I’ve been more depressed than usual for a while now. I don’t know if my antidepressants stopped working or if, maybe, I would be worse off without them. It fades sometimes, for hours or an afternoon or an evening, which makes me think they’re still working, but it always comes back. Maybe my meds are less effective than they used to be. Maybe I’m more depressed than I used to be. The latter stands to reason, given the way the world is going, but the former is an unanswerable question so it is where my mind dwells. I do not know how I’d even begin to figure that out. I doubt that there’s a blood test of some kind my doctor could perform that would tell me and while I expect there is some way of figuring it out via brain chemicals, the actual process of testing my brain chemicals seems like it’s not the sort of thing you do to figure out if your antidepressant’s effect is weakening. And it’s not like I can ask my therapist if I seem more depressed than usual. Of course I seem more depressed than usual! Have you looked outside? Have you follow any amount of news? Why WOULDN’T I feel depressed with all that going on? I can’t even say it’s probably both because either one could have this effect on me by itself! So all I can do is wonder while I interrogate my feelings and continue getting the same “I’m too tired to feel anything” response no matter what.
Continue readingAuthor: Wren
Sifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: Worldbuiling Play Has Concluded
My players and I, minus one who was not feeling well, have met for the last worldbuiling session. We played a quick game of Sentinel (the second half of Sanctuary and Sentinel), that I ended without showing the full conclusion because I wanted to save that for the right moment in the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons 5e portion of this non-traditional campaign. We had a good few rounds of play before the end, thanks to there being four of us, but we still ended earlier than most of us expected. We were still building up to something bigger when the end arrived in the form of one of the deck’s joker cards, but it was just one pull before the random number I’d produced anyway, so we didn’t lose out on much potential build anyway. It just means the then-status quo will have to be significantly escalated in order for things to happen the way I envision. Which is possible! The danger of escalation was the constant backdrop of our game, so even if it never quite got there while we played, the idea was never far from anyone’s mind, so there are all kinds of crumbs and kernels that can be built into something larger. Plenty of ammunition, so to speak. I just need to take the time to sit down, work through everything we’ve built, and figure out how it all plays out. And how many years have passed. I did my best to draw out the time, to create a significant separation between the outside world and the life inside the dome that they characters will know, but we wound up less than three centuries separated and with some degree of contact for much of that. I will probably need to run the clock a while longer to really get the effect I want, but I’m also planning to toss a “long-lived peoples are rare” element into this world just to keep things a little less historically grounded. I want things to pass into myth and legend faster than they would if some poeple lived to be five hundred or whatever.
Continue readingAll I Want Is For My Coworkers To Do Their Jobs
I feel like asking my coworkers to do their jobs should not be something I need to do on a regular basis. This doesn’t apply to all of them, thankfully, but a few that I work with routinely make me wonder I’m expecting too much of them. I mean, I’m the most junior of my coworkers amongst this cohort of irresponsible adults and yet it often falls to me to make sure that they’re doing their jobs and not letting things slip through the cracks. It would be one thing if it was an occasional slip-up, but I’ve routinely had to go to one coworker for a foundational aspect of his job that I need him to perform so I can properly do my job and the way he reacts every time I do this is like I’m making some kind of horrible, unreasonable demands of him. I get it. It’s not fun stuff to do. He’s not passionate about the maintenance project. But it is literally his job and his job alone to give me the information I need so I can tell if the developers I work with are doing things right, if they’re actually solving the problem, and if they even know what the problem is. And it should not be falling to me to do that. Every single other person in this group is either a Senior rank in their role or promoted high enough that “senior” positions no longer exist. I shouldn’t need to be the person getting the group together to address problems or fill gaps or figure out how to proceed from whatever mess we’ve landed in because no one else did something about a glaring problem I identified months ago but couldn’t get anyone to take seriously because I have no authority and even 12 years of experience isn’t enough to actually get these people to take me seriously without concrete proof of a present and pressing issue.
Continue readingActions And Reactions: Choice And Consequence
It has been an exhausting set of weeks. Someone took another shot at Trump, this time a bit more metaphorically than previously given that he was stopped before he got close enough to even try to injure Trump, and the news is full of talking heads and Republicans repeating the same tired suggestion that this politically motivated violence is a result of the Democrats inciting violence. Which is incredibly infuriating considering that only one side of the current political “dichotomy” in the US speaks of action and violence and overthrow and it sure isn’t the Democrats. That’d be far too active for any of them to advocate for, even setting aside the moral decrepitude required to direct your followers to visit violence on your political opponents. All the Democrats have in them to advocate for, during the rare moments they actually speak in support of something, is forgiveness, tolerance, and passivity. Which sucks so much especially since all that means them just sitting there and taking it while the Republicans and every political consultant without a shred of conscience attempts to alter reality by insisting that the Democrats tone down the heat of their rhetoric literally days after calling on their followers to kill people, after attempting to designate multiple minority groups as some kind of sub-human population, and generally spewing the exact sort of hatred they’re accusing the Democrats of espousing. We’ve had many attempts on prominent Democratic figures, a few of which have unfortunately succeeded, and an increasing level of violence aimed at any group that isn’t a welcomed part of the Republican party. Which makes it extra sickening to listen to those hypocrites accuse everyone they can name of doing the very thing they’re doing, and that’s saying something given the base level of Republican hypocrisy I’ve adapted to.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14: Change On The Wind
Well, I was kind of right. I thought the next expansion of Final Fantasy 14 would involve going to all of the reflections (broken-apart pieces of a once-unified world) of FF14’s near-universe and doing the work of reuniting them/assimilating the broken worlds left behind by the series’ villains in the first few expansions (the Ascians). And while that might STILL be true, it seems like the next expansion is focused on one of them specifically and this whole next arc of expansions might be doing what I thought a single expansion would. So, yeah, I was kind of right. I just thought it might involve a bit more bopping around rather than picking a specific new place to go and having the whole adventure there. That, plus everything from the new patch content (all five missions of it) has me pretty excited for what all this might bring. Watching the presentation at the US Fan Fest and then playing through the new story content is really building up something interesting that is both pretty much what I expected and still feels new and exciting to me. It is going to be a long way, of about nine months, to before the expansion actually drops, but I’ve got plenty of stuff left to do before then (and rest to get, of course) so I’m not terribly worried about the wait.
Continue readingRest Day
Still dealing with a lot so even now I’m going to take another day to skip a blog post so I don’t get buried further than I currently am. It’s a lot to keep up with, between work and personal obligations, and trying to do work over the weekend to catch up kinda defeats the point of resting. So another skip, a small delay, and maybe I can dig myself out of this hole a little bit today.
Rest Day
I’ve been really worn out, to the degree of starting to feel sick, so I’m taking a day off of just about everything, including blog posts, so I can get some more rest. There’ll be a new post on Monday, but this is all I’ve got for today.
Normal Spring Weather, Finally
Following all the storms and heat we’ve had the past few weeks, the weather has finally settled into something resembling mid-Spring weather. Days in the 50s or 60s and nights in the 40s, good breezes, occasional rain, and the recent addition to “normal” Spring weather: random heat spikes and intense blocks of bad weather coasting aorund the edges of said heat spikes. It has been nice to be able to open the windows and leave them open rather than constantly run the AC (though that might not last much longer as Spring fully arrives and delivers a metric ton of pollen into the air around me), so I’ve been trying to make the most of it while it lasts. There’s no telling when it will shift back to warm days and stay there until the fall, so I am doing my best to appreciate what I’m getting between needing to adjust how open my windows are so it doesn’t get too cold or the rain doesn’t pour in my windows. For Whatever reason, I’ve been blessed with breezes that actually enter my apartment, which is great until it starts to rain the the gusts of the storm whip it into my apartment to soak my curtains or collect on my kitchen floor. But it’s manageable and far more pleasant an experience than another snowstorm or heatwave. At least there’s been very little lightning and wind as a part of the rain we’ve had so I don’t need to worry about losing power or the potential for tornadoes.
Continue readingReturning To Wanderstop
A while back, I decided I was going to write on essay of some kind per week. A longer post, more contemplative or reflective than my usual pieces, with the goal of getting back to the style of critical analysis that I used to enjoy when I was still a student (and still enjoy to this day, even if I site fewer sources and never produce a proper MLA bibliography). I even did it a couple times until I started writing this post and then… Well, I ran aground on the problem at the heart of this and have been too burned out and beaten-down by life to push myself to contemplate it further. Because I started playing Wanderstop again. I got further and then, after a couple hours of play, ran into a hurdle I could not get over at the time. I still can’t get over it. And so I haven’t returned to the game despite how much I love its concept, art style, writing, and whole entire deal. No other game has forced me to confront my own habits and burnout and compartmentalized problems like this game has and it has proven more than I can handle while in the midst of… well, being stuck in a mire of problems I have no means of rapidly escaping. I cannot hide from it forever, though, and while I’m not sure my heart can handle diving back into it yet, I think I’m finally ready to return to whatever this winds up being.
Continue readingToday Is Patch Day And I’m Stuck At Work
It’s not actually Final Fantasty 14’s patch day. Well, you might be reading this on patch day, but I’m writing this ahead of patch day and my frustration with needing to work when I could be playing whatever new, exciting content is available has reached bad through time and left me feeling grumpy and frustrated before I’ve even been denied access by my busy work schedule. So annoying is it that time has violated causality and I am preemptively upset about events not yet come to pass! Which, to be honest, is because it’s quite easy to anticipate how busy I’m going to be next week and how much I’ll want to play the new patch despite being stuck at work for ten hours a day (eleven, if I include my commute), which means I probably won’t make much progress through any of what it has to offer unless I stay up late every night. I am trying very hard to break that habit, and that is more important than playing this game, but I am still frustrated that I can’t really take it easy during the release week for this patch because of all my work obligations and my need for overtime (since I haven’t gotten much at all so far this year). The decision I must make is clear, I’m just… I’m just annoyed about it. I’ve been excited about where the story is going, and all the new features they’re adding for months now and I’ve been too burned out to get myself stable enough to take a light week. So I must work and figure out if I’m going to take off friday for the May Day protest thing going on (still trying to figure out if it’s legit and a part of any of my existing networks).
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