Work’s been hectic lately. While all of the bad stuff in my Final Fantasy 14 guild was happening, my day job was keeping me incredibly busy with bullshit. I got notified within fourty-eight hours of being given new test equipment that it needed to have a essentially eighty hours worth of testing done by the following wednesday. That wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if I hadn’t been getting ready to leave for the day on Friday afternoon. But I stayed, I did some testing, and I put all of my considerable experience and knowledge into figuring out how to cut down on the time between tests. I was able to get it from an hour to half an hour, but even that wasn’t perfect. There was still a hard cap on how much of that I could do in any given day and that was only because it was permissable for the stress of that testing to slightly change the behavior of the thing being tested since I’d be able to start the following morning by checking if the change in behavior was due to wear or due to the heat of the testing equipment.
Continue readingChange
Slowly Heading Toward A New Normal
I am working without a buffer now. Between building a new free company in Final Fantasy 14, work kicking my ass for a project that wound up having its due date moved back only after I’d done all the hard work in a record-breakingly short time, collapsing in exhaustion, and struggling to process all of my emotions from all of this and more, I just haven’t had the time or energy for writing much of anything. Everything else has felt like a higher priority than personal blogging and while I do not like writing the day before a blog post goes up, I don’t think I made the wrong call about how to spend my time these last few days. I wish I’d had more time, I wish I’d been less exhausted, and I definitely wish things hadn’t played out the way they did (but again, I don’t think I made any bad choices), but I’m here now, still absolutely wiped out and trying to write a post while forcing my eyes open so I don’t fall asleep at work or standing at my desk. Which I’ve done before. Woke up in time to stop myself from falling down, but it was quite startling, let me tell you.
Continue readingTime To Breathe
The last week has sucked monumentally and I’m just not going to have blog posts today or tomorrow. I need one less thing to do. I have too many. I’ve spent too much energy. If you want to know what’s going on, you can read about a stupid argument that made it clear I couldn’t keep ignoring what was going on, the listless days following that as I chose to do nothing while taking stock of how I felt and what I should actually do, and then what happened when that choice got made for me. So I’m going to take the time I would have spent writing blog posts and either rest or focus on being in community with my friends as we try to put ourselves back together after someone’s actions threatened to rip us apart.
The Consequences Of Our Actions
I originally had a post about trying to find new games to play, other than Final Fantasy 14 (and succeeding), but then the last weekend happened so I shuffled my posts around a bit and now you get this. Turns out the officers in my FC were preparing to do something about the complaints they’d received. Turns out my silence was noticed. Turns out doing something isn’t better than doing nothing every time. Sometimes fissures and cracks split open into yawning chasms. Despite my attempts to take some time to calm down and keep up my personal obligations to the group, the leader of said FF14 player guild decided that he did not appreciate the officers trying to change his behavior, did not appreciate people he viewed as dissidents, and decided to just remove people and lock things down rather than listen or open a dialogue. That’s his choice. He owns the server, he owns the Free Company (the player guild) and he can do what he wants. Everyone he removed, all of whom were pillars of the community we’ve been ejected from, have decided to go on and do our own thing somewhere else. An era of my life is over and all we can do is try to put the community back together, such as we can, and move forward from here.
Continue readingDigital Impermanence And Fading Memories
To have any experience with the internet is to know that there has been no greater lie told (mostly by accident) than “the internet is forever” (or it’s popular variant, “if you put that on the internet, it is there forever”). That was always what I was told when I was young. It’s what many of my friends were told. “Be careful with what you put on the internet! There’s no such thing as completely taking it down!” Nowadays, we know better. For things to exist on the internet, they have to be stored somewhere and digital storage is not as eternal as we were led to believe. Servers go down, backups get deleted, “AI” agents delete entire environments and then back that nothing up over the backups, and sometimes Amazon just deletes your account and all it’s digital licenses for no reason with no chance of recovery. Digital ownership is ephemeral and while nothing truly lasts forever, the half-life of things on the internet might be much shorter than everyone was led to believe. And sure, just because you can’t find it doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. There’s so much data tucked away in advertising companies, various archival efforts, and forgotten, dusty hard drives in some abandonded warehouse or server rack, so it’s difficult to tell when something is truly gone forever (like a video game I played via SNES emulator that I cannot find any mention or record of anywhere that I keep thinking is Secrets Of Mana but learn it isn’t when I go play SoM). I’m sure this game from my late childhood/early double-digit-years exists somewhere and I’m sure the version I remember is some modified ROM or a translated version of a game and that it is sitting tucked away on someone’s computer somewhere, forever out of my reach other than the few hazy memories of it I hold onto.
Continue readingLike A House On Fire
It feels like the world I live in (my sphere of influence, my ability to perceive and participate in areas I occupy, etc) gets radically altered every week or two despite how little changes in practical terms. I still work the same job, do the same tasks, entertain myself the same ways, and haven’t had to make many changes to my life as a result of the last two years of stuff. And yet it feels like everything is different. Democracy in the US is being shredded in front of our eyes by a partisan, extremly Republican supreme court, various political bodies that are failing to constrain the attempts to undermine any of the principles that this country once suposedly stood for, medications are flipflopping between being legal and illegal, and all while the ostensible opposition party can’t mount a defense to save anyone’s life, not even their own, such that it is not unreasonable to look out at the current political climate and wonder if it’s too late to fix things. I don’t believe it is, not yet, but it is going to take a lot more radical action from people currently elected than we’ve seen from any of them up to this point, and while that is definitely within the realm of possibility, I’m not sure how likely it is, at all. It would require them, all Democrafts really, to stop backing down without a fight over literally everything and yet they keep capitulating on every front.
Continue readingFinal Fantasy 14: Change On The Wind
Well, I was kind of right. I thought the next expansion of Final Fantasy 14 would involve going to all of the reflections (broken-apart pieces of a once-unified world) of FF14’s near-universe and doing the work of reuniting them/assimilating the broken worlds left behind by the series’ villains in the first few expansions (the Ascians). And while that might STILL be true, it seems like the next expansion is focused on one of them specifically and this whole next arc of expansions might be doing what I thought a single expansion would. So, yeah, I was kind of right. I just thought it might involve a bit more bopping around rather than picking a specific new place to go and having the whole adventure there. That, plus everything from the new patch content (all five missions of it) has me pretty excited for what all this might bring. Watching the presentation at the US Fan Fest and then playing through the new story content is really building up something interesting that is both pretty much what I expected and still feels new and exciting to me. It is going to be a long way, of about nine months, to before the expansion actually drops, but I’ve got plenty of stuff left to do before then (and rest to get, of course) so I’m not terribly worried about the wait.
Continue readingWaiting For Something To Change
Hell is anxiously checking for a response to a message you haven’t even typed yet, much less sent. It is having made a decision that you haven’t followed through on yet, essentially forcing you to make the decision over and over again as your mind picks at it. It is knowing that you have to keep making a decision every day for years if you want it to ever pay off, despite how far away that moment might be. It is knowing something and being unable to act on it, not now and probably not ever. It is all these moments of anixety and powerlessness and more besides. These days, I find myself steeped in such things: conversations I don’t know how to start, things I feel foolishly compelled to heavily qualify before sharing, decisions made long ago that I must stick to because nothing’s changed enough to reevaluate them, and recognitions of problems I can do nothing positive to resolve. All my other choices are worse than whatever I’ve picked, acting on anything will most-likely return bad results, and no amount of practice is going to make it any easier to start conversations I feel weird for having because I was trained to ask nothing of people and still struggle to ask for anything that might require other people to put in effort on my behalf. I hate being in these kinds of no-win-but-the-long-run situations and even my therapist agrees that my life is pretty much entirely made up of them these days. I just want problems that are easy to handle, a society that doesn’t feel like it is on the verge of collapsing, and the ability to ask things of people without feeling the need to preempt all the potential negative directions the conversation could go if I was misinterpreted.
Continue readingBurgeoning Burnout And Undeniable Exhaustion
It has been a difficult week. Following my therapy appointment a couple days ago, I spent the rest of that day and all of the next at home, taking time off work. Today, the day I’m writing this a week before it goes up, I’m in the office for a normal 10+ hour shift and mentally prepared to not go in to work at all tomorrow since I’d only need to spend two days of PTO at that point. If I’m not going to get any overtime this week because of how acute my burnout is and how exhausted I feel from coming face-to-face with said burnout, its causes, and the things keeping it the same size at best or growing at worst with each passing day, I might as well give myself an extra day off so I can maybe get enough rest to tackle next week without needing to cut my days short. I also just don’t want to be here. I have described, in detail, how much things at my job have wrecked me over the past two years and I can’t pretend, even for a little bit, that I’m okay with this, comfortable with what’s going on, or happy about any of it in the slightest. I mean, it’s not like I’m being actively tortured or anything, or abused by any meaning of the word. I’m just being taken for granted and have Hard Work’d my way into an untenable position where my entire team not only expects me to do a great deal of organizational labor that isn’t at all a part of my job, but will actively make my life difficult if I’m not doing it by complaining to my boss that I don’t seem to be working much at all. It’s not a great position to be in, especially because my boss agrees with them, or at least he did six months ago when he brought it up during my yearly review, and I’m not entirely sure what to do.
Continue readingNew Year, Same Problems
I went into my two and a half weeks of vacation thinking that, by the end of it, I’d have found my voice again. That, after enough rest, even interrupted by the holidays, I would find myself gravitating towards the blank page that used to speak to me. Instead, I spent the weekend before the end of my vacation thinking about what I’d do today, the day I’m writing and posting this, since I hadn’t written anything and all I really felt as a result of my time off was more doubt than ever. I came up with a couple good ideas related to that, but whatever they were vanished into the haze of my incredibly disrupted sleep schedule and the emotional lassitude that followed an entire afternoon and evening of fun and rewarding roleplaying with some people I’ve gotten closer to over the last few weeks. This morning, as I prepared for work, I had some kind of idea about directing my writing in such a way that it was more of a means of giving voice to specific ideas rather than just giving voice to my otherwise silent thoughts and feelings, but my exhaustion from not sleeping well and the busyness of my workplace has caused whatever distinction I came up with to slip from my mind. I am running around empty-handed as the hours of the day tick past and nothing I can think of feels like more than the usual complaining and navel-gazing I leaned on so heavily before my break. Which begs the question, did taking my break actually change anything? Did all that rest actually result in some amount of recovery? Eighteen days have passed and did I do anything other than pass through eighteen days of time?
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