While not as potentially momentuous for the entire campaign as the session prior, our most recent meeting of The Rotten Labyrinth was also pretty important for all the present player characters. What started out as some plans to regroup, rest, and then take another pass at the labyrinth turned into a chaotic delay as all of that was interrupted by two random encounters during their night’s rest. I rolled incredibly, uh, portentiously on the encounter table, during their watches, and while one event went unnoticed until the morning, the other was an attack on the party that almost ended in disaster as one of the stronger monsters wandering that part of the labyrinth finally showed up. The battle itself was a bit of a mixed bag, featuring both a ton of players being knocked unconscious, but also featuring a ton of players getting back into the fray just long enough to make a difference. It really put a damper on the plan for one of the player characters (the Bard) to grab the petrified player character (the Wizard) and leave for their Sylum in search of help ending the petrification. We even had that player’s new character prepped and ready to go, but we never made it there because the monster showed up and disrupted all my plans for the session. Still, we got a lot done and now the players are faced with three new problems they’re finally aware of: who touched their character’s stuff while they slept, why did that blob show up to steal their characters’ memories, and why was one of their characters unable to leave the labyrinth during the battle?
Continue readingAuthor: Chris
After Four And A Half Months, I’m Finally Ready To Recommend Final Fantasy 14 (With Caveats!)
At this point in time (Monday the 12th of May, 2025), as I near the end of the base portion of the Shadowbringers expansion after four and a half months of playing Final Fantasy 14, I am hesistant to recommend it. You might think that odd, considering that I’ve written about the game more-or-less weekly for the entire time I’ve been playing it. Who would spend this much time on a game they didn’t like enough to recommend? Who would still be playing this game, with it’s monthly costs and life-dominating time requirements, if they’re not having a good enough time to recommend it to everyone they know? I can’t blame you for thinking that. I’ve been chewing that exact question over in my head pretty much constantly since I realized that I’ve passed the 750 hour mark with this game. How come I’m not telling everyone I know to play this game? For a long time, whenever the question of whether or not I’d recommend the game would come up, I satisfied myself with that answer that it was because I knew how much of my time this game was consuming. “I could not, in good conscience, recommend something that might take over a thousand hours of someone’s life just to mostly catch up to the modern content” is about the shape of that thought, more or less, that I’ve kicked up again and again whenever I’ve gone looking for why I’m not trying to involve all my video game friends in the game I’ve easily spend the most hours playing (thus far in my life, at least). But, as I’ve gotten further into the story and grown to appreciate it more and more–grown to love the game as a whole more and more–that answer has continued to ring hollow in a way I can’t continue to ignore.
Continue readingDwindling Daydreams Of Just Less Work Are All I’ve Got Left At My Day Job
Sometimes, as I’m standing at my desk and sweating while I try to focus on my dumb little tasks on days that I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my job, I let my mind wander through potential futures or alternate timelines. Twelve years ago, when I graduated college, I had very different plans for my life. I’d spent the four years of my college education finding out what I was interested in, what I was good at, and what I cared about, and planned to eventually return to scholastic pursuits so I could earn myself an advanced degree in some kind of writing thing and eventually further that with some kind of further degree focused on medievalism or the development of language or something. I was going to work for a few years, pay off my student loans by the time I was thirty, go back for more education, and spend my life burying myself in my beloved writing and research and education (of myself and then of others). That, of course, didn’t happen, but my dream of living a life of telling stories lasted until pretty recently and now I find myself adrift with no future I’m really working toward beyond being debt-free, no attachments to my present (geographic or occupational) and so I wonder what kind of life I might be living if I hadn’t been shackled by debt or might yet live should I find a way to remove my need to spend most of my time and energy on being a cog in a machine that does not value me.
Continue readingA Mishmash of Gender Thoughts And Reflections On Pokémon Games
I started replaying Pokémon SoulSilver recently as my pre-bedtime wind-down video game. I can’t explain where the hankering came for, but I really wanted to enjoy the simplicity of an older Pokémon game and so turned toward one of my favorite entries in the series. It’s old enough that I can play it on my 3DS, new enough to have a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to the series, and is from a period in my life where I could just enjoy things without being aware of what the larger world thought about them, so I’ve got no difficult feelings or frustrations to ignore while I’m trying to calm down for sleep. As I booted it up, deleted my old save file, and started a new one, I discovered quickly why it had been so long since I played a Pokémon game. I was prompted pretty much immediately to identify as a boy or a girl and that little bit of text reminded me immediately of the complicated feelings around gender in Pokémon games that I developed while playing the latest mainline entry, Scarlet/Violet. Feelings that I might have only started to properly examine in the more recent years of my life but that had been foundational and important to me as I grew up in ways that I’m still figuring out. Feelings that developed as the Pokémon franchise developed depictions of gender via it’s ability to actually present characters and Pokémon that looked different. A thing that existed in the first game as only symbols in the name/nickname entry field, symbols on the Nidoran names to tell you which one you got, and as an abstract concept which, for a long time, my childhood brain literally only understand via hair length because that was how my parents and all the media I had access to explained it: boys had short hair and girls had long hair.
Continue readingDoing Little Tasks At My Job (Bad) So I Can Go Home And Do Little Tasks In Final Fantasy (Good)
It has been nearly a month since I last wrote about Final Fantasy 14. I started the subsequent expansion not long after my last post (and might have dipped my toes into it just before that post went up), but progress has been pretty slow. It’s not a lack of interest mind you, but perhaps because of an abundance of it. I’ve been consistently putting off certain bits of progress in the main story until my friends could play through them with me, which has sometimes meant needing to wait a day or two to get through the next plot-blocking dungeon or trial. I also took a bunch of time away to level up a class so I could do all of the combat job quest lines simultaneously, and getting something from twenty-ish to seventy is a significant undertaking. I’ve also had a lot of little money-making tasks to pursue, some crafting to do, attempts to update my character’s various glamours, more wrestling events, and so on. I’ve played PLENTY, I just didn’t get back to the Main Scenario Quests until last week on account of all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Even now that I’ve been back at it, the going has been a bit slow as I’ve had to level up additional jobs every night so I can do their quest lines, which means I’ve been poking at the MSQ in small increments here or there every night once that is all done. I also did some raids, took most of a day off Final Fantasy, and gotten back into working all my usual overtime at my job, so I’ve just not been able to bring my focus to bear in the way I’d like to.
Continue readingThe First Casualty Of The Summer Heat
Somehow, despite the temperature hitting the upper 70s (or 26ish for you Celcius folks), my employer hasn’t turned on the air conditioning yet. In fact, given how warm and stuffy my office is, the heat might still be on. The temperature gauge outside my office says it is 75 in the lab, but I can feel the temperature drop a couple degrees the instant I exit my office door, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my office itself is 80 or higher. I mean, I can’t even stand around my desk without sweating a little bit, despite having a desk fan running on high (which doesn’t count for as much as I’d like it to since I need that thing running constantly just to counter how still and stuffy my office gets without it). Honestly, it’s so warm in here that I’m having a difficult time not falling asleep immediately any time I sit down in my chair or when my attention starts to drift while standing at my desk (have you ever dozed off while standing up? It’s quite startling but apparently not so startling that I won’t do it again within five minutes). It’s almost unbearable and the only thing keeping me from leaving the office to work at home is that my apartment won’t be much better (though the air will be moving a bit more than it is here, which isn’t nothing). And, you know, the fact that I’m sure it’d become a thing with my coworkers.
Continue readingCreating The Mythos Of The Demigods of Daelen
We finally did it. We had our first session of the something new game I started up to replace The Magical Millennium (which remains on hiatus for the time-being) and even though two of our players couldn’t make it, we had a successful first session. I designed the campaign to be playable with as few as two player characters, so having a few people out isn’t a huge bother for me or the game I’m running. It’s still Dungeons and Dragons 5e, of course (2014 version for everything except I’m including the Weapon Mastery feature for 2024 because that feels appropriate for this collection of powerful characters), since most of my players aren’t that interested in going far afield, but I’ve done an intense bit of hacking and homebrewing to alter the basic systems to work on a different scale than the game was originally intended to run at. Most of this is just massaging numbers a bit (a thing I can do because the “Bounded Accuracy” of 5e allows me to alter the numbers in ways that have predictable outcomes), but there’s a few changes to how the rules play out, how success and failure should be interpretted, and how the mechanics of the game are designed to interact. Most of which is not stuff my players need concern themselves with since I’m the one running the show and I know how to alter everything appropriately. What my players are supposed to be concerned with is building the myth of their semi-divine character!
Continue readingA Week Of Ups And Downs And Sudden Lateral Movement
This has been a difficult week. I’ve had a lot of emotional turbulence as I’ve started up a new medication while still on an old one. It’s not making me feel things, but it does seem to be amplifying my naturally occurring emotions in weird ways. Or doing nothing except leaving me incredibly sleepy. I also had a day where I just felt out of it, like I had a bad head cold that was making me feel foggy. Today (a week before this posted), I feel mostly normal except all of my emotions are hitting me at full power rather than drifting up and down as normal. I think this is the unfortunate combination of weaning off my previous medication while starting up my new one and the sort of daily variability of it is giving me hope that this is just a temporary side effect as my body adjusts to the changing chemical levels within it [this seems to have played out as I hoped it would, with these symptoms largely vanishing by the time this posted]. That all of this emotional variability will calm down eventually and my body will adjust, settling into routine side effects and new chemical balances that will hopefully have the desired effect of treating my depression and anxiety. Eventually. For now, though, I’m implementing a lot of “Shut The Fuck Up Friday” best practices because I’ve caught myself prepared to say some things in the workplace that wouldn’t necessarily get me in trouble but would give my coworkers a better glimpse at the person I am than I’m prepared to show them in a structured work environment. I mean, I don’t exactly trust them after all…
Continue readingA Perfect Morning Ruined By Casual Reality
Last week (today, as of writing this, I guess, but over a week ago as of this getting posted), I woke up incredibly peacefully. I’d gotten decent sleep and struggled to get out of bed because the temperature was perfect for staying beneath my blankets as I listened to the sound of the rain outside. It was, perhaps, the best morning I’d had in a while, especially because I was able to haul myself out of bed before long and get ready for work without too much of an issue. It was pleasant, that first hour and a half of my morning as I ate breakfast and got ready for work, but it quickly spiraled downhill from there. You see, when I went to go get into my car around half-past-eight, I discovered that my underground parking garage had flooded. Nothing terrible, or disastrous, mind you, but it was at least ankle-deep water that had backed up out of the drain and I don’t have shoes waterproof enough to handle something like that. So, I returned to my apartment and planned to work from home for an hour when I remembered a conversation my boss and I had a couple weeks prior during my yearly review. Apparently, people had been taking notice of how often I worked from home for a couple hours in the morning or how often I was gone part of the morning for doctor appointments–enough that they’d spoken to my boss about it. While my boss understood my reasons and knew I was getting my hours in and my work done, he suggested that I do what I could to cut down on how often it happened at least for a while. I didn’t say much in response because I was processing the fact that my coworkers formed opinions about how often I wasn’t present in the office but chose to speak with our manager about it rather than see if there was any kind of reason for my time away from the office. I didn’t exactly have the bandwidth to bring any of that up yet since I was still reeling from learning this and hadn’t gotten to the point of being able to express why it upset me so much.
Continue readingSubtext And Performative Extroversion Are The Key To A Good Work Schedule
On top of everything going on, all the woes of society and my on-going issues with finding a decent antidepressant that works for me, things at my job are picking back up again. Our project has been announced, we’ve gotten through all the manufacturing hurdles, and it is officially released to production as of a couple weeks ago. Which means that development can finally resume. That’s right. It’s released and actively being sold, but we’re back to working on it again. This isn’t terribly unusual for a lot of products (especially on stuff with lead-times as large as ours are–multiple months). A lot of things will be announced, get demonstrated or marketed, and have their designs shipped to factories to be produced long before development will stop working on them. Some of that work is, of course, designing future versions of the product, making improvements, and incorporating feedback based on customer experiences. A lot of it, though, is just the same work that’s been done the whole time but now focused solely on trying to remove as much material from the project as possible in order to bring down the cost of producing it. Sometimes that means chasing down ideas developers and engineers had but didn’t have a chance to try out during the initial development phase. Sometimes that’s just making choices to combat newly discovered problems that only came up after the product existed and was being used long enough. Regardless of the specifics, I’m now entering into what is going to be the longest period of heavy physical labor on this project, albeit at a much different pace than I was doing it earlier this year.
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