For past decade, almost, I’ve felt a decent amount of shame every time Fourth of July comes around. The US hasn’t been worth celebrating in a long time (perhaps ever, given its imperial nature, horrible systemic treatment of its own minority citizens (not to mention the treatment of non-citizen minorities), centuries-long campaign against indigenous peoples, etc., etc.) and, with every passing year, I feel more and more reticence to even mark the day, let alone do anything that could be construed as “celebration.” I mean, sure, to most people, it’s probably just an excuse to get outside, light some probably-illegal fireworks, and grill up some food, nothing more. There aren’t a lot of mandated days-off for most people and this one, a rare time where most people don’t work that overlaps with when kids will be free to do whatever they like, is in a prime part of the year for vacations and just getting out in the sun. I can see people just taking it as a day off and not digging too deeply into what it means to have an annual patriotism festival, but I can’t get these thoughts out of my head. Especially now. Especially with the current government. ESPECIALLY given the secret police, the ever-concerning rise of more and more overt fascism, and how the party nominally positioned to offer resistance is failing to do much of anything one could charitably describe as “meaningful.” I can’t stop thinking about it at least a little bit.
Continue readingSweating The Summer Heat
Thankfully, all of the weather prediction services were more-or-less right about the end of last week’s heatwave. Unfortunately, as I mused at the time, the official end of the heatwave took only it’s obscenely high temperatures. The otherwise toasty high temperatures and still kinda high low temperatures have stuck around, always overshooting the day-to-day forecasts so that every single day winds up hotter, more humid, and much less comfortable than expected. It has made occupying space in my apartment a bit more tricky than usual because even something as innocuous as making dinner can put a lot of heat in my apartment that my AC unit just can’t handle on top of the day-to-day heat of summer and sunshine. I don’t remember my AC unit struggling this much in the past, but it’s certainly possible that it is genuinely working less well now than it used to. I’ve had old AC units die on me in apartments before and I know that the more heavily they’re used, the faster they wear out and the layout of my current apartment demands heavy use if I’m going to actually control the temperature in any space other than right next to my AC unit. All of which amounts to me starting to sweat most days when I’m in my office, playing games on my computer. Maybe I should spend less time in my office where there’s no good airflow and two large heat generators in a small space (me and my computer), but it’s difficult to imagine that my upstairs room where all my entertainment stuff is located will be much better when I can feel the heat swamp me every time I move around that room.
Continue readingThe Endless Road To Recovery
It has been over a year since I went from “struggling” to “barely getting by” in terms of my personal health. A year ago, I was on vacation with my siblings and struggling to get enough sleep due to back pain from a mix of how a medicaiton I was taking messed with my joints and how my old, worn-out mattress had negatively impacted my back (which had only become apparent when I was trying to sleep on a not-horrible mattress). Things pretty much only got worse from then until mid-October, where they slowly reached a degree of stasis they stayed at until early January. Since early January, my physical and mental health have been variably up and down as I’ve dealt with more new medications, physically intensive work at my job, long days, too-short nights, and a general feeling of isolation that has left me wondering why I even bother with all of this stuff. I’ve written more posts about how I’m slowly improving than I care to count and this one was initially going to be no different. Things are improving, sure. I’m feeling a bit less tired than usual and while I’m more uncomfortable than ever as a result of the high temperatures and trying to change a sleep schedule I’ve more-or-less maintained for most of my life (at least two decades), I do think things are getting better. I don’t know if they’ll stay that way, if they’ll improve further, or if something else will crop up that has me feeling worse again, but I can’t help but feel like I’m trying to climb some kind of trick staircase that has me constantly feeling like I’m moving forward while I never actually get any further from the bottom.
Continue readingPlanning For My Future In Final Fantasy 14
Now that is has been six days since I finished the base portion of the Endwalker expansion of Final Fantasy 14, I’ve finally hit the point where I can really start to think about what I’m going to doing next (as opposed to just sorta thinking about it). I’ve had a lot of this stuff on my mental to-do lists for a while, but I’ve been putting a lot of it off in favor of progressing the main story or doing the work required to continue progressing the main story. Now that I’m hitting a slow-down point and won’t be racing to get as much done as I possibly can, it’s time to turn my attention back to that stuff. Most of it is stuff I’ve been working on slowly, as a part of daily and weekly activities, but it hasn’t really gotten any focused attention from me in a couple months and now it’s time to shift my attention and reasses priorities. All of which is to say that my equipment inventory has way too much stuff in it and I need to get that thing cleared out by leveling up a bunch of classes. Also, I really need to put a bit more focus and effort into my gathering and carfting skills since I’ve hit the point where I can’t repair my own gear anymore and that’s no good. Gotta be mostly self-sufficient so I don’t need to rely on barely-fixed gear or finding a random person whose crafting skills are high enough to fix my stuff (it was a whole thing in my latest raid night with the FC). Lots of stuff that I meant to maintain as I played has fallen by the wayside as the demands of my life and the main story of FF14 have fluctuated and it is time to get everything humming along again.
Continue readingI Cleared Endwalker In Final Fantasy 14
I took me 173 days and approximately 1100 hours of gaming, but I did it. I cleared the initial expansion that brought an end to nearly a decade of Final Fantasy 14’s storytelling. I fought a lot of big bosses, dealt with a lot of poeple who seemed unreasonable at first, and cried my eyes out, all but literally. I cried on and off (mostly on) for about four hours as I wrapped up the expansion. I’m still occasionally getting misty about it as I reflect on how it all wrapped up and I finished it five days ago (as of writing this, nine as of it getting posted). I do not think I’ve ever experience ANY kind of story that has gripped me like this one has. I have never been so moved, either. Even five days later, I am still struggling with the “story hangover” feeling of wrapping up the story that has spanned so many hours of my life and expansions of FF14 and normally that feeling fades after a decent night’s sleep! I’ve never had one that lasted more than twenty-four hours and I’ve already passed one hundred on this one, with no sign of it abating any time soon. Truly, the cathartic experience of this has left me hollowed out and in a new state of mind from which I might never recover/be shifted. Which isn’t a bad thing. I don’t have a problem being changed by a story about hope and perseverence and friendship and heroism. All those are in incredibly short supply these days, in my life in particular (save perseverence), and most media depictions even approaching anything like them is filed down for mass market appeal in the form of modern superhero and action flicks.
Continue readingI Finally Watched Kiki’s Delivery Service And Spent Weeks Thinking About The Ending
After talking about it for a few years, I finally sat down with some friends to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service. Given that this is one of my friends’ favorite movie, I let her pick the version we watched and so we settled in to watch a high-quality VHS rip of the original US publication of the movie. My friend cited music and some artistic choices as the reason for this selection and I, who had a vague idea of what the movie was about (burnout/depression/growing up/loss of creative spark), went along with it. I’d never seen the movie. I didn’t have an opinion. I knew that a lot of people had very specific and very strong opinions, but I didn’t really know why. After watching the movie though, I kind of get it. The specific songs chosen back in the day lend a very particular feel to the movie and, since one of them is right near the start of it, I can understand how changing the song would change the tone of the movie rather strongly. I also understand that the decision to make the cat, Jiji, speak again at the end of the movie is important to a lot of people and that it significantly changes one of the final notes of the movie, not to mention how a viewer might feel as they watch the credits roll and move on with their life. I only very recently saw the movie for the first time, so it wasn’t a very formative experience for me and while I am tempted to see how the more recent edition of the movie feels with the altered music and a story that ends more closely aligned with its Japanese source, I don’t know that I want to spend another couple hours on it (this isn’t a statement about the quality of the movie or anything, just a reflection of that fact that I don’t like to rewatch movies in quick succession). I will probably watch the movie again someday and maybe then I’ll watch the more recent version just to compare how it feels, but I really don’t expect my opinion to change that drastically since most of how I feel about it has little to do with the song selection and more to do with how burnout and creative work is depicted.
Continue readingA World Of Possibilities And Great Music In The Latest Mario Kart
After spending a bunch of time thinking about not having any ACTUAL Switch 2 games and having a weird experience trying to both play the upgraded Breath of the Wild on the Switch 2 while using my brand new 4K TV for the first time, I decided to cut to the heart of the matter and just buy Mario Kart World. For a decent part of my youth, I was a big fan of Mario Kart games. I played tons of Mario Kart 64 and Mario Kart Double-Dash, but I never really got into any of the games past that. I’ve played a few of them and might even own one or two more (I genuinely don’t remember), but most of the magic faded after the those two games. Once they started adding performance variability based on character mass and kart size and wheels and stuff like gliding and wall riding and all that, I just stopped feeling as invested in the game. They became just one more series of games that came out with incremental changes, slightly new features, and a whole load of new mechanics for me to learn. All of which is kind of antithetical to easy multiplayer games or party gaming, which was how I’d been playing all Mario Kart games since I started high school. They weren’t bad, ever, but they just didn’t feel like the experience I’d grown to know and love as a kid. They were closer to other racing games instead, all of them with an optimal strategy for winning based on the mechanics of the game (even if those mechanics could still be upset by the random items you’d get). The looseness and goofiness of my childhood experiences was gone, as was the days of firmly believing that green characters were faster and that yoshi had a slight advantage because of how far forward his face went.
Continue readingSlow-Cooked Considerations
After what has turned into three horrible, sweaty days, the heat wave is ending. It has not ended yet, but the wisdom of the remaining pieces of the US national weather prediction aparatus have declared that, by the time I’ve gotten my necessary groceries and made my way home, it will be over. My two sleepless, restless nights will not be joined by a third and the ruddy, glistening sheen of sweat I’ve taken to wearing in the place of my normal mistless pallor will finally take its leave. Even now, as I type this, all my weather apps and services cry out that the worst has passed. “All will be well,” they say, “With a fifty percent chance of severe thunderstorms and a constant overnight temperature not much lower than last night’s.” My office is muggy, made so by the water I’m constantly drinking to feed the stirring air that whicks all perspiration from my skin to compliment the moisture that made making its way through the heavy filters and cooling processes of the building’s HVAC system that leaves this place a dry husk devoid of comfort in the winter and my little thermometer’s delcaration that it is only seventy-six degrees in my litle rectangle does little to comfort me as a result. After all, what does the number mean to me when the only way for me to stop sweating is to sit in my chair and refrain from any kind of movement? What’s the point of knowing the temperature when even the movement of standing up to examine the digital readout is enough to pop tiny beads of just-drunk water on my forehead, upper lip, and forearms? It is hot, it cannot be denied, and I do not need a thermometer to tell me that.
Continue readingI Got Sick A Week Ago Due To Someone Else’s Failure
Well, I can now say that I have caught and survived E. Coli (and that I’m writing this the day before it goes up since I’m super behind on blog posts for what should be obvious reasons). I got extremely lucky that my entire case was incredibly “mild” and that I only missed four days of work for what amounted to bad food poisoning, so I’m saying this extremely gratefully. To my understanding, based on the results from my urgent care trip and the messages I exchanged with my practitioner afterwards, the only way I could have gotten more lucky than I was would be by not getting it in the first place. Anyway, I got to interact with the modern public health aperatus on a state and federal level, spend time digging through my trash for what I suspected was the culprit, and spend three solid days consuming a single can of soup, a handful of pretzels, and maybe a gallon of gatorade (I didn’t exactly track the specific amount I drank) on top of at least a gallon of water every day. It was quite an experience and not one I’m keen to repeat, so I’ll no longer be taking “pre-washed” vegetables at face value for the foreseeable future. As far as I can tell, I got it from some bagged salad I bought and now I’m never buying another bagged salad again (though this is the strongest suspect in my mind, it is not the only one, unfortunately). Fresh vegetables only, from now on, so I can thoroughly wash them. Which probably means I won’t be doing any more salads like that since I don’t want salad enough to make my own. It was a different question when I could buy a mix to toss with some extras thrown in, but that life is behind me now.
Continue readingCatching Up With The Demigods Of Daelen
Slowly, as I continue to recover from months of constant exhaustion, withdrawal, and pain (not necessarily in that order), I’m getting back into my various Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. This past weekend, it was time to get back into The Demigods of Daelen, my sorta-hack of Dungeons and Dragons 5e to make the numbers big and the storytelling potential just as big (don’t have to worry about the variability of a d20 as much if your bonuses to rolls are huge). Sometimes it feels more like I’ve hacked Roll20 rather than the Dungeons and Dragons system, but given that I’ve consciously and carefully taken the “bounded accuracy” core of D&D 5e and dramatically shifted it to work in a different way, I think I could probably call this a hack. One I’ll probably never write up and formalize in any way because you could probably get this effect much more easily using a different game system, but one that works for my crew of players who seem to prefer playing something that at least resembles Dungeons and Dragons over trying any new game system long enough to really get a feel for it. Anyway, this time we spent a good forty-five minutes catching up and then another forty-five minutes getting a player’s character finished. After that, we unified our players ahead of their upcoming mission, had a fun chit-chat-in-a-bar scene, and then promptly moved on to the main challenge the party will be facing for the first adventure of this campaing: a massive, orb-like mechanical contrapation that is very slowly but inexorably rolling its way towards a large-ish town that it will absolutely crush, slowly and painfully, if it is not somehow stopped. The session came to an end right as the party dealt with the first challenge pertaining to this strange almost-orb, as they were preparing to enter it, and I’m excited to see how the party deals with the challenge I’ve brewed up for them.
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