It has been nearly a month since I last wrote about Final Fantasy 14. I started the subsequent expansion not long after my last post (and might have dipped my toes into it just before that post went up), but progress has been pretty slow. It’s not a lack of interest mind you, but perhaps because of an abundance of it. I’ve been consistently putting off certain bits of progress in the main story until my friends could play through them with me, which has sometimes meant needing to wait a day or two to get through the next plot-blocking dungeon or trial. I also took a bunch of time away to level up a class so I could do all of the combat job quest lines simultaneously, and getting something from twenty-ish to seventy is a significant undertaking. I’ve also had a lot of little money-making tasks to pursue, some crafting to do, attempts to update my character’s various glamours, more wrestling events, and so on. I’ve played PLENTY, I just didn’t get back to the Main Scenario Quests until last week on account of all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Even now that I’ve been back at it, the going has been a bit slow as I’ve had to level up additional jobs every night so I can do their quest lines, which means I’ve been poking at the MSQ in small increments here or there every night once that is all done. I also did some raids, took most of a day off Final Fantasy, and gotten back into working all my usual overtime at my job, so I’ve just not been able to bring my focus to bear in the way I’d like to.
Continue readingThe First Casualty Of The Summer Heat
Somehow, despite the temperature hitting the upper 70s (or 26ish for you Celcius folks), my employer hasn’t turned on the air conditioning yet. In fact, given how warm and stuffy my office is, the heat might still be on. The temperature gauge outside my office says it is 75 in the lab, but I can feel the temperature drop a couple degrees the instant I exit my office door, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my office itself is 80 or higher. I mean, I can’t even stand around my desk without sweating a little bit, despite having a desk fan running on high (which doesn’t count for as much as I’d like it to since I need that thing running constantly just to counter how still and stuffy my office gets without it). Honestly, it’s so warm in here that I’m having a difficult time not falling asleep immediately any time I sit down in my chair or when my attention starts to drift while standing at my desk (have you ever dozed off while standing up? It’s quite startling but apparently not so startling that I won’t do it again within five minutes). It’s almost unbearable and the only thing keeping me from leaving the office to work at home is that my apartment won’t be much better (though the air will be moving a bit more than it is here, which isn’t nothing). And, you know, the fact that I’m sure it’d become a thing with my coworkers.
Continue readingCreating The Mythos Of The Demigods of Daelen
We finally did it. We had our first session of the something new game I started up to replace The Magical Millennium (which remains on hiatus for the time-being) and even though two of our players couldn’t make it, we had a successful first session. I designed the campaign to be playable with as few as two player characters, so having a few people out isn’t a huge bother for me or the game I’m running. It’s still Dungeons and Dragons 5e, of course (2014 version for everything except I’m including the Weapon Mastery feature for 2024 because that feels appropriate for this collection of powerful characters), since most of my players aren’t that interested in going far afield, but I’ve done an intense bit of hacking and homebrewing to alter the basic systems to work on a different scale than the game was originally intended to run at. Most of this is just massaging numbers a bit (a thing I can do because the “Bounded Accuracy” of 5e allows me to alter the numbers in ways that have predictable outcomes), but there’s a few changes to how the rules play out, how success and failure should be interpretted, and how the mechanics of the game are designed to interact. Most of which is not stuff my players need concern themselves with since I’m the one running the show and I know how to alter everything appropriately. What my players are supposed to be concerned with is building the myth of their semi-divine character!
Continue readingA Week Of Ups And Downs And Sudden Lateral Movement
This has been a difficult week. I’ve had a lot of emotional turbulence as I’ve started up a new medication while still on an old one. It’s not making me feel things, but it does seem to be amplifying my naturally occurring emotions in weird ways. Or doing nothing except leaving me incredibly sleepy. I also had a day where I just felt out of it, like I had a bad head cold that was making me feel foggy. Today (a week before this posted), I feel mostly normal except all of my emotions are hitting me at full power rather than drifting up and down as normal. I think this is the unfortunate combination of weaning off my previous medication while starting up my new one and the sort of daily variability of it is giving me hope that this is just a temporary side effect as my body adjusts to the changing chemical levels within it [this seems to have played out as I hoped it would, with these symptoms largely vanishing by the time this posted]. That all of this emotional variability will calm down eventually and my body will adjust, settling into routine side effects and new chemical balances that will hopefully have the desired effect of treating my depression and anxiety. Eventually. For now, though, I’m implementing a lot of “Shut The Fuck Up Friday” best practices because I’ve caught myself prepared to say some things in the workplace that wouldn’t necessarily get me in trouble but would give my coworkers a better glimpse at the person I am than I’m prepared to show them in a structured work environment. I mean, I don’t exactly trust them after all…
Continue readingA Perfect Morning Ruined By Casual Reality
Last week (today, as of writing this, I guess, but over a week ago as of this getting posted), I woke up incredibly peacefully. I’d gotten decent sleep and struggled to get out of bed because the temperature was perfect for staying beneath my blankets as I listened to the sound of the rain outside. It was, perhaps, the best morning I’d had in a while, especially because I was able to haul myself out of bed before long and get ready for work without too much of an issue. It was pleasant, that first hour and a half of my morning as I ate breakfast and got ready for work, but it quickly spiraled downhill from there. You see, when I went to go get into my car around half-past-eight, I discovered that my underground parking garage had flooded. Nothing terrible, or disastrous, mind you, but it was at least ankle-deep water that had backed up out of the drain and I don’t have shoes waterproof enough to handle something like that. So, I returned to my apartment and planned to work from home for an hour when I remembered a conversation my boss and I had a couple weeks prior during my yearly review. Apparently, people had been taking notice of how often I worked from home for a couple hours in the morning or how often I was gone part of the morning for doctor appointments–enough that they’d spoken to my boss about it. While my boss understood my reasons and knew I was getting my hours in and my work done, he suggested that I do what I could to cut down on how often it happened at least for a while. I didn’t say much in response because I was processing the fact that my coworkers formed opinions about how often I wasn’t present in the office but chose to speak with our manager about it rather than see if there was any kind of reason for my time away from the office. I didn’t exactly have the bandwidth to bring any of that up yet since I was still reeling from learning this and hadn’t gotten to the point of being able to express why it upset me so much.
Continue readingSubtext And Performative Extroversion Are The Key To A Good Work Schedule
On top of everything going on, all the woes of society and my on-going issues with finding a decent antidepressant that works for me, things at my job are picking back up again. Our project has been announced, we’ve gotten through all the manufacturing hurdles, and it is officially released to production as of a couple weeks ago. Which means that development can finally resume. That’s right. It’s released and actively being sold, but we’re back to working on it again. This isn’t terribly unusual for a lot of products (especially on stuff with lead-times as large as ours are–multiple months). A lot of things will be announced, get demonstrated or marketed, and have their designs shipped to factories to be produced long before development will stop working on them. Some of that work is, of course, designing future versions of the product, making improvements, and incorporating feedback based on customer experiences. A lot of it, though, is just the same work that’s been done the whole time but now focused solely on trying to remove as much material from the project as possible in order to bring down the cost of producing it. Sometimes that means chasing down ideas developers and engineers had but didn’t have a chance to try out during the initial development phase. Sometimes that’s just making choices to combat newly discovered problems that only came up after the product existed and was being used long enough. Regardless of the specifics, I’m now entering into what is going to be the longest period of heavy physical labor on this project, albeit at a much different pace than I was doing it earlier this year.
Continue readingA More Civilized Age Pivots To KotOR 2 Due To Boycott Of Disney+
Last night (as of writing this and a bit over a week ago as of this being posted), A More Civilized Age announced that they would not be covering the second season of Disney’s Andor. According to the podcast episode (which appeared in their feed instead of the first episode of coverage that everyone was expecting) shared along by the social media posts, members of the podcast felt it would go against their moral and/or ethical beliefs to cover something on the BDS boycott list, which they’d just learned included Disney+ specifically. This recording specifices that this was a difficult decision for them to make given that the members of the podcast had differing views and that they had to make it in under a week since they only learned of the Disney+ boycott the week that the new season of Andor began streaming. It makes sense that they might struggle with this choice since their weekly coverage of the first season of Andor launched them into a position of relative fame that has contributed to their current success and included perks like being able to watch the final episode early in order to release their final episode of coverage at the same time that the season 1 finale aired. That said, it speaks to their strength of character and their overall morals that the eventual decision wasn’t to cover Andor season 2 without the members of the group who objected to breaking the boycott but to pivot to covering something that isn’t being boycotted.
Continue readingMessing With Powers Beyond Your Ken In The Rotten Labyrinth
We’ve had another session of my incredibly maze-focused Dungeons and Dragons campaign, The Rotten Labyrinth and this one was a bit of a doozy. Well, from a certain perspective. Most of which I can’t actually post about because it features stuff that my players have yet to discover, chief amongst them being the ramifications of what they did in this last session. Sure, we all started with fun and games as we slowly reassembled where negotions with Steve the Goblong had been before all the sirens and the fire alarm had forced all thoughts of tabletop gaming from my mind. He safely led them through the maze, carefully pointing out that they should just follow him and not poke around other hallways that much since those paths weren’t definitely safe like his were, Which was immediately punctuated by the party finding a trap and then failing to disarm it by enough that they set it off instead, which triggered not just a normal trap, but a new secondary trap that was right next to it. They all survived thanks to some healing, but they stopped exploring other hallways after that, obediently followed Steve to the place he said there was a problem his community of Goblongs needed solved, and then wound up performing a religious ritual at an alter to a representative of the god of mazes and pathways and whatnot that this whole labyrnith had been built to worship. Once that was done and the strange tinnitus-like ringing noise had faded, Steven revealed his true movement speed as he quickly left the party behind. Which is fine for most of the party because the ones who performed the ritual can’t get lost in the labyrinth any more now that they have been magically connected to it. Like I said: it was a bit of a doozy.
Continue readingThe End Of My Ceaseless Exhaustion Is Hopefully In Sight
After three months of miserable side-effects, unending exhaustion, and sleepiness that dominated my every waking moment, I’ve finally hit the end of my “wait it out” period for the antidepressant my doctor recommended. I had some small improvement from it at the highest dose I took, but I was also so tired on it that I’d be falling asleep every afternoon even when I was sleeping a minimum of seven and a half hours. Which, you know, wasn’t exactly a viable outcome for me. It took me a couple weeks to even recognize that the medication was having a positive effect on me because I was just too tired to feel anything but nigh-overwhelming exhaustion. It was a bit of a lateral move rather than an improvement or worsening of my general well-being, but I can work through feeling incredibly depressed and I cannot work through exhaustion that complete, as I learned throughout the last three months. It never quite got bad enough to actually make me mess up at work, but I also took a lot of vacation time during the peak of the exhaustion and I had plans for that time later this year. So it wasn’t great but I got through it, told my doctor it wasn’t working for me at any dose, and now I’m officially on the “slowly wean off the antipressant” path. As of this blog post going up, I’m one week away from my last dose of it and what will hopefully be the end of my constant sleepiness.
Continue readingThe Economy And Society At Large Are Failing Artists
Recently, an… associate? Community member? Friend of a friend? Recently, someone I know vaguely in that way you know people who are in your community but with whom you’ve never had much of a direct interaction published a graphic novel (or second of three collections of a comic they’re publishing on the internet, depending on how you want to define things) and got not only zero support from her publisher but a string of such unhelpful responses that it would be easy to suggest that she was actively hindered. I’m not going to name the person, the publisher, or even the comic because I don’t want to drag any mud into her business, but it was absolutely infuriating to hear about what a shitty time she’d had in the publication of this latest book given that the one freaking thing a publisher actually does, aside from making the editing and printing aparatuses available to creators, is help to sell the book! All they’ve done so far is make sure copies show up at businesses and that’s the bare minimum for a business! You’d think that a company that was going through the actually significant hassle of receiving, editing, proofing, and printing an entire graphic novel would also spend some time and money marketing it so they can, you know, make some money of the damn thing! But no. This released with no fanfare, the creator was absolutely stonewalled when she tried to get the ball rolling, and she’s been left to do any amount of marketing by herself via social media. It’s absolutely infuriating.
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