After a solid seven evenings and some partial days, I made the set of gear I needed for my upcoming Current Content Raid event in Final Fantasy 14. Rather than buy it all, I set out to do the work required to learn how to craft it all, get all my crafting classes leveled up, get my crafting and gathering jobs geared up twice, and ultimately get myself into a position where I could craft any released recipe with the right stack of buffs and ability combos. It was a lot of work, if I’m being quite honest, but that’s part of why I did it: to distract myself from my own life and all it’s problems that require me to wait an unknown amount of time for something else to happen. I started on a Monday, with the idea of doing it at all and a brief glance into what that would entail, which convinced me it could be done. The following night, I dug into it more deeply and almost convinced myself that it couldn’t be done. Since I was looking to feel at least a little overwhelmed to combat my rising anxiety, I dug in, made lists, did research, polled my FC full of experienced crafters, and came up with a game plan. From there, I spent the next few days leveling up my crafting jobs so I could earn the resources required to get better gear for my crafting and gathering jobs, doing even more crafting and gathering to get the currency necessary to unlock the ability to gather the resources I needed for more gear, and gathering all of these new resources so that, finally, last night, I could spend some time processing the materials into their crafted versions and then put together a full set of gear for the healer job I’ll be performing a few days from now (or a few days ago as this gets posted). This is almost all I’ve done over these last few days, with some time carved out for work and sleep and actually playing the game, but I hesitate to even guess at the number of hours I spent on it, even after reducing them as much as possible by dropping a total of almost sixteen million gil (the main in-game currency) over that same period (not all of it was on this project mind you, but that was about twenty-three percent of my total gil in what felt like such a short time and I wasn’t tracking my expenses closely enough to figure out which was tied to what).
Continue readingEscapism
An Out-Of-Mind Experience
Today, the day I’m writing this (a week before it gets posted), is the first day any of my relatives could have reasonably received the letters I sent out earlier this week. It might take longer than usual, given the government shutdown and everything, but today’s the day were my anxiety goes from “steadily bubbling” to “boiling over” as I begin to flinch every time my phone buzzes or it’s little “you’ve got a notification!” light turns on. I do not want to hear from any of them. I’m not interested in what any of them have to say immediately upon reading my letter and explicitly mentioned not sending me texts or calling me in the letter itself, so I should not be hearing from any of them. I will, almost certainly, be hearing from at least one of them at some point this weekend, though. Not sure what it’ll be about, considering the various relatives getting a letter and their wide range of knee-jerk responses to stuff, but I’m sure it’ll happen eventually. After all, it’s not purely unhealthy communication if there’s not also communication when you’ve explicitly said you want none. I expect that the general content of whatever message I get will include some form of apology, some number of excuses or “explanations” for past behavior, and then either a statement that they’ll do what I asked in my letter (despite already contacting me) or some statement about the importance of family connections with a deflecting acknowledgement that our family communicates poorly. Bonus points if it includes both.
Continue readingI Got A Job In Final Fantasy 14 And It’s More Rewarding Than My Real-World Job
As I’m starting this post, I’m struck by how often the phrase “_________ says it all” is immediately followed by a more expansive explanation that includes details that weren’t present in what “__________” was. All of which to say is that the title of this post is an accurate representation of its contents in summary. I got hired (me, personally) by the leader of my Free Company in Final Fantasy 14 to do some work to help make our company projects proceed more smoothly. I’m now the person trolling the markets for the materials we need in mass quantities that our companions haven’t been able to acquire by the time we need to start distributing materials. The leader sets a price cap and gives me the in-game money (plus a 10 percent commission that is meant to also cover sales tax) for however much of whatever material it is he needs and I run around the various data centers and servers buying it all up, keeping whatever money is left once that is all over. We negotiated the details of it over the weekend prior to me writing this (two weekends ago from when this gets posted) and I got sent on my way to buy fifty thousand each of two different things last night (as of writing this). I got my money, did my research, filled out my little tracking spreadsheet (that also calculates profit margins, my current pay total, and the quantity purchased), and spent about four hours buying it all. It was actually a lot of fun! I’ve been interested in how the game’s economics work, from a player perspective, and this was a very interesting glimpse into it that I couldn’t have gotten any other way. While I definitely still prefer to spend my time playing the game, I am kind of looking forward to the next time I get to do a shopping hunt like this one, and not just because it has been the fastest I’ve made a huge amount of money in my almost ten months of playing the game.
Continue readingSetting Up A Serious Grind In Final Fantasy 14 To Distract Myself From My Life
I’m back in the saddle with Final Fantasy 14! Back to the lowkey socialization, the focused gaming, the attention-consuming escapism, and free of the need to think about my life and how much it sucks to be me this past week and a half while dealing with biological family problems (and how much it will continue to suck to be me while I’m still embroiled in this stuff for however long it takes). After my time away, I’ve come back at a bit of a loss for what to do next! There’s gear to accumulate, levels to gain, quests to do, and so much more, all of which is very familiar! This is how most patches usually start, with a huge number of quests, the ability to get new, better gear, and at least some confusion on my part about which of the many options I should start with. This time, though, the path is more muddled than ever. Instead of being able to use the resource I’ve been accumulating the whole time, “Tomestones of Poetics” to unlock new gear that’s pretty much the best stuff you can get at that point, I actually have to dig into the mud that is the various other Tomestones and resources from raids to figure out what’s the best gear for me to get right now, so I can do the current content in order to get better gear to prepare me for the harder current content while also getting myself into a position to be able to make or otherwise acquire the next set of gear that will come out with the next patch whenever that happens. It’s a lot and it’s taken me a couple days to figure out, but I think I’ve got it thanks to some incidental advice from the leader of my FC and my own organized nature.
Continue readingFire Drill Flight Risk
Every place that has some kind of fire alert system has a policy for what to do when that system alerts people to a fire. We start practicing this stuff as kids, in daycare or preschool or kindergarten or whatever you call your first educational experience, and continue into our adulthood. I missed a few years in there, since I was homeschooled. My mother tried to do a fire drill once, back when she was convinced that she could just have “school” happen at our house the same way it would at the local Catholic school that she would have otherwise sent us to, but it went poorly and she never tried again. We did get “fire escape ladders” to hang out our bedroom windows though, in case we needed to get out of our bedrooms and the door was blocked by fire, but I think the only one that got used was when my brother snuck out of the house using it, breaking the screen he dropped in the process. Anyway. I did fire drills in high school, in college (in various places: once while in class, thrice while in different dorms, and then yearly at the theater I worked at but that was a very different experience), at both my post-college jobs, and even at a couple apartments. They’re all basically the same, with a few important differences. In every single case, you get out of the building, attend to any people who might be on fire (to a degree), get away from the fire, wait for the all-clear signal, and then go back inside where you have to spend the rest of the day pretending your whole day has not been turned upside down by this disruption. Or, in my recent case, stare longingly at your car as it tempts you to just drive away since it’s unlikely that anyone will notice your absence.
Continue readingPassing Time With TCG Card Shop Simulator
A week ago today (the day you’re reading this and six days after I’m writing this), I stopped resisting my desire to buy any kind of new game to help me get over Dragon Age: The Veilguard and bought a game I’ve had my eye on for a few weeks now. I’d thought to buy it last month, but I was busy with Dragon Age: Inquisition and couldn’t afford any distractions. I was already distracted enough, thanks to being neck-deep in Dragon Age stuff and Veilguard just around the corner, so I let it pass and figured that, by the time I thought of it again, I’d probably be over my incredibly surface-level interest. I mean, I’m not one for simulator games and TCG Card Shop Simulator is just another entry in a long line of incredibly similar-looking games, so why would this one hold my interest in a way that literally none of the others ever have? Other than, you know, being introduced to it by watching two members of Friends at the Table have a great time playing it and it being focused around not only something I have personal experience with (trading card games, which is what TCG stands for) but something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about (game shops). So, last Tuesday, while in a fit of malaise and depression, I bought the game and immediately lost three hours of my life.
Continue readingMy Impending Vacation
In a week from tomorrow, I’ll be going on vacation. I’ll have some errands to run in the morning, including getting a blood test and doing some grocery shopping, but then I’ll be loading myself up for a trek northward to spend some time in a cabin in the woods with two of my siblings and one of their partners who’ll actually only be there for part of the trip. It’ll mostly be my siblings and I. I’ve also got additional time off of work after that, for post-trip recovery, resting up in my place of ultimate comfort (such that it is), and probably trying to get through my massive backlog of books, movies, and video games. A week of escapism, in as many ways as possible, followed by a week of rest and reordering of my life in whatever ways I can think of while also playing a bunch of video games, reading whatever books I’ve got left from the first part of the trip, and probably watching Delicious in Dungeon since I should be all caught up on A More Civilized Age by then. The possibilities are not exactly endless, but they’re pretty enormous, considering most of my two-week vacations over the past decade have been in the winter, around the holidays, and have suffered from the emotional angst that goes with them. This time, it’s all summer and all freedom to rest or do whatever. Maybe I’ll even stream! There’s so much I could be doing.
Continue readingHiding From All The “Year In Review” Messages I’m Being Sent
It seems like everything has a “your year in review!” thing these days. Sure, I get it as far as Spotify is concerned, since they’re all about music and basically stealing from musicians, and having all of that data is a great way to generate some buzz and attention to your platform, even though they share the data before the year is over and don’t include your entire year’s worth of listening. Nintendo started doing the same thing, but with video games, showing the number of games you played and how much you played them. My podcatcher app (Podcast Addict) doesn’t have one, but it does compile your stats in a menu somewhere so you can look any time you want rather than needing to wait for the end of the year. Amazon has one, if you use any of its media services. Barnes and Noble even sent me some kind of email about it that I instantly deleted. I don’t want to know how much money I spent on books this year since I know precisely how many books I actually read and the disparity would probably make me sad, especially after I was finally able to get myself back into a place where the quiet I needed for reading was within my grasp again. Honestly, the only services that don’t seem to do this kind of year-end review are social media companies, which I really appreciate since I would hate to see just how much I posted and how little interaction I got.
Continue readingStill Having A Wild Time In Wildermyth
After most of a year away from the game, I’ve returned to playing Wildermyth. My return from this extended absence was prompted by the group of people that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with on Fridays suggesting we play Wildermyth as a fun activity we could all do together. We even had one pleasant but incredibly late session of it, though we’ve since struggled to get together to continue playing. I suspect this will be a bit easier than scheduling a D&D session, on account of it taking less time to play in general and Wildermyth’s ability to be easily shortened or stretched to fit into whatever time we’ve got. I don’t expect us to play it weekly, by any means, but hopefully we’ll be able to return to the game we started before a full month has passed. Also, while waiting, I can continue to play by myself. It’s tons of fun to play in multiplayer mode, but still almost as fun to play in single player mode, so I’m beginning to slip it into my regular gaming rotation again. I’m also, once again, discovering that it is incredibly addicting to play and that it is incredibly easy for me to lose track of time while I’m playing it. I’ve already had a couple nights where I stayed up way too dang late to play it and I’ve only been back to playing it for a week as of writing this post.
Continue readingHappy Thanksgiving!
I’m taking the day off to spend time with my siblings and, aside from cooking a huge meal, take a break for a day. So, instead of a full post, I’ve got some suggestions for people looking to escape today. If you can only read stuff, I suggest checking out The Order of the Stick for some D&D themed fun and Erfworld (which has mostly shuttered for the time being, but the full comic is still up for viewing, which is where the link SHOULD take you) for some fantasy-themed fun that quickly turns into incredibly complex story telling with a great deal of heart and (intermittently, due to the main artist needing to focus on her family’s health rather than work) beautiful art. If you’ve got video and audio access, check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube! Every video is excellent! If you need to chew up more time, check out Drawfee for some friends making art together! Sort by popular or just scroll until one of them sounds interesting! You really can’t go wrong if you like seeing artists work (though, personally, I’d definitely recommend the Drawtectives series, my absolute favorite thing they’ve done). If you’ve only got audio, I suggest checking out Andrew Bird’s music for something cerebral and chill or Bug Hunter for something upbeat, fun, and sometimes emotionally difficult but still beautiful.
Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t forget, all colonialism is bad and genocide is even worse even though they’re almost always found walking hand-in-hand! Work to fight against their influence even today as we in the US celebrate a story we made up to attempt to make it seem like our entire country isn’t built on murder, pillaging, and the destruction of other cultures!