After a relatively short time, I managed to win the opportunity to buy a house in Final Fantasy 14. I know people who have been trying for well over a year to get a house in one of the few player housing zones in the game, but I got incredibly lucky and won on a housing plot in what turned out to be a relatively unpopular area, based on how few bids there were. Personally, I think parts of that area are incredibly underrated, which is why I added them to my list of possible locations. Normally, getting a house of some kind wouldn’t be as big of a deal as it has been this past year, but there’s been a few events in the US that had the local housing market locked in a way that it normally isn’t. Typically, if you do not enter your home for forty-five days, your house will be automatically demolished, your things put in storage, and some amount of the house’s cost refunded to you. This is to prevent players from purchasing and sitting on the nicest housing plots long after they’ve stopped playing the game. Sure, it’s still incredibly easy to just log in every so often to keep your house occupied, but that means you have to buy a subscription every month and a half, at minimum, and Final Fantasy 14 loves that. They want your money. So, prior to the massive floods and damage to North Carolina last year, this process happened regularly and houses would go back on the market at a fairly normal rate. Once those floods happened and huge portions of the US (well, not that huge in proportion the the US itself but still huge compared to most parts of the world) were unable to access secure internet and gaming time, Square Enix decided to put the timers on hold. A decision they relented on in December of 2024 and them immediately put back in place during the L.A. wildfires. As a result, until incredibly recently, most houses only became available because people actively sold them or moved into new housing of their own.
Continue readingCasual Nightmares Of Modern Capitalism In The US
One of the most frustrating parts of the era of capitalism we currently live in (at least in the US, since I think that the specific combination of problems turning into this particular disastrous megazord of malpractice is unique to the country of my birth) is that there are lots of companies out there that will just lie to you or attempt to defraud you because most people won’t put up a fight. It’s the same pattern of behavior that scammers follow, except it’s insurance agencies or medical suppliers so people tend to trust them more readily which means they have a much higher rate of success than scammers do. It is insurance companies denying your claims after the fact or attempting to prevent coverage altogether. It is the dubious practice of sending summaries of charges that look exactly like bills but aren’t actually bills. It is companies giving you the “post insurance” price for something you’re ordering but then you getting hit for so much more because it turns out that insurance only covers that much once you’ve reached your yearly out-of-pocket maximum. Or, in the case that prompted this furious reflection, a company somehow signing you up for automatic resupply on some medical supplies you ordered without you being involved, shipping an entire order without notifying you, and then sending you bills that don’t actually list anything but the words “medical supplies” on several lines, each with their own inexplicably different price. I’ve cleared up the problem, supposedly, but it was a frustrating experience that ate up an evening and most of a morning to get it resolved and even then I’m not entirely sure that things have actually settled given that any trust I had in this company (which wasn’t much) is completely shot.
Continue readingSome Pokémon News And Updates To Pokémon Olds
There was a Pokémon Dirtect last week Wednesday (or the day I started writing this post). It covered a bunch of stuff, as the Direct series of videos are wont to do, but most of it was not of particular interest to me. I’m sure that the news about the TCG games, introduction of some new lifestyle gamification applications, and updates to existing lifestyle gamification apps were very interesting to the people who enjoy those things, but Pokémon Sleep (as a representation of the gamification of sleep) still kinda skeeves me out and I’m not particularly interested in finding new ways to give the Pokémon Company more and more data about me and my life. I could probably write a blog post about the upcoming Pokémon Legends: A-Z and how that looks interesting, but I’m not excited enough by it to really write all that much about it. I will say that it is interesting to see how the Legends series is growing and that my initial suspicion, that Legends Arceus was an early release of the tech they were developing for the games that eventually became Scarlet and Violet, was essentially correct as we see it finally come to it’s full fruition in the demos we saw of Legends A-Z. We probably would have gotten to that point with Scarlet and Violet if the Switch had better hardware, but it did not and now new Pokémon games will have the strength of the Switch 2’s hardware behind them. As will Scarlet and Violet, apparently.
Continue readingI Could Balance My Gaming Time If I Wanted To
There are too many video games again. Well. I guess there’s one that is too much video game and then a few other that are a perfectly normal amount of video game, but all that comes out in the wash and I still don’t have enough time to play all the video games I want to. I’ve got a lot of gaming hours in my week as the 1200+ (I haven’t check in a while, so it’s probably notably higher) I’ve spent on Final Fantasy 14 so far this year have proven, but I’ve got so much more of that game to play and so many other games to also play. I still never went back to Slay the Princess, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, or Wanderstop, I’ve got a growing pile of updated games to play on the Switch 2, and I’ve got even more brand new games to play that are already out or coming out soon (and then even more games coming out after that). Between my new TV and my now-a-year-old gaming PC, I’ve got the ability to play so many exciting and visually stunning games that I’ve been putting off for years due to the technical limitations of my home gaming systems, and yet all I play is Final Fantasy 14 and that’s not likely to change any time soon.
Continue readingCold Comfort As The World Slowly Burns
While a large amount of my life feelings like a blazing dumpster fire inside a burning apartment at the center of a city that was recently transported into hell (specifically the firey kind of hell), there are a few things I can take some amount of comfort in. Like being able to afford living my life, even if sometimes that feels less true than it used to. Or having enough food to eat. Friends to play games with. Final Fantasy 14. All kinds of stuff, really. A lot of which is just finding the silver lining in my current moment, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Better to appreciate what I’ve got when I’ve got it rather than find myself wishing for when times were better and cursing myself for not appreciating them when I had the chance. Plus, I can still recognize that all of the products marketed as “AI” are absolute garbage and that all these LLMs are just really powerful and confident autocomplete algorithms with no ability to truly “understand” anything. It’s very comforting to know that, especially as more and more news reports come out about people having breaks with reality as a result of the tripe they’ve been fed by their emotional support “AI.” It’s not great that they’re an increasingly huge part of daily life and that more and more corporations are starting to move from “please use our garbage generator” to “you HAVE to use our garbage generator,” but at least I haven’t fallen for this spiel yet.
Continue readingDonkey Kong Bananza Is All The Reason You Need To Buy A Switch 2
Donkey Kong Bananza is everything I wanted it to be and more, so much so that I have no qualms about saying that this game is justification enough for buying a Switch 2. I have not had such an immediate and strong attachment to a game since I played first played Breath of the Wild back in 2017. Even as much as I love playing Final Fantasy 14, my first month with the game was full of fits and starts where I was not sure that I’d grow to love it as anything more than something I played with my friends. With Donkey Kong Bananza, I was hooked from the first instant I got control of DK and my time with the game has only increased this attachment. I’ve had a whole weekend to play this game (I planned to write this a week before posting it but time got away from me (which has nevertheless worked out the best for this review)) and I can firmly say that you will not regret your time with this game. You also don’t need to have any particular attachment to the franchise, knowledge of the history of Donkey Kong, or even gaming experience to enjoy this game. This could be your first video game ever and you’d probably have an incredible time with it, assuming you enjoy this kind of open-ish world collectathon adventure experience. That’s the one caveat about this game: you need to like collecting things to really enjoy this game. If you dislike or feel stressed by collecting things, there really isn’t a lot of other stuff in this game for you. You’d probably still have fun, but the way that collection drives so much of the experience would probably repel you. If you’re indifferent to or neutral on collecting things, then I think you would still have a great time with this game. You don’t need to be a “Collecting Things” sicko like me to have a good time with Donkey Kong Bananza, but it certainly helps.
Continue readingThe Other Side Of My Burnout
There’s nothing quite like being stuck in what amounts to a burning bag of shit left on the world’s porch. At least, that’s what it feels like to be a resident of the US these days. I’m not proud of it, every reasonable person hates it and is right to do so, the US government seems intent only on malicious destruction that has the potential to spiral out of control, and no one is going to come out of this without also smelling like shit. Our goose isn’t cooked or anything like that. Things aren’t irrevocably broken yet. They are irrevocably changed, though. Whatever survives this period of awfulness is going to have to find a path forward where none has yet been made. Any attempts to “go back to how things used to be” will only cause things to get worse. The only way forward is through significant change. Exactly what that looks like or how that would work… I don’t know. The whole idea of things changing for the better feels so foreign to me at this point that I’m not sure I can actually imagine what that kind of future would look like. All my conceptions of things being better are just images of the past, glimpsed through a heady filter of nostalgia and a genuine lack of awareness of how the world worked before I knew how to see it working. Who’s to say what positive change would look like this days, following the destruction of so much of the good parts of the US–such that they were–and this process can’t even be described as breaking a bone again in order to set it properly. It feels very “conspiracy theorist” to say it, but it’s difficult not to be aware of how the US is finally breaking along lines that have been slowly chiseled deeper and deeper over the last fifty years.
Continue readingStill At The Same (Raiding) Party Three Months Later In Final Fantasy 14
One of the activities I was most excited to do with the Free Company (what Final Fantasy 14 calls player guilds) was something called “Content Rewind.” This isn’t an official activity in Final Fantasy 14, but the name given to an FC activity by the founder that the rest of us have adopted. The idea is to go back to early raids and run through them in a way that resembles what it would have been like to play through them when they originally came out. Rather than the “MINE” method (Minimum Item level, No Echo) that is the hardest possible way to do the raids, doing them “synched, no echo” is a way to include a decent amount of difficulty without making them as difficult as possible. For MINE, you’re using gear that has been scaled down to the lowest item level (which represents the gear’s power, essentially) that the raid will allow. You’re also doing it with no echo, which is the game’s feature that makes repeating a fight easier after you’ve failed it by raising your hit points and damage by a certain percent. Synched, No Echo, on the other hand, limits your items to the highest level that would be allowed and while you’d be missing the boost from the echo as well, it doesn’t hurt as much since your gear is stronger. It’s supposedly even easier than if you’d gone into the fight with appropriately leveled gear that was available back then due to the slow creep of power that has occurred over the years. I have no experience with this since I’ve only been playing the game for six months, but enough people have said it independently that I believe it. What all of this means, ultimately, is that we get a group of eight players together and work our way through a tough boss fight, one strange battle mechanic at a time, until we eventually emerge victorious.
Continue readingWorking Out My Workout Routine
The main thing I’ve been doing to combat how awful I feel lately is to put more and more effort towards my exercise routine. I’ve let it slip almost completely over the course of this year due to the bodily pain and exhaustion I’ve been dealing with and I’ve been struggling to get back into it thanks to how burned out I feel and how much I’m struggling to adjust to waking up an hour earlier every work day. I can barely get myself out of bed in the morning, still, let alone push myself to get out of bed immediately when my alarm goes off at ass o’clock in the morning and then go do my morning workout routine. Especially because I know it’s going to be miserable for the first few weeks of actually doing that. I’m out of shape and the general aches and pains of every day life aren’t going to help. Working out will, fortunately, help with those. It might even help with the neck tension and pain I’ve been dealing with, assuming I can work on my neck and shoulder muscles without straining myself–that would have the opposite effect of what I’m aiming for. I want to feel better, not worse. Which is why I started working out as extensively as I do in the first place.
Continue readingThe Worst My Burnout Has Ever Been Continues To Get Worse
The past few weeks of banging my head against the same problem at work (on top of everything else going on the last few months) has burned me out worse than ever. I really wish I could say this and, with ANY degree of confidence, tack on that this was as bad as it could get, but I keep finding new depths. For instance, I spent the whole weekend resting and don’t feel any better going into work today than I did leaving work at the end of last week. Well, I mean, I feel a little better, but only because I’ve yet to work the full day since I’m writing this in the morning instead of the evening. That hardly counts in the face of how utterly exhausted I feel every moment of every day [how right I was… Evening came around and left me feeling worse than I did before the weekend]. Whatever rest I’d gotten this past spring was largely undone by how things have been going at work, between a lack of project clarity, the loss of trust in my coworkers, and my boss being so weird and evasive about things. There’s no way any amount of feeling well-rested could have survived that particular gauntlet, much less the gauntlet the last three weeks have been as my coworker dumped a problem on my lap and then dipped out of the office for several days, so it is hardly surprising that I’m feeling worse than ever. I just didn’t expect it to go from being a largely mental and emotional problem to a physical one as well. I thought I could just stay quietly miserable in my head and suffer through things until I managed to get a new job or pay off enough of my loans that I didn’t need to work as much anymore. Turns out that I was wrong.
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