I finished the original six season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars just the other day. I’ve been watching along as I listen to A More Civilized Age and I finally hit the point where, for a few years, this show had come to an end. It would eventually get a seventh season to help wrap up a show that absolutely should not have been cut off at the knees like this one was (the last few arcs of the show were some of the best Star Wars I’d ever seen and might have held the top position if not for Andor), but no one knew that at the time. This was just where the show ended, somewhat abruptly and in a bit of a lackluster manner. Now, I’ve yet to listen to the AMCA episodes covering the end of season 6, so I might change my mind once I hear someone else’s opinion on it, but I wasn’t super interested in the final Yoda arc. I feel like that time could have been better spent on wrapping up some other unanswered questions beyond “why did Yoda turn into a little, isolated gremlin on Dagobah” and “how did Yoda learn to become a Force Ghost,” which didn’t really need answers. Or at least I feel like they didn’t need answers. That said, this sort of lack-luster end to the show feels very “Clone Wars” as a whole, given its rather inconsistent quality and the more extreme peaks and valleys it developed in its later seasons. I’ve gotta give it point for consistency in that regard. And, you know, acknowledge that I don’t regret spending all this time watching five and a half full seasons of an increasingly well-made cartoon.
Continue readingThe Last Unshakeable Pillar Of My Life
There are times, more or less often depending on my mood and the state of my mental health, that I find myself thinking, usually unprompted, about how I have very little in my life other than my job. It is a difficult idea to refute. After all, I spend fifty hours a week working at this job of mine and spend nowhere near that much time on any other single thing. I don’t even sleep that much over seven days, most weeks. Outside of work, I don’t really have much in the way of variety. I have video games, which include a mix of solo games or some that I play online with friends, though I do most of my game playing by myself since I work late, most of my friends are in different time zones, or my friends play games I don’t have the energy for. I also have this blog, but it mostly feels like I’m shouting into a void and slowly realizing that the faint echo I hear is probably using my voice (along with the voices of many others) to learn to be a more massive and culturally destructive doppelganger than anyone ever feared there would be when they came up with the idea of doppelgangers. It feels bad to continue shouting when I still haven’t had the time or energy to come up with a reasonable alternative. Beyond those things, I’ve got my tabletop games but those are difficult to enjoy the way I’d prefer since they’re scheduled less regularly than I’d like and, as is true of probably ninety-nine percent of gaming groups, plagued with scheduling issues, cancellations, and the busy lives of the people involved asserting themselves in a way that demands whatever came up take a higher priority than fun. It’s disheartening to think through this all because I can never actually tell myself that these thoughts are wrong.
Continue readingI Don’t Know If Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Can Get Any Better Than This
Now, in my third week of playing, I’ve finally make it into chapter seven of Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. Chapters five and six were exactly the sort of weirdly enjoyable stuff I’ve been looking forward to since I first saw the Segway–excuse me, “Wheelie”–bits in the game’s trailer. Each one has its own little moments of interesting characterization, some whacky fun (that, in Chapter 5, bordered on being a little over the top for my tastes, but was still incredibly hilarious in the moment) unique to each chapter, and then each included a moment that swept the rug out from underneath me–even during what I was hoping would be a classic beach episode filled with emotional development and inter-character discussion in Chapter 6. This is, in my opinion, the modern versions of Final Fantasy 7 at their best. As long as we can include the bit from chapter four that I wrote about last Tuesday. It would feel wrong to describe the modern FF7s as being at their best without including that moment of intensely emotional characterization for Cloud that is incredibly rare in these games. After all, we get to see a bit of Cloud’s softer side in Final Fantasy 7: Remake, but only in drips and drabs as he plays the part of the invulnerable hero and we never really get it at all in the original game, aside from a few moments during the end of the game where Cloud admits he has no idea what he’s doing but he’s going to keep doing it anyway (which isn’t really that much vulnerability since everyone already knew that by then).
Continue readingA Situation So Bad It’s Good In The Leeching Wastes
My now-Wednesday group, currently playing The Leeching Wastes, has now met four times in a row! What a record! This time, what was supposed to be a short ritual turned into a whole-session activity that was incredibly emotionally fraught. The cliff-hanger from last time, an abysmal saving throw result, wound up snowballing first into a bit of confusion about the reason the party was there at all, grew further into a bit of inter-party misdirection, and then finally landed as a combat encounter that I didn’t expect to go as poorly as it did. I mean, I know I say this a lot, but I really don’t expect quite so many unlikely things to happen in the tabletop games I’m running despite apparently being a magnet for this kind of improbability. Nothing useful for winning the lottery or having a fortunate life. No. I just attract incredibly unlikely but still possible outcomes but only in tabletop games I’m running. I’m going to avoid speculating about how that’s reflected in my life (I already talk to my therapist about that more than enough), but it really was staggering how a part of the session I expected would take half an hour wound up taking the full hour and forty-five minutes we played (we got another later start since I was finishing up dinner and we were still chitchatting for the first half an hour). I was absolutely mechanically prepared for things to go horribly wrong since a game like this needs stakes for the victories to mean as much as they do, but I was not emotionally prepared. I was not mentally prepared. I had to pause quite a few times to figure out how to proceed or, at the very least, where to find my notes about how to proceed since we have once again taken something I expected to come up later and dropped it onto third level characters.
Continue readingGetting Emotional With Andor
One of my favorite parts of Andor, besides being able to watch it all in one sitting so that the only anxiety I had to deal with involved the actual episodes unfolding on my TV, is the range of emotion shown by all the characters. We get people who are angry, sad, happy, and so on. We get the whole range of human emotion. Which is remarkable because Star Wars typically isn’t interesting in the emotional lives of its characters beyond the broad arcs that’re involved in the stories being told and the few emotions allowed to them by their dark/light alignment. Anger for the dark side, giving way to fear on occasion with a few other moments mixed in throughout the whole series, and hope for the light side, occasionally giving way to sadness and a few other spikes that are quickly tamped down or moved past in the series at large. Sure, some of this can be chalked up to the time limit set by big films and the heroic or villainous depictions of the characters in the movies, but these limits extend to the shows as well. Even when we do see an unaligned emotion in most of the shows, it is usually something a character must overcome or some foreshadowing that a character is destined for the light or the dark. So, when we got to see all of the characters in Andor in their feelings, acting out because of their feelings, and existing outside of the usual dark/light feelings assignments, I couldn’t help but get caught up in them as well.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 7: Rebirth Is Making Me Care About Cloud
I just wrote about Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and my experiences with the game leading up to a point near the end of Chapter 4 the other day, but I’m back again, earlier than usual, because I played just a little bit more and was absolutely struck by what happened less than an hour of game time after I stopped playing. When I wrote the post linked above, I’d finished my previous gaming time with an enjoyable hour collecting squads of Shinra soldiers for a parade. Having them waiting for me–coming to attention and shouting greetings as I (well, Cloud), their parade captain, exited whatever building I’d been in–was an absolute delight. Since it was already far too late to still be awake and playing video games at that point, I saved my game and shut everything down for the evening. Then, last night, I fired it back up again, worked my way through the parade, the awards ceremony immediately after it, and then the escape from Junon aboard a cruise ship. What struck me most wasn’t the parade (I could barely pay attention to what was happening in the parade since I had to focus on the quick time event) or even the fun tournament of Queen’s Blood (since every major game needs to have a built-in card game, I guess, which I say somewhat resignedly despite actually enjoying this one), but the way Cloud reacted to being a captain in in charge of this group of soldiers.
Continue readingThe Best Session Of Heart: The City Beneath I’ve Ever Run
I ran what will probably be the final “downtime” session of my Heart: The City Beneath game. I put “downtime” in quotation marks because it was supposed to be a rather low-tension session that quickly became anything but that. Sure, our Descent Into The Rotting Heart campaign was split into two groups (last session, two party members stepped into a Fracture and the other two decided to stay in the haven adjacent to the Fracture), but they were both heading for some rest, some healing, and what was supposed to be a little bit of setup for their final delve. Instead, the party outside the Fracture went on a violent rampage that went so much better than it had any right to go, thanks to it being pretty much normal violence against our two tankiest characters while the group inside the Fracture started out following the program and then one of them quickly devolved into a series of bad roles and fallouts that not only sealed the Fracture off from the rest of the world but doomed their character to a cursed, ironic end. I’d planned to keep the session short, in the one to two hour zone, since I was super exhausted and didn’t want to tax myself, but then we wound up using the full length of the session instead. It was wild from start to finish and, in my opinion, the first time I, my players, and Heart were firing on all cylinders.
Continue readingFinding The Fun Amidst The Familiar In Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth
A few weeks ago, as a part of my on-going quest to document my time spent in the various worlds of Final Fantasy 7, I wrote about Cloud Strife and the way his character is portrayed differently between games. As I’ve gotten further into Rebirth, I’ve thought a lot about the depiction of Cloud in the original game, the way it was different in Remake, and the way it’s different again in Rebirth. The Rebirth version of Cloud is a melding of the two. The terse, non-committal version of Cloud has returned (which brought back the Classic Cloud Shrug, baybee!), but there are still moments of awkward earnestness that break through this shell. Despite that merge of the two different Clouds I saw, between the original Final Fantasy 7 Cloud and the Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Cloud, there’s still a missing element here. Original Cloud felt like he was playing at being a cool guy. He felt like he was living out his dream and trying to fulfill the image he had in his head of what it meant to be a SOLDIER. This Cloud, the Cloud of Rebirth, feels more like he’s just a million miles away. He tunes in and out, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes seemingly involuntarily. He has moments where is is alive, his personality is a brilliant spark, and he’s driving the group forward with lateral and creative thinking. Other times, he can barely pay attention to a conversation or someone sharing a memory from what should be their shared past in an effort to connect with him. It’s disconcerting to see it play out on the screen but, crucially, the game also makes it clear that the other characters are noticing it as well.
Continue readingWell-Intentioned Peer Pressure In The Workplace
This has been an incredibly busy week at work for me. Tomorrow will bring some relief, since I’ve got to leave shortly after noon for an appointment and will be finishing the day by working from home, but the arrival of some of my foreign coworkers for their yearly trip into the main office has upended my usual schedule for my week. Not only do I have extra work to do now that they’re around–taking advantage of being in the same office to get some early feedback on the next version of the software and some early drafts of future features–I was able to figure out a way to get one of my big projects into a state where I could test it and that’s a high enough priority that I’m basically supposed to drop everything to test it the instant the project is testable. Plus, a testing report I wrote weeks and weeks ago wasn’t getting reviewed so my boss announced it was due at the end of this week to light a fire under the asses of the people who were supposed to be reviewing it, so now I have to also get that done this week, including incorporating feedback from my coworkers as soon as possible so that if I need more answers from them, I can actually get them in a timely fashion. Sure, my boss’ declaration worked and I’ve gotten more eyes on my report since he pulled this stunt than I’ve gotten on all of the previous versions of the report combined, but it’s a lot of extra pressure when I’m already swamped. What turns this from something I’d endure into something I’m writing about on my blog is how the team reacted to my decision to stay and keep working when the rest of the team went out to dinner.
Continue readingPosting Through A Depression Spike
It has been a while since I’ve written about it as anything other than a tangent on a post, but I’m still struggling with my now months-long depression spike. It has definitely helped that I rarely leave work while it is still fully dark outside and that I’m able to get more sun than ever during my walks (though I’m needing to wear sunscreen now, which is not my favorite, since one of the medications I’m taking makes my skin incredibly sensitive to sunburn). That’s not enough, though, since I’m still struggling to get enough sleep and the constant grind of stress and long work days at my job are more than counteracting the positive effects of the longer days and greater exposure to sunlight. Not to mention that I feel like I’ve been struggling to connect with my friends lately and while that is probably just the depression talking, I still feel like I’m not as socially active as I used to be. I’m also struggling to make space for my own creativity and what space I do make (mostly these blog posts) feels tainted by all the stress and frustration I feel with the shit WordPress’ owner keeps trying to pull. I’ve still got my tabletop games, but most of those don’t meet as regularly as I’d like and they all have their own stressors as I try to avoid getting caught up in anxiety spirals around stuff my players said or did that could be interpreted as them not enjoying themselves.
Continue reading