After a bit of a break from sessions, my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns have finally begun to happen again. This past weekend (as I’m writing this and two weekends ago as you’re reading it), the campaign I’ve been calling The Rotten came together to do a little more labyrinth exploration, which involved making their way into their first proper hallways, finding some faded text carved into some large stone tiles, finding more faded text carved into smaller stone tiles, avoiding a few traps, fighting some undead that had been animated by the ambient magic just outside this part of the labyrinth, fighting some local raiders who were half-starved but who still nearly took down the party, AND discovered signs pointing them toward some long-forgotten religion! What a fun little session it was! We also talked about adding a few more players to the game–to help pad things out a bit when people can’t make it to a session–started inviting people, got three immediate “yes” responses, and then talked about what it would look like to have three more players. I’m still fairly confident that we’ll rarely have six players at the same time, but it’s bound to happen a few times, other than our next session when I’m hoping to bring them together to handle new character introductions and whatnot. If it happens too often, it might be difficult for some people to participate, what with all the extra faces and voices, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I’ve got a lot of experience running a bigger group, so I have some ideas to help keep people engaged and interacting if it comes to that.
Continue readingIs It Still Resilience If I’m Just Willing To Accept Being Miserable?
Content warnings for discussions of mental health and therapy, including suicidal ideation as a side-effect of obsessive-compulsive disorder and non-specific misery.
Continue readingPressing Concerns
When I sat down and wrote this poem, I was at one of the lowest points of my year, where the only thing keeping me going was the thought that maybe seeing a physical therapist would help fix my sleepless nights, my back pain, and the constant pain that wracked every part of my body as the medications I was taking took their toll on me. I was focused solely on surviving in a way I hadn’t been forced to in decades and while I clearly survived, that period of my life cost me something that’s taking a while to come back, even as my body feels better and my sleep returns to a more normal pattern. Now, I am acutely aware of some of my behavioral ticks that I’d written off for a long time and can’t ignore what they mean any longer. Which is where this poem comes in. I’ll let you decide for yourself what all this adds up to.
Continue readingReflecting Along The Road To Recovery
Well, since I’m writing this a day later than usual (on the 17th instead of the 16th), I’ve now made it through two increasingly demanding weeks at work. I got through my first exhausted weekend, started this week feeling fresh, and immediately pushed my limits as far as they could go every day I could. I spent four days doing a huge amount of testing, recruited anyone who was willing to help me, and made it through about fifty percent of the testing I needed in about a week. I also completely exhausted myself such that, despite sleeping pretty decently last night (thanks to choosing to work less and sleep more the morning I wrote this), I’m ready to fall asleep at my desk. I even forced myself to take a day off testing, to rest my poor hands, my give my aching body a break, and to focus on denying my ever-present desire to be horizontal rather than any amount of vertical, but I’m still struggling to stay conscious and alert today any time I’m not actively doing something and half of the rest of the time. It’s a nice exhaustion, though. I feel sleepy and ready for rest rather than uncomfortable and in pain like I was for most of last year. I can be still and the lingering pains will cease or I can move and stretch and feel my body loosen up. Truly, it is a remarkable thing to be recovering after so much time of just being miserable.
Continue readingTurns Out I Really Enjoy Healing In Final Fantasy XIV
As I’m writing this post a week ago (compared to when it gets posted, anyway. Who knows when you’re actually reading this), I’m officially two weeks into my time with Final Fantasy XIV and everything I suspected would be true in my last post about it (almost two weeks ago) has stayed true. I’ve continued to enjoy my time with the game, even if I have spent my time pushing myself through the Main Scenario Quests rather than via my preferred “slow puttering” method, but I was eager to unlock more parts of the game and my friends were often making time for me, so I didn’t want to waste the time they could have spent on other things by being lackadaisical about the meat of the game. Now that I’ve finished the first portion of the game, everything up through level fifty (as far as the MSQ and my chosen Job, White Mage, are concerned, anyway), I’m ready to get back to a little bit of puttering, trying out some other classes, and starting to spread myself out a bit more widely as I get deeper into things. I’m still on the free trial, since I’m none too keen to start paying subscription fees for the game, so there’s still a bunch of stuff I can’t access or can only access via a series of convoluted events (like taking my friends on dungeon delves requires a friend to invite me to a group and then promote me to the group’s leader since I can’t make groups with a free account). I’m already looking forward to when I’ve played enough of the game to justify spending money on it so I can join up with the free company my friends are a part of and maybe even start making friends with some of them. There’s still so much of the game out there for me to find and play!
Continue readingPutting My Annoyingly Competitive Coworkers To Work
Last week, I wrote about how I was feeling better and how I was kind of excited about being able to actually put in some effort at work without feeling awful for a week or more. I wound up setting a personal record for testing cycles performed entirely on accident. I’d forgotten that my previous record was counted using only half of what I’m now calling a cycle (since I was testing something else then), so I’d only done thirty cycles in a single day back when I was still feeling fairly hale despite all the pain I was in last summer and on Friday I wound up doing thirty-seven (specifically to smooth out the total count to a nice round number). I paid for it all weekend, of course, but I was feeling mostly better by Sunday and back to about ninety percent by the time I hauled myself into work yesterday morning (or, well, a week ago yesterday as you’re reading this). I felt well enough to log another thirty cycles, even, and woke up today feeling mostly alright. My hands are in the worst shape, between the blisters, the muscle tightness, and the lingering tenderness from my burns almost three weeks ago, but even so I’m able to keep up the work and wound up logging an impressive fifty cycles. The problem is, while I’m making great progress on this testing, it will take me weeks to get to the total number I need to call this test finished. After all, even if I can keep up doing fifty a day–or even get it up to my target of one hundred–that’s still ten to twenty days of work to get to one thousand (the number we’ve picked for this test). I need it to happen faster than that and I’d really prefer to not be exhausting myself every day given how much OTHER work I still need to do before this project is finished.
Continue readingUnmasking Heroes And Tearing Down Pedestals
Content Warning for mentions of accused abuser and sexual-assaulter Neil Gaiman, non-specific mentions of the allegations against him, and the discussion of other figures in the public eye who have also been revealed to be terrible people (ex. Rowling, Musk).
Continue readingFighting Phantasmal Guilt As I Wait For My Turn In The Climate Disaster Zone
Most of the time, I feel pretty happy living in the Midwest. I may not seem like the sort, especially if you’ve been reading my blog over the last two rather miserable years of my life, but I really try to count my blessings, so to speak, and appreciate what I’ve got when I can. This week (last week, as you’re reading this), I’m feeling more grateful than ever to be living in the Midwest. While we’re not entirely immune to climate change and related disasters, we’re fairly insulated from them. I mean, tornado season is growing longer, strange weather patters are becoming more common, the weather bounces from one extreme to the other as polar winds fight unseasonably warm weather from the south, and all the while local infrastructure struggles to keep up with the varying demands places on it. We’re FAR from immune, especially as droughts worsen and wildfires become more common (I fully expect to see a fire tornado sometime in my life thanks to the confluence of living in tornado and prairie fire territory), but it will (probably) be a few years yet before any of the city-destroying mass disasters show up for my part of southern Wisconsin. So, from the comfort of my workplace and home, I’m watched with mounting horror as LA has burned. I still avoid the news most of the time and I’m not one to go look for videos of horrible stuff on the internet, but looking through Bluesky has proved to be a pretty effective window into recent natural disasters, which has me once again questioning the place that social media has in my life. And, you know, thinking about climate change.
Continue readingI Now Have Proof That I’m Doing Better
So, I’m most of the way through my first week back in the office after my vacation and had my first physical therapy appointment since I started feeling better. While I’m definitely feeling a little strain from being back at work and being physically active again for the first time in a couple weeks, I had a remarkably different experience during my physical therapy appointment. Not only did I do enormously better on all the physical assessments than I did in my last appointment (a month ago), my therapist was so positive about my recovery that we put aside all the stuff we’d been working on in past appointments to address another problem I’ve had on and off for years. It was great to feel like things were finally working out for me after spending so much time in pain and feeling like I just wasn’t making any progress. I will probably go back to doing some kind of exercises once my recovery from that medication I was taking is finished, but it will probably be much more focused on taking care of my body and building good workout habits than on trying to fix my back. The more time that passes, the more it seems like that problem was tied directly to the side effects of the medication I was on and less on swapping mattresses. I mean, swapping mattresses was definitely a part of the issue, but I think that I’d have gotten through that relatively quickly on my own if I hadn’t been taking the joint and muscle pain and stiffness suite of medications. In retrospect, it feels almost kind of silly to think about how worried I was that all that pain and discomfort was a permanent problem.
Continue readingMidwinter Video Game Malaise
I’m in another weird spot with video games. A brand new one, this time around, which is kind of refreshing, but it’s still weird. I’ve never really been one to cling to a video game if I wind up not playing it all the way through. The two previous exceptions to this are huge, sprawling games like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, both of which take multiple hundreds of hours to play all the way through and are a “sometimes” game for me. Now, though, as I shift most of my gaming time towards Final Fantasy XIV and occasionally dabble in a second playthrough of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, a second attempt at a second playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom, and a second playthrough of Chained Echoes in preparation for the upcoming DLC, I find myself looking at games I didn’t finish and wishing I had the time to play games that aren’t either super engaging or just unengaging enough to listen to a podcast throughout. I mean, I WANT to play those games, even if I seem to struggle to make myself do it sometimes. It makes sense that I might have a difficult time pushing myself to play more Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth given how much I don’t enjoy the open-world segments and how many of them there are, but I actually do enjoy playing Armored Core VI but I just can’t seem to make myself sit down and play it with any kind of frequency. Nor can I seem to make myself play Dragon’s Dogma despite being incredible excited by everything I’ve heard about the game and having a podcatcher chock full of podcasts to listen to while I run around it’s wide-open world. Instead, I play a new game with my friends and replay other games when I’m not playing that.
Continue reading