I seem to be unable to have a normal week after a vacation, still. Antidepressants and taking time to rest haven’t helped at all with that particular problem. At least this time, it’s a problem I can roll with, to a degree. To a degree. See, I had my usual Wednesday of meetings, but I discovered that there was yet more stuff going on that I didn’t know about and got to witness multiple people assign credit for the work I’d been doing the past three months to my senior coworker. Who, thankfully, spoke up to say he didn’t do it, but it shouldn’t have happened from the beginning considering all the people in that meeting knew about the issue at hand because I told them about. I am also on the record just two weeks prior saying that my senior coworker, due to the timing of his vacations, was relatively uninvolved in the related testing (though I left out that he found the first hint of this problem and promptly dropped the entire thing on my lap rather than continue to work on it himself). But no. Everyone was operating under the assumption that my coworker was the person who knew what was up and had been doing the three-digit number of hours of testing involved. All of which came around and made a pretty fine point as a plausible explanation for why people were being so weird about me working from home and not having some kind of publically available accounting of my work. If everyone assumed that most of the work I’ve been doing was done by my senior coworker, it would explain a lot of stuff going back a few years.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Finally Digging Into Side Content In Final Fantasy 14
One of the quirks of essentially chugging Final Fantasy 14 is that there is a huge amount of the game that I just don’t understand, and perhaps even more that I don’t even know about. The focus on crafting, making money, story progression, and specific activities means that I’ve largely ignored significant portions of the game that showed up to fill in the gaps between major expansions. Sure, I’ve spent quite a bit of time on some of the side activities, like my Island Sanctuary and the Ishgardian reconstruction crafting activities, but I’ve mostly avoided the special activities of Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and Endwalker. I dipped my toes into the first two, but never really spent the time to figure out why I would want to do any of them in the first place. I’ve been told the Cosmic Exploration stuff from Endwalker is fun and a great way to get some crafting experience, but I’ve enjoyed my current method of doing projects so I’m not sure I’d enjoy a new side activity, especially now that I’m finally moving forward in Dawntrail. The other two areas, though, are their own beasts. The Eureka exploration from Stormblood is a pretty significant time sink, even when you’ve got people to help speed up the process, and the Bozjan Southern Front in Shadowbringers has some really difficult barriers to cross in order to progress and no amount of bringing in my level 70 jobs to level them up will make that go any faster. Still, now that my Free Company (the FF14 equivalent of player guilds) is putting in some focused effort to completeing these activities, I’ve begun spending my thursdays desperately trying to stay alive as we all fight endless swarms of enemies to get the XP we need to level up the “elemental” level thing specific to the Eurekan exploration zone. It’s not the most fun, but it’s a refreshingly straight-foward activity so far and having a large group of other FC members to play with is enough fun for me.
Continue readingThe Griefs Of Immortality And Moving On
At the end of last week, I wrote about the anime Frieren and walked right up to discussing why stories about immortals learning to deal with losing the people who were an important part of their life is of particular interest to me. I actually wrote a couple paragraphs about that, but it didn’t really fit in with talking about the anime in general or the specific parts of it that I found the most engaging while watching it, so I cut them out and morphed them into this blog post. After all, that idea, the core of why those kinds of stories are interesting to me, is what prompted me to write about Frieren and I want to explore the space a bit more than I could while discussing the show itself.
Continue readingI Finally Watched Frieren And I’ve Got A New Favorite Anime
Over my birthday weekend (a week and a half ago as I’m writing this), my friends introduced me to Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, an anime that I’d heard about a while back but never really gotten around to watching. I’m terrible at watching things by myself, I’ll freely admit, but I almost watched Frieren back when I first heard about it because the premise of it was incredibly compelling to me. Frieren is an Elven mage who saves the world with her adventuring party and then goes on a personal journey afterwards only to discover upon her return that her treasured companions are not as immune to the passage of time as she is. A mere fifty years of idle spell collection was a lifetime for her friends and now she has to cope with not only the regrets she feels but how to live amongst humans who live, grow, and pass in so very little time. The anime has it all: the unintended consequences of power vacuums, repeating the mistakes of the past because humans don’t live on the same time scale as the demons they’ve been fighting, an ancient being struggling to answer the impossible questions of (effective) immortality, and a constant dose of heart and connection to tie it all together. Exactly my shit in ways I couldn’t anticipate before watching it, to the degree that it has probably become my favorite anime, supplanting Delicious In Dungeon from just last year.
Continue readingClearing A Low Bar With My Birthday Celebration
For most of my life, I haven’t enjoyed my birthday. Once the shine of new toys and celebrations wore off during my childhood (following yet another ruined birthday party) I was mostly only interested in my birthday as the vehicle my parents used to give their children toys. Most of the time, unless we got a gift of money from a relative (this only applied to cash since all checks were deposited in our college saving account), got a reward for good grade, or saved up our allowances, our parents wouldn’t buy us anything unnecessary. They’d take us to the library or to the video rental store (and eventually the video game rental store) once a week each, but we rarely got anything permanently ours outside of our birthdays, Christmas, and the one souvenir we were allowed during family trips that happened to go somewhere that had a gift shop. Which meant that by the time I was eight or nine, birthdays had become just a means of getting new toys and books that I could keep (being able to keep something as my own was a big deal as a kid with three siblings and a “we will buy ‘big’ things for the family but not a specific child” family rule). They stayed that for a few years and, after the month of August was basically ruined for me by a few years of consecutive traumas during the month, stopped being special. I mean, I was so detached from my birthday that I got through all but the last half hour of my eighteenth birthday before I remembered that it was, in fact, my birthday since I was so busy at college with my new friends and my family wasn’t the sort to reach out via phone calls or texts at the time.
Continue readingGetting Back In The Saddle After A Decent Rest
I took a whole week off. It was only supposed to be a long weekend, but it turned into a whole week off of work. And writing. And most personal responsibilities. I didn’t even go grocery shopping and cobbled meals together out of stuff I had around my apartment, including a meal that was two bagels and the last of my jam. I did absolutely nothing that didn’t need doing and, honestly, it was kind of nice. Between actually getting some REAL rest, with proper seven-to-eight-hour nights and having an antidepressant that is (now unequivocally) working properly, that sure solved a lot of my active problems. Not all of them, mind you. It turns out that, by my approximation, eighty percent of my stress and exhaustion was actually burnout, not depression, so a single week of rest isn’t going to fix that by a long shot. It did still help a lot, though. Between having my first genuinely good birthday in at least a decade, maybe my entire life (can’t have a bad birthday if you don’t really celebrate it), taking time to sleep, allowing myself to just do whatever I wanted (which was only MOSTLY Final Fantasy 14), and reaching a point in my rest where I felt comfortable just sitting on my balcony and reading, I think I’ve gotten the most rest I’ve had in about two years. Turns out it’s difficult to rest if you have to spend a bunch of energy every day fighting your own mind in order to not be lethargic and miserable constantly and that removing that extra bit of effort can really help kickstart your other resting efforts.
Continue readingFour Months Of Effort And Zero Regrets
Finally, after approximately four months of at least weekly (often twice-weekly until fairly recently) attempts, my group of Final Fantasy 14 Savage Raiders has cleared the raid we’ve been struggling with. The Burden of the Son (Savage), also known as “A8S” is now behind us and we can all claim a very specific and probably pretty useless expertise given how this expertise is tied to a nine-year-old fight. That said, Brute Justice (the name of the final boss of A8S) is infamous for being a difficult fight in the “Savage” tier of raids, often referenced as the prototype of what would eventually become the “Ultimate” tier of raids and clearing it without the Echo (which gives you a boost to damage and HP for every failure until clearing the raid is a given) is a fairly rare accomplishment often claimed only by most serious of raiders. Well, there’s also the “Minimum Item-level No Echo” (or MINE) variant that is truly the most difficult version of the Savage raid, but the thing that makes this raid special is that actually winning the fight isn’t that hard. What’s difficult is getting the mechanics perfect because anything less than that can either immediately result in a party wipe or start a slow spiral towards a party wipe as additional resources are needed, focus is drawn away from the mechanics, and things aren’t killed as quickly as we’d like (forcing the group to face more mechanics). Any kind of clear for a Savage raid is brag-worthy, but we’ve got a special claim beyond even clearing it with No Echo: we did it while it was (and still is, as far as I know) bugged.
Continue readingSummer Days I Can Finally Enjoy As It Comes To An End
After months of constant heat and too-warm mornings, we’ve finally had some days with lower temperatures. Heck, it even dropped into the low fifties overnight, just recently. We’re finally back in the range of what I’d expect for mild Summer weather and I’m only slightly worried that it’s happening in late August rather than September when I’d start to expect days like this [of course, this week, it’s already going back to temperatures in the mid-to-high 70s]. It’s nice, though. To be able to enjoy the breeze without tons of wildfire smoke, to be able to exist outside without sweating, to be able to bask in the warm sun while the cool breeze blows past… I’ve been missing weather like this for a long time. We used to see it more, but now we tend to leap past it, either because Winter ran long and Spring catapulted instantly into Summer or because Summer arrived early and ate what little Spring we might have hoped for, so I’m trying to enjoy it while I can. Not by opening my windows, of course. That would be a disaster for my allergies right now… I’m just trying to get back into the habit of my daily walks now that it’s less punishing to even step foot outside. I’m hoping this weather will stick around for a while, and that it’ll lead into a nice, gentle Fall, but I’m not holding my breath. Nothing about the seasons has been “gentle” in years.
Continue readingThe Price Of Burnout
After months (and perhaps even years, depending on how you want to measure it), I’m taking my first break where my depression hasn’t been a factor. Which means that, as I’m assessing myself and my well-being, my burnout is the remaining explanation for how awful I feel. Surprisingly, my depression was only about twenty percent of how bad I’ve been feeling for a long time and while it, and so many other factors, contributed to my burnout, removing my depression as a factor doesn’t decrease my burnout. It just shows me how bad things have gotten. Which is why I’m going to be taking a break from proper blog posts today and tomorrow. I’ve finally hit the point in this suddenly-a-full-week of vacation where I’m able to spend time and energy thinking about stuff, but I’m trying to avoid pushing myself too hard, so I will probably write posts, I’m just going to save them for maintaining my buffer after two days of posts and absolutely no writing as I felt myself by-and-large removed from reality by the personal collapse I’ve experienced as a result losing the tension and focus that has been keeping me going for the last eight months. So don’t look for a post tomorrow, but you can expect to see them again on Monday and I expect I’ll have plenty to say about all this which I’m sure you’ll be able to read next week at the latest.
Apt And Timely Metaphors In Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker
I’ve been slowly progressing the Main Scenario Questline once again in Final Fantasy 14. A little bit at a time. A few quests here or there, a dungeon, a trial, a little bit of support work, and so on. Slowly but surely, I’ve been getting closer and closer to the final parts of Endwalker–little threads that need wrapping up as whatever is next gets slowly referenced and eventually (I’m assuming) revealed. It’s been nice to move at a moderate pace, to make steady progress as I continue splitting my attention between a few different activities or goals, and it has given me plenty of time to chew on what’s been happening. I’m going to avoid details because I’m getting pretty deep into spoiler territory for the events that have been unfolding for the past four major updates to the Endwalkers expansion, but I’ve been having a lot of conversations with one of my Final Fantasy 14 friends about the story that have also given me plenty to think about. For instance, while I instantly agreed and had thought about it much the same way, I didn’t think of the conclusion of Endwalker as “fighting depression itself” until she put it that way. This particular vein of thought prompted me to take a step back from my “what does it mean to be a hero” line of thinking and consider other elements of the story that I hadn’t focused on up to that point. All of which feels a bit silly to admit considering that one of my favorite jokes about the Final Fantasy franchise is that the conclusion to most of the games can be boiled down to some form of “attack and dethrone god.” Which is kind of what happened in Endwalker, if you get just a tiny bit more metaphorical with it.
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