Yesterday’s post was called “On The Other Side Of Sickness” because it was a bit of wishful thinking about the future. I wrote it on a Monday, as I went into work while still unwell, and hoped that, by the time I was editing it, I’d be better. I am not. I’m also a bit behind in blog posts because work has been so busy and I’ve been so cotton-brained and tired that I’m having difficulty focusing. It is truly awful, to feel myself mentally diminished and be unable to do anything about it at all. And yet I must soldier on because there is work to do, money to earn, plates to spin, balls to juggle, and a small legion of crafters and gatherers and combatants to lead into a new Final Fantasy 14 patch (we’re up to six people, as of the night before I wrote the first draft of this). Lots going on and very little rest to be had despite my illness, which definitely hasn’t helped me get over the last bits of this. I’d be tired and unfocused at this point regardless of having a cold, so it’s no wonder that I still feel as loopy as I do. I wish I could say it was all bad choices, but only staying up late last night was a bad choice and it was a bad choice made knowing that I spent the two previous nights unable to fall asleep. Not because of coughing or congestion or anything like that. No, this was because I was too warm or I couldn’t get comfortable or my mind just wouldn’t wind down or I kept jerking awake as I was falling asleep for some reason. I don’t really know what’s got me in such a fuss right now, but I can definitely tell that it’s my anxiety coming at me like it hasn’t in a long time.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
On The Otherside Of Sickness
After a year of burnout, physical exhaustion, worsening mental health, and pushing my limits as much as I could, my body gave up on me. I was taken down not by Covid, the flu, or even that time I had E. Coli. It was the common cold that laid me low and while I was able to keep working through most of it, I definitely did not like doing that. Couldn’t even let myself rest while I was so stuffed up I’d go into my bathroom to steam out my sinuses at least twice a day, just to keep things manageable (nothing else was sufficient). Capitalism and modern society demands that, and going into the office today (the day I’m writing this), regardless of whose health it risks, since I am not in such a comfortable position that I can afford to take more days off in-between the holidays (or I could, but then I’d need to work during the holidays). I managed to mitigate the worst of it by putting in a hard day’s work while I was only mildly feverish (or not feverish at all while the acetominophen was working) so I could work from home the subsequent two days, but it was still not great. This is the sickest I’ve been in years. Even that time I got the flu (made more mild by my vaccination) a few years back and spent two days semi-conscious on my couch watching the freely available seasons of Pokemon on Amazon until they somehow turned into the Emperor’s New Groove on repeat was less bad than this. At least that passed [this post is going up on day 14 of me being sick, though now my ears are clogged and my brain’s still a little fuzzy rather than the “standard” cold symptoms I still had when I wrote this]. At least the medicine I had available worked. This cold, though? Nothing really helped for long and my last five days have been an endless cycle of soothing mitigations as I dealt with one symptom at a time until I somehow got a decent couple hours of coherence and decongestion before it all came back.
Continue readingAnticipation And Preparation For Final Fantasy 14’s Next Patch
When this post goes up, there will only be a few more days before the next Final Fantasy 14 patch. This will be the first one where I’m actually IN the parts of the game impacted by the patch. I’ve got my crafters all set for the new gear, I’ve got almost all of the main scenario quests done, and I’m just going through the last steps of completing stockpiles, acquiring supplies, and making sure I have everything ready that I can possibly think of. I have no idea what to expect and while I’m sure I could ask people for the information I need to know it all, I kind of want to go in without knowing. I want to experience the bleeding edge of it all. I want to chart my own path through unknown territory. I want to be driven into the systems of the game because none of the outside resources have the answers yet. I want to experience what it’s like to not know something along with a whole bunch of other people who also don’t know. I want to experience a massive game and the way the world of players within it shift to respond to changes. It’s possible I’m building up anticipation for something that will be ultimately disappointing. It’s possible nothing I imagine will come to pass and it will just be another Tuesday marked by the ability to more freely glamour everyone’s gear (using off-job gear now). I have no idea what to expect and I’m very invested in finding out what it will be, roses and thorns together.
Continue readingI’ve Had A Lot Of Time To Think Lately
I don’t normally have a bunch of time where I’m not actively engaged in doing something. That’s an active choice I’m making, generally speaking. I’ve spent my whole life managing my anxiety and depression by keeping myself constantly busy with one thing or another so there’s no room in my mind for them to occupy. Music or podcasts while I drive, cook, and do chores. Books or TV while I eat. Video games when I’m free. Endlessly scrolling social media when I need a minute to myself at work. I’m always doing something. It’s not like I’m afraid to spend time thinking. That’s kind of what this blog post is, and my daily journaling haiku habit, but even that isn’t letting my mind be at rest. It’s an active form of thinking, a directed mode of thought. I rarely leave myself the space for my mind to wander wherever it wants since even the usual “wandering” is directed by whatever activity I’m doing. While driving, though, there’s not much else to do. Watching the road, being aware of drivers, and so on takes some of my attention, but when you’re driving a thousand miles in sixteen hours, almost all of it on one long interstate route, you have a lot of time where there’s no cars or trucks near you where you can’t afford to let your eyes wander but your mind is free to stroll about as it pleases. I rarely come out of a long drive with much in the way of clarity so much as ideas to pick at some other time, but this time I woke up the morning after my drive with a thought nestled in my head that had bubbled to the surface as a result of the time I’d spent and coversations I’d had with my friends over the days preceeding the drive.
Continue readingA Week Of Not Rest But Recovery
Last week, to visit friends and family (chosen family) for the US Thanksgiving holiday, I drove just a shade under two thousand miles. It was broken up into two drives of five hundred miles each and one drive of a thousand miles–which came a day earlier than planned. I committed numerous caffeine crimes, ate a lot of junky travel food (and a whole lot of pretzels), gave myself sinus problems due to the elevation changes, and still started my first week back at work before the holidays feeling way more prepared for the long weeks ahead than I’ve felt in a long time. Even that week off for my birthday didn’t have this kind of effect on me and I got WAY more sleep during that week than I did while traveling. Hell, I might have gotten more sleep in half of that week than I did during the entire week of traveling and visiting people that just ended. And yet I feel so much better. Part of that has to do with getting to spend time with two people I don’t get to see and be around nearly enough, and part of it was that, despite the snowy struggles of part of my sixteen-hour drive home last Friday (two Fridays ago as this gets posted), it’s so much more relaxing to do that than to do my job. Which feels like quite a statement. Driving two thousand miles over the course of six days was less taxing than even a quiet week at my job. It stands to reason, though. That took only about thirty-five hours, which is fifteen hours less than a normal work week takes, and I only had to worry about myself and accomplishing my goals rather than a whole bunch of delicate personalities and people who only think you’re working if they see you outside your office (despite all of them having jobs that happen almost exclusively in their office).
Continue readingTaking A Couple Sick Days
I was incredibly sick last week. Not, like, dangerously sick or in need of hospitalization, just emphatically sick in ways I found difficult to work past. And, since capitalism required that I continue working (just as it demands that I go into the office today, the day this is posted, and risk the health of my coworkers because I can’t afford to take days off right now), I did not have the energy to come up with ideas for blog posts, let alone write them. So, rather than push myself to write a bunch of extra posts this week in order to keep my streak uninterrupted while rebuilding my buffer, I’m just going to take two days off this week (today and tomorrow) so I can go into this week on slightly better footing than I feel I have right now. Metaphorical footing. I do not have problems standing despite being sick. So, look for a new post on Wednesday and things will continue as normal from there. I’ll also have some interruptions during the holidays, but I’ll post about that when it happens. Hope you’re avoiding getting sick in this season of colds and flus.
Finding A New Flavor Of Overstimulation
I wound up taking today off work (the day I wrote this, which is about two weeks before it got posted) because I was just so burned out and exhausted that my body physically refused to operate correctly. Which is a bad state to be in, considering that I have plans to drive about five hundred miles in two days, another five hundred two days after that, and then a thousand in a single day four days after that. I don’t need to be in tip-top physical shape going into all of that, but it would certainly help make the total thirty-two-or-more hours of driving more bearable if I didn’t feel like crap. So I stayed in, played some video games (to wrap up some Final Fantasy 14 stuff before my week away from the game), and had a mostly relaxing day. Unfortunately, it was not entirely relaxing. I found out about an event my favorite wrestling group was doing a literal hour before it was supposed to start and scrambled to reorganize my evening so I could attend the event. It was a lot of fun, but I was not prepared to record and I was not mentally prepared for the shear amount of stuff that was going to be happening. Wrestling events can be a little overwhelming because there’s two chats to watch (the Wrestling chat and the crowd chat), the action to follow, the event’s music to listen to (used to help set the emotional tone for scenes), and usually my recording to monitor (and related camera work). While I wasn’t recording this time, there was a lot more mixing of chats than usual, a lot more attendees, just as much music, and I wound up in a discord voice chat with some people I’ve been getting to know, all of which left my fried and overstimulated after the first two-hour event.
Continue readingPokémon Legends: Z-A Really Has It All
I started playing Pokémon Legends: Z-A over the weekend. I made a file sometime last Friday and wound up turning to the game for entertainment as I clicked through a bunch of crafting macros in Final Fantasy 14. So far, it’s been a lot of fun! There was quite a bit of preamble and introduction as seems to be the case in the more recent Pokémon games, but the only restrictions on me where invisible barriers to prevent me from entirely wandering off while I was still going through the tutorial and early missions. Once those opened up, though, I was able to roam as far and as wide as I liked, taking on side quests, catching Pokémon, blowing all of my money on clothing, earning more money by battling at night, and then blowing even more money on yet more clothing items. It has been quite a rewarding experience, so far, and it’s been fun and engaging enough that I’m only sticking with my nightly forays into Final Fantasy 14 because I’m good at making myself do my chores (and I have a LOT of those to do in the next couple weeks yet). This is the kind of game I could lose myself in for a few weeks to a month, if I could tear myself away from FF14 long enough, and I might yet do that while I’m on my trip to visit people over the holidays (I am writing this before the trip and it was published after the trip, so I’m in a bit of a weird place vis-a-vis timing). I think it will help balance out my Final Fantasy 14 time a bit, though, even if I don’t entirely lose myself to it, so maybe I can start building a more healthy variety of activities. I have so much I still want to play, even beyond Pokémon Legends: Z-A.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy Tactics Isn’t Bad, But I Keep Forgetting It Exists
A few weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy Tactics. I’d bought it for something to play during my 2-week break from Final Fantasy 14 and while it certainly kept me occupied, it didn’t really hook me. I don’t have the nostalgic tie to it that many other people do and have to admit that it left me feeling a little underwhelmed even after applying a correction to the expectations set by all those people for whom this game was a significant part of their youth. So many people spoke about the impressive story, about some of the subversive lines, and the way the game supposedly flips the bird to authority in a way that was supposedly unheard of in games at the time. I just don’t see it. The writing isn’t bad, of course, but it’s still pretty normal. It’s on the positive side of neutral for a video game, but I think my penchant for reading a lot has worked against the idea that this is excellent, unheard-of writing even for when it originally came out in the late 90s. I mean, there was a lot of subversive media in the 90s, depending on what you consider subversive, and the idea of fighting authority or turning against family in the name of justice is a classic trope in heroic storytelling. I know I was probably just oversold on it to the degree that it has warped even my ability to dial back my expectations, but I have to say that I’m just not hooked by the story in the way so many of my contemparies seem to be. The gameplay is pretty good, though, so it’s not like I’m having a bad time. I am just having trouble sticking to it.
Continue readingAn Embarrassment Of Riches: Figuring Out What To Do With A Second Desktop Computer
Every year, my workplace holds a raffle to give away the computers that the IT department is retiring that are still in good working condition. I’ve participated without fail every year since I joined the company in the hopes of getting one of the actually pretty-decent computers for my personal use or a laptop that will get me through a few years of mobile computer usage (aka, writing) now that my old laptop can’t handle running a word processor on top of the OS. Eigth years in a row, I lost. There’s not a lot of computers and this is a popular program. This year, though, I almost missed it because I’ve been so distracted with other stuff going that I forgot about it completely and only managed to sign up at the last minute because the IT department sent out a message saying that not many people had signed up for the raffle. Since it was simple, thanks to the addition of a digital sign-up form, I filled it out and then promptly forgot about it again. I’ve had enough other stuff going on lately that some little lottery I wasn’t going to win didn’t seem like it was worth the mental space it would take to remember it. Which is why I was so surprised when I got the email congratulating me on winning the drawing. It took a little messaging back and forth for me to be certain this wasn’t some kind of scam or phishing attempt (seriously, both the IT and DevOps teams write their emails and messages like some kind of crappy phishing scam), but I was able to fill out the form and go pick up my brand new, 9-year-old-but-refurbished PC.
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