Once again, the calendar has rolled around to the midway point in the year and I have gotten information about how my next year of financial life is going to shift. That’s right, it’s raise time. I got a decent raise this year. Objectively not stellar, considering my experience and the work I do and so on, but my employer is not known for paying well and I got pretty much the maximum possible raise I could get without getting promoted as well, which is rather uncommon for someone in the upper half of the pay bracket for my current position. My boss seemed pretty surprised by the numbers, but he might have been goofing around. I literally have no idea if any of the things he said were jokes or genuine. I actively interpreted them as jokes in the moment, because my boss is the kind of guy who will let anything slide as long as he’s got you laughing, but I genuinely can’t tell if they were if maybe he’s a lot less involved in how people get raises than I’ve been lead to believe these past nine years.
Continue readingAuthor: Wren
Aching To Return To Avowed
While I’ve not had as much time lately due to all the things I have to do in Final Fantasy 14 to help settle the community and situate some kind of new normal, I do really want to get back to playing Avowed. I’ve been having a great time as a Gun Mage and enjoying the sort of build/rebuild system of leveling up that allows me to effectively tweak how I do things every time I get to a new tier of power and should probably stop using weaker spells. I mean, I still have the drain life spell because that’s part of my “ultimately sustainability” maneuver, but really mostly because I have the bonus that locks down my target. It’s nice to have a panic button, you know? Freeze whatever moster or hulking man is charging me, looking to obliterate me in one hit because I’m a weak little noodle with only brainpower and determination to see me through the day. I’ve also gotten deep enough into the story that I think I know what’s going on (and have a suspicion that I might be shaping some amount of it? But maybe that’s just good writing to make me FEEL like I have more control than I do) and have only reloaded a save once because I had made a note to go do a thing, had to deal with my FF14 free company imploding, and promptly forgot in the hubbub that I’d made a note to go do a thing until after it was too late. Which I’ll give myself without any guilt. That was a wild, exhausting few days.
Continue readingSlowly Settling In To A New Normal In Final Fantasy 14
Being the leader of a Final Fantasy 14 Free Company (player guild) that has topped the weekly rankings twice in a row is pretty rewarding. I’m very proud of that accomplishment, considering how much work I did to make it happen and how much my life has revolved around making that a sustainable process over the last two weeks (and continues still, but to a lesser extent). I’m also proud of how much effort the community put it to making it happen as well, considering not everyone has so completely optimized their characters to the do the sort of work involved. I may have done a lot of the work, but only because I had people supporting me and enabling me to do that work. Truly a community effort, and one that I figured out how to make profitable for everyone. After all, that’s what I’m good at. No matter what, I will find a way to turn a profit. In a system like this, with predictable inputs and outputs, dependable resources, and actual rewards based on effort, how could I not? Which will come in handy since I’ve been sinking so much of my own finances into this group and paying back everyone else who spends their own in-game currency on stuff. I would like to pay myself back, eventually. And get the group opportunities to get paid, as well.
Continue readingShouldering An Old Burden
There is a particular pain I live with most days. Nothing profound, at least not in this case. I just come from a long line of people with bad joints and, as a result of taking after that side of the family so strongly (physically, anyway: I represent all of the mental health issues on both sides of my family rather than leaning in any one direction), I also have bad joints. Thanks to a lifetime of largely avoiding high-impact sports save for a period in high school and preferring cycling and swimming as my forms to cardio to running, I’ve managed to get pretty far into my life without joint issues. In fact, in the last few years, I’ve had a great deal of success improving my joint health thanks to regular excise targeted at maintaining flexibility and improving joint strength. Unfortunately, all of that has gone out the window due to the medication I was on a couple years ago and my subsequent struggles to get back into a healthy exercise routine. Which means an old foe has reappeared after quite a few years away: my right shoulder pain.
Continue readingSummer Has Arrived
After a couple weeks of relatively stable weather, we’re back to temperature jumps, storms, and the occasional severe storm warning. Thankfully, there wasn’t much to write home about during the two week period where everything started going to shit, went to shit, and started slowly recovering, but now, as I labor to get back into the swing of things at work and in my video gaming life, I am finding myself hampered by a day of relative uselessness that is the result of the shifting pressure. My joints, already worn from the work I’ve been doing the last few weeks and not nearly recovered enough thanks to my sleep troubles, are causing me pretty severe pain as the temperture drops fifteen degrees, a storm rages overhead, and the power blinks out briefly. It was bad enough around noon that I had a difficult time walking and moving around without groaning in pain, and I’ve walked off a broken ankle before. I’m no stranger to pushing through the pain. It’s just gotten really bad today.
Continue readingWork Continues Despite The Horrors
Work’s been hectic lately. While all of the bad stuff in my Final Fantasy 14 guild was happening, my day job was keeping me incredibly busy with bullshit. I got notified within fourty-eight hours of being given new test equipment that it needed to have a essentially eighty hours worth of testing done by the following wednesday. That wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if I hadn’t been getting ready to leave for the day on Friday afternoon. But I stayed, I did some testing, and I put all of my considerable experience and knowledge into figuring out how to cut down on the time between tests. I was able to get it from an hour to half an hour, but even that wasn’t perfect. There was still a hard cap on how much of that I could do in any given day and that was only because it was permissable for the stress of that testing to slightly change the behavior of the thing being tested since I’d be able to start the following morning by checking if the change in behavior was due to wear or due to the heat of the testing equipment.
Continue readingOnce More Waiting For Dorohedoro
Dorohedoro season 2 has concluded. At only eleven episodes long, it feels distinctly shorter than the first season, but also a little bit longer if only because it does not spend the first few episodes spinning its wheels. While it is clear that the information within those first episodes is important in retrospect, season 2 does not rely on the long view of the series to make its episodes relevant. Every seemingly disjointed moment, all of the action and reaction that weaves through its first episodes, comes together quickly, breaks apart, and then returns for the conclusion of the season. It is incredibly clear, from the pacing of the season and the final beats of the last few episodes, that there is more to come. Unlike the first season, which left on a a downbeat, a retreat from the action and a moment of setup for the long-haul, season 2 ends on the climb up to what feels like the story’s finale. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the next season (which has been formally announced even if no other information has been provided yet) is only going to be six episodes. There may be plenty more story to tell that I can’t anticipate, but it really feels like we’re heading toward the end of things at the pacing that Dorohedoro likes to take.
Continue readingSlowly Heading Toward A New Normal
I am working without a buffer now. Between building a new free company in Final Fantasy 14, work kicking my ass for a project that wound up having its due date moved back only after I’d done all the hard work in a record-breakingly short time, collapsing in exhaustion, and struggling to process all of my emotions from all of this and more, I just haven’t had the time or energy for writing much of anything. Everything else has felt like a higher priority than personal blogging and while I do not like writing the day before a blog post goes up, I don’t think I made the wrong call about how to spend my time these last few days. I wish I’d had more time, I wish I’d been less exhausted, and I definitely wish things hadn’t played out the way they did (but again, I don’t think I made any bad choices), but I’m here now, still absolutely wiped out and trying to write a post while forcing my eyes open so I don’t fall asleep at work or standing at my desk. Which I’ve done before. Woke up in time to stop myself from falling down, but it was quite startling, let me tell you.
Continue readingDesperately Grasping For New Games
In my doldrums, I’ve been trying to find new things to play that aren’t Final Fantasy 14. I’ve mostly succeeded, thankfully, but it’s still kind of rough since all the stress and everything of the last few days makes it difficult to enjoy things [and, as of editing this after everything blew up two days after I wrote this, I now feel compelled to be logged into Final Fantasy 14 and Doing Something To Fix This]. Thankfully, Pokémon Violet (a revisit, now on the improved Switch 2 hardware), Avowed, Ghost of Yotei, Pokémon ZA’s DLC, and Grounded have been there for me. Pokémon to fill my quiet idling hours, Avowed to bring me in, Ghost of Yotei to give my something else to do when I run out of this stuff, and Grounded for a survival building game with a friend. I’ve got everything I could need and I only feel a little panicked every night as I turn to this little collection of games and try to figure out what I’m going to do with myself. Which, lately, is mostly Avowed. The whole premise of it didn’t super appeal to me, especially considering everyone calling it an adventure game like Skyrim, but thankfully I looked past those statements (Skyrim was fun, don’t get me wrong, but I’m very tired of it now) and I’ve been enjoying myself. It’s actually been a fun alternative to FF14 rather than something I embrace out of a desperate need to do anything else.
Continue readingTime To Breathe
The last week has sucked monumentally and I’m just not going to have blog posts today or tomorrow. I need one less thing to do. I have too many. I’ve spent too much energy. If you want to know what’s going on, you can read about a stupid argument that made it clear I couldn’t keep ignoring what was going on, the listless days following that as I chose to do nothing while taking stock of how I felt and what I should actually do, and then what happened when that choice got made for me. So I’m going to take the time I would have spent writing blog posts and either rest or focus on being in community with my friends as we try to put ourselves back together after someone’s actions threatened to rip us apart.