Getting a workshop, even a digital one, off the ground is a lot of work. Even if I’ve got a spreadsheet I’ve inherited from my Final Fantasy 14 Free Company leader, getting it updated and ready to be used after most of it hasn’t been updated since 2024 is a pretty significant undertaking. Adding on to it the way I want to (and have been) in order to support other kinds of projects and an “I will buy this from you” list for my own purposes is an even larger undertaking. I’ve spent at least a few hours a day on it for five days straight and I’m sure that I’ll eventually be adding more to it tonight, once I settle down to “game,” since gaming these days is seventy-five percent idle crafting while I work on this spreadsheet, twenty-percent doing my daily grind for levels, four percent doing weekly reset work, and one percent doing things that are fun. I miss doing fun stuff and I can’t wait to get back to it once I have this spreadsheet updated, a project-management process in place, and all of my new projects humming along. It’s going to be difficult to manage at first since I don’t have the kind of in-game money needed to support the more proactive of my fellow players, but if I keep it up and have picked the right items to make and sell, then I should be able to translate all this effort into even more money. We’ll have to see if it actually works out, though. I might wind up losing a bunch of money and needing to shut down all parts of the workshop other than the group-contribution efforts, or just not making the money fast enough to keep up with the influx of materials (since I can only make things so quickly and can’t flood the market with them if I want to keep prices up). Only time will tell.
Continue readingLabor
At The Heart Of My Desire To Run TTRPGs
As someone who has more than a passing interest in tabletop games, scholastic pursuits, and reflecting deeply on things, following Dr. Emily Friedman, a professor studying games with a focus on tabletop roleplaying games and the Actual Play media created using them, on social media was a no-brainer the instant I first came across her posts. I also wound up following a bunch of people she communicates with regularly for their insights on these interests of mine and, after the fall of Cohost, saw the tabletop scene of that website merge with the growing one on Bluesky, such that it isn’t uncommon for me to find someone proposing an interesting idea and them mutliple other people examining the idea or thought through different lenses. Lately, this has been especially important to me because Dr. Friedman has been writing more and more about how being a Game Master (or Dungeon Master) is a form of labor, how the labor of game-making happens falls so heavily on them, and what that means for the community that exists in the form of players and GM. It has given me a lot to think about as I reflect on what I want out of running games, why I care about games, and what am I actually getting out of all the time and effort I put into running games. This, itself, has sparked a lot of thought about the various games I’ve run over the years and the one lingering campaign I still have these days, even if we don’t play that often, and all of it came to a head when I read a follow-up post to the latest idea proposed by Dr. Friedman (that a specific corner of the hobby that is tabletop gaming is likely comprised almost entirely of poeple who did all the work in group work assignments to make sure it all got done right): RPGs are, in a sense, an unwelcome activity even while doing them.
Continue readingI’m Tired But Not Sad So I’ll Just Ramble About Why That Is
As I slowly move back towards the kind of heavy labor I was doing at the beginning of this year (though at a slower pace, thankfully), it is nice to know that I am not only more physically capable than I was back then, but that a good night’s rest is more effective than it used to be. From just over a year ago until sometime in the spring, it would take me multiple days of rest to recover from a single day’s exertion and now a single night is enough to recover from feeling physically exhausted. Assuming I get enough sleep, anyway. But also, a year ago, I wasn’t able to sleep for more than a few hours, three or four at most, without waking up with excruciating back pain! I was so tired and pained all the time that it was everything I could do just to keep getting through my days. I descended into a place of fog, exhaustion, misery, and constant trudging persistence while I slowly recovered from years with a worn-out bed, the physical toll of the medication I was taking, and the added weight of not sleeping enough for three months in a row. In fact, I only ever started to recover when I stopped taking that medication and my body was able to start properly repairing itself instead of… well, whatever was going on there. I tell you, there’s nothing like going from needing three to seven days for your muscles to recover from feeling tired to being able to get back up and do more with them after sitting down for a little bit, much less feeling almost all the way better by the next morning. I mean, today was a doozy and I’m going to be feeling it tomorrow, but only enough that it’ll make me do my morning stretches for sure and not leave me in a miserable amount of pain like even half this much effort would have done a year ago.
Continue readingA Weekend Of Chores In And Out Of Final Fantasy 14
I spent most of my weekend doing chores. Almost the entire thing, actually, when I think about it. I woke up feeling refreshed on Saturday, got out of bed–ready to dive into my weekend’s list of Things To Do in preparation for my friends coming to visit (last weekend, as this gets posted)–and then got slammed almost immediately by the difference between feeling rested and recovering from burnout. So, rather than push myself to do the chores I’d set aside for that day, I took my time through the morning to relax, play some video games, and let my body be awake but still for a while. All while doing chores in Final Fantasy 14. I’ve started a personal money-making project, something simple but hopefully still lucrative, and had a bunch of orders and gatherables to deliver for my player guild to keep me busy while I spent my idle time doing research for said project. Once that was done, I moved back and forth between doing bits and pieces of my chores and attending to the various tasks I’d set up in Final Fantasy 14, slowly whiling away my Saturday while I collected a ton of stuff, crafted a bunch of stuff, sorted out my retainers in a more beneficial manner, and attended to some of the more laborious of my weekend chores. I did mostly the same thing on Sunday, but with the addition of spending about four hours playing Stardew Valley with one of my D&D group members since I wasn’t up for running a session, so really it was just chores all the way up and down my weekend.
Continue readingThis Hyperfixation On My Own Energy Levels Will Hopefully End Soon
Way back in 2015, I went on a pretty hardcore diet. I was trying to pick up running (long story) and having issues because of how hard it was on my legs (from knees on down), so I thought I’d try to lose some weight and see if running worked better. I took a severe, rather limiting approach that drove a significant lifestyle change I was hoping to maintain (that lasted until I went to a convention, slacked off on the severity of my limitations, and never picked it back up again), and it was all I could think about for a solid month. I had cut down my calorie intake to an incredibly low number and was fighting through the feelings of hunger that plagued me as my appetite slowly shrunk and my body adapted to burning stored fat rather than recently consumed food, so it was kind of at the forefront of my mind whenever I wasn’t focused on something else. It was all I talked about with my friends, in my group chats, and around my D&D group, so much so that I eventually realized it and (unsuccessfully) tried to stop talking about it. This past week of recovering my executive function has been kind of like that. Getting something back that I’ve been missing for so long–years and years–has consumed my mind and attention to the point that I’ve written about it every single day this week. I’m sure I could try to jog my mind away from this topic, but I’m not sure I want to yet since, well, this is a part of my lived experience and very important to me.
Continue readingTreading Water At Work While Trying To Manage An Intern
The week I’m writing this, I am the only tester on my team who is in the office. The other two are away on multi-week vacations, coincidentally overlapping during what could be described as the busiest period of the summer so far. I’m sure neither one of them did this on purpose. It’s not like any of us knew this week was going to be busy until Thursday of last week and it was far too late to do anything about it then. So, to make up for the lack of other testers and the large amount of work that needs doing every day, I’ve been strictly managing my time at work and bouncing between a large variety of tasks. It is incredibly exhausting, I’ll be honest, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be have gotten less done than if I’d been able to just do my own thing rather than constantly need to reprioritize as something new crops up. Still, I’ve managed to keep on top of everything so far, for three days in a row, other than the testing intern. He’s supposed to be running some tests the senior tester gave him before he left, but I think he’s not actually doing that, given the lack of questions and how the two times I’ve gone to check on him, he’s had to wake up his computer and log back in to show me what he’s supposedly been working on. Since the first time that’s happened, I’ve been keeping on eye on him from the lab or my office, wherever I’m working, and noticing how little time he’s spending looking at his monitors and how much time he’s spending looking at his tablet. I’m not one to bust anyone for taking a break or not looking busy, and I can understand that he probably doesn’t want to have this job but is kind of getting forced into it since his relatives work here (they’re high up in the company, too, so there’s quite a lot of nepotism going on here since he’s been given the most nothing job assignment), but this work needs doing and all of us testers are counting on it getting done, so I’m going to need to figure something out for his last handful of weeks.
Continue readingLaboring To Make Sure My Value Isn’t Only Seen In My Labor
I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be the sort of person who, in multiplayer video games, tends to be the one doing infrastracture projects. The best example of what I mean is back in my old days of playing Valheim with some of my friends. There was a lot of cooperative labor and effort put into what we were doing in that game because the very nature of the game demands it (or at least strongly encourages it), but we all had our own time to work on individual projects and it was very telling that all of mine were things like building new bases for us to share, creating pathways to ease travel to resource clusters, and setting up various mechanic-based game features (things like resource farms and safe places to go AFK (Away From Keyboard)). I’d make roads so that, when we were mining, it would be easy to move the cart back and forth with everything we’d gathered. I’d do research into how base raids would start and what prevents monsters from spawning so I could make what we wound up calling “AFK Island” so that the server’s owner could leave it running with his character in-game so the rest of us could play whenever we wanted to (and so we could go AFK without worrying about being swarmed by goblins or dragons or whatever the current threat was). I even set up monster farms with safe sprinting paths so that we could collect resources that were normally a pain to acquire without too much fuss or danger. I’d make minecart pathways and Nether roads in Minecraft. I’d maintain the group’s purse and resource allocation in multiplayer Stardew valley. And now, in Final Fantasy 14, I’m taking it upcon myself to craft a bunch of food we use for raiding.
Continue readingSubtext And Performative Extroversion Are The Key To A Good Work Schedule
On top of everything going on, all the woes of society and my on-going issues with finding a decent antidepressant that works for me, things at my job are picking back up again. Our project has been announced, we’ve gotten through all the manufacturing hurdles, and it is officially released to production as of a couple weeks ago. Which means that development can finally resume. That’s right. It’s released and actively being sold, but we’re back to working on it again. This isn’t terribly unusual for a lot of products (especially on stuff with lead-times as large as ours are–multiple months). A lot of things will be announced, get demonstrated or marketed, and have their designs shipped to factories to be produced long before development will stop working on them. Some of that work is, of course, designing future versions of the product, making improvements, and incorporating feedback based on customer experiences. A lot of it, though, is just the same work that’s been done the whole time but now focused solely on trying to remove as much material from the project as possible in order to bring down the cost of producing it. Sometimes that means chasing down ideas developers and engineers had but didn’t have a chance to try out during the initial development phase. Sometimes that’s just making choices to combat newly discovered problems that only came up after the product existed and was being used long enough. Regardless of the specifics, I’m now entering into what is going to be the longest period of heavy physical labor on this project, albeit at a much different pace than I was doing it earlier this year.
Continue readingExperiment Complete, It Is Unfortunately Back To Business As Usual
One of the worst habits I’ve got is my need for diversion. I’m constantly letting my attention wander if whatever I’m doing isn’t engaging enough to constantly hold it. Most of the time, it’s fine. I can turn on some music to occupy the part of my mind that wanders, turn on a podcast if I need more distraction, or just change activities if I’m not getting anything out of what I’m doing. When I can’t, though, I’m usually at work and trying to focus on something. Which means that my mind wanders to places that I have access to at work, which is unfortunately pretty limited. Though I save my webcomics into the day as long as I can, they’re still not enough to take up all of my “mind wandering away” time, much less that and my “I need to take a break” time as well. Which means I tend to wind up doomscrolling or just cycling through websites I’ve already checked without purpose, neither of which are great for my mental health. That’s why I removed imgur from my phone all those years ago. That’s why I’ve got a couple games on my phone. Those aren’t really one-to-five-minute activities, though, or things that work great it a “work a bunch and then take a break” style work day structure. What I’ve found that works well, though, especially after having a couple chances to try it out recently, is Final Fantasy 14. Unfortunately, I can only use that as my distraction when I’m working from home.
Continue readingCatching Bugs On The Weekend: Then And Now
Last weekend, on a Saturday (the first of February, 2025, for anyone reading this disconnected from when I’m posting it), I woke up after barely five hours of sleep to the calming tones of my alarm and hauled myself out of bed so I could go to work. I had to work for at least a few hours that day, thanks to someone else’s fuckup (or, to hear them tell it, me not being able to properly anticipate that they would take my testing equipment without a word to me), so I hauled my way through my morning routine as I did something I hadn’t done in about fifteen years. It was difficult and I did not enjoy needing to cut myself short on sleep in order to go into the office to do work that I’d have had ample time to do if someone else hadn’t messed up my week so horribly. As I went through the motions, prepared my coffee, and made myself ready to stop at the pharmacy on my way in, I had the strangest feeling that something was missing from my morning. I eventually figured it out as I got into my car to drive away, since the feeling eventually grew into the faintest echoes of a song I would know anywhere from its opening notes alone. It was a bit of music that had once featured prominently in some of my more recent playlists as a calming instrumental piece but that I’d recently moved away from, as I shifted into new playlists that better matched how I’ve felt this past year and am feeling today, which made it easy enough to reclaim. It was the National Park theme from Pokémon: SoulSilver (or just Silver).
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