I kind of expected shit to go sideways as soon as Trump took office. I’ve been readying myself for it for a while, after all, so I had a pretty good idea of what his government would do, how’d they do it, and how that would go. I didn’t expect it to be as grand and sweeping a shitstorm as it is, but we’re still within (the admittedly far end of) my projections. What has surprised me, though, which maybe it shouldn’t have given how the election went and how the party behaves over all, is how the Democrats don’t seem to be doing anything at all. And not only are they not doing anything, but they’re actually supporting some of the confirmations of Trump’s horrible, unqualified, and incredibly disastrous government. They’re not trying to reformat themselves into an opposition party. They’re not even trying to PRETEND to be acting against him! What they’re actually trying to pretend, with a few exceptions, is that this is a normal governmental transition. Which is whack! It’s fucked up, even! This shit isn’t normal and the fact that they literally made a goddamn vote deal so they wouldn’t have to work on the weekends is abhorrent, ESPECIALLY after the first aerial crash that came as a likely result of Trump attempting to gut the FAA. This isn’t normal! They should try to do fucking anything at all! Literally anything! People’d be lining up to support them if they did! No one likes this and even the people who like this are going to stop liking it as soon as more air traffic accidents start happening, disease via food contamination runs rampant, and the next plague breaks out! The first two are a foregone conclusion [I wrote this on the morning of the 31st, before the second collision, so I feel kinda bad but also very justified in writing this, even as SOME Democrats have begun to do something that still falls short of what feels like the minimum I’d expect from an opposition party] but the last thing seems increasingly likely as bird flu and fucking tuberculosis start to pick up and the systems that might have warned us they were coming are being dismantled by a mixture of pettiness destructiveness and incompetence!
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Getting Caught Up In Virtual Reality In The Magical Millennium
After a couple lengthy breaks for the holidays, The Magical Millennium finally met up again! This time, we spent the entire session running through a virtual reality “escape room” type adventuring experience. The party’s goal was to find the four employees stuck in a factory where all the magitech machinery had gone haywire and then safely guide them out of the building. They had gone through a few rounds in the previous session where, thanks to their decision to split up and cover as much ground as possible, they’d found the first three employees AND a safe route to the front of the building. This time, they got an unconscious employee back on his feat, convinced the three employees they’d found that they knew a safe route out through the front door, found the fourth employee, found and fought an electric ghost, lost more faith in adults by uncovering the secrets of the cost-and-safety cutting manager, discovered they could have been shutting down the dangerous machines this whole time, and managed to get all of that done in a touch less than two in-game minutes. It was a pretty wild, busy session as I did my best to ride herd on the group, striking a careful balance between ushering people along and letting everyone have fun since I realized fairly quickly that we probably weren’t going to finish the rest of the virtual reality dungeon in this single session. I think I did a pretty good job of that, getting through twenty busy rounds of a dungeon while keeping the information flowing as the group solved the mysteries of why the factory was going haywire and briefly touched on the last secret of this gamified experience that would let them go wild in the VR Dungeon Sim they were trying to win. After all, this is a timed competition! They need to finish in first place so they can show up all their rivals and haters. At this point, I mostly just hope that they don’t overextend themselves and lose as a result of taking too many risks. They’ve got the time to be careful!
Continue readingA Late Night Mission Statement: Why I Write
I’ll be honest. I’m writing this at midnight the night before it’s supposed to get posted. I had a poem planned for today, but I haven’t had the time or energy to do a proper recording of myself reading it, so I don’t want to post it yet. I want to give it, and myself, time to breathe so I’m not cramming out subpar work just so I can have something ready to go. Getting anything done right now (this blog post included) is a struggle because I worked twelve hours today and the only reason I didn’t work a longer day was because I had to go to a doctor appointment this morning. I also worked fourteen hours on Wednesday (which isn’t yesterday anymore, since I started writing this after midnight), so I didn’t even start my day feeling any kind of fresh. I’m worn out and worn down by the stress and effort of the last few days, which is probably why I’ve written and deleted several partial and complete opening paragraphs. None of them felt right. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff on my mind as the world continues to devolve, as horrible things happen to people, and only the rich shitheads seem to be getting anything positive out of this state of affairs, but it’s difficult to put any of that into words that feel worth writing here and now, at my desk as I’m fighting the urge to sleep.
Continue readingRecovery Is A Process
Well, after pushing my limits as far as I could pretty much every work day for two weeks, my physical testing is one day from being done (well, for now. No testing is ever truly “done” and there’ll be more physical testing coming as soon as new parts show up and I’ve got so much software testing that needs doing that I’m starting to think about working on future weekends) and I am exhausted. My arms are sore, my hands are stiff, my forearm muscles have gotten much larger than I ever expected them to be, and I’m ready for another weekend of rest. And maybe another few days past the weekend. I wouldn’t mind some more time for my hands to recover, for my muscles to rest, and for my joints to get some relief. Even keeping my goals modest by sticking to fifty test cycles a day rather than aiming for my previous target of one hundred, the toll this work has taken on my body is considerable. My physical therapist, though, thinks it’s all a good thing since my problems seem to all be muscular now and that I’m as generally resilient as I am about it. I feel better each morning. I’m capable of moving in ways I couldn’t when I was on those medications. I actually got up from a laying-down position using core strength alone and It’s been a good nine months since I even attempted that. I just, you know, ache from repeating the same strenuous activity fifty times a day every day, on top of all my other laborious work. Normal stuff. Anyone else would ache as much, if not more than I do.
Continue readingSurprisingly Relevant Politics In Final Fantasy XIV
I’ve written before about games that are so big that you can find almost anything you want to look for in them. In games like Dragon Age: Origins, it leaves you with a game that isn’t really saying anything or that buries the things it would like to say in smaller chunks of storytelling so that you, the all-important player, can make whatever choices you’d like and still wind up doing some form of the “heroic” thing in the end. In games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it never says anything but presents you with enough opportunities for you to say something about what you’re seeing that you will find a story emerging from your experience with the game. I’ve always preferred the latter, where the game relies on setting things up for you to discover or lend your voice to, because all of my experiences with things like the former have left me feeling satisfied with my video game time but unfulfilled. I’ve never really blamed games like that because how the hell are you supposed to write a story that can account for that much player choice without sacrificing a lot of the direction you’d like or rendering most player choice meaningless? How could you craft a story meant to have wide appeal that still makes a stand about what is good and what is bad in a way that will surely be alienating to some people? Well, Final Fantasy XIV does it mostly by (so far) taking a few weak but potentially alientating stands on some issues and letting everyone you skip all the cutscenes you’d like (with a few exceptions, but none of those ever seem to overlap with a story that has something to say beyond “hero good, villain bad”). Which I find incredibly surprising now that I’m digging into more and more of the story following the story that plays out over the first fifty levels of your character in the game given how it abjectly refused to do anything of the sort early on.
Continue readingFinding Our First Clues In The Rotten’s Labyrinth
After a bit of a break from sessions, my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns have finally begun to happen again. This past weekend (as I’m writing this and two weekends ago as you’re reading it), the campaign I’ve been calling The Rotten came together to do a little more labyrinth exploration, which involved making their way into their first proper hallways, finding some faded text carved into some large stone tiles, finding more faded text carved into smaller stone tiles, avoiding a few traps, fighting some undead that had been animated by the ambient magic just outside this part of the labyrinth, fighting some local raiders who were half-starved but who still nearly took down the party, AND discovered signs pointing them toward some long-forgotten religion! What a fun little session it was! We also talked about adding a few more players to the game–to help pad things out a bit when people can’t make it to a session–started inviting people, got three immediate “yes” responses, and then talked about what it would look like to have three more players. I’m still fairly confident that we’ll rarely have six players at the same time, but it’s bound to happen a few times, other than our next session when I’m hoping to bring them together to handle new character introductions and whatnot. If it happens too often, it might be difficult for some people to participate, what with all the extra faces and voices, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’ve got a lot of experience running a bigger group, so I have some ideas to help keep people engaged and interacting if it comes to that.
Continue readingIs It Still Resilience If I’m Just Willing To Accept Being Miserable?
Content warnings for discussions of mental health and therapy, including suicidal ideation as a side-effect of obsessive-compulsive disorder and non-specific misery.
Continue readingPressing Concerns
When I sat down and wrote this poem, I was at one of the lowest points of my year, where the only thing keeping me going was the thought that maybe seeing a physical therapist would help fix my sleepless nights, my back pain, and the constant pain that wracked every part of my body as the medications I was taking took their toll on me. I was focused solely on surviving in a way I hadn’t been forced to in decades and while I clearly survived, that period of my life cost me something that’s taking a while to come back, even as my body feels better and my sleep returns to a more normal pattern. Now, I am acutely aware of some of my behavioral ticks that I’d written off for a long time and can’t ignore what they mean any longer. Which is where this poem comes in. I’ll let you decide for yourself what all this adds up to.
Continue readingReflecting Along The Road To Recovery
Well, since I’m writing this a day later than usual (on the 17th instead of the 16th), I’ve now made it through two increasingly demanding weeks at work. I got through my first exhausted weekend, started this week feeling fresh, and immediately pushed my limits as far as they could go every day I could. I spent four days doing a huge amount of testing, recruited anyone who was willing to help me, and made it through about fifty percent of the testing I needed in about a week. I also completely exhausted myself such that, despite sleeping pretty decently last night (thanks to choosing to work less and sleep more the morning I wrote this), I’m ready to fall asleep at my desk. I even forced myself to take a day off testing, to rest my poor hands, my give my aching body a break, and to focus on denying my ever-present desire to be horizontal rather than any amount of vertical, but I’m still struggling to stay conscious and alert today any time I’m not actively doing something and half of the rest of the time. It’s a nice exhaustion, though. I feel sleepy and ready for rest rather than uncomfortable and in pain like I was for most of last year. I can be still and the lingering pains will cease or I can move and stretch and feel my body loosen up. Truly, it is a remarkable thing to be recovering after so much time of just being miserable.
Continue readingTurns Out I Really Enjoy Healing In Final Fantasy XIV
As I’m writing this post a week ago (compared to when it gets posted, anyway. Who knows when you’re actually reading this), I’m officially two weeks into my time with Final Fantasy XIV and everything I suspected would be true in my last post about it (almost two weeks ago) has stayed true. I’ve continued to enjoy my time with the game, even if I have spent my time pushing myself through the Main Scenario Quests rather than via my preferred “slow puttering” method, but I was eager to unlock more parts of the game and my friends were often making time for me, so I didn’t want to waste the time they could have spent on other things by being lackadaisical about the meat of the game. Now that I’ve finished the first portion of the game, everything up through level fifty (as far as the MSQ and my chosen Job, White Mage, are concerned, anyway), I’m ready to get back to a little bit of puttering, trying out some other classes, and starting to spread myself out a bit more widely as I get deeper into things. I’m still on the free trial, since I’m none too keen to start paying subscription fees for the game, so there’s still a bunch of stuff I can’t access or can only access via a series of convoluted events (like taking my friends on dungeon delves requires a friend to invite me to a group and then promote me to the group’s leader since I can’t make groups with a free account). I’m already looking forward to when I’ve played enough of the game to justify spending money on it so I can join up with the free company my friends are a part of and maybe even start making friends with some of them. There’s still so much of the game out there for me to find and play!
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