Rushing to get everything into place so I can make money again in Final Fantasy 14 is exhausting. I have so much crap stockpiled that is valuable! That I will work through and make a bunch of gil on! But it is difficult to make the time for that amongst everything else, especially when I was pretty worn out on crafting random junk to sell even before all this drama happened, so it is gathering dust and everyone is clamoring for ways to make money while I’m still trying to get my systems in place so I’m not just buying junk I’ll never use and trying to keep up with my depleting funds by selling the high-value stuff. If I’m not going to benefit from this in any way, I should not constantly deplete myself for the sake of others. Both in terms of energy and my characters’ material wealth. After all, I’m already spending a lot of my character’s potential for income on providing things for the Free Company to make money on, free of charge. The whole thing pretty much only works because I’m not charging for the stuff I am providing. Which is fine. I just need to set limits somewhere or else I’m going to burn out again.
Continue readingMusing
Pacing Myself Through The Endless Busyness
I cannot remember the last time I was this busy. I mean, a lot of this is stuff I’ve chosen to do and could technically choose to not do, but I’ve made commitments to myself and other people already and I always follow through on my commitments when possible. Work’s been constantly lately. All the chances for breaks and letting my mind rest are done except for the time it takes for software updates to do their job. That’s the only time during my work day when I can let my mind wander and it’s generally not enough time to do much of anything other than have a stray thought or check my discord notifications. After work, I’ve got errands or chores (especially now that I hit the point where I can’t keep putting things off), some kind of plans usually, and then the endless work of trying to get things up and running in my new Final Fantasy 14 FC so that I can eventually take a break, which it’s own set of almost endless tasks that just need a little time and attention when I can spare them now that all the urgent stuff is done. Plus, of course, my crafting workshops, my desire to play other video games, two episodes of The Sopranos to watch, various podcasts, and whatever other entertainment options I’m forgetting since my time away from work is currently focused on whatever plans I’ve made, recording wrestling shows every week, doing stuff for the FC, and then doing stuff so I don’t wind up hating Final Fantasy 14 because all I do in it is work (which currently means jostling my priority order a bit every day so I can do some of the “fun” work rather than just whatever is most important and/or urgent).
Continue readingReminders Of Past Decisions In The Workplace
Once again, the calendar has rolled around to the midway point in the year and I have gotten information about how my next year of financial life is going to shift. That’s right, it’s raise time. I got a decent raise this year. Objectively not stellar, considering my experience and the work I do and so on, but my employer is not known for paying well and I got pretty much the maximum possible raise I could get without getting promoted as well, which is rather uncommon for someone in the upper half of the pay bracket for my current position. My boss seemed pretty surprised by the numbers, but he might have been goofing around. I literally have no idea if any of the things he said were jokes or genuine. I actively interpreted them as jokes in the moment, because my boss is the kind of guy who will let anything slide as long as he’s got you laughing, but I genuinely can’t tell if they were if maybe he’s a lot less involved in how people get raises than I’ve been lead to believe these past nine years.
Continue readingShouldering An Old Burden
There is a particular pain I live with most days. Nothing profound, at least not in this case. I just come from a long line of people with bad joints and, as a result of taking after that side of the family so strongly (physically, anyway: I represent all of the mental health issues on both sides of my family rather than leaning in any one direction), I also have bad joints. Thanks to a lifetime of largely avoiding high-impact sports save for a period in high school and preferring cycling and swimming as my forms to cardio to running, I’ve managed to get pretty far into my life without joint issues. In fact, in the last few years, I’ve had a great deal of success improving my joint health thanks to regular excise targeted at maintaining flexibility and improving joint strength. Unfortunately, all of that has gone out the window due to the medication I was on a couple years ago and my subsequent struggles to get back into a healthy exercise routine. Which means an old foe has reappeared after quite a few years away: my right shoulder pain.
Continue readingSummer Has Arrived
After a couple weeks of relatively stable weather, we’re back to temperature jumps, storms, and the occasional severe storm warning. Thankfully, there wasn’t much to write home about during the two week period where everything started going to shit, went to shit, and started slowly recovering, but now, as I labor to get back into the swing of things at work and in my video gaming life, I am finding myself hampered by a day of relative uselessness that is the result of the shifting pressure. My joints, already worn from the work I’ve been doing the last few weeks and not nearly recovered enough thanks to my sleep troubles, are causing me pretty severe pain as the temperture drops fifteen degrees, a storm rages overhead, and the power blinks out briefly. It was bad enough around noon that I had a difficult time walking and moving around without groaning in pain, and I’ve walked off a broken ankle before. I’m no stranger to pushing through the pain. It’s just gotten really bad today.
Continue readingWork Continues Despite The Horrors
Work’s been hectic lately. While all of the bad stuff in my Final Fantasy 14 guild was happening, my day job was keeping me incredibly busy with bullshit. I got notified within fourty-eight hours of being given new test equipment that it needed to have a essentially eighty hours worth of testing done by the following wednesday. That wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if I hadn’t been getting ready to leave for the day on Friday afternoon. But I stayed, I did some testing, and I put all of my considerable experience and knowledge into figuring out how to cut down on the time between tests. I was able to get it from an hour to half an hour, but even that wasn’t perfect. There was still a hard cap on how much of that I could do in any given day and that was only because it was permissable for the stress of that testing to slightly change the behavior of the thing being tested since I’d be able to start the following morning by checking if the change in behavior was due to wear or due to the heat of the testing equipment.
Continue readingSlowly 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 readingPointless Arguments And Untennable Silence
I got into an argument in a discord the other day. I didn’t want to, but someone (the server owner) was being very pro-“AI” in a way that was frankly kind of insulting to the people who didn’t share his opinion, so I lightly weighed in and lent emote-based support to the people arguing against him. He kept shifting his position, arguing on behalf of “AI” being inescapable and a forever part of our future now while also hedging every time someone confronted him about its various issues with some variation of “I never said it didn’t have issues!” So, when he tried to pull me in following a comment where I said I completely agreed with someone’s lengthy, well-reasoned statement, I tried to disengage and my attempt do so only led to another branch of the argument forming since he turned to trying to pin me down to saying “AI” is impossible to remove. I can’t agree to that statement because I think that Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist and might never while the algorithmic bullshit that is modern ML-based “AI” is bad enough that I think it might be worth doing whatever it takes to eradicate completely. Other than the programs modern “genAI” are built from, which always had a use and still have a use in their very specific contexts, of course. So I tried to split the hair because my stances requires it and he didn’t like that. Then things took a turn for the worse between him (as he continued to shift his position such that no one could ever tell him that he was wrong without ever really engaging with the arguments other people brought up) and another person (who was much less polite in his arguing than the rest of us were and has a bad habit of dismissing viewpoints he disagrees with) and now a friend of mine has been demoted in that server for doing their job as a moderator and forcing the argument to end by deleting comments after the final two refused to stop.
Continue readingSo Much For Resting
As it turns out, it is not that easy to take a week off. Any other week would have been easier, since this last week involved the in-game bonding ceremony between my dearest friends’ Final Fantasy 14 characters (now they are married in real-life and in this video game) and I was as involved in that as I had the energy to be. Plus there was another wrestling event to record and edit, all the busyness of a “normal” workweek, the sudden extra busyness of this past week, and then the complete screeching halt of all of the work stuff for at least a day due to me twisting my ankle. And while twisting my ankle sucked, it did actually force me to rest in a way I couldn’t make myself until I actually had an unavoidable reason for it. But there’s still more celebrations tomorrow (as of the day I wrote this), the imminent return of my delayed obligations and plans, and now the exhaustion of painfully hobbling around my two-story apartment to contend with, so I’m not out of the woods yet. To be honest, given everything I’d done this week, I’m not sure I actually took a break the way I meant to and maybe just… Stopped doing as much. Which definitely counts for something, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not exactly what I was looking for with this decision to step away from things for a bit.
Continue readingWearing Out My Shoes Just To Feel Something Change
I go for daily walks. Longer ones, now, thanks to a bit of an accountability push from a friend. But I go outside daily, at around more or less the same time every day. I drink the same number of cups of coffee every day. I work the same number of hours pretty much every day. I eat the same lunch every day. I cycle between one of five meals for dinner every night. Breakfast is the same almost every day of the week and then every weekend when I bother to eat it. I drink the same amount of water, take the same medications, eat the same snacks (thought the quantity varies), walk through the same rooms, drive the same places, do the same things, and on and on and on and on. Nothing changes. Sometimes I eat cereal for breakfast instead of a banana, but I still eat the banana eventually. Sometimes I have a can of soda instead of ice cream for desert after dinner on the rare days I feel like something sweet. I write at almost the same time every day. I stand the same way. Even my speech falls into similar patterns from day-to-day, given my relationships and the people I talk to. And sure, my clothes are different and while I often do wear different shirts on different days, sometimes I just wear the same shirt on a given day of the week. The only thing that really changes to make the passage of time is the weather and how worn out my shoes have become.
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