We’ve had our first session of the tenatively titled “Sifting Through The Ashes” campaign. We had a good starting session of The Quiet Year (By Avery Alder) and while it took most of our session to get through Spring, there was a bunch of slowly figuring things out as we played and periods of thoughtful silence, so I’m hoping this next session (the day I’m writing this, actually) will go a bit faster [it did! But more on that next week]. Not that I’m in any kind of hurry, I just want to keep things moving along and there’s plenty of ground left to cover. I want to keep us moving so that we aren’t still working up to the actual game we’ll be playing by the time next year rolls around. After all, we only have one regular session a month and up to two additional sessions scheduled as/if we find a day to hold them. That’s not nothing. Three sessions in a single month is pretty good even for a weekly campaign, in my experience, and we’ve definitely gotten that this month, so it looks like we’re moving at a pretty good pace. And yet I don’t want to risk us faltering or losing steam at a crucial moment. I also want to pace things so that my players have enough time to start thinking about whatever game we’re going to play next and getting through two seasons of The Quiet Year tonight (the day I wrote this, not the day it gets posted) would mean that they have two weeks before our next session and can spend that time reading the rules for the next game we’ll play. I’ve got it all planned out and being able to stick to that plan would be nice. Not essential, of course, just nice.
Continue readingAuthor: Wren
Family Like An Open Wound
A bit over a week before writing this, I got a chunk of skin taken off by a thing I was working on at work. A ratchet slipped and my hand banged into a hard metal edge in a way that gouged me pretty deeply. The wound was about the size of a dime (which is a bit less concerning when I tell you that my fingers are at least as wide as a quarter) and I spent the three days after that taking special care of it. I wanted to keep the wound clean while I continued to work and to keep it from getting irritated by coming into contact with anything. Once I was through the work week, though, and just spending time in my apartment, I stopped covering it and let it air out a bit. Now, a bit over a week later, it mostly doesn’t hurt. There’s still some tightness when the heat of my office dries out my hands, there’s the occasional twinge of pain if I bump it into anything, and there’s the dull ache of it every time I was my hands. It’s healing well, it looks much less horrible than it was, but a closer inspection reveals the true depth of the wound, as does running my hand or fingertips over it. So while it mostly doesn’t hurt, every so often, I am reminded of the severity of this injury and am inflicted with the full pain of the injury all over again (I never realized how much I use that knuckle for tapping things until doing that shot a lance of pain deep into my finger and arm). Which is kind of like the experience of cutting off contact with my biological family, just compressed down into seven days instead of seven years.
Continue readingFirst Thoughts On Pokopia… POkopia? poKOpia?
I’m not sure I’ve thought or said the same pronuncian more than a couple times in a row since I started playing this game. I didn’t even think much about it until I actually booted the game up on my Switch 2, an act that already had me thinking deeply about the game and it’s place in my life since I decided to buy a digital copy of the game. Typically, I eschew digital-only ownership because that’s a thorny proposition in this day and age of increasingly leasing products rather than actually owning them in order for companies to extorot more money from customers who just want to enjoy the things they’ve bought. I almost didn’t get the game at all for this reason, but there’s an inevitability to all of this stuff that I can’t really ignore, so I went ahead and bought it. In my mind, it’s better to buy the digital copy of the game than a physical cartridge pretending to be a “physical” copy of the game when actually it’s just the license required to allow you to play the digital copy of the game you had to download anyway. Better to be able to just play the game rather than need to swap cartridges around, if I can’t actually hold the entire thing in my hand. That way I can swap between two games without needing to get up or pick through my collection of cartridges. And, you know, not have to deal with the license relay bullshit involved in the game key cartridge if I ever, say, download the game onto a storage device in my Switch 2 that just so happens to never be in my system when it connects to the internet.
Continue readingDigital Spring Cleaning
In attempt to count the bad weather we’re having in the days leading up to the start of Spring (which has already begun by the time you’re reading this), I decided to stop putting off a significant task I’ve been ignoring for months and clear out my digital inventories in Final Fantasy 14. Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve accumulated a lot of junk that I thought would eventually be useful. Some of that wound up being true, and some of it wound up being incredibly false. It has been a real grab-bag, having all of that junk around, and while it was certainly helpful sometimes to just have the stuff I needed for whatever weird little thing I wanted to do or make, I’ve recently reached the point where I need to instute actual inventory management as I start having more and more stuff I need to sort into discrete collections that the game doesn’t recognize. So, rather than have to pick through a bunch of different inventories, I’ve reworked how much is kept where, what stuff is kept for future projects, what is kept from workshops, and what is kept around for my various “money makers.” It’s not a terribly complex system, but it’s one that works without needing a lot of management. Unforunately, that comes at the cost of actually needing to follow through on all of my “I’ll save this for crafting at a future date” promises so I can actually use some of these incredibly rare resources for their intended purposes rather than just throw them out so they stop cluttering up my virtual pockets.
Continue readingA Busy Weekend Is Enough To Wipe Me Out
I had a busy weekend. Not the busiest I’ve ever been, but I had stuff going on every day since Wednesday (of the week before I wrote this) on top of a being incredibly busy at work every day, and it has wiped me out. Only thing making today doable is that I’m working from home due to a blizzard. If I had to be around people and at least pretend to be nice and social, I would probably have lost it before the day was even half over. It is weeks like the one that just ended that remind me just burned out I still am. After all, it was busy but not horribly so. I still had time for fun stuff and social activities. I didn’t sleep as much as I’d have liked to, but I got enough. I shouldn’t be this tired. I shouldn’t be feeling like I need a vacation to recover from five semi-busy and mentally engaging days. And yet here I am, tired as well and wondering if one day of rest is going to be enough as I cycle through various tasks, trying to find something that keeps me engaged long enough for me to make any real progress while my mind wanders and I consider what it would be like to not have a giant list of stuff that needs doing and problems that need solving. I miss the days when I could just exist. When I didn’t have to chose between getting low-quality rest and burning more energy to get something done so that I can hopefully get better rest at some unknown point in the future when all the things on my mind that are stressing me out are finally done. I do not know when those days will return again, but it surely won’t be for a while.
Continue readingThe First Heavy Winter Weather Appears On The Cusp Of Spring
So, after a rather underwhelming winter of cold, grey, bland days, we finally get a proper winter storm. A blizzard, as they’re calling it. Up to almost a foot of snow, a heavy layer of ice, some amount of sleet, and heavy winds. A recipe for a nasty bit of weather that I’m kind of excited for and kind of dreading. It’ll be cold enough after the storm that everything is going to freeze up and anyone caught out in it will be in danger. Given that the winter has so far been mild enough to still see people panhandling, I really hope they all have some place warm, safe and sheltered to hide during this. At the same time, I’m kind of excited at the idea of being able to work from home because of the weather. After how crazy busy and exhausting this week has been, I could really use a bit of quiet and peace while I work. I’ve got my first session of my new campaign tonight (the night I’m writing this–this is also why I’ve got no “dev log” for this week, since nothing has happened yet and I haven’t done any further prep) and I’m so tired I’m considering cancelling it (I won’t) just to get a bit of rest. And work on editing this past week’s wrestling event. Wednesday shows really throw me off. All of which is to say that I feel more than a little conflicted and guilty about this upcoming storm because I definitely want it to happen but it runs a real risk of killing power in the area and whoever is forced to go out in that weather is running quite a risk to themselves.
Continue readingLiteral Blood, Sweat, And Tears
I’ve spent the last few days donating small bits of my fingers to the project I’m doing at work thanks to a mix of unlucky incidents and things slipping as I’ve been applying force. It’s made for an increasingly rough time given how many of my fingers I’ve had to bandage, how often I have to wash my hands, and how I keep needing to reapply those bandages in order to keep my (this makes most of them sound worse than they are) open wounds from getting dirt in them. When it was one finger, it was easy to make sure that one wasn’t involved in everything going on so I wouldn’t injure it again. Now that it’s half my fingers (and mostly knuckles at that), I don’t really have a choice other than to continue risking my digits. Which also makes it sound worse than it is. Most of the danger is just, say, a wrench on a bolt slipping or the nut suddenly coming loose, which causes my hand to lurch into a hard metal surface that refuses to let my hands go without taking a souvenir. Some of it is decidedly worse than that and not something I’m going to share on a public blog post due to the nature of my work and the incidents. All of which means that now I have a very deep appreciate for bandages and how “waterproof” doesn’t also mean “soap-proof.”
Continue readingThe Rapid Approach Of Dorohedoro Season 2
The trailer for Dorohedoro’s second season dropped a few days ago (as of writing this) and I’m getting pretty excited for it. It looks to have the same strange energy that the first season had, but with more going on? More order to find amidst the chaos? That or the trailer just took every bit of available “order” from the show and slapped it together in some kind of classic mislead that tends to crop up in trailers where they hint at something that doesn’t actually exist in the movie by showing you all of whatever it is in the trailer. I don’t think they’d do that with Dorohedoro Season 2, but anything can be made terribly, even things six years in the making (especially because it probably wasn’t being worked on for six years, but I don’t really know much about that), so I’m trying to avoid getting my hopes up too much. Which feels odd to say because, while I definitely enjoyed it while I was watching it, I thought I was much more neutral-trending-positive about it. Now, as I look back on it, I find that I feel more warmly about it and more actively engaged with it, maybe because my mind has had time to work through everything I saw, whereas I didn’t really give myself that when I first watched it? I mean, I binged the whole thing is a single go, more or less, so it stands to reason that I’d feel differently about it once I had time to let it settle, but this is maybe the first time I’ve liked something more as a result of that. Usually I either like it less or just appreciate some of the details more, which isn’t the same thing as liking it better.
Continue readingStepping Up The Workshop
As things have slowly settled and I’ve begun to adjust my expectations and workloads, I’ve decided to do a bit of stepping up my Final Fantasy 14 workshop. I finally reached my personal goal of having nine figures of in-game currency on my main character and while I’m absolutely not going to stop (I do still need to pick out a new goal now, though), I am shifting my focus a little bit. I’m going to try to put together a larger work call than usual in order to get some stuff on the market so we have fewer gaps in our offerings. It will be a lot to manage, I think, but it’ll be worth it in the end since I’m going to make a few adjustments to my rules this time around. There won’t be any radical shifts, mind you, and I’m going to be maintaining my limits on how much individuals can claim to limit how much the wealthier people in the group get, but I’ll probably wind up dropping it sooner rather than later given how some of those high-value materials are genuinely difficult to get in a reasonable time frame and only the more experience players in the group can probably acquire them quickly or easily (or just buy them outright since they have the financial stability to take the short-term hit in order to get the long-term gain). Regardless, this will be mutliple times more materials than I usually handle, so there’s going to be a bit more work required to get everything accounted for and handled.
Continue readingDaylight Saving Time Strikes Again
Once again, time has shifted. All the clocks I’ve been ignoring for months are correct once again (or just a couple minutes off instead of an hour and a couple minutes off). The sun rises later, it sets later, and everyone is struggling to adjust our perceived notions of time to fit the new path the sun is charting through the various hours of our days. It is not a pleasant experience. It is even less pleasant of an experience when you are awake for it as I was this weekend. Turns out that having a lot going on does not mix well with the bevy of negative feelings I’ve been struggling with lately and it creates a degree of dissastifaction that makes it difficult to fall asleep. So I did not get a lot of sleep that night (nor did I get much sleep last night as my soul casts about for something to feel about anything other than the constant grinding negativity in all its various little flavors) and now I’m struggling to deal with waking up “earlier” than usual even as I struggle to fall asleep at a currently reasonable hour much less one that used to be earlier than it currently is. My entire sleep schedule and sense of time is already messed up from months of not sleeping well, so throwing an hour shift into the mix is just making it work. I really hope I can get this sorted out sooner rather than later since I’m not sure how much more of this I can take…
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