to pull at. The first steps in undoing any tangle is always finding something to pull on, after all. Maybe that will be enough. Maybe it will be enough to have considered it all and, once I finally get some sleep, my mind will start the work required to undo all this awful mess.
All good questions. All good things to consider. Maybe I should delete my island. Start over. There’s a lot to be said for starting fresh when the opportunity provides itself. I can’t always cling to the past if I want to move into the future. The loss of things cherished makes room for new things to arrive, ones with fewer barbs perhaps. Maybe I can leave it there, encased in glass and ready for me to visit when I feel the need, while I move on elsewhere. Maybe all I need to do to excise the dagger it has stabbed into my very soul is go in and explore it. After all, most poeple remove daggers by pulling them out rather than hoping they magically vanish on their own or that you grow used to it being there.
I might as well try. The one thing all this thought has made clear to me is that no amount of actually going to visit my island is going to be worse than how deep I’ve driven this metaphorical knife by obsessing about it for weeks as my mind has kept flinching away from any heavier version of this introspection. Better to see if there’s the option to heal–to process these feelings–rather than ignore them while they slowly fester. Better. Or at least not worse.
The Disparity Is There For A Reason
It has been a long time coming, so long that I don’t know when or why I added it to My List on Netflix, but I finally started watching Centaurworld. I do remember that it got a bit of buzz when it first released, with people saying how unexpectedly good it was and how the visuals from the clips being shared didn’t really represent the show as a whole, but the furor subsided, I stopped watching things regularly, and now it’s 2026. I’m finally trying to get through the whole show before my Netflix subscription ends a few days after I’m writing this and it’s been surprisingly engaging. I mean, I expected to enjoy myself, given how much convincing I need before I’ll actually save a show on a streaming platform’s list thingy, but I didn’t expect to find such a neat little story wrapped up in the bright colors and over-the-top-but-not-quite-absurd silliness. I wasn’t entirely sure what I expected, to be honest. I mean, I thought there’d be some kind of framing narrative wrapped around the show to set up what I knew about it–a horse gets stuck in a magical world of centuars–but I didn’t expect the framing narrative to become the narrative. I expected some goofiness, but I didn’t expect songs ranging from second-hand-embarrassment-makes-this-difficult-to-watch to beautiful but uncanny forewarnings of something so dire and evil that it seems like it surely couldn’t exist in this chipper little show. I expected noodle-limbed, physics defying characters, but found myself in a world with a strong and coherent set of underlying rules that guided the way its denizens moved through it even if it was different from what I’d expected from a “standard” world. It really was an exepectedly interesting show for the first whole season and while I’m only a couple episodes into season 2, my hopes for it remain high.
Continue readingA Small Compromise To Prop Up My Mental Health During This Horrible Week
My Final Fantasy 14 workshop has been chugging along this week. There’s new mail in my mailbox every day as people turn items in, there’s a slow trickle of item allotments being claimed in the discord, and plenty of work for me to do as I try to keep up with what people are bringing to me. Since last week’s writing on the matter, I’ve done what I can to address the stress all this has been putting on me. Complicating that, though, is that fact that it just clicked into place that I went from passionately putting in too much work for D&D and my job to adopting a brand new cause to burn myself out on the instant the D&D stuff ended. Beucase that’s what this workshop is: I think my guild in Final Fantasy 14 should have opportunities to make in-game money and, now that the FC leader isn’t doing the work anymore, I’ve taken up the mantle. I didn’t change anything, I just swapped how I was wrecking myself. So, in order to address that, I finally started modding a bit more heavily than I did before. I would argue that it’s still “quality of life” stuff, but I know that’s not what I meant the last time I wrote about this stuff. I mean, sure, being able to update the base texture of my character’s form was huge. Getting rid of the boxiness of their limbs and fingers, a thing that has always bothered me, for just a few days has left me shocked at how bad things look now when I turn the mod off. I’ve also tried out some picture-taking improvements, a mod for trying out looks and adding things to your pictures, and the one that has made all the difference: an auto-crafter.
Continue readingInsomnia And Caring Too Deeply And Existential Identity Crises, Oh My!
I have not slept much the last couple days (as of writing this). It has been difficult for me to wind down these past few days because I am currently caught in an exhausting vortex of my own creation. It isn’t video games or TV shows I’ve starting watching (though my tendency to lose track of time while doing those things certainly hasn’t helped me these last few weeks), but just my good ‘ol insomnia. My mind will not spin down in the evenings and, in fact, seems to kick things into high gear when I’m trying to go to sleep. Most of the time, though, I can attribute a period of restlessness to a spike in anxiety or stress. These days, it’s all anxiety and stress to the degree that I’ve stopped registering it as anything but “normal” everywhere except in how much anxiety and stress I can manage in a day: that just keeps getting smaller as the world around me gets messier and messier. Still, despite this, I am pretty sure I know why I can’t fall asleep easily lately (this has been going on for a while but only recently has it prevented me from sleeping for long periods of time): I am having a small-to-moderate existential crisis. I joke often about having those, or at least have joked about that once or twice over the course of this blog, but my sense of purpose and self has been relatively stable for a while. After last year’s burnout (which is continuing into this year), deciding to stop my D&D campaigns troubling my self-identity as a storyteller, and the way that my thoughts about why I stopped that D&D campaign has grown in my mind to be applicable to so many of the difficult and draining parts of my life, all my mind can do is spin its wheels and get nowhere.
Continue readingMy Job Really Stinks Sometimes
I have spent the last week working on a now months-long issue at work. I mean, I’ve been working on it for months, but over the last couple weeks it has become a particular focus for me as the mechanical engineers and I are taking some of my recent test results and reproducing them again and again, tweaking variables here or there, as we try to find a path out of this mess. Since I work on heavy machinery and the software that goes in that machinery, this means that I have spent my time working on gearboxes and the goop that goes inside them. Which means that I finally have a job that involves getting my hands dirty despite largely being a white collar worker (well, this job is a sort of interesting mix of white and blue collars but it’s still mostly white collar since it is still a knowledge job by-and-large) and that I’m also using all the engineering, math, and physics knowledge I’ve picked up over the years of being raised by two engineers and mistakenly believing that I was going to study math and physics in college because I was really good at calculus. It also means that my poor, sensitive nose has been assaulted by some of the most heinous scents I’ve had the displeasure to sniff. The only things that outdo them is raw sewage and the sulfurous chemical solution my chemistry teacher in high school made everyone sniff on the first day of class so he could threaten to put it under our noses if we ever fell asleep on him (which smelled so much like raw sewage that it is pointless to make the distinction between the malodorus mixtures). Even through a properly-fitted N95 mask, some of these stinks send me reeling, lightheaded and nostrils aflame, any time I’m unfortunate enough to stand over one of these suckers when we crack them open to check our test results.
Continue readingMy Workshop Is Working Too Well
It is done. After a solid week of pretty much constant effort in my free time, I’ve finished creating the document required to run a workshop in my Free Company in Final Fantasy 14. A lot of the basics were handled by the FC leader, in his previous iteration fo this workshop, but I’ve diversified the portfolio a bit, reworked some things, and adapted it to fit my needs and interests. It has been out in the world for two days now, as I’m writing this (and we’re rapidly approaching the deadline I set for people to let me know they’d read it before I go actively tagging the folks who’d answered my poll near the start of last month), and not only are people already sending me stuff to buy, but I’ve decided against my initial idea to hold off on starting a project until Sunday and put up a couple projects for everyone to get involved with right away. This way I get to try things out, everyone will get a little money at the very least, and I can see how much interest there is. I mean, it won’t be a perfect example of that because I’m trying to turn these things around in just a couple days and most people probably won’t want to stress out for a chunk of change, but it should give me an idea. And, if nothing else, it has spurred a bunch of conversation, gotten me some feedback about how to improve things, and taught me a lot about how to manage these things going forward. I like to learn by doing and boy howdy am I doing these days…
Continue readingI Really Like Ninety-Nine Percent of Dandadan
In continuing my burgoening tradition of watching something new every week, I finally gave in to the cultural zeitgeist (which makes it sound like I was resisting the cultural zeitgeist but, to be honest, I was just ignoring it like I was ignoring every TV show and movie for the last couple years) and watched Dandadan. It’s been on my radar for a while, even if all I really knew about it was “there’s a supposedly old lady with tall hair who carries a metal baseball bat?” based on some images I’ve seen on the internet, but one of my friends told me it was actually a really cute love story in addition to the slightly-more action-y episode-to-episode events and I was sold. Who doesn’t want to see a cute love story these days? So I watched it with that in the forefront of my mind, got swerved almost immediately, and then swerved more and more as the first season played out. It was a wild ride, but now I’m a diehard fan and dying on the inside because I’ve got to wait who even knows how long for Season 3 to come out. I suppose I’m lucky in that I only started watching it after the second season had been released so at least I didn’t have season 1’s horrific cliffhanger dangling over me for months and months while I waited. Which, if I had to levy a criticism at the show, it would be the way they’ve chosen to pace things. Not every episode has problems with it, but there’s enough that I kept feeling like I was being jostled around by the ending theme of the show, which is too bad because the opening and closing themes of both seasons are great and the sort of thing I chose to watch each time. It didn’t really impact the quality of the show for me, but I also can’t imagine this show coming out on a weekly schedule and would have been infuriated multiple times if I’d been watching it one episode a week.
Continue readingA Mixture Of Interest, Dread, and Exhaustion
There was a time in my life, a pretty long time actually, when I would have read the next Dresden Files book the night it came out. I’d have my acquisition strategy worked out, I’d have left work early, and I’d have powered through it in a single evening, staying up until an ungodly hour to finish it if required. Today, the book’s been out for a week and in my hands for five days and I haven’t even opened the package it was delivered in. I actually didn’t even realize it was coming out until a couple weeks beforehand, promptly forgot again, and only got it eventually because one of my coworkers brought it up when I was at my computer so I could order it immediately. I’m sure that my penchant for staying up to ungodly hours to play Final Fantasy 14 has something to do with my shift in priorities, but I have to admit that I’m just not as excited about the franchise as I once was. I’m still gonna read the book and however many more there are before the series comes to an end, but I’ll admit that the shifting scales and recent story events have kind of lost me. I mean, I understand that this kind of noir-adjacent story requires the protagonist to be the perpetual underdog, even as his competence grows (this is the 18th book in the series, after all. Harry Dresden HAS to be a power player at this point) and I understand why a major character was killed in the last book (age is an issue for a series that covers about a year per book and only SOME of the characters have special magical regenerative powers that slow their aging/divine blessings that keep them combat relevant as the baddies turn from local vampires to deities and deific figures), but I don’t have to like it.
Continue readingThere’s Always More Work To Do For Fun
Getting a workshop, even a digital one, off the ground is a lot of work. Even if I’ve got a spreadsheet I’ve inherited from my Final Fantasy 14 Free Company leader, getting it updated and ready to be used after most of it hasn’t been updated since 2024 is a pretty significant undertaking. Adding on to it the way I want to (and have been) in order to support other kinds of projects and an “I will buy this from you” list for my own purposes is an even larger undertaking. I’ve spent at least a few hours a day on it for five days straight and I’m sure that I’ll eventually be adding more to it tonight, once I settle down to “game,” since gaming these days is seventy-five percent idle crafting while I work on this spreadsheet, twenty-percent doing my daily grind for levels, four percent doing weekly reset work, and one percent doing things that are fun. I miss doing fun stuff and I can’t wait to get back to it once I have this spreadsheet updated, a project-management process in place, and all of my new projects humming along. It’s going to be difficult to manage at first since I don’t have the kind of in-game money needed to support the more proactive of my fellow players, but if I keep it up and have picked the right items to make and sell, then I should be able to translate all this effort into even more money. We’ll have to see if it actually works out, though. I might wind up losing a bunch of money and needing to shut down all parts of the workshop other than the group-contribution efforts, or just not making the money fast enough to keep up with the influx of materials (since I can only make things so quickly and can’t flood the market with them if I want to keep prices up). Only time will tell.
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