It has been a long time since I was last struck by inspiration. Most of the time, when an idea “comes to me,” it’s the result of me chewing something over in the back of my mind for a long time before coming up with whatever thought or idea will form the center of what thing I’m going to produce. Poetry, short stories, a novel draft, all these blog posts… None of them are the result of inspiration even if I’ve often claimed to have been “inspired” by something. Even those times, I came up with an idea after thinking about some media or idea for a while. Which might sound a lot like inspiration, but I would define inspiration as something external that plops a fully-formed idea into your head. All of my “inspired by” ideas are a result of my internal processing coming up with an idea based on thinking about something else. It feels like quite a thin hair to split, which is why I haven’t written about this before and am somewhat hesitant to write about it not (mostly because it doesn’t much matter to me which side of the split hair you’re on since it’s all a part of the writing process and the only person the precise definition of this stuff matters to is the person doing the defining as a part of their process). Still, this feeling of actual, true inspiration is rare enough that I feel compelled to say something about it now that I’ve been on the receiving end of it for the first time since I set up an online D&D campaign back in 2019.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 25
Rather than complain about how tired and sad I am, or about how rough work has been this week, I figured I might as well turn my attention toward my favorite gaming franchise and not only avoid my blog becoming a dour place full of only my sourest feelings but also maybe even lift my own spirits. After all, there’s a new Legend of Zelda game coming out soon (Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom) and you get to play as Zelda in this one! Which is a pretty big deal, considering the only other protagonist we’ve even seen in a Legend of Zelda game is Link. Link’s been our only player character this whole time. Sure, the Hyrule Warriors games muddied the waters a bit, but those aren’t really the same thing since they’re even further from “canon” than even the handful of Capcom handheld games. Even if you moved to include them in this accounting of Legend of Zelda protagonists, Link is still the primary protagonist and all the other characters show up to support and fight alongside him, so that argument is iffy at best. All of which is to say that this is a pretty big deal. I know a lot of people are nervous about what looks like a departure from the norm (dungeons and puzzles and relatively clear progression) as the game touts its world being as open to exploration as your imagination allows and shows Zelda committing mostly indirect violence rather than ever truly dirtying her hands like Link does, but I think it’s almost always worth taking a relatively wild swing. Wild swings got us Breath of the Wild and, sure, they also got us Tears of the Kingdom (which was an enjoyable foul ball, but a foul ball all the same and I could probably make a good argument it for being less of a wild swing and more of an attempt to hit a home run again, which doesn’t really make sense in this metaphor but feels like an accurate description of what the game did), but I’m all for trying new things and desperate to play as Zelda, especially after they took the very gender-neutral Link of Breath of the Wild and solidly masculinized him in Tears of the Kingdom. Let’s move the men aside for a bit and let someone else have a turn at the game, you know?
Continue readingWhy I’m Still Struggling Along In Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
I’ve been steadily chipping away at Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth again and was planning to keep my thoughts to myself until I got further in the game (apparently ending the open world sections of chapter 9 just launches you into an open world section in chapter 10, unlike every other open-world section that got to have a break for some fun story time before heading back to the open world stuff again, which made me so frustrated that I turned my PlayStation off and stared at my ceiling in discontent for fifteen minutes). Instead, I’m writing this post because I saw someone writing about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth by saying that there might never be another game like it. This was meant as praise and had me wondering if the writer of that post had played the same game I did. As I chewed on this opinion, I realized I’d never really looked at reviews for the game, as it released or in the months since then, because I’d wanted to avoid being spoiled while I finished up some other games before diving into FF7: Rebirth. Uncertain, now, if my opinion was just me being curmudgeonly and unwilling to allow myself to appreciate the game, I decided to spend some time looking at reviews and discussions of the game. Which pretty much all broke down into people either loving or hating the open-world segments of the game, for good and bad reasons on both sides, and doing nothing but shouting down the people who disagreed with them. So, today, as I complained about the game to a friend, I decided I should actually talk about WHY this game doesn’t work for me, why I continue to push myself to play it, and why I feel so emotionally invested in all of this that I’m writing about it multiple times without even finishing it.
Continue readingGuardian-Teacher Conferences And First Adventures In The Magical Millennium
Though we were short a player, there were still enough people available to hold another session of The Magical Millennium. We picked up immediately where we left off last time, with a few notes about how most of the player characters present spent their afternoons and evenings before we launched into the two big events for the session: a guardian-teacher conference (like a parent-teacher conference but for legal guardians who want to avoid the topic of parents) to discuss the uncontrolled magic one of the player characters unknowingly cast on their unsuspecting dorm neighbor and the party’s first adventure in a city park that had an Awakened Bush problem! Everything went well, my players had a great time, and no one was knocked unconscious despite the irritable awakened plants landing two critical hits in a combat session that was almost prevented by good roleplaying (bad rolls and cascading failures are the only reason this didn’t even non-violently). I got to make up some random NPC names, accidentally create a really cool character, and start to trickle in a little bit of information about the retired adventuring party casting its shadow over the city and the player characters. After all, if one of the players is going to make their character the second child of one of the ex-adventurers who saved the world by sealing the rifts into the fiendish planes before they could consume the planet, I’m absolutely going to find a way to do something narratively fun with that. Why wouldn’t I?
Continue readingBurnout By Any Other Name Would Ache As Much
I am happy to report that I made it through a whole weekend without discovering some new wild and unprecedented thing happening in the world. Perhaps because I avoided social media as much as possible and have avoided going to look for what I might have missed, but perhaps because nothing significant and unprecedented happened! Maybe it was a normal weekend! Like any other! Just a totally average weekend that included the start of the summer Olympics as France showed off what it brings to the world. Which I didn’t watch, but heard was absolutely wild. I plan to go watch it at some point (even though I don’t really care much about the Olympic sporting events themselves) since the pageantry of it all seems incredible, but I avoided at the time so I could spend the entire weekend trying to recover from how absolutely exhausting and draining last week was. Which, of course, means that I got into work today and all of that resting immediately flew out the window, leaving me more burned out and stressed than I was last week. It is difficult to be the source of truth and knowledge for a project that a lot of people have strong opinions on when said people decide to insert themselves into said project and voice their opinions without asking to be caught up on where the project is at. It is a particularly futile brand of frustrating to spend an entire day explaining to people that you did, in fact, think of all the obvious things they’re suggesting, that you have returned to the basics multiple times, that you’ve done all the easy troubleshooting they suggested, and that your data is actually as conclusive as you’re saying even if they don’t understand it. Literally spent five hours today on that kind of work and made it exactly one iota of a step further than I was last week because of how much stuff I had to do so my coworkers could “just see it happen” themselves.
Continue readingThree Years Of Blog Posts
It has been (almost exactly) three years since I started posting to this blog again. The first post officially went up on August 4th, 2021, but I’d begun writing posts the week prior, setting up my “write the posts one week ahead of them going up” plan so I could focus on my editing skills and the delayed gratification of working ahead of my deadline rather than right up to it. Now, it is three years later and though I’ve down to five posts a week and am not posting any more creative writing work (poems, stories, etc) on my WordPress .com page since those fuckers are still willing to sell my data without compensating me (using a setting that is on by default, the absolute worst way they could put in a setting for this shit), I’m still going strong. I’ll admit I’m struggling to keep these posts written a week ahead of time, but I can mostly keep it up and the days I fall behind aren’t really a big deal since that’s usually a result of me being so busy that my brain was too tired to actually participate in writing something. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to write moderately interesting blog posts without using your brain, but nothing good has ever come from it for me. Better to take breaks and rest without recrimination than to try and fail to produce something even modestly interesting. Which is a lesson I’ve only just learned over the course of these past three years, actually, so clearly this version of the whole blogging thing is working out pretty well for me.
Continue readingStar Wars: The Acolyte Makes For Great Light Watching
I finished watching The Acolyte last week. Not the week I wrote this, but the week prior. Pretty much two weeks prior to the day this went up. I was watching it in chunks to match up with the Patreon episodes of A More Civilized Age, so I watched shortly after episode 5 came out and then the Friday after episode 8 came out. I’ll admit I struggled a bit with the show initially, but one of the things Austin Walker said in the first episode of AMCA’s covered of the show reframed the entire thing for me in a way that made it much easier to enjoy: The Acolyte is a YA show. Once I started treating it with the same level of seriousness and mindset as I treated most of the CW-type YA shows I’ve seen in my life (which is not many, to be honest), the whole thing felt way more enjoyable (which even applied in retrospect, given that I started listening to the podcast episode minutes after I finished episode 4 of The Acolyte). Once you stop expecting deep character motivations for every decision and can silence the voice in your head comparing the show to Andor, it’s actually quite enjoyable. I’d call it a good show, even, in the way that chips are a good food. It’s not the most substantive thing out there and you can easily find issues to pick at if you want to, but it’s mostly fun enough that none of that really matters. To once again paraphrase Austin Walker from multiple episodes of AMCA, there was enough interesting stuff going on most of the time that I didn’t really care about the stuff that didn’t work (with a few notable exceptions). All-in-all, I’d definitely recommend the show to anyone who likes Star Wars and especially to those interested in stories about how the Jedi (individually) aren’t always good people and how the institution as whole is pretty rotten.
Continue readingThe Slow, Grinding Burnout Of Constantly Finding Problems
One day deeper into the week, one more day of fruitless work on a project I can’t talk about behind me. I’m not as upset about everything as I was yesterday, though I’m still a little upset and frustrated, but now I’m feeling extra worn down because we’re still unable to figure out why things aren’t working the way we want them to and how nothing we do that improves those results makes any kind of sense. It has everyone stumped and while we have been able to make slowly improving progress over the past two months, we haven’t really fixed things yet. It is exhausting to work on, mentally and emotionally, because we’re just beating out heads against a problem, and it is exhausting physically because any proposals about different methodology or improvements require a decent amount of heavy labor from me. This work has become every kind of exhausting and I can feel myself less and less able to spring back from it with every passing day. Sure, nothing I’m doing is wrong or a failure or anything like that, but it sure feels like a failure when I’ve been working on a problem this long and this consistently but haven’t been able to figure anything out. Sure, my job is to collect data and tell people that things are wrong, but I clearly understand the problems and how they play out better than everyone else (as my repeated explanations prove almost daily) so it feels like some part of the solution is my responsibility. Regardless of whether that is right or wrong, it is how I feel and these repeated days of zero progress despite my efforts have me feeling incredibly drained.
Continue readingVenting What Steam I Can From Work Frustrations
Today has been shitty and exhausting. Not the usual kind of shitty where it’s mostly my depression, my despair at the world in general, or me needlessly spiraling over some unlikely anxiety, nor is i shitty in the sudden-crisis-at-work kind of way. No, today, I got to spend four hours doing manual labor I can’t talk to anyone about to test a project I can’t talk about in any level of specificity while being watched by a bunch of people who frequently ignored my advice and all but shouted me down when I suggested that something they were worried about wasn’t actually a problem based on the hundreds of hours of experience I’ve gotten with the product at the heart of this project. I had to spend ten minutes enduring their nattering and catastrophizing about how what they observed could be the source of all these problems we’ve been trying to solve for months now before I could prove myself correct (that it was an optical illusion caused by their point of view and multi-directional movement of the thing I was moving around). I wasn’t going to let them interrupt my data collection to do the unnecessary thing they wanted to do, since that would require dismantling the current test, doing an entirely different test, setting my current test back up again, and then calibrating the measuring tools again. It took me all of a minute to prove they were wrong when I finally set their test up in a much faster and easier way than they thought it had to be done. As I moved to continue testing following their reluctant agreement that I was correct, one of them said “and now we’re never going to hear the end of it.” That really soured my mood, which is worth remarking since I wasn’t in a great mood already based on the whole “hours of manual labor while those coworkers stood around and wrote down numbers or pressed buttons” thing.
Continue readingEverything Is Too Much All The Time
Well, the day my last post about living in unprecedented times went up, all I could do was sigh miserably as I felt today’s post come bubbling out of the stress from, once again, a weekend of wild shit. Mostly one wild event since everything kind of pales in comparison, but some of “smaller” stuff bears mentioning anyway. Sure, as time passes and more of what was going on behind the scenes emerges into the light of day, it looks like President Biden’s decision to step aside from the US Presidential Race was a calculated move that could have some positive effects [which seems to become more and more clear with each passing day], but I really don’t know that there’s any world in which changing horses mid-race will do anything but ultimately hinder the jockey’s attempts to win. Maybe in a few weeks or months, I’ll be walking all this back and crowing about the easy victory of (presumably ) President Harris, but that seems like too good of a future to be true. Sure, Vice President Harris might win against Trump (I doubt there has been a more detestable presidential nominee from a major party in US History than Trump in 2024), but I bet the next three and a half months are going to be exhausting. I mean, it has been only a little over twenty-four hours since the announcement and I’ve already gotten more campaign solicitation text messages, emails, and phone calls than I’ve gotten in the calendar year up to this point (I’ve unsubscribing and blocking zealously for the past three years). I would really love it if things could calm down for a bit, you know? I’d love one of those “nothing” decades.
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