I was incredibly sick last week. Not, like, dangerously sick or in need of hospitalization, just emphatically sick in ways I found difficult to work past. And, since capitalism required that I continue working (just as it demands that I go into the office today, the day this is posted, and risk the health of my coworkers because I can’t afford to take days off right now), I did not have the energy to come up with ideas for blog posts, let alone write them. So, rather than push myself to write a bunch of extra posts this week in order to keep my streak uninterrupted while rebuilding my buffer, I’m just going to take two days off this week (today and tomorrow) so I can go into this week on slightly better footing than I feel I have right now. Metaphorical footing. I do not have problems standing despite being sick. So, look for a new post on Wednesday and things will continue as normal from there. I’ll also have some interruptions during the holidays, but I’ll post about that when it happens. Hope you’re avoiding getting sick in this season of colds and flus.
Finding A New Flavor Of Overstimulation
I wound up taking today off work (the day I wrote this, which is about two weeks before it got posted) because I was just so burned out and exhausted that my body physically refused to operate correctly. Which is a bad state to be in, considering that I have plans to drive about five hundred miles in two days, another five hundred two days after that, and then a thousand in a single day four days after that. I don’t need to be in tip-top physical shape going into all of that, but it would certainly help make the total thirty-two-or-more hours of driving more bearable if I didn’t feel like crap. So I stayed in, played some video games (to wrap up some Final Fantasy 14 stuff before my week away from the game), and had a mostly relaxing day. Unfortunately, it was not entirely relaxing. I found out about an event my favorite wrestling group was doing a literal hour before it was supposed to start and scrambled to reorganize my evening so I could attend the event. It was a lot of fun, but I was not prepared to record and I was not mentally prepared for the shear amount of stuff that was going to be happening. Wrestling events can be a little overwhelming because there’s two chats to watch (the Wrestling chat and the crowd chat), the action to follow, the event’s music to listen to (used to help set the emotional tone for scenes), and usually my recording to monitor (and related camera work). While I wasn’t recording this time, there was a lot more mixing of chats than usual, a lot more attendees, just as much music, and I wound up in a discord voice chat with some people I’ve been getting to know, all of which left my fried and overstimulated after the first two-hour event.
Continue readingPokémon Legends: Z-A Really Has It All
I started playing Pokémon Legends: Z-A over the weekend. I made a file sometime last Friday and wound up turning to the game for entertainment as I clicked through a bunch of crafting macros in Final Fantasy 14. So far, it’s been a lot of fun! There was quite a bit of preamble and introduction as seems to be the case in the more recent Pokémon games, but the only restrictions on me where invisible barriers to prevent me from entirely wandering off while I was still going through the tutorial and early missions. Once those opened up, though, I was able to roam as far and as wide as I liked, taking on side quests, catching Pokémon, blowing all of my money on clothing, earning more money by battling at night, and then blowing even more money on yet more clothing items. It has been quite a rewarding experience, so far, and it’s been fun and engaging enough that I’m only sticking with my nightly forays into Final Fantasy 14 because I’m good at making myself do my chores (and I have a LOT of those to do in the next couple weeks yet). This is the kind of game I could lose myself in for a few weeks to a month, if I could tear myself away from FF14 long enough, and I might yet do that while I’m on my trip to visit people over the holidays (I am writing this before the trip and it was published after the trip, so I’m in a bit of a weird place vis-a-vis timing). I think it will help balance out my Final Fantasy 14 time a bit, though, even if I don’t entirely lose myself to it, so maybe I can start building a more healthy variety of activities. I have so much I still want to play, even beyond Pokémon Legends: Z-A.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy Tactics Isn’t Bad, But I Keep Forgetting It Exists
A few weeks ago, I started playing Final Fantasy Tactics. I’d bought it for something to play during my 2-week break from Final Fantasy 14 and while it certainly kept me occupied, it didn’t really hook me. I don’t have the nostalgic tie to it that many other people do and have to admit that it left me feeling a little underwhelmed even after applying a correction to the expectations set by all those people for whom this game was a significant part of their youth. So many people spoke about the impressive story, about some of the subversive lines, and the way the game supposedly flips the bird to authority in a way that was supposedly unheard of in games at the time. I just don’t see it. The writing isn’t bad, of course, but it’s still pretty normal. It’s on the positive side of neutral for a video game, but I think my penchant for reading a lot has worked against the idea that this is excellent, unheard-of writing even for when it originally came out in the late 90s. I mean, there was a lot of subversive media in the 90s, depending on what you consider subversive, and the idea of fighting authority or turning against family in the name of justice is a classic trope in heroic storytelling. I know I was probably just oversold on it to the degree that it has warped even my ability to dial back my expectations, but I have to say that I’m just not hooked by the story in the way so many of my contemparies seem to be. The gameplay is pretty good, though, so it’s not like I’m having a bad time. I am just having trouble sticking to it.
Continue readingAn Embarrassment Of Riches: Figuring Out What To Do With A Second Desktop Computer
Every year, my workplace holds a raffle to give away the computers that the IT department is retiring that are still in good working condition. I’ve participated without fail every year since I joined the company in the hopes of getting one of the actually pretty-decent computers for my personal use or a laptop that will get me through a few years of mobile computer usage (aka, writing) now that my old laptop can’t handle running a word processor on top of the OS. Eigth years in a row, I lost. There’s not a lot of computers and this is a popular program. This year, though, I almost missed it because I’ve been so distracted with other stuff going that I forgot about it completely and only managed to sign up at the last minute because the IT department sent out a message saying that not many people had signed up for the raffle. Since it was simple, thanks to the addition of a digital sign-up form, I filled it out and then promptly forgot about it again. I’ve had enough other stuff going on lately that some little lottery I wasn’t going to win didn’t seem like it was worth the mental space it would take to remember it. Which is why I was so surprised when I got the email congratulating me on winning the drawing. It took a little messaging back and forth for me to be certain this wasn’t some kind of scam or phishing attempt (seriously, both the IT and DevOps teams write their emails and messages like some kind of crappy phishing scam), but I was able to fill out the form and go pick up my brand new, 9-year-old-but-refurbished PC.
Continue readingCrafting Burnout And Lines I Won’t Cross
I spent the last weekend (well, two weekends ago as this is getting posted) doing pretty much nothing but crafting and a deep dungeon run in Final Fantasy 14. It might have taken eleven intense months, but I think I’ve finally gotten tired of crafting. I’ve been making gear for people and the amount of mind-numbing macro-clicking involved in it is driving me more and more rapidly insane. I have done nothing but lose myself in crafting, the grind for various currencies, and trying to get new gear for the last month or so and it is burning me out like nothing else has. I’m not at risk of no longer wanting to play the game or anything like that, but it made me kind of glad that I had to take a week off for holiday travel. I don’t know that I’m going to be changing much in the next couple weeks as we run up to the release of the next patch, but I’m really hoping I can at least take a break from crafting a few hundred materials and gear pieces every week. I mean, I’ve still got a lot of stuff to do as I’m writing this two weeks before it gets posted: crafting and gathering food to make, a couple gear sets to wrap-up, one more set of gear to entirely produce, limited currencies to earn, and so much questing to do in order to be fully caught up for the start of the whatever comes with the next major patch, but I hope I can get at least another week away from all that before the update drops so I can do other stuff like level other jobs and work on finding some roleplaying opportunities or do literally anything other than constantly grind away at preparations for whatever the next patch is going to require of me to make the next gear sets.
Continue readingTaking The Week Off
I will be taking this week (the 24th through the 28th of November, 2025) off of blog posts because of the holiday (US Thanksgiving) and because I will be traveling for all of that time! I will not be near a computer and while I can do some writing on my phone, I prefer to avoid it. Plus, I’ll have enough going on with traveling for the holidays. I do not need to add blog posts to that mix. It would be detrimental to my already burned-out mental state. Normal posts, most if not all of which have been written by the time you’re reading this, will resume on Monday the 1st of December, 2025. Stay well until then! And preferably after then, too, but you get my meaning.
Familiar Disappointments Still Sting
Today (the day I wrote this), was the day that tickets for Final Fantasy 14’s Fan Fest went on general sale. I’d signed up for the pre-sale lottery (to get a chance to buy tickets early) but struck out there and then struck out again when I queued for tickets and got assigned the 8000th (and change) spot. I was not able to get tickets. Which, on one hand, is going to save me a bunch of money. On the other hand, I didn’t realize how excited I was about the idea of going to the convention until I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. It was a pretty heavy blow. Much, much heavier than I expected, to the degree that losing out on this opportunity has cast a bit of a pall over my day. After all, I don’t really have a lot of stuff to look forward to, most of the time, so any time one of those things gets taken away, it hits harder than it ought to, and there’s been a lot of it lately. A lot of stuff has not been working out. lately. Siblings cancelling plans, friends getting sick and needing to cancel, missed opportunities, and so on. All I’ve really had that’s dependable is my gaming, work, and the inevitability of bills. It feels silly for this to be hitting me as hard as it has been, to rather completely sidetrack me for multiple hours today, but I have spent a large portion of the last couple years not planning stuff because of how often people flake on me or cancel last minute and I’m probably just a little overly sensitive to this kind of disappointment. I just wanted it to work out, despite all the evidence it wouldn’t, and now I have move on from this. Eventually.
Continue readingTeamwork, Bonding, And Growing Frustration
Yesterday, while talking about the final steps of my Final Fantasy 14 crafting project in our discord, I joked about a bit of bad luck on my part traumatizing another player and myself. You see, the final step of making my top-notch crafting and gathering gear in Final Fantasy 14 was putting little stat-boosting things called “materia” into the gear. Most gear has one or two slots that you can place materia in without a problem, but it is also frequently possible to add more materia to a piece of gear via a process called “Advanced Melding,” which is how you wind up with gear that is “pentamelded” (meaning it has five materia melded into it, which is the absolute cap on melding). The reason most people don’t do it is because there is a decreasing chance of success with every subsequent Advanced meld, with the 4th advanced meld having only a five percent success rate, and that innocent little five percent number only means that you have a low chance of success, not that it will happen five out of one hundred times. Everyone who has done pentamelding has a horror story of burning up a huge chunk of materia in an instant (you can check a box to make the game just keep trying until it succeeds so you don’t have to click through the activity so many times) as your luck turns bad and you go from spending one to twenty on an attempt to spending over a hundred. Which almost always means that a significant amount of money also just vanished into smoke. Which is why, when I burned through 1,260,000 gil (FF14’s in-game currency), my friend (who was crafting other stuff next to me and had helped me acquire all the materia) and I simply froze and stared at the chat window’s little read-out. It was so much. Fully a third of what I’d bought in that round and I burned through it in an instant.
Continue readingHoliday Travel Preparations: Changed Oil And Managed Expectations
I am preparing for a bit of a long car trip. I’ll be driving about two thousand miles, all told, over the course of a week, so I’ve been trying to get some things in order to make this trip happen in a way that isn’t going to destroy me. Primarily, I’ve taken my car in to get serviced. Thankfully, despite passing 111,111 miles just the other day and being almost twelve years old, there’s nothing really wrong with it. An oil change, a new oil filter, and an appointment to change out the weatherproffing seal around the driver’s door for after the holiday. Pretty small stuff, all told, and little enough that the anxiety I’ve been ignoring about needing to replace my car any time soon (which I absolutely cannot afford to do) has faded thanks to its clean bill of health following a full inspection. It is, of course, entirely possible that some significant issue is just one pothole away from bursting this sense of security, but I’ve been going to this mechanic for nearly a decade and they came well reviewed when I first started bringing my car to them. I trust their work and their thoroughness when I asked them to make sure I wouldn’t run into any problems during my holiday travels. I might still need to check the air in the tires since I prefer to put them at a higher pressure than I think they put them at (I like the top of the range of the acceptable tire pressure and they usually only fill them to the bottom), but I did forget to ask about that this time so I wouldn’t hold that against them.
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