In my many years of living as an adult in this crazy world of ours, I’ve learned that the number one thing I can do when I’m stressed or feeling like I have no control or just too anxious for my usual methods to handle is to take some time to rest and, most importantly, to spend some of that time cooking a large, elaborate meal. Growing up as part of a Catholic, Midwestern family, providing people with food was an expression of love, with more volumnous and/or more elaborate food making a statement about the depth of your care for the person (or people) getting the food you’ve made. After all, the much/elaborate food acts as a display of the time and resources you’re willing to spend on someone else’s fleeting, but still life-sustaining, experience. This hasn’t always turned out well for me, considering how much it ties into the whole “earn love through service/giving to others” thing that has fucked me up my whole life, but I’ve been able to reclaim it as an adult as a means of showing myself, in a way that hits all my senses and displays a degree of care about myself, that I can afford to spend a decent amount of money, time, and effort on something I absolutely do not need and merely want. It’s a lot like retail therapy–an assurance of your comfort and safety–but with the explicit reminder that this will only ever be a fleeting thing you’ve done for yourself. Additionally, the engagement of the senses is an excellent grounding technique, the effort of cooking an elaborate meal is involved enough that my mind can’t wander elsewhere, and I usually wind up with a bunch of good food to eat over the course of a few days.
Continue readingA Project I’ve Been Considering For Years Has Been Stymied By How Much “AI” Crap There Is
After about three years of deeply considering it (which is a long time, even for me and my whole “think about getting a tattoo for a year before I can get it” thing, or my “think deeply about my personal indentity and how I wish to be referred to, testing things out in my head for nine months before mentioning that I was considering it even once” thing), I’ve decided to get into video editing. Not in a huge way. I’m not going to change careers or even get into the super fancy stuff. I just want to be able to do some basic editing: trimming, stitching, simple visual effects (like text on the screen), the occasional blur, and maybe some audio mixing for sound effects. Nothing major, just stuff that would help turn my many video-based ideas into a reality. I mean, I still want to make my “XX Ways To Die In Hyrule” Breath of the Wild video from that time I streamed playing through BotW wearing only hats right before Tears of the Kingdom came out. I also want to take the recordings I’ve made of wrestling events in Final Fantasy 14 and clean them up a bit so I’m not stuck trying to manage the start and end of the files by clicking the start/stop recording button. It’d be nice to be able to clean those up a bit and maybe hide my Party Chat stuff from the video so I can keep it private AND actually participate in it during wrestling events. I’ve also got a lot of ideas for other things bumbling around my head that would be fun to put together, if I could find the parts I need, so I’ve finally started directing a little bit of time and energy towards figuring all that out. And no, I’m not just doing this because I hit the downhill glide portion of my FF14 crafting project and still need to keep myself distracted (well, maybe a little, but it’s entirely coincidental).
Continue readingAll My Crafting Work In Final Fantasy 14 Has Paid Off
After a solid seven evenings and some partial days, I made the set of gear I needed for my upcoming Current Content Raid event in Final Fantasy 14. Rather than buy it all, I set out to do the work required to learn how to craft it all, get all my crafting classes leveled up, get my crafting and gathering jobs geared up twice, and ultimately get myself into a position where I could craft any released recipe with the right stack of buffs and ability combos. It was a lot of work, if I’m being quite honest, but that’s part of why I did it: to distract myself from my own life and all it’s problems that require me to wait an unknown amount of time for something else to happen. I started on a Monday, with the idea of doing it at all and a brief glance into what that would entail, which convinced me it could be done. The following night, I dug into it more deeply and almost convinced myself that it couldn’t be done. Since I was looking to feel at least a little overwhelmed to combat my rising anxiety, I dug in, made lists, did research, polled my FC full of experienced crafters, and came up with a game plan. From there, I spent the next few days leveling up my crafting jobs so I could earn the resources required to get better gear for my crafting and gathering jobs, doing even more crafting and gathering to get the currency necessary to unlock the ability to gather the resources I needed for more gear, and gathering all of these new resources so that, finally, last night, I could spend some time processing the materials into their crafted versions and then put together a full set of gear for the healer job I’ll be performing a few days from now (or a few days ago as this gets posted). This is almost all I’ve done over these last few days, with some time carved out for work and sleep and actually playing the game, but I hesitate to even guess at the number of hours I spent on it, even after reducing them as much as possible by dropping a total of almost sixteen million gil (the main in-game currency) over that same period (not all of it was on this project mind you, but that was about twenty-three percent of my total gil in what felt like such a short time and I wasn’t tracking my expenses closely enough to figure out which was tied to what).
Continue readingThe Joys (And “Joys”) Of Being Good At My Job
All of last week’s chickens have come home to roost. The letter I sent got responses, the work I was doing has come around back to me, and all of my crafting in Final Fantasy 14 has culminated in my plans for tonight. I’ll write more about how all that goes later this week, I’m sure, but suffice it to say that I’ve been very productive and, after lots of effort, I’m finally ready to actually make the gear itself. I’m also going to hold off on writing more about my letter responses and my subsequent therapy session for a bit longer, until I’ve had the time to process it all a little while longer. Instead, today I’m going to talk about the absolute nightmare that is this one bug I found at work. Thankfully, I found it and, since it’s my job to do that, things are going well for me in terms of my career. This will not pose any problems for me in that direction and will more likely be a feather in my cap than a hindrance since I found a horrible problem in an unorthodox way that would surely have eventually happened in the field but might otherwise have never occured in a testing environment. It’s just going to be a lot of work for me and I can’t even take satisfaction in foreseeing a thorny issue since I just sort of bumbled into this. I mean, I absolutely made the decisions that resulted in me learning that it’s possible to burn out an essential component of this product in a way that is safe but only because it renders the entire thing unuseable, but I didn’t think it was going to go poorly. I was actually looking for something unrelated that I still haven’t pinned down, but such is the life of a tester. You do a lot of inexplicable or unlikely things and stumble into bugs you never could have anticipated.
Continue readingA Whole Weekend Of Avoiding My Life Via Final Fantasy 14 Has Left Me With A Lot To Show For It
Sometimes you wake up, start getting ready for work, and then get a text message that sends you back to bed. That’s what happened to me today (the day I’m writing this). Took a day off and everything. Slept for another couple hours, lay miserably in bed while trying to doze for a couple more, and then finally forced myself out of it around noon so I could actually shower and get dressed, make my coffee, and eat some kind of food. You know, the things you do to have some kind of day. Then, instead of think about anything since my next therapy appointment isn’t until tomorrow and I’m putting off everything I can until then, I lost myself in more Final Fantasy 14 crafting hell for the entire afternoon. Or, in this case, gathering hell. Over the weekend, I spent most of my free time working through this crafting project of mine, to make my own high-level gear that is going to quickly become irrelevant, I’m sure. The instant the next patch hits, it will all be largely irrelevant, but for now it’s the baseline required to participate in high-level content that has already been released. Well, for the combat job gear. The crafting and gathering gear is probably the best stuff we’ll see for a while, so getting that stuff set up properly is going to matter a whole lot more permanently since, according to my research, I’ll be using it until the patch content of the next expansion (and I have no idea when that might even happen). Unfortunately, to make any of that, I had to acquire some mid-level patch-content crafting and gathering gear, get all that set up with stat-boosting materia, and only then could I start gathering the special materials required for the actual high-end gear. Which needs to come together soon because I have a set date for doing current “raid” content with other members of my Free Company who have finished everything the game has to offer so far.
Continue readingAn Out-Of-Mind Experience
Today, the day I’m writing this (a week before it gets posted), is the first day any of my relatives could have reasonably received the letters I sent out earlier this week. It might take longer than usual, given the government shutdown and everything, but today’s the day were my anxiety goes from “steadily bubbling” to “boiling over” as I begin to flinch every time my phone buzzes or it’s little “you’ve got a notification!” light turns on. I do not want to hear from any of them. I’m not interested in what any of them have to say immediately upon reading my letter and explicitly mentioned not sending me texts or calling me in the letter itself, so I should not be hearing from any of them. I will, almost certainly, be hearing from at least one of them at some point this weekend, though. Not sure what it’ll be about, considering the various relatives getting a letter and their wide range of knee-jerk responses to stuff, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually. After all, it’s not purely unhealthy communication if there’s not also communication when you’ve explicitly said you want none. I expect that the general content of whatever message I get will include some form of apology, some number of excuses or “explanations” for past behavior, and then either a statement that they’ll do what I asked in my letter (despite already contacting me) or some statement about the importance of family connections with a deflecting acknowledgement that our family communicates poorly. Bonus points if it includes both.
Continue readingColder Weather Arrived Like We Hadn’t Just Had Six Extra Weeks Of High Summer
After a long summer that stretched into both Spring and now Fall, the temperatures have begun to fall. I had a brief period of maybe a couple weeks where I could enjoy having the windows open and fresh air blowing through my apartment, but now they’re all closed save for the one in my bedroom and I’m contemplating turning the heat on. Even in my upstairs living room, normally the warmest area in my apartment thanks to my habitual presence and all my heat-generating electronics (not to mention normal thermodynamics), I’ve started experiencing the dreadful plague that is cold feet and fingers. It’s not all bad, of course. It’s nice to get some crisp, fresh air when I go outside. It’s also quite pleasant to be able to sleep under all my blankets and my comforter without sweating. I’ve also put my flannel sheets back on my bed, so that’s been nice, too. The only real downside to this is how abruptly it happened. We went from low eighties and high seventies one day to a low in the mid-thirties a day and a half later. That, coupled with the sudden arrival of a Rainy Autumn, left my joints and hands in a sorry state after just a bit of manual labor at my job. It got bad enough in the middle of the temperature change that I developed a tension headache that took a full day to finally diminish and go away. Since then, though, the weather has been fairly consistent as it slowly drops toward normal late-October temperatures.
Continue readingI Got A Job In Final Fantasy 14 And It’s More Rewarding Than My Real-World Job
As I’m starting this post, I’m struck by how often the phrase “_________ says it all” is immediately followed by a more expansive explanation that includes details that weren’t present in what “__________” was. All of which to say is that the title of this post is an accurate representation of its contents in summary. I got hired (me, personally) by the leader of my Free Company in Final Fantasy 14 to do some work to help make our company projects proceed more smoothly. I’m now the person trolling the markets for the materials we need in mass quantities that our companions haven’t been able to acquire by the time we need to start distributing materials. The leader sets a price cap and gives me the in-game money (plus a 10 percent commission that is meant to also cover sales tax) for however much of whatever material it is he needs and I run around the various data centers and servers buying it all up, keeping whatever money is left once that is all over. We negotiated the details of it over the weekend prior to me writing this (two weekends ago from when this gets posted) and I got sent on my way to buy fifty thousand each of two different things last night (as of writing this). I got my money, did my research, filled out my little tracking spreadsheet (that also calculates profit margins, my current pay total, and the quantity purchased), and spent about four hours buying it all. It was actually a lot of fun! I’ve been interested in how the game’s economics work, from a player perspective, and this was a very interesting glimpse into it that I couldn’t have gotten any other way. While I definitely still prefer to spend my time playing the game, I am kind of looking forward to the next time I get to do a shopping hunt like this one, and not just because it has been the fastest I’ve made a huge amount of money in my almost ten months of playing the game.
Continue readingSetting Up A Serious Grind In Final Fantasy 14 To Distract Myself From My Life
I’m back in the saddle with Final Fantasy 14! Back to the lowkey socialization, the focused gaming, the attention-consuming escapism, and free of the need to think about my life and how much it sucks to be me this past week and a half while dealing with biological family problems (and how much it will continue to suck to be me while I’m still embroiled in this stuff for however long it takes). After my time away, I’ve come back at a bit of a loss for what to do next! There’s gear to accumulate, levels to gain, quests to do, and so much more, all of which is very familiar! This is how most patches usually start, with a huge number of quests, the ability to get new, better gear, and at least some confusion on my part about which of the many options I should start with. This time, though, the path is more muddled than ever. Instead of being able to use the resource I’ve been accumulating the whole time, “Tomestones of Poetics” to unlock new gear that’s pretty much the best stuff you can get at that point, I actually have to dig into the mud that is the various other Tomestones and resources from raids to figure out what’s the best gear for me to get right now, so I can do the current content in order to get better gear to prepare me for the harder current content while also getting myself into a position to be able to make or otherwise acquire the next set of gear that will come out with the next patch whenever that happens. It’s a lot and it’s taken me a couple days to figure out, but I think I’ve got it thanks to some incidental advice from the leader of my FC and my own organized nature.
Continue readingYet Another Ending, But This One Feels More Final For Some Reason
It is done. After quite a while of trying to make this one every-other-week game stick around, I have brought it to an end. The campaign/group that included both The Demigods of Daelen and The Magical Millennium has concluded. Between my time off this past summer, general scheduling woes, and the slow withdrawal of half the players I’d tried to include in the campaign, there just wasn’t much left to keep alive. Especially considering how much we were probably going to struggle with getting the remaining folks together to play, a thing we wouldn’t be able to do if even one of them was missing. With only three players and the GM left, any single person missing makes it impossible to continue. We talked it over this past weekend, ironically with one of the remaining players arriving very late, and conluded that this was for the best right now. We might get the group back together in the future, when everyone’s schedule is more dependable and we’ve got more players to join us, but for now we are bringing it to an end. I’ll still have my The Rotten Labyrinth game on its every-other-weekend schedule, but now I am without one of my staple campaigns for the time being. We might yet get together for one-shots or to play games or hang out or whatever, but it won’t be on the structured, three-to-seven-Sunday-afternoon schedule we’ve been trying to maintain up to this point. It’ll be more ad hoc. Impulsive, even. Less regular. Which feels silly to say given how little this group has met. We couldn’t even get more than two people together on our play-Stardew-Valley-instead-of-D&D days.
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