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.
Continue readingThe One Resource Management Game I Can’t Seem To Enjoy
I tried another gacha game. I’ve got friends who are really into some of them (the ones that are pretty high-qaulity, generally speaking), so when one showed up that included one of my favorite things ever (factory building and resource management), I figured it was finally time. Plus, I needed something else to play on my Tuesday nights that didn’t require much of an emotional or mental committment. Arknights: Endfield seemed like the perfect thing, especially after watching Let’s Game It Out’s video about it. After all, LGIO is what got me into Satisfactory, perhaps my favorite entry in the resource management and factory building genre and second only to minecraft in terms of survival/crafting games, and he made it look so fun! So of course I tried it out. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really lived up to my expectations and has even fallen further and further from them as I’ve played. Even without getting the the gacha side of things, honestly. There’s enough free stuff there that I don’t feel tempted to pay money for anything and the whole “gambling on loot boxes or random draws for heroes” thing never really appealed to me. I get absolutely nothing out of the process other than more piles of junk I need to sort through or turn into one of a couple dozen currencies. The game’s menus feel labyranthine, I frequently can’t find what I’m looking for unless I click through every single menu option and even then I’m not guarranteed to find it. For exmaple, I kept accidentally opening a menu that showed my resources in to production numbers back before I could actually automate anything and now that I’ve got a bunch of stuff automated, I can’t find that menu for the life of me. It’s so much clutter! There’s so many menus, sub-menus, limited-use currencies, weirdly expiring items, and on and on and on. It never ends.
Continue readingFinally Settling Into Comfortable Activities In Final Fantasy 14
I’ve been bouncing between a lot of different activities in Final Fantasy 14 lately. A solid chunk of my time goes towards leveling (and supplying) an alternate character who will head up my storage and resource generation FC. Another solid chunk is going toward general play on my main character. A third, smaller chunk is going towards activities for the rolaplaying wrestling league I’m part of. And any other time goes towards the general maintenance work of my various crafts, monitoring my various sales attempts, keeping an eye on the housing market, and general maintenance work that I don’t really want to do but occasionally feel like doing anyway. I’m also back to taking Tuesday nights off of the game and while I’m writing this on my second (and posting it on my third), I think I can stick with this for at least a while. After all, while it is possible that I’ll make a lot of sales on weekly refresh days, I don’t really expect to (I’m playing a long game with most of my sales, waiting for the cheaper stuff to run out and positioning myself in the middle-to-middle-top of the pack so I can get a good price for my stuff but still get sold) and there really isn’t anything in the game that is so urgent that I’d need to play on refresh night. Wednesday is my weekly island night, that I also often fill with roulettes and working on my own weekly refresh stuff, Thursdays are a grab bag of whatever, and now Fridays and Saturdays are wrestling nights. Wednesday will also be a wrestling night on occasion, but it’s mostly Fridays and Saturdays, so all the plans I can make for those are usually pretty last-minute and focused on whatever I feel like doing. It’s a nice place to be in at this point, even if I still feel a tugging at the back of my mind that I should focus up and get more done with my time.
Continue readingInstability Makes For Poor Resting Conditions
Well, I got one decent night of sleep. Went to bed at my usual weekend time, fell asleep right away, and slept for a solid eight before I got up on my own and started my day. One night isn’t a lot, but it’s better than nothing and it hopefully signals the approaching end of this period of insomnia. I didn’t sleep as much the following night, but then I was up late editing videos for the absolutely smashing opening to this year’s Cross Realm Wrestling (the Final Fantasy 14 roleplaying wrestling league I’m recording and editing events for) season. That was a choice, as was waking up after not enough time so I could spend time with my siblings, so I’ve only got myself to blame for that one. Last night’s relatively sleeplessness, though, was back to good ol’ insomnia. I sometimes wonder if I have trouble falling asleep at night because I spend so much of my day struggling to stay awake, but that thought is really depressing so I try not to spend too much time on it. I mean, it’d make sense, you know? I’m constantly struggling to stay awake and putting a lot of effort into not falling asleep during the day, so maybe I’m just training myself to not fall asleep easily. Which fits last night’s sleeplessness really well. Lot of dozing off and then twitching awake, lots of shifting my legs to try to find a comfortable position without any pain for me to focus on. And a lot of desperate thinking of topics I can’t remember as my brain just fires off thought after thought so my brain can’t truly wind down. If that’s not at least a part of my sleep issues, I’d be genuinely quite surprised.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes: Starting A TTRPG Campaign Development Log
As I get more and more rest and gradually recover from my extreme burnout (and probably wind up back at just “bad” burnout instead of “extreme”), the idea I had for a TTRPG campaign just won’t leave me alone, so I’m going to start working on development (well, I already have been, to be completely honest). It might yet go nowhere, it might go somewhere fun, or it might follow the course of all of my campaigns by starting out with promise that slowly dwindles as I burn out and my less-than-engaged players stop putting in any effort. I don’t know. I’m definitely not getting my hopes up about being able to play out the idea I had in its entirety. I just… I WANT to be doing this again. I cut out so much of my day to day life and the one thing I miss the most, that still fires me up the most, that I only ever think of along the lines of “I wish I hadn’t had to end this,” is running games. I want to get back in the storyteller’s chair. I have such an interesting idea that I’ve been letting cook for a while and I really want to do something with it. I mean, I could write a story about it, but I really miss collaborative storytelling. I really miss looking at friends as I run a game and roleplay through whatever situations we wind up in. Dipping my toes back into D&D as a player has also whet my appetite for this kind of storytelling, so it’s all kind of coming together. I’ve got an interesting story, the world is practically building itself, and I think I’ve got four people who would be just as committed to playing this game (and doing their homework for it) as I am.
Continue readingA Life’s Worth Of Problems To Solve
Last week’s anger is still around. It’s currently locked in battle with my exhaustion in a way that is amplifying all my other emotions in ways I do not particularly appreciate, but then very little that’s positive has happened. I mean, I had a nice weekend, that was good, but I haven’t been able to make much headway on any job applications, nor have any of my floating problems resolved themselves. They’re not even closer to being resolved than they were before. Hell, I feel like I’ve made negative progress on some of them. I’ve tried talking through what’s going on with some people and that hasn’t actually helped at all. Normally that helps a lot–normally thinking out loud like that helps me push towards a better understanding of what’s going on with me but I feel like that hasn’t worked lately. To cap it all off, I feel like this is all pointless because I’ve got practical problems I need to solve now and all this theoretical stuff, while incredibly important to my sense of self, doesn’t matter as much. I just got my lease renewal which stands to raise my rent by over one hundred dollars, there’s some big changes happening at my employer that necessitate reconsidering stuff I thought I’d already settled about my future, and everything I thought I’d settled about how and why I spend my energy is suddenly in question again as a couple interactions that should be inconsequential have bent me out of sorts.
Continue readingReflecting On My Relationship With Trigun Over The Last 15 Years
I’ve begun to watch the latest season of Trigun (Trigun Stargaze, to be precise) and while there’s still more to watch before I share my thoughts on it, it did kind of jiggle something loose when I started watching it last weekend. You see, I first watched Trigun about fifteen years ago and it quickly became my favorite anime. A cheerful, happy protagonist (Vash the Stampede) who endured endless suffering but still managed to get out there every day and crow about love and peace? That was what I aspired to be for quite a while. It was easy to admire his dedication to not killing anyone, his ability to endure in the face of unspeakable pain, and his willingness to sacrifice himself in order to save others. After all, that aligned him with the vision of myself I’d been raised to hold and it fed into the still-unhealthy parts of said vision that I carried forward into my adulthood. It was easy to take his side as he preached against killing, as he tried to redeem his ally (Nicholos D. Wolfwood) who would kill as he thought he must, and just as easy to mourn but celebrate Wolfwood’s death at the end of the first anime (the one from the late 90s) because Wolfwood ultimately chose the path of nonviolence and self-sacrifice. These days, it is much less easy. These days, after decades of self-sacrifice and burning myself up (and out) to keep others warm, I find my perspective has shifted. I still appreciate Vash and his optimision, I still appreciate his commitment to protection, but I can’t really align myself with it any more. I like what he does, I like the way that he is perhaps the least gun-using gunslinger in this western-adjacent anime of the last few years. But I find myself on Wolfwood’s side more and more now. Sometimes, no matter what you want, no matter how much you sacrifice, no matter how strongly you will it, some one needs to be stopped and you won’t be able to redeem them.
Continue readingBreathing Space And Balancing Routine With Spontaneity
Things have settled down in Final Fantasy 14. I’m building new routines and continuing to find my fun in the game, even if I’m also thinking about playing it a bit less. Things have calmed down with the crafting workshop, largely because attendance remains fairly sparse. I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff made to slowly sell–personally and on behalf of the exterior crafting groups–a much-narrower list of things I’m buying, and I’ve even begun slowly clearing out my retainers so I have space to store things again. I’ve spent more time leveling one of my alternate characters hand-in-hand with a pair of friends who are doing the same thing, I’ve wrapped up a very long quest set that was exhausting to deal with, and even started the process of getting my storage Free Company set up so I can start churning out retainer-based materials. Which I’ll probably wind up selling eventually, once I’ve got enough stored up for my own purposes. It’s not like I want to endlessly churn that stuff anyway. And I’ve been making sure I take the time to do something at least a little fun every day I open the game, even if it is just daily roulettes with a job I enjoy playing. I’ve also started reading again, set up a day for my book club to meet, and am thinking about playing other games [which I actually did the night I wrote this blog post]. We’ll see if that latter one materializes into anything (the time away from Final Fantasy 14, ostensibly required to play other games, means I don’t generally want to), but it’s nice to think about given how many games I’ve got that I’d like to give some attention to at some point.
Continue readingAt Least My Thoughts Are More Directed While I’m Still Unable To Sleep Enough
More time has not fixed my sleep problem. It has gotten better, but it hasn’t fixed itself yet. I’m able to think fairly clearly. I’m very tired still, and a day at work is still very draining, but I think I’m getting through the worst of the mental muddling that has left me in this state. I haven’t really figured anything concrete out, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I feel about all of the stuff going on in my life (namely my tendency to throw myself into projects with a dedication rarely reflected by those I work with, what part I wish to play in the various communities I’m a part of, how much should I temper my passions in order to avoid further burnout, and so on) and I think I’ve at least figured out what I don’t want and taken a couple steps on the road to somewhere. I know I don’t want to return to my old quiet days of playing games by myself and going entire weeks without talking to anyone save my coworkers. I don’t want to do nothing but what I need to. I also don’t want to give up on some of the things I’ve started, not entirely, even if they can be draining. I know I need to continue to work on balancing the energy I spend against the rest I’m getting. I also know that I want to be a part of communities and that community doesn’t happen without people to oragnize it and do the work. Someone has to be the person to say “let’s do stuff” and while it doesn’t have to be me all the time (and shouldn’t be me all the time!), I am a very organized person who does enjoy logistical work, so I need to figure out how to find balance between this truth and the just as real truth that I’m burned out and constantly exhausted these days.
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