I went into my two and a half weeks of vacation thinking that, by the end of it, I’d have found my voice again. That, after enough rest, even interrupted by the holidays, I would find myself gravitating towards the blank page that used to speak to me. Instead, I spent the weekend before the end of my vacation thinking about what I’d do today, the day I’m writing and posting this, since I hadn’t written anything and all I really felt as a result of my time off was more doubt than ever. I came up with a couple good ideas related to that, but whatever they were vanished into the haze of my incredibly disrupted sleep schedule and the emotional lassitude that followed an entire afternoon and evening of fun and rewarding roleplaying with some people I’ve gotten closer to over the last few weeks. This morning, as I prepared for work, I had some kind of idea about directing my writing in such a way that it was more of a means of giving voice to specific ideas rather than just giving voice to my otherwise silent thoughts and feelings, but my exhaustion from not sleeping well and the busyness of my workplace has caused whatever distinction I came up with to slip from my mind. I am running around empty-handed as the hours of the day tick past and nothing I can think of feels like more than the usual complaining and navel-gazing I leaned on so heavily before my break. Which begs the question, did taking my break actually change anything? Did all that rest actually result in some amount of recovery? Eighteen days have passed and did I do anything other than pass through eighteen days of time?
Continue readingPlanning
Slowly Turning My Final Fantasy 14 Project Planning Towards The Next Patch
While I still have materials to process (a couple hundred, which feels like just so much given that it’s maybe three times as much material needed for my last craft which involved five full sets of gear and this is just two), I’ve hit the point in my Final Fantasy 14 crafting and gathering projects where all that’s left is to hit macros. Currently, it takes about half an hour to do twenty-four of these long-crafting macros, so I’m trying to pace myself and do about an hour of them a day around everything else I’ve got going on. If I can do that every day this week, I should have everything done this weekend in time for… well, in time for nothing, really. It’s not like I need a lot of these materials around. Most of them only get used for this crafting and gathering gear and whatever gear drops in the next expansion will almost certainly use entirely different materials. As far as I can tell from looking at past expansions, the final set in an expansion’s patches (which is what this set will be for the latest expansion) uses a mix of brand new materials and older high-level-but-not-starred materials. I have no idea if that will remain true for this expansion, so I don’t know what to do but maybe keep stockpiling things and hope that I can flip the materials later if they prove unnecessary. I don’t know if I’ll be able, though, since the need for them will be almost entirely gone once new gear exists. I mean, the stuff used in the crafting and gathering sets I’m making will probably still sell given that there will continue to be people like me who are showing up a bit late to the party but still want to get the full experience, but I have no idea about any of that older stuff. It’ll be a gamble.
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 readingWhat’s Next Now That My Dragon Age Playthrough Is In The Rearview Mirror?
Please, if you know the answer, tell me. I’m desperate. As of writing this, it has been almost a week since I finished this momentous task, this three hundred forty hour undertaking, and nothing compares to the soaring highs and wonderful emotional lows (that were also soaring highs, let’s be real, because I love a tear-jerker) of Veilguard. I’ve tried playing other video games, things I set aside to brute-force my way through Inquisition, and none of them seem fun. I’ve tried to read, but my mind can’t focus on something that doesn’t feel as real as Veilguard did. I tried taking a night off, to do something other than play a Dragon Age game, and yet I found myself unable to focus on anything but thoughts of how nice it would be to start a new file. Nothing compares to the depth of character and delight I felt while blissfully escaping into this latest Dragon Age game, so how can I tear myself away from the fresh character I made on my second night after beating the first one? How can I deny myself what my entire being desires so deeply and clearly?
Continue readingPlanning My New Apartment
I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to lay everything out at my new apartment. It’s a bit difficult, unfortunately, since I’m not certain where everything might eveb fit. I never saw the exact unit I’m renting (I saw a similar model in a different building) and I have no idea which of the various internet jacks into the apartment will be the one that is active as far as my ISP is concerned. Also, my couch is huge. It can be broken up into smaller pieces, sure, but it’s always a bit weird to use when it is. Most of my stuff fits together in rooms in pretty specific ways, and I’d want to try to keep things that are currently near each other together in the new apartment. I think I have an idea, based on what I’ve seen, that will get it all to fit and I’ve got a lot of really fun ideas on how to lay things out in interesting ways. All of which might be moot since the location of the internet port is going to really dictate where my computer goes and, if I want to improve on my current streaming setup, where my entertainment center will go. I’ll have some ability to work around awkward or difficult origin points for my internet setup, but only to a degree since fifty-foot cables can only do so much for spreading out devices.
Continue readingI’ve Got Moving On The Mind
One of the major upsides to being an orderly person is that packing does not take as much mental effort. Sure, there’s a bunch of stuff I have to figure out if I want to keep it or throw it away, but I don’t really need to organize my stuff. It’s already very organized and I’m just going to be moving it from where it is to a series of boxes and then back out somewhere that at least sort of matches where it currently is. Books will still be on shelves. Games and puzzles will still probably be in a closet somewhere. It’s not like i’m going to change how my books are sorted. Everything that needs to get packed together is already together. Everything that hasn’t moved from where it sits in my closet in the three years I’ve lived in my current apartment is automatically marked for “keep or toss” assessment. I’ve still got all my old boxes, I haven’t added to my collections much (thanks to the austerity I’ve observed over the past three years), and now all I’ve got to do is slowly, carefully pack it all up and set it to the side to be eventually deposited in whatever room winds up being my library/living room/office space.
Continue readingMy (Incredibly Loose) Summer Plans
Now that I’ve finally finalized where and when I’ll be moving next month, I can start to make plans for the rest of the summer. Broad strokes only, of course, since I’m still too far out from any chance to rest to get specific. Gotta pace myself, you know? I don’t want to give myself so much to do that I wind up just exacerbating my current burnout. So I’m mostly focusing on the ways I’ll spend my time in general rather than things tied to specific dates. Which, in my case, means video game plans. After all, there’s a whole lot coming out this summer that I’ve been looking forward to, so it’ll be a good summer for gaming, even if I might want to (eventually) make some plans to get me out of what will hopefully be a much cozier, more comfortable apartment.
Continue readingTime Loops, Battle Strategy, and Lateral Thinking
One thing I’ve learned, watching my players work their way through a time-looped demi-planar prison of some being they haven’t quite grasped yet, is that even knowing that you can just try again should you die in battle doesn’t remove the sting of defeat. Whether because of bad luck, a few difficult choices, or a lack of the proper strategic application of strengths, it still sucks to lose a fight you probably could have won. There were a few lucky natural-20s, a few unlucky natural-20s, a lot of low rolls, a great deal of below-average damage rolls, and the revelation that enemy spellcasters can cast spells to bring their allies back from the brink of death just like the player characters can. Or, well, just like they could before the main healer left the party to do something only his player and I know about, so I’m not going to reveal where he went or why he went, just that he left and now there’s no one whose primary focus is keeping people alive.
Continue readingPost-Vacation Reflections
Welp, I did it. I went on vacation and survived. Everyone got along, we all had as much space as we wanted, and I got to enjoy having a largely unstructured week. The most frustrating part of the trip was that people would talk about doing something in the morning, I’d set an alarm accordingly (to ensure I was up and ready to go by the discussed time) and rarely was that true of anyone else. Which wasn’t really a big deal since I could just play video games or read or go for a walk or anything else I desired, so all things said and done, it was a pretty great trip. I do wish I came out of it feeling more rested, but I also didn’t spend more than an hour laying in bed, feeling super depressed before coming in to work this morning, so I think I benefited from the rest. Another week or two would have been better, but it would also have been better to have won the lottery, so I’m content with what I got.
Continue readingIs It Pessimism If You’re Right?
I was accused of being a pessimist today. It was a fairly routine conversation at work, a discussion of projects, timelines, and expectations for what is going to happen over the course of a project. My boss and my coworker were discussing their optimistic outlook and some information they’d gotten recently that made them expect good things. I contend that I merely brought them back to reality by reminding them of some important bits of information about the project and the course of similar projects in the past, but they felt that I was just looking for a reason to be miserable. I told them that I’d stop saying things like this when I was proved wrong and we all walked away from the conversation feeling discontent.
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