Fairly recently (a week and a half ago, as of this going up, since I apparently finish major story segments of the game on Monday or Tuesday), I finally finished the Main Scenario Quests for the central chunk of the first major expansion of Final Fantasy XIV. This one, called “Heavensward” or 3.0, depending on if you’re into titles or major version numbers, features a section of the world that went largely ignored in the original part of the game (A Realm Reborn) because of its policies of isolation. This place, Ishgard, is a society located within a cold and dreary chunk of the world that withdrew into its major city (and surrounding defenses) as the thousand-year-long dragon war began to escalate around the same time the invasion of the surrounding area started ramping up. Following the end of the “patch content” between the end of A Realm Reborn and the start of Heavensward, you’re granted entry into this isolated city, adopted by one of the major houses (metaphorically, I mean, not legally), and then thrown into the societal problems facing this country like a Holy Hand Grenade from the Worms games. As is right and proper for the protagonist of a video game, you crash into a thousand years of lies, an ancient betrayal, and shine the light of true on the world shebang like you’re a nightlight in a dark hallway. And, you know, meet some memorable characters along the way.
Continue readingGetting Tired Of My Favorite Type Of Snack Media
For a pretty significant portion of my life, I was (at the VERY least) receptive to the idea that you sometimes just needed to get back up and try again whenever you failed. I’d grown up on that idea, caught in an inescapable bad living situation through no fault of my own, so it was a sentiment that appealed to me. Even as I got older, my problems changed, and everything stopped being a waiting game until I could finally escape it (like my home growing up), the message still resonated with me. I’m a pretty soft touch, after all. My heart is near the surface and moves easily, so any story about grit and determination and carrying on despite impossible odds could tug on my heart strings. That’s probably why I was pretty receptive to Shonen anime (“shonen” here being a genre of anime classicaly aimed towards young boys, featuring adventure and fighting and easily-digested morality typically dispensed around or within the aforementioned fighting, thereby showing the righteousness of the heroes’ ideals when they emerged victorious from combat against their hated foe) as a whole when I was introduced to it. So much of it features characters that are the living embodiment of “just try again/harder and you’ll eventually succeed!” and I was pretty much always down to watch whatever. Not everything needs to be high art and sometimes fun can be fun and a cheap tug at the heartstrings will play you just as well as a subtle and artful thrum. It never really bothered me, especially considering that I don’t actually watch a lot of anime as a whole, so I never interrogated it.
Continue readingA Poor Excuse For A Wisconsin Winter
Today, while I was stuck inside working and writing blog posts during all of my breaks, the snow melted. It hit the mid-50s and would have been an excellent day for a walk if a few inches of snow hadn’t melted and turned the entire world into a swampy morass of goop, mud, and salty grit. You see, until just a couple weeks ago (two, as of this being posted), we hadn’t gotten much snow. There’d been several incredibly light dustings and maybe an inch or two total of accumulation over a couple snow events, but none of it stuck around long and it was never enough to really blanket the environment. Two weeks ago, we had a couple snowstorm events over a few days and accumulated a proper amount of snow, enough for it to ACTUALLY feel like a proper Wisconsin Winter. Now, today, it’s all melting and will likely completely vanish over the next few days as the temperatures rise above freezing and stay there. Sure, it’ll drop down eventually and we’ll get that Wisconsin Classic, the good old Wintery Mix of snow, rain, and sleet that turns the world to slush, but this is probably going to be it for actual snow accumulation barring some strange late-March temperature drops. A week and a half of snow. Maybe three or four weeks of decently cold temperatures, most of it without much snow. And then a bunch of days in the fifties, tons in the fourties, and who know how many High Temperature Records. What a terrible excuse for a winter.
Continue readingIt’s Party Time In The Rotten’s Labyrinth
After a month away, mostly due to burnout on my part (our last session was scheduled for the weekend I wound up working and I just did NOT have it in me to run a game), The Rotten finally met again and we got to introduce three new players, their characters, and a pair of NPC siblings. Unfortunately, only one of the original players could make it and he wasn’t the talkative one in the group, so I wound up doing a lot of talking to myself when introducing the core party to the group of two new PCs and their NPC companions. When it came time to introduce the final PC, she rolled really poorly on her “phase of the moon check” and the resulting lucky/unlucky check, ultimately revealing her lycanthropy in the one and only party of the labyrinth that has access to the night sky during what turned out to be the full moon. Thankfully, despite being tossed to the extremely-not-literal wolves (this character is a wereboar rather than a werewolf, after all), the party was able to subdue the lycanthrope enough that she was able to recover her senses, retreat from the moonlight, and take some precautions against potentially losing control of herself for the remainder of the night. After that, this group of now eight people talked about how to handle the fact that they’d wound up in one of the most dangerous parts of the first floor of the labyrinth while still exploring for treasure and came up with a plan that will allow players to come and go more easily from one session to the next as our rather large group of players deals with people who aren’t available to play every time. All-in-all, it was a successful session even if there wasn’t much forward progress made.
Continue readingIt Was Bound To Happen Eventually
It finally happened. Between burnout and the depression I’ve been dealing with (which may or may not be related to the burnout), my buffer ran out and I could not drive myself to write anything even knowing I had nothing scheduled to post the next morning. I couldn’t even make myself get out of bed quickly enough in the morning to write anything before posting time. I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for months now and have only been actually caught up on my preferred “5 posts ready to go” amount of pre-written material once or twice since sometime latter last year, so it really isn’t that surprising that it happened. Between everything going on in the world, my lifelong growing burnout, the pressure and stress of work (ten days until the project I’ve been working on is announced and I can finally talk to people about it), my always not-quite-good mental health, and my growing feelings of isolation, I just am not operating at the level I’d like to be. I mean, I’m not longer taking that medication that made me miserable, but I’m taking others that require some pretty specific timing to manage and have enough mild side-effects that I’m once again no longer comfortable most days (though these side-effects should fade in time). It’s a mess, I feel like my life is a mess, and I feel like I am a mess. It’s rough being me these days and it really shouldn’t be, so I feel kinda bad about it.
Continue readingIdle Thoughts About Working From Home
I’ve had a few days where I’ve worked from home lately. One and a half due to weather and one due to a stomach bug that left me mostly fine but unwilling to share bathrooms/run the risk of not being able to find a toilet in time. These are the first days I’ve worked from home in a while and the first ones where I was actually able to work on my highest-priority work while working from home in a year and a half or thereabouts. You see, the project I’ve been working on for that time has necessitated me being in the office. I can’t exactly bring it home with me and, even if I did bring some stuff home, it wouldn’t be terribly useful for all the work I had to do. So, on days that I felt less than stellar, needed some time to myself, needed a mental health break from being around people, or just felt crummy, I still went into the office. That’s the job, you know? Gotta go to where the work is and do the work, at least as long as you’re not sick or contagious or putting yourself (or someone else) in harm’s way by doing so. And I was not, so I went into the office and suffered through a lot of days where I’d have much rather been working from the comfort of my home. Now that I’ve got a bit of a reprieve from that sort of work, though, I’m absolutely working from home every chance I can get.
Continue readingSuper Smash Bros. Nostalgia
I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. for decades. More than two and a half, if I recall correctly. I was not a terribly athletic child, so my hand-eye coordination wasn’t good and I wasn’t terribly skilled at video games because I just couldn’t get my brain to get past needing to think about which buttons to press and how to manipulate the joystick with everything I did. This meant I was pretty terrible at the game even though it was built on an incredibly simple if frequent combination of button presses and joystick manipulation. It was always a battle against myself to even be able to play it, let alone battle my more-skilled friends and elder sibling, and it was a battle I frequently lost with not just this game but ANY game that required even rudimentary simultaneously activation of buttons and a joystick. I just couldn’t get my brain and body to do two different things at the same time (I was never able to rub my stomach and pat my head at the same time, which was at least my childhood’s measurement of how coordinated you were compared to your friends). It was frustrating, to know what I needed to do to be able to compete and to be unable to do it, made even more so by the ease with which my brother beat me and the way he’d lord his superior skills over me because it was yet another thing he was better than me at. Not that I ever had much of a chance, mind you, given that I only ever got to practice while playing against him or some of our neighborhood friends thanks to how limited my video game time was.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy XIV: One Week After Buying The Full Game
Last time, I wrote about my impressions of the general plot of the first major chunk of Final Fantasy XIV and my thoughts about buying the game. Now that I’ve own the game for a full week, gotten in a solid weekend of play, and had a few more days besides, I’ve gotten a much better impression of the gameplay loop that I’ll be experiencing for a significant portion of the future. At this point, now that I’ve joined up with the Free Company my friends are in, gotten a few more jobs up to the post-level-50 zone, and started to dig into the more modern day-to-day stuff, I feel like I’m on firm enough ground to say that I’ll probably be playing this game for years to come. I’m sure I’ll take months off, cancel my subscription from time to time, and eventually play other stuff when I get tired of FFXIV or run out of interesting things to do (or just get tired of sitting in my office all the time), but I can see myself playing this game for quite a while yet. The whole “daily events, do some gathering, meet up with friends, and idly pursue quests or rare drops” loop is really working for me here, likely because so much of it is social or something I can (and probably should!) be doing with other players. I’m still new to the FC, but everyone has been so warm and welcoming that I’m sure I’ll get over my initial shyness really soon and start reaching out to them for help or to do some of my daily/weekly events. I’m just really feeling new right now and that’s a difficult place for me to ask for help from, especially when I know I could probably figure it out by myself.
Continue readingBuying In Bulk In These Uncertain Times
Eggs are expensive. They’re hardly a good barometer for the economy as a whole, especially now when they’re expensive largely due to scarcity resulting from bird flu running rampant, but it’s difficult not to look at a seven dollar carton of eggs and think about all the little ways that grocery buying has gotten kinda fucked up over the last couple years. These days, unless I’m not buying much or really skimping, it is rare that I make it out of the store without spending about one hundred dollars. I could probably get that down with cheaper products and really hunting bargains, but doing that doesn’t save me all that much money and, as someone who has done that more than a few times in the last half a decade thanks to COVID-19, I’m already buying the cheapest stuff I can without sacrificing flavor or quality. What’s worse is that I’m not even buying stuff in the quantities I was before. I used to buy the economy size of most of my staples since I’d definitely go through that stuff before it went bad. Certain spices, condiments, various shelf-stable food in boxes, rice, etc. All stuff I’d buy in the biggest container I could. Now, though, my grocery bill has gone up noticeably and I can’t even buy the volume per item I used to. I literally can’t find some items in the sizes I used to. If I could, I’d still buy them in that size, increased cost be damned, but a lot of brands in the grocery stores I go to have just stopped selling those larger sizes.
Continue readingFinishing The First (Virtual) Dungeon In The Magical Millennium
After what feels like months (because it has been three months since we first started, given that we’ve played about once a month due to holidays and scheduling issues), my The Magical Millennium campaign finally cleared our first dungeon! They even did it without anyone dying or staying unconscious for very long! It was great! There were some close calls and a lot of bad conveyor belt related rolls, but they managed to clear it all in the end. We started the session with a check-in to remind everyone of how much time had passed (and a bit of frantic scrambling from me because D&D Beyond didn’t save the state of my encounter from last session), the party proceeded to kill the remaining clouds of energy, the Paladin beefed it on the conveyor belts repeatedly, the characters emerged from the virtual realm to get some notes from the person overseeing their game, and then they all settled down to sleep for the night before we wrapped up the session a couple hours early. It was nice to be able to bring the dungeon to a close, even if we didn’t play a full session (mostly due to the Super Bowl being that day), so we can hopefully start fresh in a brand new week when we all play again. Our next session will start with a bit of a time skip and a quick conversation about the highlights of what each character did during that time skip, but we’ll be moving on pretty quickly from there. My hope is we’ll be able to start off with homecoming week right away, since that’s a big day for high school students, and I want to get moving a little bit faster than we have been. We’ve been playing for a year now (or will have been, at the time of our next session), and we’ve only covered two in-game weeks! We’re moving so slowly!
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