In what should probably not be a surprise to anyone who knows me and my video game habits but is probably nevertheless a surprise to everyone I know, I’ve gotten really into Final Fantasy XIV. To be abundantly clear, given the way some people get super obsessed with this game, I’m playing it a normal amount. I’m slightly less into it than I’m into Baldur’s Gate 3 every time I start playing that again and much less than I was into Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which means it will probably become a sustainable habit. Which is probably what is surprising to the people who know me since I’m not really into Massively Multiplayer Online games. The only two I’ve ever played with any regularity are Overwatch and Destiny 2 and have bounced off literally every single other MMO I’ve ever tried. Hell, I eventually stopped playing Overwatch and Destiny 2 as well. Those were extenuating circumstances, though. I stopped playing Overwatch after a couple years because they changed the game to support play at their league level and that made all the things I enjoyed doing absolutely unpleasant to do unless I had a solid team behind me (and that almost never happened). I played Destiny 2 for years and only stopped because the people I played with were no longer available to me due to my connection to them revealing himself to be undependable in a way I couldn’t overlook or let go. Neither of those reasons has anything to do with a commitment or my attention span, but every single other MMO I’ve tried–like Guild Wars 2, WoW, Runescape (back in the day), League of Legends, and so many more–fell by the wayside in less than a month. Even Palia, as much as I enjoy it, rarely lasts a month before I forget it exists for six to twelve months. But Not FFXIV, though. At least not so far, anyway.
Continue readingMy Year In Haiku: 2024
Time for my now-traditional post with a sampling of the journaling Haiku I wrote over the course of last year! This is my third year in a row doing one of these posts, so I feel confident calling it a tradition now. As usual, each of these haiku is titled with the date it represents in my journal, which means you’ll see a few with the same name. These similarly-titled haiku are not necessarily thematically linked, but they sometimes are. The point of journaling in haiku format is to force myself to really focus on what I’m feeling, how I’m feeling it, and what all comes with those feelings, so I try to avoid writing multiple Haiku as that kind of defeats the purpose of thinking it all through until I can express it in three short lines of text. But the human condition is rarely that concise and while I love giving myself unnecessary restrictions and rules to follow, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes rules are meant to be broken and sometimes coloring outside the lines can serve to highlight the moment of deviation as an intentional and important choice.
So here’s a bunch of notes from last year. I’ll warn you now, it was not a great year for me. 2023 was the “most” year I’ve had in my life, maybe, but 2024 is the one where I’ve been the most miserable, which feels like it really says something if you know my personal history… I spent most of it dealing with some amount of constant pain, had a period of sleeplessness that mirrored my teenaged insomnia burst (which I often refer to as the grey/cloudy period of my life), and had such a significant reduction in my personal spoons that I could barely make myself reach out to talk with my friends online. Everything was a struggle at the best of times, thanks to the pain and other side effects of the medication I was on, and yet it was also the most physically demanding year I’ve had at work so far. I tried to avoid picking only the miserable, unhappy haiku, but avoiding all of them would have meant not doing a year-in-review post. So, with that important bit of context in mind (and absolutely no additional context since that’s kind of the subtextual point of these haiku: personal emotional expression devoid of full context), here is what last year looked like in my journal.
Continue readingA New Type Of Going Home For The Holidays
As scattered and ever-too-short as it was, it was nice to spend the holidays with family this year. I think, between finally making peace with my decision to separate from most of my biological family, processing all the emotions from that, and doing the work to start creating new habits and routines in my own life, this was the first time the holidays have felt “good” since… I genuinely don’t even know. And they weren’t even all good! I burned the shit out of my hand on Christmas Day! I overextended myself cleaning and cooking for my two siblings’ visit the weekend after Christmas! I even had to deal with the dwindling pain of a medication course that seems to have taken almost fourteen months for me to discover that it wouldn’t have any lasting effect beyond what happened in the first two months. It wasn’t a great holiday, but I’m already looking back on it fondly, which is a significant change from literally every other holiday season I’ve ever experienced where I immediately tried to forget it. I really enjoyed seeing my chosen family–the couple whose wedding I was in back in 2023–and my two remaining biological family members. I got to see friends on New Year’s Eve, meet some people I’d only ever talked to online, attend my first New Year’s Eve party in half a decade (I hadn’t gone to one since 2018 since I was feeling ill and emotionally exhausted after my first holidays away from my biological family in 2019 and then, well, because Covid for the rest of them), and got to have a great hour and a half chat with a friend after I picked her up from the airport. It was a great time, even if I’m incredibly bummed out that the demands of my work life and my careful recovery from the aforementioned medication I’m no longer taking mean that I won’t be spending much time physically around people until sometime in March at the earliest. I’m just glad I got to see so many people I care about.
Continue readingA Mixture Of Hope And Frustration: The Story Of 2025
As I spend time during the last few days of my vacation rebuilding my buffer and trying to get myself some breathing room to write (and some breathing room to miss a day of writing by loading up some posts that could be dropped in as-needed, though I’m struggling to come up with enough topics that can be dropped in without any acknowledgment of the day they were written), one of the things I’m noticing as I consider the end of this period of rest is that I’m kind of ready to be doing things again. I think I’m going to get a couple weeks in and be exhausted again, since that’s just how the last few years of my life have gone, but I am trying to convince myself that I’ve got reasons to hope for something better than what was going on before this break. After all, as of the day I’m writing this, I’m three weeks of the medication I was taking for almost all of 2024 and not only can I walk down stairs again without needing to brace myself, I’m back to healing pretty quickly and my back rarely hurts the way it used to on a “good” day. Hell, barely any part of me hurts or aches in comparison to how I felt even a month ago. My muscles and joints still ache, sure, but it’s a 1-3 ache rather than a constant 5 (numbers are out of 10 on the pain scale). It’s a VAST improvement and it is giving me hope that I’ll be able to actually feel better and rested in the upcoming busy months. Or that I’ll at least not get progressively worse every day.
Continue readingdiss sew sea aye shun
Looking Ahead At 2025
I’ll be honest: my main goal for 2025 is to make sure that all of the people I know and love are still breathing at the end of it. With the way the world is turning, bureaucracy’s inertia or not, I’m mostly concerned that people I know and care about will be targeted for simply living their lives as their most authentic selves. Pretty much everything I have in mind for the rest of this incredibly fresh year is geared toward doing what I can to make that happen. It isn’t much, given the relative imbalance of myself and the systems that might be leveraged against them (and, of course, the inability to shield anyone from the random misfortunes of the world), but I will be doing what I can. Effective activism is often a subtle thing in this day and age, especially compared to the performative stuff that fills social media. I’m not going on diatribes about what I’ll do to anyone who hurts my friends, but I am calling my senators. I’m calling my state and federal government representatives. I’m doing what I can to directly support people in dangerous positions with direct financial contributions, at least when I can afford them. It never feels like enough, it is rarely lauded, and it almost never feels even remotely effective, but at least it beats sitting on the internet, joining the chorus of voices who say they will kill/die for those being targeted but can’t be bothered to try organizing locally.
Continue readingOne Last Check-In Before The End Of 2024
Today, (the day I’m writing this, which is the 23rd of December), I had to run into the office for a little bit. There was a test I’d left running of the weekend that I needed to shut down, collect the data from, and then clear out of the test chamber. It’s a shared resource, you see, and while there’s a good chance that no one else is going to be using it in the next two weeks (no one has reserved it as of the last time I checked, a few days ago), it would not do for me to leave all that crap there in case someone else wanted to sneak a little testing in during a historically quiet time at our employer. So I went in the early afternoon, wrapped up my test and put everything away, and then left the building. Took all of half an hour, plus fifteen minutes for adjusting my time card to reflect the fact that I’d shown up and worked for forty-five minutes rather than spent a full day’s worth of vacation time. In, work, and out. Still, in that short amount of time, I still managed to run into every single one of my coworkers who was still working at that point, have a couple conversations about the project I’m working on, and get sidetracked for a few minutes as one of them tried to shove good intentions under my fingernails. It wasn’t that bad, but it was a bit annoying to be trying to quickly finish something and leave only to get bogged down in conversation. Typical, but annoying. Once I was done with it, though, I’d hoped to be able to finally relax only to still feel just as tense and keyed-up as I felt this morning while I procrastinated going to work.
Continue readingI’ve Decided To Take Another Day Off
I honestly haven’t rested much yet, between my day of going into work a week ago, holiday stuff, burning the shit out of my hand while making Christmas dinner, and then hosting my siblings, so I’m just going to take another day off. I’m gonna try to actually rest and get my head out of the weird funk I’m in as I’m writing this. I’ll have a new post tomorrow, to do one final check-in before the end of 2024, and then no new post on Wednesday the 1st. Starting on the 2nd snd carrying forward, I’ll be back to my usual “every work day” blog posts and, if I can ever get my feet under me properly, some new Saturday posts in the future. Not any time soon, though. Typing is a more laborious activity than usual on account of burning the shit out of my hand. It’s been a couple days, and it’s not horrific or anything, but it kinda aches unpleasantly, to the extend that I’m not even holding video gsme controllers with it. Just sort of literalized my burnout with thisnhand injury… So, maybe someday, but definitely not in January. The month hasn’t even started and its off to a rough start.
Happy Holidays! I’m Taking A Few Days Off!
I’m taking a few days off, this week and next! I won’t be posting anything further today (the 25th of December) through the rest of the week. I will have four new posts next week, every day except the first. I’m planning to take some time to rest, celebrate the holidays with the people I care about, and try to hope that nothing goes to shit while I’m resting during my last break before the project I’ve been working on since October of 2023 finally finishes sometime in March. Finally. After that… well, who knows? I have stopped trying to predict the future that far out and have resigned myself to taking it one or two weeks at a time. I hope you’re having a great day today regardless of what you celebrate and if you celebrate a holiday today, well, still have a great day. I’m going to be resting and doing nothing. Hopefully in a more positive way than my last few attempts at doing that. Happy Holidays!
The Magical Millennium’s First (Virtual) Dungeon!
Another wonderful session has come and gone with my players in The Magical Millennium. While we seem to be skipping every-other-session due to holidays, that’s about what I expected (so much so that I did zero preparation for the last session we skipped since I was all but absolutely certain that we would wind up canceling) and I’m very hopeful about things picking up in the new year. We’ll see, of course, but I think we’re finally going to be making some forward progress again. As much as I love all the stuff we’re doing and seeing in this endless Lock-In (which has been going on since October), I’m ready to move on to the next thing. Still, we’ve had a lot of fun in this school-event-turned-adventurous-teen-corral so far and that pattern shows no signs of changing after our latest session. This time around, we had an amazing set of rolls that started off the final match of the dodgeball tournament we began in our previous session, an unexpected downbeat as the time I’d set aside for a drawn-out final match was unexpectedly free that one of my players managed to put to EXCELLENT use, and then our first dungeon! It’s a virtual reality dungeon/escape room adventure experience, but my players took the gentle suggestion that this one would be competitive to absolutely dive in with a level of focus and teamwork that I’ve never seen in them for ANYTHING ever. Seriously. Every time these kids are stuck together, something happens to make them hate each other or deepen the existing fractures in this group and they threw that all aside so they could absolutely wreck this competition. It’s amazing and I’m so excited to continue our game in the new year!
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