Being the leader of a Final Fantasy 14 Free Company (player guild) that has topped the weekly rankings twice in a row is pretty rewarding. I’m very proud of that accomplishment, considering how much work I did to make it happen and how much my life has revolved around making that a sustainable process over the last two weeks (and continues still, but to a lesser extent). I’m also proud of how much effort the community put it to making it happen as well, considering not everyone has so completely optimized their characters to the do the sort of work involved. I may have done a lot of the work, but only because I had people supporting me and enabling me to do that work. Truly a community effort, and one that I figured out how to make profitable for everyone. After all, that’s what I’m good at. No matter what, I will find a way to turn a profit. In a system like this, with predictable inputs and outputs, dependable resources, and actual rewards based on effort, how could I not? Which will come in handy since I’ve been sinking so much of my own finances into this group and paying back everyone else who spends their own in-game currency on stuff. I would like to pay myself back, eventually. And get the group opportunities to get paid, as well.
Continue readingLeadership
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 readingRunning A Raiding Party In Final Fantasy 14
I’ve officially run my first raiding party in Final Fantasy 14. Technically twice. The first time, I was mostly quiet and just the nominal party leader, letting people figure things out and act according to their own wills just avoid being too controlling. The second time, though, it quickly became clear that we needed someone to pay attention to the mechanics that were happening and make calls about what to do. I asked if anyone wanted to do it, fully prepared to do it myself, and someone immediately cracked the joke that it sounded like I volunteered, so I started doing it. It wasn’t that bad. Took a bit of practice to be able to split my attention between my role’s needs in the battle and the mechanics everyone else needed to be warned about, but most of them were for everyone, so it wasn’t splitting my attention too much more than usual. Especially because I’m almost always looking for this stuff anyway, even when someone else is calling the shots, so I don’t become dependent on that specific person/voice. My goal is to figure out fight mechanics and find the balance necessary to perform them perfectly while also keeping my rotation going as much as possible, not just get through the fire enough times to never go back, so it’s a pretty natural fit. Except, of course, for the fact that I have mild aphasia (specifically “anomic aphasia”) as a side effect of my antidepressants, so sometimes I have a difficult time producing a noun I need in a moment and that’s a bad thing to run into when trying to call shots in a raid. Thankfully, I managed to avoid the problem during my shot-calling debut, but I’m going to continue to be the shotcaller as this group carries on and I feel like it’s only a matter of time until I can’t produce the word I need and everyone dies as a result.
Continue readingLooking For Reassurance As The World Threatens To Crumble Around Us
Despite being a part of the economy of the United States of America, both as a person producing value/wealth for others like a good capitalist cog and as someone whose retirement is largely dependent on it’s health due to the broken way that retirement is set up in the US, I feel a sense of satisfaction every time the stock market loses value. I understand this is the perversity within me making itself known–it is my one source of schadenfreude even though it is far from harmless–to a life mostly spent setting it aside in order to do what I know to be right (for example, I did actually vote in the latest election in Wisconsin despite wanting nothing more than to not vote at all because I was being harassed and hangued at all hours of the day, by phone and mail, about note just voting but how just ANYONE could look up whether or not I voted in any particular election by those messages that always feel more threatening than motivational). I understand that and do not set it aside because, for all the harm it does, it has a greater impact on those so wealthy that their “worth” is tied up in the bullshit confluence of imagined value known as the stock market. It is the only time I get to look at the world and know that while the actual impact on my life is greater than it will ever be on a billionaire’s, at least my changes are measured in four or five digits while a billionaire’s changes are measured in at least double that many digits. Cold comfort, to be sure, given that I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be able to actually retire in the modern sense of the word, but it’s the only comfort I’ve got as my country and economy shake a rattle at a scale beyond my ability to influence.
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