The trailer for Dorohedoro’s second season dropped a few days ago (as of writing this) and I’m getting pretty excited for it. It looks to have the same strange energy that the first season had, but with more going on? More order to find amidst the chaos? That or the trailer just took every bit of available “order” from the show and slapped it together in some kind of classic mislead that tends to crop up in trailers where they hint at something that doesn’t actually exist in the movie by showing you all of whatever it is in the trailer. I don’t think they’d do that with Dorohedoro Season 2, but anything can be made terribly, even things six years in the making (especially because it probably wasn’t being worked on for six years, but I don’t really know much about that), so I’m trying to avoid getting my hopes up too much. Which feels odd to say because, while I definitely enjoyed it while I was watching it, I thought I was much more neutral-trending-positive about it. Now, as I look back on it, I find that I feel more warmly about it and more actively engaged with it, maybe because my mind has had time to work through everything I saw, whereas I didn’t really give myself that when I first watched it? I mean, I binged the whole thing is a single go, more or less, so it stands to reason that I’d feel differently about it once I had time to let it settle, but this is maybe the first time I’ve liked something more as a result of that. Usually I either like it less or just appreciate some of the details more, which isn’t the same thing as liking it better.
Continue readingStepping Up The Workshop
As things have slowly settled and I’ve begun to adjust my expectations and workloads, I’ve decided to do a bit of stepping up my Final Fantasy 14 workshop. I finally reached my personal goal of having nine figures of in-game currency on my main character and while I’m absolutely not going to stop (I do still need to pick out a new goal now, though), I am shifting my focus a little bit. I’m going to try to put together a larger work call than usual in order to get some stuff on the market so we have fewer gaps in our offerings. It will be a lot to manage, I think, but it’ll be worth it in the end since I’m going to make a few adjustments to my rules this time around. There won’t be any radical shifts, mind you, and I’m going to be maintaining my limits on how much individuals can claim to limit how much the wealthier people in the group get, but I’ll probably wind up dropping it sooner rather than later given how some of those high-value materials are genuinely difficult to get in a reasonable time frame and only the more experience players in the group can probably acquire them quickly or easily (or just buy them outright since they have the financial stability to take the short-term hit in order to get the long-term gain). Regardless, this will be mutliple times more materials than I usually handle, so there’s going to be a bit more work required to get everything accounted for and handled.
Continue readingDaylight Saving Time Strikes Again
Once again, time has shifted. All the clocks I’ve been ignoring for months are correct once again (or just a couple minutes off instead of an hour and a couple minutes off). The sun rises later, it sets later, and everyone is struggling to adjust our perceived notions of time to fit the new path the sun is charting through the various hours of our days. It is not a pleasant experience. It is even less pleasant of an experience when you are awake for it as I was this weekend. Turns out that having a lot going on does not mix well with the bevy of negative feelings I’ve been struggling with lately and it creates a degree of dissastifaction that makes it difficult to fall asleep. So I did not get a lot of sleep that night (nor did I get much sleep last night as my soul casts about for something to feel about anything other than the constant grinding negativity in all its various little flavors) and now I’m struggling to deal with waking up “earlier” than usual even as I struggle to fall asleep at a currently reasonable hour much less one that used to be earlier than it currently is. My entire sleep schedule and sense of time is already messed up from months of not sleeping well, so throwing an hour shift into the mix is just making it work. I really hope I can get this sorted out sooner rather than later since I’m not sure how much more of this I can take…
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes: Now It’s Official
The multi-game campaign I’m calling “Sifting Through The Ashes (Working Title)” has officially begun. We had our first meeting, the first conversations about what we’re doing have been started, we’ve observed our first lengthening silence in response to a question I asked, and I’ve even made a discord for the group. Heck, the day this posts, we’ll be getting together to start playing our very first game: The Quiet Year. I’m excited to introduce more people to that, and to get this whole campaign thing a-rolling. Of course, it would help if I wasn’t still struggling to get enough sleep and feel rested, but that’s just kind of life these days. Never enough sleep. But that’s okay. It’s only a three hour session playing a game I’m familiar with and need to just lead, not adjudicate. After all, it’s a GMless game and while I’ll still be wearing my GM hat, it will be just to facilitate the game and help get everyone’s creativity flowing rather than because rules need interpretation or a difficult situation needs arbitration. As long as work doesn’t kick my ass the whole week leading up to the session or give me extra hard on the day of the session itself, I should have enough juice in the tank to handle whatever that might bring [work has kicked my ass the whole week up to the session]. I still need to make sure my players are reading up on all the stuff I posted in the discord, continue reviewing the rules of Armour Astir: Advent, and make the roll20 game we’re going to use for maps and stuff, but most of that is pretty easily handled when I’ve got a bit more time and energy than I do right now.
Continue readingPracticing Radical Acceptance Of The Fact That I Should Stop Radically Accepting Things
Today–a random day because I fell behind in blog post writing–I read a post on bluesky by Taco Bell Quarterly, (self-described as “The World’s Most Prestigious Literary Magazine. Unaffiliated with Daddy Taco. We publish the boundaries of cease and desist.”) that plainly stated the truth that most writers face: “You’re not going to make any money doing this and no one is going to read it, so you must hope for a secret third thing to happen“. This, no matter how many people might wish to deny it or refuse to except it, is the truth of being a writer in this day and age. Whatever that third thing is, though, is up to you, and the replies to this post were full of people giving voice, in varying degrees of sincerity, to what that third thing is for them. Most (ignoring all the people who missed the point by trying to get around thing two by saying “someone reading it and enjoying it”) of them fall into pretty standard categories such as “spite,” “to have done the thing,” or “because I need to,” but the one that I keep thinking about is someone quoting the post and asking the respondants “At what point does ‘artist dies penniless’ stop feeling like the artist in question just wasn’t sufficiently zen?” Because that’s the side of this that doesn’t get considered enough, you know? We’re all so ready to find reasons to write other than getting paid or making a living or being able to support ourselves, and it’s a good thing that we do that since finding our own purpose is more likely to play out positively than trying to make a living at it, but it’s still worth thinking about the fact that we’re essentially papering over a massive, systemic issue with acceptance and inner strength.
Continue readingGiving Arknights Endfield A Second Chance
I did actually uninstall Arknights Endfield last week after writing my post about it. I was determined not to keep playing it because I really wasn’t having fun. All of the fun bits were gated behind plot progress and it was just so dull and poorly written that I wasn’t able to enjoy any of it. One of my friends started playing it, though, and started having a fun time with it. Curious, I talked to them about my experience and asked how they coped with the problems I identified. Turns out the secret to enjoying the game was skipping most of the cutscenes and dialogue moments AND turning all of the voice acting to a language I didn’t understand (Japanese). Now, I don’t feel compelled to engage with the plot any more than I’m interested in, I don’t feel as trapped behind slow-talking characters as I once did, and I can actually focus on the parts of the game I anticipated enjoying and a few of the surprisingly fun parts of the game that I didn’t expect to enjoy. There’s been more than a few of those, to be honest, but it took more plot than I liked to get to them, and some of them are now so expansive an activity that I’m struggling to engage with them, even if they are kind of fun. This game is definitely one meant to take up most of your time, to engage all of your play hours, and I can see how the daily grind and routine of the game could make a compelling case to give it just that. Unfortunately for this game–and very fortunately for me–I just don’t get any kind of joy or pleasure from this kind of gameplay loop or loot boxes, so all I need to worry about hooking me is the constant rewards for doing daily acitivities. I’m not exactly a sucker for daily accomplishments and rewards, but they are something I enjoy enough that I am willing to consider picking them over something that feels a bit more long-term rewarding.
Continue readingMaking Forward Progress In Final Fantasy 14 Once Again
The story of my time playing Final Fantasy 14 is that there is more to do than anyone could reasonably accomplish without years of effort. As a result, every time I play, I am making choices about what gets my time and attention and what will languish, untouched, for months or even years. My previous attempts to dabble in a bit of everything spread me too thin and left me worn out, so these days I am trying to stay focused on a smaller number of things. There’s all my usual weekly stuff, of course: Island Sanctuary maintenance, side quests, acquiring limited currencies, leveling my alt, stockpiling things for future projects, maintaining my sales listings, and so on: the background work of playing a video game that is required to do the more focused parts of the game at other times. All of this can take up as much time as I give it because, while there is an end to it all, it is so far away right now that I have no idea when I’d reach it even if this stuff was all I focused on. So I try to keep it to a reasonable level, based on how I’m feeling in any given week or on any given day, and pick some other stuff to focus on when I’ve got the time and energy. Right now, a lot of that is going towards the RP wrestling season that’s currently under way, but if I had to name my focuses, I would say the Occult Crescent and leveling an alternate character.
Continue readingEmotionally Beaten Black And Blue
I had a busy weekend. A wrestling event in Final Fantasy 14 Friday evening followed pretty immediately by editing the recordings, a few hours of sleep before I had to be awake and aware for roleplaying, catching up completely on Trigun Stargaze, hanging out with my usual Saturday crew, the absolute inability to sleep until around 4am, up again in time for plans that fell apart pretty much immediately since everyone else no-showed, a long couple hours of dealing with my frustrations, the start of a tabletop campaign, and then an evening of lingering frustration capped with, once again, the inability to fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning. Which is why I took a day off. It’s going to absolutely scuttle the roll I was on in terms of my income, but I was so exhausted and bent-out-of-shape by everything that I needed the time to resettle myself. Time that grew from one day to two days to two and a half days. Turns out that mixing a dose of frustration that is slow to leave into the tulmult of my unsettled life only exacerbated the problem. Which, you know, isn’t entirely on the frustration or exhaustion from a busy weekend. I’ve made very little progress on any of the larger problems I’m facing and that has entirely ruined my resilience to the point that things which wouldn’t normally be a big deal become one. I really need to get some of this stuff resolved so I can get any kind of feeling of control back in my life, so I can maybe stop feeling like cracked glass, emotionally speaking, but that remains easier said than done.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes: Off To The Races
I was never one to hesitate long once I’d made up my mind. Which is why, a week later, I’ve got just a bit over fourty-eight hours left before session pre-0 (or -1 as I’ve taken to calling them) with my group of players. Three new folks I’ve never run for before and one familiar constant. I know at least two of the three new folks share my passion for committing to things and taking those commitments seriously, so I am hopeful that I will be able to avoind the old follies of campaigns past. Which just means I’ll be open for all new follies in this campaign. One of the players, the boyfriend of one of the other new players, is not someone I’ve spoken to extensively, like I have with the other two players. I did a bit of a semi-formal interview, asking him a bunch of questions about his interests, experiences, and how he’d react to things, so I think he at least won’t be a bad fit for the group, but I usually want more reassurance than this that I’m bringing in a good, quality player who will mesh with the group’s dynamic. It makes it easier that we’ll have a few sessions of worldbuilding, ending, and protecting games before we get into the meat of things, so I should know by the day we do character building for our final game (so we know what to make in our penultimate game in order to arrive there by the time that final game begins) if he’s a good fit or not. If the whole group is a good fit or not. I’m a bit nervous that it’ll all fall apart before we get to the juicy stuff I’m most interested in, but all I can do is press onward and deal with that if it ever comes up.
Continue readingAn Apt But Unwelcome Metaphor
There is this expression I first encountered in playing Magic The Gathering (which is probably used in a lot of card games, but I don’t really play many card games so I’ve got no idea) that I wish more people were familiar with so I could actually use it as much, and in as wide a variety of situations, as it pops into my mind. Sure, the explicit meaning of “top-decking” is that you’re using whatever you draw from your deck as you draw it, but the actual meaning behind that says a lot more. You see, when you’re playing one of these card games, you are generally using a deck built around a specific function or theme. You’ve assembled cards to enable types of play to help you win and the rest of your deck is usually built to get those cards into your hands or to respond to other types of play so you have the time you need to get a winning combination in place. So, when you’re top-decking, what that usually means is that you’re out of options, you’ve done everything within your power at the moment, and all you can do is respond in the moment with whatever comes into your hand. You have no ability to respond to other players’ actions and all you can do for the future is hope that you eventually draw something you need or that will get you what you need. Which is how living my life feels a lot of the time.
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