Two months into my current dose of antidepressants and I’m pleased to say that the lack of misery/constant depression has stayed consistently gone. I’ve had my ups and downs during this period, my sleepless weeks that make the whole world seem darker, but it has been a weight off my shoulders to not have to fight myself every step of the way. Well, mostly. I’m still fighting myself occasionally, in ways that I was only sort of prepared for, and that by only one weirdly intense interaction with someone and the constant refrain of people complaining about weird increases in anxiety. Turns out, one of the side effects I’m experiencing is irregular but intense anxiety spikes. My brain will pick one specific thing and get incredibly bent out of shape about it no matter what that that thing is or what I tell myself. The first one was about a weird experience I had in a discord and how I should have responded, where I worked myself up like I haven’t in a decade despite my best efforts to calm down and work through it myself. The second one was about my birthday, though I didn’t recognize it for a strange anxiety spike given how negatively I normally feel about contemplating my birthday. Currently, I’m struggling to contain the anxiety I feel about knowing that the world population status on Final Fantasy 14 has changed as part of today’s update (the day I wrote this) and I need to take this time to make alternate characters because there’s no telling when the world will close again or how long it will be until it opens up again in the future. I’ve had a couple others here or there, but they were all easier to work through: things that took a few calming breathes or waiting a few minutes for my mind to calm down rather than the day or days that these other ones are taking.
Continue readingTime To Mix Things Up A Bit And Play Less Final Fantasy 14 Before I Burn Out Completely
Well, I did it. I finished the base expansion of Dawntrail in Final Fantasy 14. I’ve got a few patches worth of Main Scenario Quests to do yet (twenty-five quests, according to the wiki that has a little quest progress bar on it) and plenty of other content on my immediate to-do list (some big “Alliance” raids, various exploration zones, whatever it is you do to get good gear once you’re basically “current,” and tons of crafting stuff), but I think now is the time for me to take a break. I’m very tired, if I’m going to be honest. Not of Final Fantasy 14, just in general. I have had a lot of fun and continue to have tons of fun, but I need something without the sense of urgency that comes with most Final Fantasy 14 stuff. I’m not going to forbid myself from playing it or anything like that, I’m just going to give myself a nudge to do other things instead of constantly pushing myself towards Final Fantasy 14. Part of me wants to take a complete break–stop playing altogether–but I don’t want to bail on the people who’re depending on me for various group activities. Sure, static groups sometimes need to replace people temporarily, but things rarely go as well when they do and it would just be temporary. I doubt it would last more than two weeks before I felt the urge to log on for one reason or another. Plus, I actually want to keep doing that stuff, even if it isn’t the most fun or the most rewarding and is, perhaps, the most tiring stuff I do in the game. I want to do it. I am just also very tired.
Continue readingEye Have A Problem Once Again
I have been back at work, doing my usual overtime, for a week and I’m already worn out again. This time, it’s not just the usual burnout stuff (though I’m sure that hasn’t helped any). This time, a significant part of why I feel so worn out and tired is because my eye problems are flaring up again. Or maybe it’s “eyes” problem. It’s the same problem, but this time it’s flaring up in both eyes at the same time. The old familiar irritation, sensitivity, itchiness, and inability to resolve any of those in a quick manner has left me feeling drop-dead exhausted from the constant sensation that is having eyes right now. Each of them itches like I’ve got gunk in the corner of my eyes that needs cleaning out and every time I blink I feel like there’s something trapped underneath my eyelid. It’s a frustrating pair of ghost sensations that won’t stop no matter what I do because there’s no gunk and nothing in my eye other than the irritation (and maybe some ulceration, but if I see that, then it’s time to call my eye doctor and get them checked out again rather than just treat it at home with extra drops). It’s wearing me down completely, this inescapable, unignoreable set of sensations, and I’m ready for it to stop. The only relief I get from them is when I’m sleeping, so I’m very hopeful that the double-vaccination I’m getting today (flu and COVID) will knock me on my ass for a couple days while my body recovers from the vaccinations and my eyes recover from their current irritation.
Continue readingOne Year After Cohost Closed Down
Bluesky is in the middle of speedrunning the entire existence of twitter, up to and including the CEO contracting poster’s madness. After they (the moderators and executives of Bluesky) noticeably didn’t enforce their terms of sevice against noted transphobe and alt-right provocateur Jesse Singal the instant he showed up and started shit with the established userbase, people have periodically called on them to address their hypocrisy in any kind of meaningful way. This often happens more frequently following moments when Bluesky selectively enforces their terms of service against monorities or victims of various trolls and bullies the instant they dare to stand up for themselves or do something so horrible and disgusting as to comment positively on the death of a noted gun-rights activist who said that mass shootings were a worthwhile price to pay for continued access to tools of murder while also conveniently pointing his followers at people whose opinions he disagreed with in ways that undoubtedly ruined those people’s lives. Which means that, right now, Bluesky’s executives, who often use the platform to chat or interact with each other as standard users might, are in the middle of getting shellacked every time they make statements about their social media site. For good reasons! Their hypocrisy is genuinely sickening and it’s annoying to see them answer serious questions with jokes (including one that rapidly became a new alt-right dogwhistle), silence, or attempts at baseless refutation that amounts to them shoutinging “nuh-uh!” while sticking their fingers in their ears.
Continue readingHitting Level 100 In Final Fantasy 14
After putting it off for about two months, I finally got my first job to Level 100 (the current level cap) in Final Fantasy 14. I also got three more to level 100 in rapid succession (one each day since then) [for a total of seven by the time I’m editing this the day before it gets posted], as I’ve shifted gears back to focusing on progressing the Main Scenario Quests of Dawntrail and needed to get one of each of the job types to level 100 for the Role Quests. With all that done, I can now focus entirely on the MSQ and getting as far as I can in whatever play time I’ve got most days. Everything else, for at least the next four evenings after I write this, will sit on hold [it did not, in fact, sit on hold, and I wound up doing a lot of side work] as I try my hand at getting through the main portion of Dawntrail in time for the new Deep Dungeon coming out the day before this gets posted (the day after this gets posted is the day there’s a group of people in my Free Company getting together to do said dungeon [but I will not be joining them because I’m taking a break]). I’m not going to skimp on sleep or avoid doing my weekly chores and whatnot around my apartment (nor am I going to cancel my D&D session for this reason, but it IS looking like I’ll be cancelling it for other reasons), but I did clear as much of my weekend as I could because I’m getting the good ol’ double-vax Flu-And-COVID combo on Friday. I am giving myself the space to crash super hard if I need it, but I have typically dealt with the double-shot combo without too much trouble in the past, so I’m hoping to see how much Dawntrail I can get through.
Continue readingAll Of This To Say…
Growing up, in the simplified lessons of conservative Catholicism and childhood emotional grow, I was taught that love and hate are opposites. That they’re so opposed they cannot exist together such that, should you feel love for something, you are incapable of actually hating it, or if you burn with hatred for something, you are incapable of loving it. This was taught to me again and again as I dealt with my abusive elder brother and neglectful parents, alongside the lesson that of course I loved my family since anything less would be some kind of sin or moral failing on my part (these are equivalent in the version of Catholicism I was taught as a child), and since I had little access to people outside of my family thanks to being homeschooled, I didn’t learn any different until high school when I finally got out from under my parents’ teaching and learned from people who had different ideas and understandings of the world around us. There, as I began to develop emotionally and learn things about myself and others, I learned that the opposite of love wasn’t hate but a lack of care or concern. In fact, love and hate were two sides of the same coin, emotions so intense that they couldn’t help but overlap in ways big and small that could not only lead to some incredible opportunities for change and grace (since this was still a Catholic high school and everything was taught as close to a religious framing as possible) but also to some of the most toxic and horrible relationships that humanity had to offer (I was, after all, finally learning enough to know that my life at home was not normal or good). This mixture of emotions contributes to codependent relationships, manipulation, many different forms of abuse, and an inability to escape these things because, culturally, US society places a huge degree of importance on the power of love to overcome and redeem those who ahve hurt us.
Continue readingThe Rotten Labyrinth Returns To Life Just In Time To Spring My First Trap
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.
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