It’s been a rough week. Had a mid-week Final Fantasy 14 roleplay wrestling event in the middle of the week (and I’m behind on my blog posts, so this is written less than a week ahead) and that coming so soon after the last one (which was on the Saturday prior) left me with little evening space for much else. Doubly-so considering how sick I’ve felt the last couple days, how worn out I am from work and not feeling well, and how much of a struggle work has been despite having a long weekend just prior to it. I’ve been so tired that I haven’t had the energy to do much in-game other than what my friends are doing and I’ve barely managed even that. I probably should be more focused on the homework tasks I’ve assigned myself in the hopes of having my relic weapon ready to go when the new expansion drops in just under three weeks (as of writing this and two as of posting it), but I just have not had the energy in me to push forward on the grind. Heck, I haven’t even played much of anything else, either. I’ve just… messed around a bit in Pokopia and spun my wheels on an alt in Final Fantasy 14. And now, even as I try to think about doing the work I genuinely want to do in order to progress on my relic weapon, I find myself wanting to just… not do it. I don’t even want to do the video editing I’ve got lined up from that last wrestling show, despite how much I’ve come to enjoy it. I just… don’t have the focus right now.
Continue readingGoals
This Is Going To Be An Entire Week Of Final Fantasy 14 Posts
It’s funny to think back to my early days of playing the game. Putting around with side quests, gathering whatever random crap I could, crafting more random crap with what I gathered, fighting low-level mobs, and generally just not being super focused on the game. Then I slowly dialed in more and more as I started to run into the boundaries of what I could do with a free account and, a month into my playtime, bought all the expansions and a subscription. From then on, I was basically all-in. I still had occasional nights off and spent time doing other things on the weekend, but I mostly stopped playing other games and completely stopped being “relaxed” about the game. I had to catch up to my friends, after-all. I had so much stuff to do in order to make up for the months they’d been playing while I was off in Dragon Age Land, playing through that franchise and it wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t focus. Plus, it gave me goals to pursue and I love having goals. I love having targets to aim for. So I spent a lot of time driving myself forward in the Main Scenario Quests for weeks at a time and then took a break to do crafting and gathering stuff before ultimately returning to MSQ. The cycle repeated itself for almost six months when I cleared the final pieces of Endwalker hand-in-hand with my friends and then we all collapsed in exhaustion. I resolved to get back to puttering, my friends resolved to pace themselves, and the rest of our Free Company hinted at what exciting stuff awaited us in Dawntrail whenever we finally got to it. Which, for me, took about four or five weeks. I was content to rest for a while, catch up on some leveling of other jobs and personal projects, explore my island sanctuary, and mess around in a variety of other types of gameplay, but eventually I felt the itch to get moving forward again and let that lead me into the post-Endwalker patches, Dawntrail, and not to being caught-up with the Dawntrail patches.
Continue readingTrying To Take My Time In Final Fantasy 14
Over the weekend, after about six or so weeks away from doing any kind of Main Scenario Quest progression in Final Fantasy 14, I’m back at it again. For the first time in my seven and a half months of playing the game, it ACTUALLY feels like I’ve been away for a while when I meet back up with the main cast of NPCs and they all remark on how well I look like I’m doing (and I look GREAT, btw, since my main glams all got updated renders in the latest patch) and how nice it is to meet up again after all this time. Generally speaking, there’s usually at least a few months between an expansion and each of its patch updates, so people playing the game as it came out got to experience the passage of time that the game softly implies–albeit usually a truncated version given the way people talk about finally seeing each other again (the game’s actual timeline is incredibly unclear, but I’d guess it’s maybe a fifth of the real-world passage of time if I had to suggest something). When you play through almost the entire main story arc of the game that exists today, you don’t really get the same breaks and breathing space that the game was (eventually) written to reference. It was interesting to see the way they went from tightly-spaced events with a degree of implied continuity that mmade it feet like there wasn’t much time between each major event to events spread out by gaps the characters suggest were significant when they reconvene. They took the nebulousness of in-game time and went from ignoring it–which implied not much time passed at all–to doing enough soft framing around the start of each expansion and certain patches that it implied a moderate passage of time. Perhaps most notably, this was a major component of Endwalker’s conclusion and, given my own feelings at the time, it felt like it would be doing myself and the game a disservice to once more dive into the plot immediately.
Continue readingNational Novel Writing Month Update: One Week Later
Well, it’s been rough. I was INCREDIBLY optimistic about the course this month would take and I think I hit my primary daily writing target only once so far, let alone my daily secondary target of getting enough words to exclude my blog posts from my daily writing totals. I’ve been so busy with work and then so burned out from how busy I was that I when I finally go home and eat dinner, I’ve only got enough time and energy to spend an hour listlessly trying to write before shuffling off to bed. Even the weekend wasn’t much better since all the exhaustion I’d been putting off since I couldn’t afford to feel tired during my incredibly busy work days came crashing back down on me. I did almost nothing but play Spider-Man (the PS4 one, since I never finished the DLC) the entire time. I did eventually finish a blog post and do my laundry, but I was so wiped out that writing the post took three times longer than it should have and I didn’t even fold my clean laundry. What little energy I had for stuff beyond all that was spent on doing my dishes, a little bit of cooking, and taking care of things like paying my bills and other such unfortunate necessities. It has been rough mentally, emotionally, and physically these past few days, and even now that it seems like the worst has passed (though it remains to be seen if this will stay true since it’s not like I anticipated the horrible, frantic, and exhausting week I’ve had since the month began) I am barely staying on my feet as I struggle to remain functional despite the exhaustion.
Continue readingReturning to the Mines
After a little bit over two years, I returned to Minecraft. Even though I played back in mid to late 2020, I didn’t really get into it much. One of my friends wanted to run a server and wound up setting up a huge number of automated farms to generate pretty much every type of material we could want, all the resources we could trade for, and so many XP farms that we never ran into issues when it came to enchanting things. We even cleared The End and got everyone on the server kitted out with Elytra (a cape that lets you glide or even fly if you use fireworks while gliding) so that travel become easy and safe. Except in the Nether, where there was lava everywhere and one false step could not just kill you, but destroy every item you had. Which, you know, falling to your death in The End could also do, since that’s above a massive, endless void, but you usually had time to save yourself if you were flying when this happened.. It was a lot of fun, but it took a lot of the procedural joy out of the game, when everything became easily available.
Continue readingReflections On My Birthday
Today is my birthday (the day of writing this, not the day of posting it) and, after waiting my entire life for this moment, it finally arrived. My Golden Birthday (or Champaign Birthday or Lucky Birthday, depending on where you’re from). I turned thirty-one on the thirty-first of August. I was always very excited as a child about the idea of a Golden Birthday and always a little sad that it would take me so long to experience mine. As I got older, I comforted myself by saying at least I’d be able to have a real party. In the last decade, though, I’ve stopped caring. I don’t really like to make a big fuss about myself. I like it when other people fuss over me, of course. Who doesn’t love attention from the people you care about? But I also don’t like people making a fuss over me when I’m in a bad mood and, as I mentioned in the post that actually went up on the 31st, I’m usually not in a good mood during the month of August. This year has been no exception and, in fact, might be one of the worst in the last decade thanks to everything else I’ve got going on.
Continue readingI Don’t Usually Remember My Dreams And Today I’m Glad I Don’t.
I rarely remember my dreams. I’m not sure why, though I’d bet it has to do with my various sleep issues and how rarely I feel properly rested, but this has been my experience for my entire life. I can’t remember a time in my life that I recall waking up with the details of a dream in my mind more than once in a long while. Most of the time, the dreams I do recall are bad ones, full of negative emotions and unpleasant images perhaps only still present in my mind because the experience of these dreams was so awful that I shook myself awake from them. The rest are a general smattering of the sort of odd, disconnected ideas and sequences that seem to form most dreams and are utterly unremarkable in any way other than their rarity.
Continue readingReasonable NaNoWriMo Goals
Whenever I do something that I know will be difficult or particularly taxing, like take my current level of stress and work and dial it all up a notch by deciding to participate in a month-long writing event, I like to set two separate goals for myself at the outset. Goal one is my realistic goal. It is something I know I can meet with a reasonable amount of effort no matter what happens. My second goal is more aspirational, something I think I can do but that might take more than just effort to make it happen. For instance, in NaNoWriMo 2021, my primary goal is to write in a book project every day. My secondary goals is to write 50,000 words in that book project over the course of a month.
Continue readingThis Tired Refrain
Not gonna lie, I was really hoping to start the month on better footing. I’m writing this on November first and pushing a bunch of other posts around so it can go up closer to the day I’m writing it, just so this doesn’t go up a week later and wind up completely detached from the reality in which I wrote it. Dunno how much I’ll be doing this, since I do want to keep things a bit more journal-y while working my way through Nation Novel Writing Month, but I expect I’ll also be tired, slightly overworked, and incredibly bad at editing anything as I write it. So we’ll see. I like to avoid posting error-filled blog entries if I can avoid it.
Continue readingAiming for Balance
One of my goals for this year is to find balance in my life. While it might seem like this statement is so vague as to be entirely useless, I kind of planned it that way. I get so caught up in my goals and working on projects that I find it difficult to split my attention or to stay focused on big goals instead of little ones. So, instead of giving myself narrow, specific goals to work on or work towards, I’m keeping them general and focusing on the big picture. Instead of trying to lose weight this year or trying to prioritize my mental wellness, I want to be healthy. Instead of updating my blog every day, working on a book, or running three D&D campaigns, I want to create. Instead of trying to stay three weeks ahead in blog posts or reading a book a week, I want to find balance between work and relaxation.