I’ve been making progress in the final (currently available) expansion of Final Fantasy 14 (Dawntrail) over my weekends lately, but I don’t really have a lot to say about it yet. There’s very little that has carried over from the previous chapters of the game, so I don’t have a building sense of what’s going on to discuss, and I’m only just starting level 94 quests (out of level 100), so I’ve yet to get to the midway point, much less what I expect to eventually be the inflection point or whatever twist might be coming. Things are just fine. They’re proceeding apace. I’ve reassessed my opinion of one of the main characters and am beginning to suspect so many people online seem to hate her because she’s a woman who is seen struggling with the mantle of potential leadership (I’m flashing back to how nonsensically people reacted to Keyleth of Critical Role’s first campaign) but I’m trepidatious given how many people react to that with something like “just wait” or “the story isn’t over yet.” Other than that, though, the only other noteworthy thing is that I’ve learned my favorite song from the expansion (so far) is called “Taco Delight” and I’m not sure how I feel about that beyond “mildly amused.” That’s fine, though. Most of my time and attention has gone to my various other activities: leveling crafting classes, working on leveling up my non-main combat jobs, doing side-quests with the job I’d set aside for that purpose, and doing high-end difficult content. The two raid series I’m still in, The Epic of Alexander (an “Ultimate”) and the Alexander Savage series (we’re now on A11S, the penultimate raid in the series), are what take up most of my extra time and attention since both require doing a bit of homework and preparation in the Savage series’ case and a LOT of homework in the Ultimate’s case.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Breathing Life Back Into My Tabletop Games
As part of getting my life back together following the dual function of working antidepressants and some rest, finally, I’ve begun the slow, laborious process of getting my two tabletop campaigns up and running again. One has met already, to talk through things, and the other failed to achieve sufficient player availability, so we’re going to try again in a couple weeks. It’s been so long since I really thought about my two campaigns that I genuinely struggled to get back into the right headspace for them. I was able to do it, thanks to extensive preparation and a review of my notes, but I was still picking up the pieces of it all as we sat down to review what had been going on, refresh ourselves as to what the plan was, and ultimately decide how we wanted to proceed in and out of character. I plan to do something similar for the other one, but that campaign spun up in the middle of my worst brain fog and depression this past year, so trying to pick up those pieces feels a lot like groping around in the dark for something that might cut me if I’m not careful. I’m not worried about remembering something that would upset me or anything, but there’s a certain gingerness I feel when thinking back to that period of time because it’s one of only a few blurry periods in my memory and all the other ones are minefields of forgotten/potentially-repressed trauma. It’s difficult to fight the feelings of nervousness such periods of forgetfulness inspire in me while also trying to actually remember what was going on and what I was thinking at that time.
Continue readingA Refreshing Breeze As The Winds Of Change Start Slowly Blowing
Last week (the days prior to this being written), Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air. This is noteworthy because it was a transparent attempt by the owners of the ABC network to appease the current US government, and Trump in particular who has long held a grudge against the late-night host. Kimmel made some innocuous comments about the death of Charlie Kirk, nothing that could be, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as making light of the far-right provocateur/gun-rights activist ‘s death. Despite that, adding to the growing unreality of an already difficult-to-believe week, the administration claimed that this was just one more “liberal” celebrating Kirk’s death and threaten to revoke ABC’s broacasting license if the network didn’t do something about Kimmel. ABC buckled as expected since it is clear that no corporation is going to stand up to Trump, and immediately the public began to mobilize. Calls for a boycott sprang up from several different corners of the internet and various celebrities also began to cry fowl. After all, this is a blatantly unconstitutional act and as clear-cut a violation of our First Amendment rights as any other thing that’s happened in the last two years since Biden’s government began cracking down on protests against the genocide in Palestine. What made it different is that this was something that couldn’t be written off. There was no way to describe this as being anti-semetic somehow, no way for people to open up a harmful “we should debate the rights/existence of this minority” discussion, no way for ANY kind of spin since Kimmel’s remarks were public record and the Trump administration has repeatedly proven that they will lash out at anyone who pisses them off for no reason at all.
Continue readingCracking Cooking With A Crock-Pot
One of my recent domestic chores of late has been trying to get myself set up for slower cooker food preparation. I’ve got plenty of good stovetop recipes that could probably be converted into slow cooker recipes, but I’m also trying to expand my game a bit, mix some variety in, by finding some new recipes I can set up in my crock-pot before work so they’re ready by the time I get home. I want to try my hand at different stuff rather than cycling through the same dozen recipes all the time, but I often don’t have the energy to cook every night or to prepare some kind of big, week-of-leftovers type meal on the weekends, so I’m hoping the convenience of a slow cooker will let me do that without delaying my dinner later than it usually is these days. The problem is, I didn’t grow up in a household that used a slow cooker, so I have zero experience cooking with one other than the pot roast I made for my birthday back in 2024, right before the crock of my crock-pot fell off my kitchen counter and shattered on the floor. I get the basics of course, it’s all there in the generic name (slow cooker), but I also know enough to know that very little water is lost during cooking and that the length of cooking means that various seasonings tend to be extra effective. Since my usual method for seasoning things is by smell, I can’t rely on that for any slow cooker meals since you’re not supposed to uncover it while it’s cooking, it’ll ideally be cooking while I’m at work, and the thin scent of food in a slow cooker doesn’t compare to getting a face full of steam from whatever you’re preparing on the stovetop or in the oven.
Continue readingI’m Tired But Not Sad So I’ll Just Ramble About Why That Is
As I slowly move back towards the kind of heavy labor I was doing at the beginning of this year (though at a slower pace, thankfully), it is nice to know that I am not only more physically capable than I was back then, but that a good night’s rest is more effective than it used to be. From just over a year ago until sometime in the spring, it would take me multiple days of rest to recover from a single day’s exertion and now a single night is enough to recover from feeling physically exhausted. Assuming I get enough sleep, anyway. But also, a year ago, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, three or four at most, without waking up with excruciating back pain! I was so tired and pained all the time that it was everything I could do just to keep getting through my days. I descended into a place of fog, exhaustion, misery, and constant trudging persistence while I slowly recovered from years with a worn-out bed, the physical toll of the medication I was taking, and the added weight of not sleeping enough for three months in a row. In fact, I only ever started to recover when I stopped taking that medication and my body was able to start properly repairing itself instead of… well, whatever was going on there. I tell you, there’s nothing like going from needing three to seven days for your muscles to recover from feeling tired to being able to get back up and do more with them after sitting down for a little bit, much less feeling almost all the way better by the next morning. I mean, today was a doozy and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow, but only enough that it’ll make me do my morning stretches for sure and not leave me in a miserable amount of pain like even half this much effort would have done a year ago.
Continue readingFinal Thoughts On Hunter x Hunter: For Real This Time
I finished watching Hunter x Hunter (2011) last night. I took a couple months off due to depression since the last arc deals with some family-dynamic stuff that hits a little too close to home for me to deal with if my emotional fortitude is lacking, but I’ve been doing better lately and I really wanted to catch up on Media Club Plus, so I sat down and watched the entire last arc yesterday (a week prior to this getting posted). It was so much better than I remembered. Not just this arc, but the whole entire show. I get why people love it so much. I can also see why the person who introduced it to me spent so much time editorializing and cut some parts out. If you’re not clued in to the deeper layers of the show, the metaphors the author was making in the source material and the depth enhanced by the decisions the adaptation team made while converting the manga into an anime, it probably seems like there’s a lot of fluff. Sure, there’s some, mostly in the form of the dropped plot threads that started showing up once the author started condensing his story in order to reduce the toll it took on him to continue writing and drawing it, but most of the stuff my ex-roommate called “fluff” is important deep characterization, incredibly specific worldbuilding, and the appearance of a narrator in order to help move things along. It’s such a well-crafted story that even the dropped plot threads get at least tidied up a bit, if not tied off somewhere, by the end of what I’ve seen. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s definitely better than I thought it was after my first watch and I can clearly see why that’s the case now that I’ve watched it again.
Continue readingTEA Time In Final Fantasy 14
After finally clearing the Alexander 8: Savage (aka A8S) raid, the core of our Difficult Content group decided that we’re gonna go into Ultimates now. Specifically The Epic of Alexander (TEA) as chosen by a poll. We’ve proven our abilities on A8S and now we’re ready for the big time. We recruited two other experienced players to replace the two of our A8S group that weren’t interested in doing Savages, and spent a hectic weekend preparing for our first session as what I thought was a planning session for sometime in the more distant future shoved everything else aside in order to start on the one day everyone had available. Which means, as of writing this, our group is down to one weekly “Content Rewind” session since the Monday one was displaced by Ultimate practice and we’ve had our first session. Things went pretty well, as far as Ultimates go. We’re making slow progress as we adjust to the new level of demands placed on most of us, each time getting a little bit further or messing up on something new, but it’s not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. Probably because I’d doing DPS for this group rather than the healing I was doing in the other group, but it’s like any other raid at the end of the day: you study the mechanics, work on getting your part down, and slowly move forward as the group comes together. I do miss the added complexity of healing on top of all that–having a challenge to throw myself into that’s constantly fluctuating and will likely never become rote–but there were people in our group who don’t have the versatility of skillset that I do, so I knew from pretty early on that I wasn’t going to get the chance to heal.
Continue readingI’m Gonna Make It Through This Month If It Kills Me
In the last five days, multiple news anchors have called for the death of homeless people and they all still have their jobs. Other people have stated, with no spin or hyperbole, the beliefs of a man who was killed in the middle of making excuses for mass shootings being an acceptable loss for the right to have guns and gotten themselves fired, doxed, or stuck on administrative leave as a result. People have come out of the woodwork to praise a man who spoke only hate merely because he was killed. An entire factory of temporary workers were abducted by ICE and had their human rights violated while imprisoned, which isn’t even the worst thing that happened that week. The president of the United States of America has called on the various executive powers of the government to start investigating anyone who has spoken ill of him publicly (culminating in Jimmy Kimmel getting taken off the air for incredibly innocuous comments, but that seems to have broken through to the general public in a way nothing else has so far, which feels both horrendous and mildly relieving–horrendous because so much worse has happened already and mildly relieving because finally, something broke through to the public). A man going about his day-to-day life was killed by ICE agents who lied about what happened and will likely face no real consequences because there’s no way to know for sure who did what because they’re going around with their faces hidden and all identifying information removed from what can’t even be called their uniforms. All of this, and so much more I can’t bear to write about (or don’t dare to write about) has happened in the first half of the month (September, 2025).
Continue readingVisions Of The Past In The Reflection Of An Arcade Cabinet
After seven years, my coworkers finally fixed the arcade cabinet one of us designed back in 2017. The computer powering it got bricked in 2018 for reasons still unknown but one of our out-of-town coworkers was in town for a week and decided he’d spend his spare time fixing it up. Now it’s working again and my team has slowly begun to gravitate back towards it. It’s currently running a different version of Galaga than we all used to play, but the few interactions with it have quickly resurrected the ol’ competitive spirit of some of my coworkers in a way that I find mildly frustrating but ultimately not worth my emotional effort. I’ve got much better reasons to be frustrated with them these days and it’s not like I’ve got the time for Galaga anymore. Back when we were all playing it, there were four testers on my team. Now there’s only three and we’re doing more work than ever, so taking even half an hour out of my day to do something simple and fun like play a round or two of Galaga isn’t really something I can afford to do most days. I might have a bit more time on Fridays, given that I’m usually less productive then anyway, but I don’t think I can pursue my old records as much as I used to. I’m not even sure I want to, to be honest. Not just because of my difficulties with my coworkers, but because I’m doing a lot of learning things these days and am very aware that I have a limit. I can only learn so much on any given day–and that’s a lot less than I’d like thanks to how draining work often is–and I’ve got more important stuff to remember than enemy appearance and attack patterns in a game older than I am.
Continue readingUnwelcome Invisibility In The Workplace
I seem to be unable to have a normal week after a vacation, still. Antidepressants and taking time to rest haven’t helped at all with that particular problem. At least this time, it’s a problem I can roll with, to a degree. To a degree. See, I had my usual Wednesday of meetings, but I discovered that there was yet more stuff going on that I didn’t know about and got to witness multiple people assign credit for the work I’d been doing the past three months to my senior coworker. Who, thankfully, spoke up to say he didn’t do it, but it shouldn’t have happened from the beginning considering all the people in that meeting knew about the issue at hand because I told them about. I am also on the record just two weeks prior saying that my senior coworker, due to the timing of his vacations, was relatively uninvolved in the related testing (though I left out that he found the first hint of this problem and promptly dropped the entire thing on my lap rather than continue to work on it himself). But no. Everyone was operating under the assumption that my coworker was the person who knew what was up and had been doing the three-digit number of hours of testing involved. All of which came around and made a pretty fine point as a plausible explanation for why people were being so weird about me working from home and not having some kind of publically available accounting of my work. If everyone assumed that most of the work I’ve been doing was done by my senior coworker, it would explain a lot of stuff going back a few years.
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