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 readingAuthor: Wren
A 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.
Continue readingTrying To Find Balance In My Final Fantasy 14 Activities
Back in October, when I set aside everything else I had going on in Final Fantasy 14 in order to get deep into crafting (in order to avoid thinking about my relationship with my biological family), I didn’t realize that it would take me three months to get through that and everything that sort of just flowed out from it: two rounds of intense combat gear crafting, numerous rounds of crafting and gathering gear crafting (largely free of charge because I don’t like making people pay me for the ability to make/earn money on their own), the start of a workshop that has largely fallen into stillness now that the major demand for new gear and consumables has passed (though I imagine it’ll tick up again when the raiding members of the workshop run through their current stock), and starting progress on one of my alts. I thought it would be a few weeks of work and then I’d just go back to leveling other jobs, digging into older parts of the game that I brushed past in my drive to finish the Main Scenario Quests, and puttering around. Instead, I wound up getting carried away by all that, changes to my weekly activities with my FC, the slow start of a new season of roleplayed wrestling (busier now as I am the official cinematographer for the federation), and the thought of starting up a workshop within my Free Company to help give everyone the means to make some money while the thing we used to do is on indefinite hiatus. Only now, as I’ve settled in to the realization that none of my groups are going to become high-end content groups in any kind of a hurry and started doing stuff “to make sure I’m not missing out” rather than in preparation for a specific thing, have I returned to the slow, plodding tasks that fell by the wayside in my fervor to accomplish all my very specific goals.
Continue readingThe Return Of The Polar Vortex
Once again, the Polar Vortex has returned. I am writing this the day before it arrives and brings wind-chill temperatures into the negative fifties to my area, thinking about how long it will be before we get another day where the high temperature is in the upper teens like it is today. It’s not a big deal for most. We’re used to it at this point. I even had some people make wisecracks about my shorts and how I’ll need to find some pants or whatever (I won’t be outside in the wind long enough for it to matter tomorrow). Just another normal week of incredibly low temperatures made worse by heavy wind out of the north to make the further collapse of the jet stream that once kept these polar winds north of the Canadian border ninety-nine times out of one hundred. The rest of the country, from Texas to the distant northeast, is preparing to mountains of snow. They might be relative mountains–a couple inches in texas and multiple feet, potentially, in the plains and new england–but they all promise far more snow than the area is used to. Which I’m kind of jealous of, if I’m being honest. Where I live, all we get is temperatures far too cold for it to snow or precipitate at all and occasional snowfalls. I mean, we’ve had maybe a foot of snow fall this year so far, which is up from previous years, but most of it melted after the first round and the subsequent rounds have all been relatively light. This is not an opinion I voice anywhere that people are expecting to get slammed by snow because most of those places don’t have the infrastructure required to handle it (though, to be fair, judging by how miserably any of this year’s snow has been handled, I’m not sure my home has the infrastructure to handle it anymore either) and I don’t want to come off as insensitive, but I really do miss the days of heavy snowstorms and large amounts of snow accumulation.
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