I’ve had a few days where I’ve worked from home lately. One and a half due to weather and one due to a stomach bug that left me mostly fine but unwilling to share bathrooms/run the risk of not being able to find a toilet in time. These are the first days I’ve worked from home in a while and the first ones where I was actually able to work on my highest-priority work while working from home in a year and a half or thereabouts. You see, the project I’ve been working on for that time has necessitated me being in the office. I can’t exactly bring it home with me and, even if I did bring some stuff home, it wouldn’t be terribly useful for all the work I had to do. So, on days that I felt less than stellar, needed some time to myself, needed a mental health break from being around people, or just felt crummy, I still went into the office. That’s the job, you know? Gotta go to where the work is and do the work, at least as long as you’re not sick or contagious or putting yourself (or someone else) in harm’s way by doing so. And I was not, so I went into the office and suffered through a lot of days where I’d have much rather been working from the comfort of my home. Now that I’ve got a bit of a reprieve from that sort of work, though, I’m absolutely working from home every chance I can get.
Continue readingSuper Smash Bros. Nostalgia
I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. for decades. More than two and a half, if I recall correctly. I was not a terribly athletic child, so my hand-eye coordination wasn’t good and I wasn’t terribly skilled at video games because I just couldn’t get my brain to get past needing to think about which buttons to press and how to manipulate the joystick with everything I did. This meant I was pretty terrible at the game even though it was built on an incredibly simple if frequent combination of button presses and joystick manipulation. It was always a battle against myself to even be able to play it, let alone battle my more-skilled friends and elder sibling, and it was a battle I frequently lost with not just this game but ANY game that required even rudimentary simultaneously activation of buttons and a joystick. I just couldn’t get my brain and body to do two different things at the same time (I was never able to rub my stomach and pat my head at the same time, which was at least my childhood’s measurement of how coordinated you were compared to your friends). It was frustrating, to know what I needed to do to be able to compete and to be unable to do it, made even more so by the ease with which my brother beat me and the way he’d lord his superior skills over me because it was yet another thing he was better than me at. Not that I ever had much of a chance, mind you, given that I only ever got to practice while playing against him or some of our neighborhood friends thanks to how limited my video game time was.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy XIV: One Week After Buying The Full Game
Last time, I wrote about my impressions of the general plot of the first major chunk of Final Fantasy XIV and my thoughts about buying the game. Now that I’ve own the game for a full week, gotten in a solid weekend of play, and had a few more days besides, I’ve gotten a much better impression of the gameplay loop that I’ll be experiencing for a significant portion of the future. At this point, now that I’ve joined up with the Free Company my friends are in, gotten a few more jobs up to the post-level-50 zone, and started to dig into the more modern day-to-day stuff, I feel like I’m on firm enough ground to say that I’ll probably be playing this game for years to come. I’m sure I’ll take months off, cancel my subscription from time to time, and eventually play other stuff when I get tired of FFXIV or run out of interesting things to do (or just get tired of sitting in my office all the time), but I can see myself playing this game for quite a while yet. The whole “daily events, do some gathering, meet up with friends, and idly pursue quests or rare drops” loop is really working for me here, likely because so much of it is social or something I can (and probably should!) be doing with other players. I’m still new to the FC, but everyone has been so warm and welcoming that I’m sure I’ll get over my initial shyness really soon and start reaching out to them for help or to do some of my daily/weekly events. I’m just really feeling new right now and that’s a difficult place for me to ask for help from, especially when I know I could probably figure it out by myself.
Continue readingBuying In Bulk In These Uncertain Times
Eggs are expensive. They’re hardly a good barometer for the economy as a whole, especially now when they’re expensive largely due to scarcity resulting from bird flu running rampant, but it’s difficult not to look at a seven dollar carton of eggs and think about all the little ways that grocery buying has gotten kinda fucked up over the last couple years. These days, unless I’m not buying much or really skimping, it is rare that I make it out of the store without spending about one hundred dollars. I could probably get that down with cheaper products and really hunting bargains, but doing that doesn’t save me all that much money and, as someone who has done that more than a few times in the last half a decade thanks to COVID-19, I’m already buying the cheapest stuff I can without sacrificing flavor or quality. What’s worse is that I’m not even buying stuff in the quantities I was before. I used to buy the economy size of most of my staples since I’d definitely go through that stuff before it went bad. Certain spices, condiments, various shelf-stable food in boxes, rice, etc. All stuff I’d buy in the biggest container I could. Now, though, my grocery bill has gone up noticeably and I can’t even buy the volume per item I used to. I literally can’t find some items in the sizes I used to. If I could, I’d still buy them in that size, increased cost be damned, but a lot of brands in the grocery stores I go to have just stopped selling those larger sizes.
Continue readingFinishing The First (Virtual) Dungeon In The Magical Millennium
After what feels like months (because it has been three months since we first started, given that we’ve played about once a month due to holidays and scheduling issues), my The Magical Millennium campaign finally cleared our first dungeon! They even did it without anyone dying or staying unconscious for very long! It was great! There were some close calls and a lot of bad conveyor belt related rolls, but they managed to clear it all in the end. We started the session with a check-in to remind everyone of how much time had passed (and a bit of frantic scrambling from me because D&D Beyond didn’t save the state of my encounter from last session), the party proceeded to kill the remaining clouds of energy, the Paladin beefed it on the conveyor belts repeatedly, the characters emerged from the virtual realm to get some notes from the person overseeing their game, and then they all settled down to sleep for the night before we wrapped up the session a couple hours early. It was nice to be able to bring the dungeon to a close, even if we didn’t play a full session (mostly due to the Super Bowl being that day), so we can hopefully start fresh in a brand new week when we all play again. Our next session will start with a bit of a time skip and a quick conversation about the highlights of what each character did during that time skip, but we’ll be moving on pretty quickly from there. My hope is we’ll be able to start off with homecoming week right away, since that’s a big day for high school students, and I want to get moving a little bit faster than we have been. We’ve been playing for a year now (or will have been, at the time of our next session), and we’ve only covered two in-game weeks! We’re moving so slowly!
Continue readingA Lingering Sense Of Danger
I think I might have the most to say about this poem, at least compared to the ones I’ve written, but I don’t really want to tell you what I meant by it. I hope it’s vague enough for you to find your own meaning but also specific enough for you to find mine (but only after you’ve found yours). It’s a tricky thing, creating metaphors, especially when I want it to straddle the line like this one, but I think I did it this time. I’d like it if you told me what you thought about as you read this or what it made you think about after you’d read it or if you thought at all about it ever again. I’d love to hear what others think of this, but I don’t want to voice what I do, at least not beyond what’s in the poem itself, because I don’t want to lock the meaning down to what I was thinking about as I wrote it. Currently, this is the most recent poem in a collection I’m calling “in retrospect” (or at least that’s what I named the folder it is in) that includes all my recent poem posts. I’m sure there will be more poems in the folder eventually, but if I had to pick one to represent them all, it would be this one.
Continue readingFixing One Problem So I Can Work On The Rest
After a few sessions without much in the way of stuff to work on, my physical therapist and I decided to change our appointment schedule to every-other-week (starting with a three-week skip due to scheduling issues). Since I stopped taking that medication that was making me physically miserable, I’ve had fewer and fewer problems that I’ve needed to work on with my physical therapist. At this point, as I’m coming up on two months off the medication, I’m still dealing with some lingering stuff, but most of what I’ve got going on is due to the physical demands of my job and the somewhat uneven muscle usage those demands result in. Other than stretches and starting up my exercise routine in earnest again, there’s not much to do for now. Thus the every-other-week appointments. We’ll let some time pass, see if getting back into my exercise routine helps fix my lingering problems, and then hopefully either end our appointments or set me up with a better workout and stretching routine and THEN end our appointments. Either way, I suspect I’m less than half a dozen appointments from being done. Which is great, let me tell you. I still remember just how awful last fall was, even if a lot of those days blur together in my memory, and no matter how tired or sore I feel nowadays, I can take comfort in knowing that it will pass in a couple days if I stretch and get enough sleep. And destress a bit. I’m still struggling with that part, but I always have so I doubt I’m going to fix it any time soon.
Continue readingWrapping Up Part 1 of Final Fantasy XIV
There won’t be any direct spoilers for the final plot points of Final Fantasy XIV’s A Realm Reborn in here, but I’ll be gesturing at it broadly. It’s not a surprising twist or anything, but I felt I should at least disclaim that, even if I’m writing about stuff nearly a decade old at this point. After all, I just started playing the game and would have wanted to avoid spoilers, so maybe you would too. Anyway, skip paragraph three if you want to avoid spoilers (this is paragraph 1).
Continue readingMental Health In My Doom Spiraling Era
My experience of depression has pretty much been a lifelong series of ebbing and flowing cycles. I used to compare it to floating in the ocean, with days where everything is calm and still, others where gentle waves rock you, and the occasional day of furious storms that threaten to bury you deeper beneath the surface than you could ever hope to return from. These days, or maybe these years, really, it is a much less tumultuous affair. Part of that is being more emotionally even-keeled as I’ve worked through a lot of my trauma and removed a bunch of the unhealthy relationships that added turmoil to my life. Another significant part of this more mild experience has been that I’ve learned how to handle my own internal spikes and troughs better, thanks to years of therapy and introspective work. The rest is probably settling a lot of outstanding issues that were actively causing me deep and constant pain. That said, it’s not like my depression is gone. It’s just different. I tend toward valleys and hills rather than waves and cratering depths. Little rises and falls along the way as I cross much larger rises and falls measured in a scale closer to geography than individual steps. The bad days are still bad and the good days often feel few and far between, but I have to admit that feeling less caught up in it, moment to moment, is a huge improvement.
Continue readingCatching Bugs On The Weekend: Then And Now
Last weekend, on a Saturday (the first of February, 2025, for anyone reading this disconnected from when I’m posting it), I woke up after barely five hours of sleep to the calming tones of my alarm and hauled myself out of bed so I could go to work. I had to work for at least a few hours that day, thanks to someone else’s fuckup (or, to hear them tell it, me not being able to properly anticipate that they would take my testing equipment without a word to me), so I hauled my way through my morning routine as I did something I hadn’t done in about fifteen years. It was difficult and I did not enjoy needing to cut myself short on sleep in order to go into the office to do work that I’d have had ample time to do if someone else hadn’t messed up my week so horribly. As I went through the motions, prepared my coffee, and made myself ready to stop at the pharmacy on my way in, I had the strangest feeling that something was missing from my morning. I eventually figured it out as I got into my car to drive away, since the feeling eventually grew into the faintest echoes of a song I would know anywhere from its opening notes alone. It was a bit of music that had once featured prominently in some of my more recent playlists as a calming instrumental piece but that I’d recently moved away from, as I shifted into new playlists that better matched how I’ve felt this past year and am feeling today, which made it easy enough to reclaim. It was the National Park theme from Pokémon: SoulSilver (or just Silver).
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