Part of creating this massive labyrinth has been coming up with a variety of encounters for the characters (and players) exploring the labyrinth. Some of this is basic traps, random monster encounters, and bits of loot spread around the labyrinth in as close to a haphazard manner as I can manage while still making use of the space properly. Other stuff is what I like to think of as “The Big Deals:” things that could have significant impacts on the group or that change locations as time passes (and, usually, could still have significant impacts on the group). So far, the party has run into one Big Deal of each type, but they only just achieved that in our most recent session when they found a trap that had the potential to slowly kill them while also giving them a chance to learn huge, significant, and important details about the world as a whole. It was a difficult trap to avoid once they (literally) stepped into it, but it was one with a bunch of red flags raised around it, there to warn my players about what they were going to find, so they would be in a position to choose whether or not to step in the trap. Like players everywhere, they still chose to step in the trap so I got to share some information about the world around them and they still managed to get out with only a single level of exhaustion rather than their entire life force drained away. All-in-all, I think it was a pretty successful session and an all-but-perfect deployment of the first of many Big Deal traps (though I suppose there is another Big Deal trap out there that they already tripped, but it only became a Big Deal Trap once they chose to interact with what was supposed to be a mixture of set dressing and world lore). Coincidentally, it was also the first Big Deal anything that I made when designing this labyrinth.
Continue readingToday Is A Day For Rest
Needing to take a day to rest so soon after taking an entire week off has me thinking about my long-term plans. I typically try to space out my rest days and PTO usage a bit more, so I don’t burn through it too quickly. Plus, you get way more bang for your buck during weeks with holidays and it gives me a good reason not to work insanely long days in order to make up for not getting overtime on the day that I’m off work already (which is all part of the particulars for how my employer handles overtime and overtime eligibility). Spacing them out has been my way of maximizing my rest over the past couple years, by doing sprints instead of long marathons, but that has not stopped my burnout from slowly getting worse and worse. Taking a longer rest really hasn’t been an option at any point, though I’ve gotten close to it being an option a few times before something happened to return my financial situation to the edge of precarity. For these last few years of rising rent and cost of living, I have to carefully manage my time and energy so I can maximize the number of weeks in a year that I’m working as much as I can handle. I need the money, after all, and overtime is much more time-efficient than getting a second job. Ten hours of overtime each week gets me three quarters of a week’s pay per paycheck and none of the side jobs I can find would come even close to matching that level of income for the same amount of time. No matter what I do, no matter what numbers I crunch or how I try to rebalance my budget, there just isn’t more I can extract from myself without descending into misery. And yet, despite knowing all that, I’ve already hit a point where I can’t keep pushing myself to work and I haven’t even been back in the office working for three weeks.
Continue readingThe Burnout’s Back Already
It took about two full weeks of my normal work schedule, but my burnout and related exhaustion have come roaring back. It certainly doesn’t help that I’ve been struggling to sleep due to stress about things going on in the world and the mounting anxiety that there’s something I could be doing that I’m not doing (which, by it’s very nature, is an impossible anxiety to resolve given that I’m already doing as much as I reasonably can and don’t know of anything else I could actually do that’s also useful). There’s just no escaping any of the mounting pressure I’m feeling, at work or at large in the world, and it has left me more brittle than even I expected. I had thought that, between my antidepressants and a week off of work, I’d recovered some of my resilience–my ability to endure–but that does not seem to be the case. Maybe if I was sleeping more, that would still be true. Maybe if I could get away from the stress of it all for more than a few moments here or there, it would still be true. I don’t know. Maybe if I actually got out of bed on time, maybe if I could force myself back into a proper workout routine, maybe if I wasn’t feeling sweaty almost constantly due to the one annoying side effect of my antidepressants… So many maybes and I have no certain answers. I don’t even know if I can get any more certainty than I’ve got, even, since it’s not like there’s much left for me to try in terms of my day-to-day life that won’t definitely make things worse for me.
Continue readingTrying (And Failing) To Spend More Time On My Switch 2
Two and a half months in to Donkey Kong Bananza (it turns out that games take forever to play through if you mostly ignore them and play Final Fantasy 14 instead), I’m almost to the end of the game. I’ve gotten almost all of the Bananas, most of the fossils, and almost all of the unlockable cosmetics/stat boost items. The only things I’m missing are from the area I’m currently exploring so it’s only a matter of time before I get those as well and then fight the final boss. There was a bit of a twist at the end that changed a bit of where I thought the game was going and how it was going to end, but I’m here for it. I’m ready to dive into whatever is coming my way, regardless of whether or not I expected it from the start (though there were hints if you knew enough about the Donkey Kong franchise). Plus, once I finish that, I’ll have the freshly released DLC to play, too. And the Kirby and the Forgotten Land expansion to play, too. Plus Final Fantasy Tactics (which comes out the day before this is scheduled to post) and then probably some other games after that. I’m going to really need to start splitting my time more if I’m going to play all these games! That, or focus down my Final Fantasy 14 stuff, wrap that up, and then take a break from it [which is where I’ve landed as of editing this the day before it posts]. Both are probably good ideas for my well-being, but the latter is growing more and more appealing as time goes on. Not because I’m not enjoying myself or anything, but because I’ve spent nine months sitting in my “office” (a walk-in closet) and it would be nice to spend some time in a more open sapce.
Continue readingI Finally Picked An In-Game Title For Myself In Final Fantasy 14
I’ve been making progress in the final (currently available) expansion of Final Fantasy 14 (Dawntrail) over my weekends lately, but I don’t really have a lot to say about it yet. There’s very little that has carried over from the previous chapters of the game, so I don’t have a building sense of what’s going on to discuss, and I’m only just starting level 94 quests (out of level 100), so I’ve yet to get to the midway point, much less what I expect to eventually be the inflection point or whatever twist might be coming. Things are just fine. They’re proceeding apace. I’ve reassessed my opinion of one of the main characters and am beginning to suspect so many people online seem to hate her because she’s a woman who is seen struggling with the mantle of potential leadership (I’m flashing back to how nonsensically people reacted to Keyleth of Critical Role’s first campaign) but I’m trepidatious given how many people react to that with something like “just wait” or “the story isn’t over yet.” Other than that, though, the only other noteworthy thing is that I’ve learned my favorite song from the expansion (so far) is called “Taco Delight” and I’m not sure how I feel about that beyond “mildly amused.” That’s fine, though. Most of my time and attention has gone to my various other activities: leveling crafting classes, working on leveling up my non-main combat jobs, doing side-quests with the job I’d set aside for that purpose, and doing high-end difficult content. The two raid series I’m still in, The Epic of Alexander (an “Ultimate”) and the Alexander Savage series (we’re now on A11S, the penultimate raid in the series), are what take up most of my extra time and attention since both require doing a bit of homework and preparation in the Savage series’ case and a LOT of homework in the Ultimate’s case.
Continue readingBreathing Life Back Into My Tabletop Games
As part of getting my life back together following the dual function of working antidepressants and some rest, finally, I’ve begun the slow, laborious process of getting my two tabletop campaigns up and running again. One has met already, to talk through things, and the other failed to achieve sufficient player availability, so we’re going to try again in a couple weeks. It’s been so long since I really thought about my two campaigns that I genuinely struggled to get back into the right headspace for them. I was able to do it, thanks to extensive preparation and a review of my notes, but I was still picking up the pieces of it all as we sat down to review what had been going on, refresh ourselves as to what the plan was, and ultimately decide how we wanted to proceed in and out of character. I plan to do something similar for the other one, but that campaign spun up in the middle of my worst brain fog and depression this past year, so trying to pick up those pieces feels a lot like groping around in the dark for something that might cut me if I’m not careful. I’m not worried about remembering something that would upset me or anything, but there’s a certain gingerness I feel when thinking back to that period of time because it’s one of only a few blurry periods in my memory and all the other ones are minefields of forgotten/potentially-repressed trauma. It’s difficult to fight the feelings of nervousness such periods of forgetfulness inspire in me while also trying to actually remember what was going on and what I was thinking at that time.
Continue readingA Refreshing Breeze As The Winds Of Change Start Slowly Blowing
Last week (the days prior to this being written), Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air. This is noteworthy because it was a transparent attempt by the owners of the ABC network to appease the current US government, and Trump in particular who has long held a grudge against the late-night host. Kimmel made some innocuous comments about the death of Charlie Kirk, nothing that could be, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as making light of the far-right provocateur/gun-rights activist ‘s death. Despite that, adding to the growing unreality of an already difficult-to-believe week, the administration claimed that this was just one more “liberal” celebrating Kirk’s death and threaten to revoke ABC’s broacasting license if the network didn’t do something about Kimmel. ABC buckled as expected since it is clear that no corporation is going to stand up to Trump, and immediately the public began to mobilize. Calls for a boycott sprang up from several different corners of the internet and various celebrities also began to cry fowl. After all, this is a blatantly unconstitutional act and as clear-cut a violation of our First Amendment rights as any other thing that’s happened in the last two years since Biden’s government began cracking down on protests against the genocide in Palestine. What made it different is that this was something that couldn’t be written off. There was no way to describe this as being anti-semetic somehow, no way for people to open up a harmful “we should debate the rights/existence of this minority” discussion, no way for ANY kind of spin since Kimmel’s remarks were public record and the Trump administration has repeatedly proven that they will lash out at anyone who pisses them off for no reason at all.
Continue readingCracking Cooking With A Crock-Pot
One of my recent domestic chores of late has been trying to get myself set up for slower cooker food preparation. I’ve got plenty of good stovetop recipes that could probably be converted into slow cooker recipes, but I’m also trying to expand my game a bit, mix some variety in, by finding some new recipes I can set up in my crock-pot before work so they’re ready by the time I get home. I want to try my hand at different stuff rather than cycling through the same dozen recipes all the time, but I often don’t have the energy to cook every night or to prepare some kind of big, week-of-leftovers type meal on the weekends, so I’m hoping the convenience of a slow cooker will let me do that without delaying my dinner later than it usually is these days. The problem is, I didn’t grow up in a household that used a slow cooker, so I have zero experience cooking with one other than the pot roast I made for my birthday back in 2024, right before the crock of my crock-pot fell off my kitchen counter and shattered on the floor. I get the basics of course, it’s all there in the generic name (slow cooker), but I also know enough to know that very little water is lost during cooking and that the length of cooking means that various seasonings tend to be extra effective. Since my usual method for seasoning things is by smell, I can’t rely on that for any slow cooker meals since you’re not supposed to uncover it while it’s cooking, it’ll ideally be cooking while I’m at work, and the thin scent of food in a slow cooker doesn’t compare to getting a face full of steam from whatever you’re preparing on the stovetop or in the oven.
Continue readingI’m Tired But Not Sad So I’ll Just Ramble About Why That Is
As I slowly move back towards the kind of heavy labor I was doing at the beginning of this year (though at a slower pace, thankfully), it is nice to know that I am not only more physically capable than I was back then, but that a good night’s rest is more effective than it used to be. From just over a year ago until sometime in the spring, it would take me multiple days of rest to recover from a single day’s exertion and now a single night is enough to recover from feeling physically exhausted. Assuming I get enough sleep, anyway. But also, a year ago, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, three or four at most, without waking up with excruciating back pain! I was so tired and pained all the time that it was everything I could do just to keep getting through my days. I descended into a place of fog, exhaustion, misery, and constant trudging persistence while I slowly recovered from years with a worn-out bed, the physical toll of the medication I was taking, and the added weight of not sleeping enough for three months in a row. In fact, I only ever started to recover when I stopped taking that medication and my body was able to start properly repairing itself instead of… well, whatever was going on there. I tell you, there’s nothing like going from needing three to seven days for your muscles to recover from feeling tired to being able to get back up and do more with them after sitting down for a little bit, much less feeling almost all the way better by the next morning. I mean, today was a doozy and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow, but only enough that it’ll make me do my morning stretches for sure and not leave me in a miserable amount of pain like even half this much effort would have done a year ago.
Continue readingFinal Thoughts On Hunter x Hunter: For Real This Time
I finished watching Hunter x Hunter (2011) last night. I took a couple months off due to depression since the last arc deals with some family-dynamic stuff that hits a little too close to home for me to deal with if my emotional fortitude is lacking, but I’ve been doing better lately and I really wanted to catch up on Media Club Plus, so I sat down and watched the entire last arc yesterday (a week prior to this getting posted). It was so much better than I remembered. Not just this arc, but the whole entire show. I get why people love it so much. I can also see why the person who introduced it to me spent so much time editorializing and cut some parts out. If you’re not clued in to the deeper layers of the show, the metaphors the author was making in the source material and the depth enhanced by the decisions the adaptation team made while converting the manga into an anime, it probably seems like there’s a lot of fluff. Sure, there’s some, mostly in the form of the dropped plot threads that started showing up once the author started condensing his story in order to reduce the toll it took on him to continue writing and drawing it, but most of the stuff my ex-roommate called “fluff” is important deep characterization, incredibly specific worldbuilding, and the appearance of a narrator in order to help move things along. It’s such a well-crafted story that even the dropped plot threads get at least tidied up a bit, if not tied off somewhere, by the end of what I’ve seen. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s definitely better than I thought it was after my first watch and I can clearly see why that’s the case now that I’ve watched it again.
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