This has been an incredibly busy week at work for me. Tomorrow will bring some relief, since I’ve got to leave shortly after noon for an appointment and will be finishing the day by working from home, but the arrival of some of my foreign coworkers for their yearly trip into the main office has upended my usual schedule for my week. Not only do I have extra work to do now that they’re around–taking advantage of being in the same office to get some early feedback on the next version of the software and some early drafts of future features–I was able to figure out a way to get one of my big projects into a state where I could test it and that’s a high enough priority that I’m basically supposed to drop everything to test it the instant the project is testable. Plus, a testing report I wrote weeks and weeks ago wasn’t getting reviewed so my boss announced it was due at the end of this week to light a fire under the asses of the people who were supposed to be reviewing it, so now I have to also get that done this week, including incorporating feedback from my coworkers as soon as possible so that if I need more answers from them, I can actually get them in a timely fashion. Sure, my boss’ declaration worked and I’ve gotten more eyes on my report since he pulled this stunt than I’ve gotten on all of the previous versions of the report combined, but it’s a lot of extra pressure when I’m already swamped. What turns this from something I’d endure into something I’m writing about on my blog is how the team reacted to my decision to stay and keep working when the rest of the team went out to dinner.
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
Posting Through A Depression Spike
It has been a while since I’ve written about it as anything other than a tangent on a post, but I’m still struggling with my now months-long depression spike. It has definitely helped that I rarely leave work while it is still fully dark outside and that I’m able to get more sun than ever during my walks (though I’m needing to wear sunscreen now, which is not my favorite, since one of the medications I’m taking makes my skin incredibly sensitive to sunburn). That’s not enough, though, since I’m still struggling to get enough sleep and the constant grind of stress and long work days at my job are more than counteracting the positive effects of the longer days and greater exposure to sunlight. Not to mention that I feel like I’ve been struggling to connect with my friends lately and while that is probably just the depression talking, I still feel like I’m not as socially active as I used to be. I’m also struggling to make space for my own creativity and what space I do make (mostly these blog posts) feels tainted by all the stress and frustration I feel with the shit WordPress’ owner keeps trying to pull. I’ve still got my tabletop games, but most of those don’t meet as regularly as I’d like and they all have their own stressors as I try to avoid getting caught up in anxiety spirals around stuff my players said or did that could be interpreted as them not enjoying themselves.
Continue readingBasking In The Solar Eclipse
Yesterday was the date of the 2024 Solar Eclipse (the day I wrote this, anyway: it was a week and a day ago as you’re reading this) and I had the opportunity to go outside for half an hour to watch it happen. Despite my love for celestial events and cool space pictures, I was a bit unprepared for it, since I didn’t have the energy to figure out what glasses were safe to use and then acquire a pair but, since I saw it while at work, there were plenty of people around who were more prepared than I and who were willing to share their glasses, specialty scopes, scrabbled together lenses, and goggles. As much fun as the eclipse was (and I LOVE a Celestial Event), it might have been more fun seeing what all the other nerds in the R&D department I work in came up with to view the eclipse using only the stuff they had around their labs. The very nature of our mutual employer meant that we all had high quality stuff to work with and that a lot of people contributing to these handmade objects actually had the knowledge necessary to make them correctly. Despite a rather high number of cobbled-together viewing devices, not a single person reported being ocularly injured. No one at work here was googling “why do my eyes hurt” like so many other people in the US have been since the eclipse. The ingenuity of all these people–coupled with their willingness to share their knowledge, their crafts, and their company–made an already excellent event even better than I could have expected.
Continue readingI Watched All Of Andor In A Single Sitting
This past weekend, instead of playing a ton of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, I decided to bank some more episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, got wrecked by the end of the fifth season, realized the podcast I’m listening to as I watch along (as separate activities) pivots immediately after those episodes to watching Andor, and then wound up binging all of Andor until 1 in the morning on a work night. This was not a great choice, to be honest, but my “a couple episodes” turned into “I NEED to watch another episode” and that was pretty much it for me. My initial plan for an uninterrupted Sunday (since two players of my usual Sunday TTRPG were out, I cancelled our session) was to spend most of it making some advancements in Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth so I’d have more to write about this week, but I got carried away by how amazing Andor is. This shouldn’t be news to most people, given how much everyone raved about it back in the fall of 2022 when it came out, but even I was surprised by how good it was and I had a front seat to everyone raving about it. I had high expectations going in, expectations that had been raised when I saw that A More Civilized Age (a podcast about Star Wars media that I’ve grown to love dearly) pivoted away from their plans to focus entirely on Andor, and they were exceeded in almost every single way.
Continue readingEarly Thoughts On Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
After a week of cramming what gaming I can into my work nights, I’m about six hours into Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Which might sound like a lot, but much of that time has been spend exploring the largely open world available to me about an hour into Chapter 2 of the game. After all, I can’t NOT explore every nook and cranny of the wipe world open world suddenly thrust upon me with its incredibly limited potential since there doesn’t seem to be much in it other than crafting resources. What if I missed something actually interesting [turns out that following the plot unlocks exploration activities so the interesting stuff isn’t even there or available to you until you’ve gone through the requisite steps]? What if there was a quest that I missed because I didn’t run along the top AND the bottom of each cliff? And, like, after spending some sixty or so hours (probably more, to be honest) playing two Final Fantasy 7 games–Remake and Intermission–that didn’t let me move freely around the world, I might have gone a little bit overboard. Also, you can jump now. Sort of. You have to be next to a cliff that the game judges is short enough for you to jump up, jump down, or somehow clamber over, but you can do it. Only vertical jumps, though, which lends some credence to one of my idle theories from a post that went up just over a week ago. If you want to hop across a small gap, you better hope you can jump down and then back up the other side. After all, you’re not jumping. You’re executing environment maneuvers. Heaven forbid you actually jump. Still, all that aside, it’s been an interesting look at what I might be able to expect from this game as I continue playing.
Continue readingClosing The Loop In My Dungeons And Dragons Campaign
Bumping our record to three out of three scheduled Dungeons & Dragons sessions for the first time in years, my group playing The Leeching Wastes met for our third session following the revival of the campaign. Last time, I revealed that their characters were caught in a time loop situation and that there was something going on with the moon thanks to a (relatively) young god performing her first miracle, finally living out my dream of bringing Majora’s Mask to my D&D table. This time, the party reviewed their plans, ran through a short scene that turned into a long scene (which is my favorite way that a short scene can go) between two characters, decided to wait until they could start fresh with a new loop, and one of them even turned into a weretiger. We also talked through the mechanics of the time loop and how they weren’t designed to be punishing since they’re only third level character, talked about how the checkpoints worked in case they needed to try again, and then they absolutely aced it on their first full attempt to get through, all without using the skills of the NPC I’d created to fill in some of the somewhat alarming gaps in the party’s abilities (suffice it to say that there are no terribly cerebral characters in the group). They just strolled right through it, arrived at the boss fight, and even learned a little bit about everyone’s favorite cute, little NPC that they were guiding to a central point in The Grove so she could perform a druidic ritual to help The Grove’s balance be restored. A good, fulfilling session where everyone got to have a good character moment or two, where everyone got to show off their stuff in combat, and where the paladin obliterated half of the two-monster boss fight in a single critical hit thanks to some hefty damage rolls and a damage type vulnerability. Good times, all around.
Continue readingSpring Weather In Winter And Winter Weather In Spring
I spent my most recent Friday (two Fridays ago from when this gets posted) spring-cleaning my apartment. Which feels a little funny to write today, given the blizzard conditions I drove in last night and the multiple inches of slowly-melting slush that still coat the ground today. A lot of which is only just thawing out from last night’s freeze. We’re solidly in April now and still getting wintery weather, despite much of our actual winter being much closer to what I’d expect of spring around this point in the year. It’s not unheard of for us to get a few late snows (as late as May, sometimes) as spring temperatures fluctuate, but we rarely get snow after we’ve had a day that has broke past seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday, two days of rain turned into about thirty-six hours of snow and while it only just barely froze while it was falling yesterday, that little bit of ice and tons of slush turned my evening commute from its comfortable fifteen minutes into an hour-long affair. It was horrendous and coming home to a still-clean apartment was only mildly comforting. After all, I had to turn my heat up again and figure out what I was going to do the next day if the roads proved too treacherous to risk (as it turns out, the roads were fine, but getting to them was nearly impossible because my landlord never plowed my parking lot and being in an underground parking garage means contending with a slippery, uphill drive that proved impossible on mornings like today’s). Which wasn’t a huge issue, but it’s still incredibly off-putting to have spent a solid ten hours with my windows open as I cleaned my apartment more thoroughly than I have since before I moved into it and then, just over three days later, see snow blowing in my still-open bedroom window.
Continue readingTaking A Break Between Final Fantasy 7s Remake And Rebirth with Intermission
Over the weekend, taking much longer than I expected, I played through both chapters of the Final Fantasy 7: Remake Intermission. I’m pretty sure I’m missing part of the name, but even after looking it up, it seems confusingly similar to what they’re calling the remake of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core, so I’m just gonna call it “FF7: Remake Intermission” or just “Intermission” for short. Despite my confusion and unwillingness to engage with it deeply enough to deal with the overly complex naming scheme used for parts the remake of Final Fantasy 7 that aren’t a part of the “core” game, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The Fort Condor minigame was a lot of fun, if a bit frustrating at times (I beat the grandmaster, but only be restart spamming so I could get an advantageous start and then getting a bit lucky as the match continued), and seeing the other side of Avalanche was an interesting addition to the world. I got a bit tired of how many references were crammed into the game, partly because it made it very clear that Rebirth was going to have less going on in the periphery than the original game did. Which, you know, makes sense given how much they’ve expanded the part of the original game that they turned into Remake. Games aren’t infinite, even if this one comes on two discs unlike literally any other massive PS5 game I’ve played (though not needing the internet to play this game is a pretty big plus that none of those other games can claim), so it makes sense to trim down some parts of the old game to make room for additions like riding Segways.
Continue readingPlaying A Shipshape Support Character In A Birthday One-Shot
Last week, I had the privilege of joining my friends for a birthday one-shot Dungeons & Dragons game. Most of the players were my every-other-Wednesday group (who play The Leeching Wastes campaign I’m running), but this group was originally formed from the available players of a group I’ve never been a part of before. Now, I’ve run a D&D game for everyone in the one-shot’s group before, thanks to our trip to Spain in 2023 and our desire to run a D&D game in a castle while we were there, but this was my first time playing along side one of the players and my first time to play under this GM since early 2023. It was nice to be back at his table, to be able to play a silly, goofy character, and to enjoy some light-hearted fun. And then talk with one of the other players for an hour and a half after that, which included discussions of creating a book club for the two of us to use as motivation for getting through interesting-to-talk-about-but-difficult-to-read books like Frank Herbert’s Dune (which we’ve both bounced off before). But I digress. This post is about the one-shot, my fun little character, and how I incorporated both my desire to create an interesting thematic character while still making one that will be an effective part of the mechanical side of the game. They were built as a nod to the limitations of a one-shot and as a means of maintaining a high degree of effectiveness that would, if used well, make my allies look good instead of me.
Continue readingChanging The Past By Destroying The Future In Final Fantasy 7: Remake
I finished Final Fantasy 7: Remake. I’ve still got to do the Intermission thing with Yuffie and I’ll probably go back at some point to finish collecting the achievements by playing through the game on Hard Mode (I’ve been enjoying the extra challenge of a more difficult game mode lately and I enjoy the combat in FF7: Remake enough to figure overcoming the challenge could be a fun way to spend my time), but I think I should finally be getting to Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth sometime this weekend [this turned out to barely be true, as I only had about an hour to play it before I went to bed Sunday night]. In the meantime, though, I’m surprised by my lack of ideas to write about. Sure, I’ve got plenty to say now that I’ve fully played through both Remake and the original Final Fantasy 7, but most of that is kind of boring since it amounts to “oh, I know who that character is, now” instead of “who the hell is this Sonic The Hedgehog-looking bipedal Cat?”. Which, honestly, is still my main impression of Cait Sith since I played FF7: Remake the first time not long after I watched the Sonic The Hedgehog movie in theaters (and all that separated the two experiences was the everlasting month of March, 2020). He sure looked like a character right out of that movie. Other than that, most of my impressions of Remake have nothing to do with the original. After all, the whole point of the end of Remake is that you’re ultimately rejecting the pre-ordained future of the original game. Quite literally, given that you fight three strange figures in the lead-up to the Sephiroth fight that are, according to the Assess skill (which shows you a bit of background information about the enemies you’ve targeted, some battle strategy information in yellow text, and then a bunch of game statistics such as weaknesses, resistances, and immunities), the embodiments of people who fought for the future you’re rejecting.
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