One week into the Final Fantasy 14 crafting workshop for my Free Company and things have mostly settled down. I still have to do some amount of administrative work every day to keep things rolling, to keep paying out people who bring me stuff, and keep making stuff I need to sell in order to keep my profit margin positive, but it’s getting less and less as I’m figuring out some organizational systems to manage my day-to-day activities. Unfortunately, my storage situation is currently completely borked and it is going to take a LOT of work to unbork it. A lot of work and a lot of time since half the stuff I’ve got is stuff I’m saving for specific projects, is a rare drop needed for one item I’ll want eventually, or is just crud i’ve accumulated over the past year because I thought stuff would stay relevant longer than it has. I also thought I’d go back and work my way through my entire crafting recipe catalogue at some point and while I still want to do that eventually, I don’t think that I have literally anything in such quantities that keeping it until I eventually do that work is going to save me any time at all. It’ll be drudgery whenever I get to it and having half-a-dozen ingots I think I’ll need but maybe won’t need isn’t really going to save me that much time and effort. It might be easier to just pick up what I need and then throw it away when I’m done rather than try to cycle it in and out of my storage. All of which is rather beside the point of my current efforts, other than needing to get my storage cleared out and organized so It can actually be useful for me again.
Continue readingFun
Trying To Find Balance In My Final Fantasy 14 Activities
Back in October, when I set aside everything else I had going on in Final Fantasy 14 in order to get deep into crafting (in order to avoid thinking about my relationship with my biological family), I didn’t realize that it would take me three months to get through that and everything that sort of just flowed out from it: two rounds of intense combat gear crafting, numerous rounds of crafting and gathering gear crafting (largely free of charge because I don’t like making people pay me for the ability to make/earn money on their own), the start of a workshop that has largely fallen into stillness now that the major demand for new gear and consumables has passed (though I imagine it’ll tick up again when the raiding members of the workshop run through their current stock), and starting progress on one of my alts. I thought it would be a few weeks of work and then I’d just go back to leveling other jobs, digging into older parts of the game that I brushed past in my drive to finish the Main Scenario Quests, and puttering around. Instead, I wound up getting carried away by all that, changes to my weekly activities with my FC, the slow start of a new season of roleplayed wrestling (busier now as I am the official cinematographer for the federation), and the thought of starting up a workshop within my Free Company to help give everyone the means to make some money while the thing we used to do is on indefinite hiatus. Only now, as I’ve settled in to the realization that none of my groups are going to become high-end content groups in any kind of a hurry and started doing stuff “to make sure I’m not missing out” rather than in preparation for a specific thing, have I returned to the slow, plodding tasks that fell by the wayside in my fervor to accomplish all my very specific goals.
Continue readingA Focus on Power Fantasies Ruins TTRPGs For Everyone
I saw someone post on Twitter that Dungeons and Dragons is all about power fantasies and, as a result, most people play characters that are like them in an effort to roleplay situations that make them, personally, feel powerful. I have a lot of mixed feelings about this idea and a WHOLE lot of thoughts about how it can play out in actual games. Part of the problem, of course, is that making any blanket statement based on your personal experiences shows your personal biases, privelege, and frequently overlooks the experiences of people who aren’t like you. I’m going to try to avoid making any such statements here by talking about my experiences specifically, but I will have to generalize a bit unless I’m going to write an entire novel. Which has a certain appeal, but this isn’t really the medium for discourse at length.
Continue readingI’m Not Religious, but this Show is Miraculous.
I really love cartoons. More often than not, I feel like I get more out of cartoons than I do out of most TV shows. TV shows focus on drama and situational comedy, while cartoons are a little bit more free to explore a little bit of everything. Steven Universe is probably my all-time favorite show, edging out Adventure Time for the number 1 slot. Most non-animated shows I’ve watched don’t even make it into the single digits. I may not enjoy all cartoons, but I definitely enjoy more cartoons than live-action TV shows.
Which is why it didn’t take much suggestion from my girlfriend to get me to sit down and watch an episode of this French cartoon, Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir. One episode was all it took and now I’m hooked. It may not have the wonderful music or thought-provoking themes of my two favorites, but it is one of the most charming and enjoyable cartoons I’ve ever watched. The lessons are simple, the plotting is straight forward, and the pacing is incredible for a show with very little continuity.
The place the cartoon shines is in the writing and the characters. Each person is their own kind of clever, everyone feels like a person you either know or would know if you didn’t spend all of your free time watching Netflix, and there are only a couple of characters you dislike. That being said, as you watch the show, even the villain seems to have something he wants that might redeem him if the show ever actually reveals it.
The protagonist, Ladybug, is a teenage girl who is granted super powers through a special item called a “miraculous” that she wears in the shape of earrings. When she uses the command phrase to empower them (there’s this little ladybug creature that follows her around and often acts as her conscience), she gets super strength, a neat outfit (with an amazing transformation sequence), a magical yoyo, and the ability to summon a lucky charm that, if used correctly, will also let her undo all the damage the villain has wrought throughout the episode.
Her opposite, Cat Noir, is a teenage boy who gets his super powers from a “miraculous” that takes the form of a ring he wears. He gains his powers using a different command phrase and his little familiar is a tiny cat-creature that is 75% snark and 25% desire for smelly cheese. This is just my opinion, and you can feel free to disagree, but I think his transformation sequence is better, though his powers aren’t as great. An extending staff replaces the yoyo, and the ability to destroy any one thing he touches replaces the lucky charm. His outfit is a little weirder, but his costume is cat themed and you can’t just slap polka dots on a body suit for a cat theme like you can with a ladybug theme.
Together, they have a wonderful dynamic. Cat Noir is confident, constantly spews terrible puns, has a huge crush on Ladybug, and seems at ease with his superhero powers from the start. Ladybug is less confident, but often the one to figure out the trick to the villain or who eventually perseveres. She is a lot less comfortable with her powers and most of her growth is her adjusting to being a hero and trying to overcome her rather innate clumsiness when she gets flustered. She has a crush on Cat Noir’s secret identity and has little patience for her fellow hero’s flirting at first, though it eventually develops into delightful banter between the two of them.
The support cast of best friends, classmates, parents, and associate people is diverse and wonderful. They’re all unique, avoid clichés, and you get the excellent juxtaposition of Ladybug’s ideal family life and Cat Noir’s less-than-ideal family. Cat Noir comes from a wealthy, broken family because his mother is missing and his father is worried something will happen to him and Ladybug comes from a warm, loving family of bakers and cooks who shower her with love and baked goods. Ladybug’s father is super supportive, her mother teaches her well, and they both care for her greatly. Cat’s Noir’s family is essentially his bodyguard, his father’s assistant who sometimes plays the mother role, and his father who is often cold and very restrictive in what he allows his son to do. The show doesn’t pull its punches when it confronts complicated issues and it handles them well, given that its target audience is children.
Aside from the obvious superhero tropes (no one knows their secret identities and there’s the constant risk of one of the hero duo figuring out the other’s secret identity because they wind up trying to protect them before they transform), the only negative aspect of the show is that it is a French cartoon and, as a result, I cannot seem to remember anyone’s names. They’re not even all French names but I literally cannot remember any of them aside from their hero names. This is a personal failing of mine rather than of the show, but it is frustrating nevertheless because I just can’t seem to make them stick… I think Ladybug’s real name begins with an “m”? Don’t quote me on that. All rants aside, the lack of synchronization between the mouths and the words using in the dubbed version of the cartoon is barely noticeable. It is excellently done and even the kind of shiny computer animation doesn’t detract from the excellence of the cartoon aside from a few of the trickier perspective or movement shots that any form of animation without a budget larger than the GDP of any small European country would struggle to portray.
Since all of the “negatives” are personal preference things and just me being picky, I really feel I should recommend you watch this show. The themes are basic enough for most kids and the violence that’s there is rather tame, so feel free to show it to your kids, young siblings, or tiny cousins as well. It’s really just a lot of fun to watch and I suggest adding it to your Netflix queue.