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.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Crafting Burnout And Lines I Won’t Cross
I spent the last weekend (well, two weekends ago as this is getting posted) doing pretty much nothing but crafting and a deep dungeon run in Final Fantasy 14. It might have taken eleven intense months, but I think I’ve finally gotten tired of crafting. I’ve been making gear for people and the amount of mind-numbing macro-clicking involved in it is driving me more and more rapidly insane. I have done nothing but lose myself in crafting, the grind for various currencies, and trying to get new gear for the last month or so and it is burning me out like nothing else has. I’m not at risk of no longer wanting to play the game or anything like that, but it made me kind of glad that I had to take a week off for holiday travel. I don’t know that I’m going to be changing much in the next couple weeks as we run up to the release of the next patch, but I’m really hoping I can at least take a break from crafting a few hundred materials and gear pieces every week. I mean, I’ve still got a lot of stuff to do as I’m writing this two weeks before it gets posted: crafting and gathering food to make, a couple gear sets to wrap-up, one more set of gear to entirely produce, limited currencies to earn, and so much questing to do in order to be fully caught up for the start of the whatever comes with the next major patch, but I hope I can get at least another week away from all that before the update drops so I can do other stuff like level other jobs and work on finding some roleplaying opportunities or do literally anything other than constantly grind away at preparations for whatever the next patch is going to require of me to make the next gear sets.
Continue readingTaking The Week Off
I will be taking this week (the 24th through the 28th of November, 2025) off of blog posts because of the holiday (US Thanksgiving) and because I will be traveling for all of that time! I will not be near a computer and while I can do some writing on my phone, I prefer to avoid it. Plus, I’ll have enough going on with traveling for the holidays. I do not need to add blog posts to that mix. It would be detrimental to my already burned-out mental state. Normal posts, most if not all of which have been written by the time you’re reading this, will resume on Monday the 1st of December, 2025. Stay well until then! And preferably after then, too, but you get my meaning.
Familiar Disappointments Still Sting
Today (the day I wrote this), was the day that tickets for Final Fantasy 14’s Fan Fest went on general sale. I’d signed up for the pre-sale lottery (to get a chance to buy tickets early) but struck out there and then struck out again when I queued for tickets and got assigned the 8000th (and change) spot. I was not able to get tickets. Which, on one hand, is going to save me a bunch of money. On the other hand, I didn’t realize how excited I was about the idea of going to the convention until I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. It was a pretty heavy blow. Much, much heavier than I expected, to the degree that losing out on this opportunity has cast a bit of a pall over my day. After all, I don’t really have a lot of stuff to look forward to, most of the time, so any time one of those things gets taken away, it hits harder than it ought to, and there’s been a lot of it lately. A lot of stuff has not been working out. lately. Siblings cancelling plans, friends getting sick and needing to cancel, missed opportunities, and so on. All I’ve really had that’s dependable is my gaming, work, and the inevitability of bills. It feels silly for this to be hitting me as hard as it has been, to rather completely sidetrack me for multiple hours today, but I have spent a large portion of the last couple years not planning stuff because of how often people flake on me or cancel last minute and I’m probably just a little overly sensitive to this kind of disappointment. I just wanted it to work out, despite all the evidence it wouldn’t, and now I have move on from this. Eventually.
Continue readingTeamwork, Bonding, And Growing Frustration
Yesterday, while talking about the final steps of my Final Fantasy 14 crafting project in our discord, I joked about a bit of bad luck on my part traumatizing another player and myself. You see, the final step of making my top-notch crafting and gathering gear in Final Fantasy 14 was putting little stat-boosting things called “materia” into the gear. Most gear has one or two slots that you can place materia in without a problem, but it is also frequently possible to add more materia to a piece of gear via a process called “Advanced Melding,” which is how you wind up with gear that is “pentamelded” (meaning it has five materia melded into it, which is the absolute cap on melding). The reason most people don’t do it is because there is a decreasing chance of success with every subsequent Advanced meld, with the 4th advanced meld having only a five percent success rate, and that innocent little five percent number only means that you have a low chance of success, not that it will happen five out of one hundred times. Everyone who has done pentamelding has a horror story of burning up a huge chunk of materia in an instant (you can check a box to make the game just keep trying until it succeeds so you don’t have to click through the activity so many times) as your luck turns bad and you go from spending one to twenty on an attempt to spending over a hundred. Which almost always means that a significant amount of money also just vanished into smoke. Which is why, when I burned through 1,260,000 gil (FF14’s in-game currency), my friend (who was crafting other stuff next to me and had helped me acquire all the materia) and I simply froze and stared at the chat window’s little read-out. It was so much. Fully a third of what I’d bought in that round and I burned through it in an instant.
Continue readingHoliday Travel Preparations: Changed Oil And Managed Expectations
I am preparing for a bit of a long car trip. I’ll be driving about two thousand miles, all told, over the course of a week, so I’ve been trying to get some things in order to make this trip happen in a way that isn’t going to destroy me. Primarily, I’ve taken my car in to get serviced. Thankfully, despite passing 111,111 miles just the other day and being almost twelve years old, there’s nothing really wrong with it. An oil change, a new oil filter, and an appointment to change out the weatherproffing seal around the driver’s door for after the holiday. Pretty small stuff, all told, and little enough that the anxiety I’ve been ignoring about needing to replace my car any time soon (which I absolutely cannot afford to do) has faded thanks to its clean bill of health following a full inspection. It is, of course, entirely possible that some significant issue is just one pothole away from bursting this sense of security, but I’ve been going to this mechanic for nearly a decade and they came well reviewed when I first started bringing my car to them. I trust their work and their thoroughness when I asked them to make sure I wouldn’t run into any problems during my holiday travels. I might still need to check the air in the tires since I prefer to put them at a higher pressure than I think they put them at (I like the top of the range of the acceptable tire pressure and they usually only fill them to the bottom), but I did forget to ask about that this time so I wouldn’t hold that against them.
Continue readingIntrinsic Motivation Doesn’t Make Me Immune To External Discouragement
After wrapping up everything but the finishing touches on my Final Fantasy 14 gear project, I posted in my Free Company’s discord that I was planning to make myself new gear right after the patch drops with all my fancy new gathering and crafting gear. I wanted to know if anyone else was interested in participating in a fun little bleeding-edge gear crafting activity. So far, I’ve gotten one bite and a lot of silence (as I’ve mentioned before, I think most of the bleeding-edge players in my group have the in-game currency to just buy whatever they want, so they will just wait until the prices drop a little bit and buy it OR just accumulate it slowly by doing the raids and whatnot), but the bite I did get has been very interested in making this happen. It’s a player I kinda get along with and have been doing more and more with as I shift into endgame content, but he’s very combat-focused and a bit less crafting-focused. He is absolutely doing a bunch of crafting still, but he hasn’t even gotten all of his jobs to level 100 yet, so there is likely no way that he’d be ready in time given how much combat stuff he does every single day (it’s exhausting even thinking about trying to keep up with him!). That said, all of his gathering skills are at level 100 and he recently requested that I help him get somemid-tier gear for his level 100 classes. That took a little time (not much, given that I’ve done it already and have higher stats than when I did it myself), but I quickly realized that I should just get him up to the current top-tier of gathering gear. It’s a bit more work on my part, but less now that I’m using all top-tier gear and it’ll be a huge help to have someone gathering the new materials alongside me. He’ll probably still do mostly the combat stuff and I’ll do most of the gathering and crafting stuff, but it’s good to have someone ready to help out.
Continue readingThe Story Of Senate Democrats: Turns Out It Was All For Nothing
I am writing this monday morning, between tasks at work as I try to pace myself through a day full of frustration. Last night, a bunch of Democrats capitulated to the latest Republican bullshit as eight of them (none of whom are up for relection next year, “coincidentally”) voted to pass the current Continuing Resolution (which is like a budget except it just kicks the can down the road for a couple months). Forty or so days of a government shutdown causing untold hardship for so many people and they gave up without getting anything other than a promise that there will be a vote on healthcare stuff. All of which ignores just how many people are going to lose healthcare as a result of this CR and makes the suffering of federal employees and low-income households getting food assistance a complete and total waste. There was no reason to shut down the government. The Dems got nothing but an empty promise for a future conversation that will likely have as much benefit as anything the Dems have “done” up to this point. It’s just so galling to see, especially on the tail of such a big blue wave not even a full week before they threw in the towel! The people said they want fighters, officials who stand for something, and the current crop of senators replied by instantly giving up. It was all such a waste. A pointless waste.
Continue readingI’ve Even Stopped Wishing I Could Put An Optimistic Spin On These Posts
It has been a rough… Well, couple of months in particular. Years. Decade. Etc. But the last couple months in particular have been very draining and extra exhausting. Having all of this stuff with my family hanging over me isn’t helpful at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The world looks increasingly awful as fascism continues to rise. Sure, we had a really good set of election results this past week, but we’ve got a long ways to go before anything starts to really change and the actions of various senatorial elected officials have made it pretty clear that this doesn’t change anything in their eyes despite how clear of a call to resist this should have been [I wrote this before they gave up, too, but more on that next week]. I don’t know how it could be any more clear than it is that the people of the US want our elected officials to resist every single one of Trumps moves, heinous or mundane. Throw is increasing work loads, a messed up sleep schedule, and it’s no wonder that I can’t seem to shake the dogged exhaustion I’m feeling. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that? It’s all I can do to even think about sending a letter back to my aunt, the one who responded in what I’d call a positive manner, let alone write it and manage all of the other stressors that are taking up space in my mind with no relief on the horizon. All I want to do is lay down and surrender to unconsciousness until something has happened to resolve at least one of these things because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to actually do anything about any of them.
Continue readingThe Rot That Is “AI” Keeps Spreading Into Things I Love
Square Enix, the company that publishes (and makes, for the most part, but it’s also a little more complicated than that because of how companies are structured) Final Fantasy 14, has announced recently that they’re partnering with a bunch of local academics in Japan to study current “AI” products in an effort to have seventy percent of all Quality Assurance (testing, aka the work I do) and debugging fully automated sometime during 2027. Now, this is, of course, patently ridiculous and not something that will actually work out or is even possible in the way they want it to work, but the past years of watching the tech industry get gutted and people begin to lose their jobs to “AI” bullshit has taught me the obvious lesson that it doesn’t need to work for it to be adopted. It doesn’t need to be good for people to lose their jobs. It just needs to be good enough that someone can pretend it’s great and fire all of their QA staff in order to “reduce costs” so that shareholders can get a fraction of a decimal percent more money at the end of the fiscal year. It’s bleak, I know, but all of the studies done on it, every post-mortem on “AI Workflows” and almost every single company to adopt it have all shown that it is a neutral move at BEST and a net loss in every other case. People hate needing to check over the work of “AI” because of how often its wrong. People hate being forced to use tools that don’t work properly. As I watch it chip away at the industry I work in and watch it start being focused specifically on the work I do, I can’t help but feel like I’m staring down the barrel of a loaded gun every time it comes up. Which means that, every time someone jokes about it trying to take my job, I feel like they’re joking about the gun pointed at me going off and then insisting that it will never actually happen whenever I try to talk about how all this feels or why it’s bad to have around.
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