One interesting factoid about social media is that far more accounts are created than are active at any given time. Most accounts will never post more than once or twice and most posts on social media are created by a relatively small number of uses. Something similar is true about video games, even if it’s often more difficult to observe or discover (or maybe I’m just following weird people on social media who talk about that stuff a lot and can get the numbers to back their assertion up): lots of people start but don’t finish video games. These days, that information is, if available at all, pretty easy to find since a lot of video games will have achievements of some kind (achievements, trophies, etc.) and a subset of achievements that are unlocked for completing sections of the game. You can go to your Steam profile and look at the global achievement numbers for a game you’ve played and while it absolutely doesn’t count every singe person who has played that game thanks to the proliferation of other sources for games, it still gives some interesting statistics about the people on the platform you’re using. Since useless statistics are one of my favorite things, if I get bored while I’m waiting for a Steam game to update or for a friend to come online so we can play a game together, I’ll spend some time looking into what achievements I’ve got that are rare according to Steam. Recently, as I’ve been playing more and more games on my PS5, I’ve taken to doing the same thing while winding down for the evening, once I’ve shut the game off. Which is how I found out that almost half of players never finished Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
Continue readingLeaving For Vacation Is The Most Stressful Thing I’ve Done At Work
When I initially imagined myself going on vacation at this time in the calendar year and the lifecycle of the big project I’m working on, I imagined myself gracefully exiting the scene that is my workplace with things either finished enough that there was time for a breather or with my coworkers prepared to attend to whatever trickle of work came in while I was away. Unfortunately, over the last two weeks (as I’m writing this as I sit in an exhausted sweaty heap in my home office far too late at night on the day before I leave on my vacation, this is actually four weeks prior to the day this post goes up) I’ve been absolutely swamped by work. I’ve been leaving work at increasingly late times as I’ve struggled to balance the work that’s been pouring in against trying to finish the items on my to-do list that have fallen by the wayside over the last month and a half of increasing business, all while trying to get my coworkers up to speed so that the work can continue while I’m gone since all of the different pieces of my project are at a crucial stage where they can’t just wait a couple weeks for me to return from my vacation. I finally managed to get the last things done tonight, at about a quarter to ten in the evening after an almost fourteen hour day. I’ll be able to rest easily, as a result, since I won’t have anything left dangling over my head, but I am so absolutely exhausted that I don’t even feel tired anymore. I’m found some state beyond even exhaustion where nothing matters and my numb sense of self can continue to push my body until I run out of things to do or I collapsed because my body refuses to listen.
Continue readingMedia Club Plus Is The Best Hunter x Hunter Analysis I’ve Ever Heard
I’ve mentioned this multiple times now, over the last year or so, but I started putting an effort into expanding my podcast selection from just Actual Play podcasts to include some of my other interests. The ones I mostly settled on, thanks to them being adjacent to my favorite podcast (Friends at the Table) in some way or another, both wound up being media analysis podcasts. I studied English literature and literary criticism in college and found them both incredibly fun, so it makes sense to me that I’d enjoy podcasts that basically do that same thing but with movies or TV shows. Which is how I landed on listening to A More Civilized Age and the subject of today’s post: Media Club Plus. I technically started Media Club Plus first, since I’ve been listening not only since the day the first episode dropped, but from the day they streamed episode 0 as a proof-of-concept in order to get people to drive up their Patreon subscriptions to the tier that would see them spin off the Media Club Patreon episodes into their own podcast. The selling point of the show was that the main cast would feature a few long-time fans of the anime Hunter x Hunter and one person who had not only watched very little anime at all but had never watched Hunter x Hunter and had only expressed an interest in it after listening to their friends talk about it all the time. The stream was an instant hit and while it took a few months to get the show off the ground, it funded in less than a month after the stream, thanks in part to a large number of people increasing their pledges (myself included) to help push the group toward their goal. Since then, not only have they put out twenty episodes of the main podcast (an episode every other week), but they’ve also published three Patreon specials with one more imminently on the horizon [which released between writing this and it getting posted], covering a selection of Dragon Ball and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episodes. It has been a genuine delight to listen to the podcast go from a rough concept on a Twitch stream to the absolutely stellar analysis and insight that I make sure to never miss when it drops every other week, time allowing.
Continue readingThe Rising Stakes In Star Wars: Rebels Season 2
Last night, a few episodes ahead of where I’m at in the podcast A More Civilized Age, I finished Season 2 of Star Wars: Rebels. At this point, I’ve finally caught up to the latest episode of AMCA and will now need to slow down my watching speed to match the podcast’s pace. Which is incredibly tough given where Season 2 ends and how badly I want to immediately stop writing this blog post so I can watch another few episodes at least. Maybe a whole season. Wouldn’t be the first time I sat down to dip my toe into something and wound up watching the whole season instead. I can’t really afford to do that, in terms of my need for sleep and mental, emotional, and physical rest, so it’s probably a good thing that I have something preventing me from diving into season 3. Even though I really want to just turn the show on and keep watching until I’m out of seasons to watch. Honestly, I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to stay strong and pace myself alongside AMCA like I originally planned to. I haven’t been this invested in a show in ages, not with the same level of emotional investment and burning curiosity, anyway. I mean, I’ve watched plenty of anime over the last couple years by sitting down each week to watch the newest episodes as each of them was released, but I was mostly just enjoying the ride. This time, with Star Wars: Rebels, I’m dying to know what happens next. Waiting is a genuine struggle and that’s saying something because I rarely struggle with impatience.
Continue readingDiving Into Dragon Age: Origins After At Least A Decade
As I’ve previously mentioned, my book club will be playing through the Dragon Age video game franchise as we collectively prepare for the release of Veilguard (I refuse to call it The Veilguard). Since I’ll be away from my computer for a week, I decided to set aside my Switch and Unicorn Overlord for a weekend and dive into Dragon Age: Origins. It took a while longer than I thought it would to settle back into the game, since I’d forgotten what most of the stats did and what my preferred builds were, but I mostly got that out of the way in the first day by reading build guides and remembering what parts I used to enjoy about the game. I’m still settling in after about fifteen hours of game run time (an unknown amount of which is me getting restless, walking away from my PC to fold laundry, do dishes, make food, and so on), but I’m mostly comfortable with the game again. Despite how much I played it on my old Xbox 360, coming back to it has me feeling out-of-synch with the way the game works. Maybe it’s because of the almost two hundred hours I put into Inquisition, which has a very distinct and different feel to it. Maybe it’s because it has been over a decade since I last played it. Maybe both. Regardless, trying to get back into this game has me feeling like I found an old beloved shirt that I’m trying to get to sit comfortably on my frame despite how different my frame is even from when I was in college (my shoulders are the broadest they’ve ever been). It’s fine, mostly, but it just feels a little weird and the comfort I remember is largely gone.
Continue readingToday’s Focus Is On Infrared Isolation!
I’ve put a lot of work into what is currently thirty chapters of an entire novel and while I haven’t had the time or energy to work on it since I chose to stop updating with new chapters every Saturday (or as close to every Saturday as I could get) due to WordPress dot com deciding to sell the work of its users to a company making plagiarism machines, I’m still proud of the work I’ve done. Maybe someday, when I’m more confident in my ability to protect my work as a citizen of the United States of America, I’ll go back to posting it, but until something gets done at the federal level about all these junky, shitty, and downright artless plagiarism machines, I’m disinclined to provide them with new material to scrape off the internet. But, it’s too late for these thirty chapters and I’ll continue working on the novel someday. At which point I will at least post them behind a wall of some kind (to keep out the bots) so people can continue reading and I can feel like I’ve finished something for once in my life. Someday.
Today’s Focus Is On The Voice Of The Author!
It has been a while since I’ve posted any new poetry, but I got in the habit of recording myself reading it after talking to my friend (and editor) about how different it feels to read a poem and to hear the author speak it. After all, the author can lend a cadence and tone to the poem that the words alone might not. Formatting is fun and you can usually suggest a lot of that stuff with the right formatting, but it is ultimately up to the reader to determine if they’ll follow the conventions of the author’s home accent and primary language or if they’ll tread off the beaten path and hear the line breaks or commas in their own unique way. Since I had a bunch of recording equipment and a little bit of experience doing rough sound editing (both from my theater facilities job in college and from recording an online D&D campaign I ran for a couple years so I wouldn’t have to take notes by hand), I decided I might as well record myself reading my poetry. Plus, reading it aloud and hearing it read back to me was a great way to find lines that weren’t working. Anyway, I hope you at least mildly enjoy the sound of my voice and some decent poetry along with it.
Today’s Focus Is On Podcasts!
I haven’t written about many podcasts (something I’m sure to rectify in the future, given that I was positive I’d written about more than four of them), but I’m incredibly fond of the ones I HAVE written about, enough so that you should go read about them right now! There’s not a lot there and it won’t take you long, but that’s okay! That’ll leave you more time to listen to two of my favorite podcasts, A More Civilized Age and Friends At The Table! There’s plenty of both for you to listen to, so you better get started!
Today’s Focus Is On Grief!
I’ll be completely honest: it feels weird to put an exclamation point at the end of that title, but I think some of my best blog writing and poetry has been about grief in the myriad shapes and forms I’ve experienced it over the last five or so years. It is a very relatable emotion since everyone loses someone eventually and while I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest I’ve tread new ground in my reflections on grief, I would suggest that this expansive emotional experience is the one I’ve developed the most healthy relationship with. While I’m recommending pretty much everything under the tag if you’re up for some writing about the various forms of grief and how we process it, often through the lens of my experiences, I’d recommend one post in particular: Grief And Personal Revisionist History. I wrote this post on the day of the previous monarch of England passed away (and, coincidentally, exactly one year to the day before I’d be attending my grandmother’s funeral) and is probably the best thing I’ve written about grief in general and how an unhealthy relationship to it and loss can warp our views of the people who have passed.
The past decade has been full of grief for a lot of people, as we’ve seen drastic changes in our country–often to the detriment of people who are already treated as less-than–as we’ve lost (and continue to lose) millions of people to a pandemic that capitalist society has deemed the acceptable price of continuing to do business, as I’ve lost the one person that made putting up with my biological family worth the effort, as I’ve grappled with my decision to separate myself from all but two members of my biological family, and as we’ve all struggled to grapple with the trauma of the last four years specifically. There’s so much to process, so much to grieve… It’s no wonder that this tag includes some of my most-read posts. If you wind up reading, I hope it brings you some solace, comfort, or food for thought.
Today’s Focus Is Creative Non-Fiction!
To start off the time that I’ll be fully away from home (rather than just preparing to leave it), I thought I’d recommend my Creative Non-Fiction category. This link also include a a sub-category I call “descriptive,” which are just bits of writing focused on describing something rather than telling a story. The descriptive bits often include stories, but not always. Sometimes I just had an experience I wanted to share or a moment I wanted to capture and the main vehicle for me doing that is via the written word. There’s plenty of 2018 and 2017 stuff that I did not look at very closely because it pains me to spend too much time contemplating my old writing, so I can’t say how good any of that is. The rest is decent, though, so I hope you enjoy yourself!