After four weeks of updates and tracking and filling out my tables and monitoring inventory, my latest workshop project in Final Fantasy 14 has concluded. I spent hours making the items over the weekend and now they’re up for sale, to be replaced as they’re bought out, in an effort to maintain a stock level rather than just craft a random assortment of things. I’m hopeful that this will all go according to my plan (the market is pretty low on available housing exterior options at the moment, so I was putting the only item up for a lot of them and could name my price), both in terms of how much all this stuff sells for an how much easier it will be to maintain a stock level than try to predict what is going to sell at any given time. It required an immense amount of up-front work, between adminstering the project and participating in it, but we managed to reach the end with only one miss-delivered item and my record-keeping made it easier to figure out what went wrong than to fix it (and fixing it was very easy). If I’d gotten more participants, I think it would have gone faster, but that would have also meant the work I did would have been more concentrated than it was and it was already enough to make me so tired that I am considering dropping the workshop stuff entirely. After all, the main people doing it don’t need more money and I’ve got my own means of earning money, so this just seems like a waste of time and effort sometimes. Less so if my pricing scheme works out (establishing a more controlled price across the board for some of these housing things rather than playing the “set the price lower than any current listing” thing most people seem to do), but I’m not super confident that it will. It’s worth a try, just like this entire project has been, but I’m not sure there’s much of an end-point to this other than me just quitting or turning it all into personal work rather than work for my Free Company.
Continue readingIncreasingly Bitter Reflections Of An Exhausted Mind
Work has been hitting me on all fronts lately. It has routinely achieved the burnout trifecta of inducing mental, emotional and physical exhaustion in me on a day-to-day basis for the last month (all of March, really) and it does not look to be letting up any time soon. Hopefully my latest email to my landlord results in me getting the answers I need so I can make a decision there [it did], about whether or not to stay at my current apartment [I’m going to, but I’m mad about it]. It would be nice to be able to put that particular issue to bed so I can focus on literally anything else (having a place to live kinda takes precedence). The next highest priority thing would be to find a new job if I can, since this one is killing me a little bit faster than entropy does, on average, and I’d really like to no longer have such a drain on my existence be such a significant part of my day-to-day. I am so tired after everything happening this week that I’m practically falling asleep as I write this. Well, a bit more than practically, actually. Just briefly dozed off there. I haven’t been sleeping super well, either, which has made me all the more susceptible to the exhaustion work has been bringing to bear. Every single aspect of my job that is incredibly exhausting has come up just this past week, too: pysical labor testing, repetitive testing, complex testing, my coworkers being unreliable, my coworkers leaving me to do all the work, my boss being unreasonable about something dumb, pro “AI” conversations, and on and on and on… It’s enough to make me want to lay down on my office floor face-first amd weep into the too-thin carpet.
Continue readingTaking A Couple Days Off
I am taking a little break. Got a holiday at work on Friday the 3rd (love a “non-christian” workplace that still somehow manages to only observe christian holidays) and took off an extra day to keep myself from working too hard and burning out. I need the rest slightly more than I need the money, so I’m going all-in and am going to spend my time doing some fun little video editing projects. Maybe I’ll share some of that eventually, but right now I’ve carefully avoided crossing the streams between my writing and meatspace identity and my digital identity in Final Fantasy 14, and the videos would eventually just give it away, I’m sure. Or at least provide enough of a trail that someone could follow it from one place to another. Right now, I appreciate the distance even if I also desperately want to show off the cool work I’ve been doing. I’m not amazing at the video editing thing yet, but I’m getting pretty good at cutting and pasting things into an interesting and cohesive shape, such that some people don’t even realize I’ve done it. Which is most of editing footage. Special effects are their own thing. Which I will spend my days off learning about! It’ll be fun!
Keeping My Nose To The Grindstone In FF14
It is still a metaphor, even in Final Fantasy 14, though perhaps a more true one than usual given how much of the crafting I’ve been doing in this game actually involves my character using a grindstone. Unfortunately for me, the actual heavy work for the crafting workshop I’ve been running these past two weeks has been the day-to-day administration of it. There’s a lot of stuff moving around, a lot of things to be tracked, and so very much that needs to be stored for eventual use that it is a significant undertaking if one of the other players participating in the workshop submits a few claims and then the items from the claims in quick succession. Which one of the players, an officer in the FC, has been doing. She has so very much time to work on this stuff that it has become a regular occurrence that, despite my efforts to put systems in place to prevent this from happening, I am getting quite burned out on it. I mean, I set this up with a ten-claim limit, with restrictions on the high-value items to one-per-ten-claim-set, to hopefully force people to pace themselves so I’m not constantly updating this set of tables and worksheets, but I also set it up so that people were supposed to be claiming on resource per set of things being produced as “one claim” and the first person to take work didn’t do that, so no one else has either, which is why this has taken so long. I’m not terribly surprised that the spirit of the whole thing got missed in the rush to get the financial gain side of things. But I persevere because this will put the workshop in a good spot so I can just do maintenance crafting projects in the future rather than have to spend time each week planning what to craft (and hoping that this isn’t the week that those things turn unpopular).
Continue readingMundane Burdens Of Responsibility
Over the weekend, I made some alterations to my cell service plan and added one of my younger siblings to it. Since they wanted a new phone, I had to upgrade my plan and that, unfortunately, meant that the way that I understood cell phone service plans no longer applied. Instead of just “adding a line” to my existing plan and paying a reduced fee for the additonal line, I basically set up a copy of the plan I upgraded to for my sibling. A complete duplicate of all benefits, fees, costs, and everything. I’m still saving a bit of money thanks to adding them, but I’d have saved the same amount of money just changing my plan from what it was to what it is now, a thing I only put off as long as I did because it wouldn’t save me that much money and I simply did not want to think about it. But, years after my initial offer, as they’ve grown further from our parents, my sibling wanted to leave our parents’ phone plan and join mine, so I had to think about it. And am still thinking about since it will take a while for all of that to settle out (as coverage changes, plans update, new numbers/lines become accessible, and so on), which has gotten me thinking about the role that (cell) phone service plays in our lives. After all, when I was young and learning to use the phone, cell phones weren’t as common as they are now. Cell phones became common while I was in high school and smart phones rose to the fore while I was in college, so I’ve gone from having access to an old rotary phone in my parents’ garage to having a front row seat for the rise of voicemail and then the ultimate takeover of smart phones.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: The Not-So-Quiet Year
We’ve had our first session of the tenatively titled “Sifting Through The Ashes” campaign. We had a good starting session of The Quiet Year (By Avery Alder) and while it took most of our session to get through Spring, there was a bunch of slowly figuring things out as we played and periods of thoughtful silence, so I’m hoping this next session (the day I’m writing this, actually) will go a bit faster [it did! But more on that next week]. Not that I’m in any kind of hurry, I just want to keep things moving along and there’s plenty of ground left to cover. I want to keep us moving so that we aren’t still working up to the actual game we’ll be playing by the time next year rolls around. After all, we only have one regular session a month and up to two additional sessions scheduled as/if we find a day to hold them. That’s not nothing. Three sessions in a single month is pretty good even for a weekly campaign, in my experience, and we’ve definitely gotten that this month, so it looks like we’re moving at a pretty good pace. And yet I don’t want to risk us faltering or losing steam at a crucial moment. I also want to pace things so that my players have enough time to start thinking about whatever game we’re going to play next and getting through two seasons of The Quiet Year tonight (the day I wrote this, not the day it gets posted) would mean that they have two weeks before our next session and can spend that time reading the rules for the next game we’ll play. I’ve got it all planned out and being able to stick to that plan would be nice. Not essential, of course, just nice.
Continue readingFamily Like An Open Wound
A bit over a week before writing this, I got a chunk of skin taken off by a thing I was working on at work. A ratchet slipped and my hand banged into a hard metal edge in a way that gouged me pretty deeply. The wound was about the size of a dime (which is a bit less concerning when I tell you that my fingers are at least as wide as a quarter) and I spent the three days after that taking special care of it. I wanted to keep the wound clean while I continued to work and to keep it from getting irritated by coming into contact with anything. Once I was through the work week, though, and just spending time in my apartment, I stopped covering it and let it air out a bit. Now, a bit over a week later, it mostly doesn’t hurt. There’s still some tightness when the heat of my office dries out my hands, there’s the occasional twinge of pain if I bump it into anything, and there’s the dull ache of it every time I was my hands. It’s healing well, it looks much less horrible than it was, but a closer inspection reveals the true depth of the wound, as does running my hand or fingertips over it. So while it mostly doesn’t hurt, every so often, I am reminded of the severity of this injury and am inflicted with the full pain of the injury all over again (I never realized how much I use that knuckle for tapping things until doing that shot a lance of pain deep into my finger and arm). Which is kind of like the experience of cutting off contact with my biological family, just compressed down into seven days instead of seven years.
Continue readingFirst Thoughts On Pokopia… POkopia? poKOpia?
I’m not sure I’ve thought or said the same pronuncian more than a couple times in a row since I started playing this game. I didn’t even think much about it until I actually booted the game up on my Switch 2, an act that already had me thinking deeply about the game and it’s place in my life since I decided to buy a digital copy of the game. Typically, I eschew digital-only ownership because that’s a thorny proposition in this day and age of increasingly leasing products rather than actually owning them in order for companies to extorot more money from customers who just want to enjoy the things they’ve bought. I almost didn’t get the game at all for this reason, but there’s an inevitability to all of this stuff that I can’t really ignore, so I went ahead and bought it. In my mind, it’s better to buy the digital copy of the game than a physical cartridge pretending to be a “physical” copy of the game when actually it’s just the license required to allow you to play the digital copy of the game you had to download anyway. Better to be able to just play the game rather than need to swap cartridges around, if I can’t actually hold the entire thing in my hand. That way I can swap between two games without needing to get up or pick through my collection of cartridges. And, you know, not have to deal with the license relay bullshit involved in the game key cartridge if I ever, say, download the game onto a storage device in my Switch 2 that just so happens to never be in my system when it connects to the internet.
Continue readingDigital Spring Cleaning
In attempt to count the bad weather we’re having in the days leading up to the start of Spring (which has already begun by the time you’re reading this), I decided to stop putting off a significant task I’ve been ignoring for months and clear out my digital inventories in Final Fantasy 14. Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve accumulated a lot of junk that I thought would eventually be useful. Some of that wound up being true, and some of it wound up being incredibly false. It has been a real grab-bag, having all of that junk around, and while it was certainly helpful sometimes to just have the stuff I needed for whatever weird little thing I wanted to do or make, I’ve recently reached the point where I need to instute actual inventory management as I start having more and more stuff I need to sort into discrete collections that the game doesn’t recognize. So, rather than have to pick through a bunch of different inventories, I’ve reworked how much is kept where, what stuff is kept for future projects, what is kept from workshops, and what is kept around for my various “money makers.” It’s not a terribly complex system, but it’s one that works without needing a lot of management. Unforunately, that comes at the cost of actually needing to follow through on all of my “I’ll save this for crafting at a future date” promises so I can actually use some of these incredibly rare resources for their intended purposes rather than just throw them out so they stop cluttering up my virtual pockets.
Continue readingA Busy Weekend Is Enough To Wipe Me Out
I had a busy weekend. Not the busiest I’ve ever been, but I had stuff going on every day since Wednesday (of the week before I wrote this) on top of a being incredibly busy at work every day, and it has wiped me out. Only thing making today doable is that I’m working from home due to a blizzard. If I had to be around people and at least pretend to be nice and social, I would probably have lost it before the day was even half over. It is weeks like the one that just ended that remind me just burned out I still am. After all, it was busy but not horribly so. I still had time for fun stuff and social activities. I didn’t sleep as much as I’d have liked to, but I got enough. I shouldn’t be this tired. I shouldn’t be feeling like I need a vacation to recover from five semi-busy and mentally engaging days. And yet here I am, tired as well and wondering if one day of rest is going to be enough as I cycle through various tasks, trying to find something that keeps me engaged long enough for me to make any real progress while my mind wanders and I consider what it would be like to not have a giant list of stuff that needs doing and problems that need solving. I miss the days when I could just exist. When I didn’t have to chose between getting low-quality rest and burning more energy to get something done so that I can hopefully get better rest at some unknown point in the future when all the things on my mind that are stressing me out are finally done. I do not know when those days will return again, but it surely won’t be for a while.
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