While a large amount of my life feelings like a blazing dumpster fire inside a burning apartment at the center of a city that was recently transported into hell (specifically the firey kind of hell), there are a few things I can take some amount of comfort in. Like being able to afford living my life, even if sometimes that feels less true than it used to. Or having enough food to eat. Friends to play games with. Final Fantasy 14. All kinds of stuff, really. A lot of which is just finding the silver lining in my current moment, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Better to appreciate what I’ve got when I’ve got it rather than find myself wishing for when times were better and cursing myself for not appreciating them when I had the chance. Plus, I can still recognize that all of the products marketed as “AI” are absolute garbage and that all these LLMs are just really powerful and confident autocomplete algorithms with no ability to truly “understand” anything. It’s very comforting to know that, especially as more and more news reports come out about people having breaks with reality as a result of the tripe they’ve been fed by their emotional support “AI.” It’s not great that they’re an increasingly huge part of daily life and that more and more corporations are starting to move from “please use our garbage generator” to “you HAVE to use our garbage generator,” but at least I haven’t fallen for this spiel yet.
Continue readingReflection
The Other Side Of My Burnout
There’s nothing quite like being stuck in what amounts to a burning bag of shit left on the world’s porch. At least, that’s what it feels like to be a resident of the US these days. I’m not proud of it, every reasonable person hates it and is right to do so, the US government seems intent only on malicious destruction that has the potential to spiral out of control, and no one is going to come out of this without also smelling like shit. Our goose isn’t cooked or anything like that. Things aren’t irrevocably broken yet. They are irrevocably changed, though. Whatever survives this period of awfulness is going to have to find a path forward where none has yet been made. Any attempts to “go back to how things used to be” will only cause things to get worse. The only way forward is through significant change. Exactly what that looks like or how that would work… I don’t know. The whole idea of things changing for the better feels so foreign to me at this point that I’m not sure I can actually imagine what that kind of future would look like. All my conceptions of things being better are just images of the past, glimpsed through a heady filter of nostalgia and a genuine lack of awareness of how the world worked before I knew how to see it working. Who’s to say what positive change would look like this days, following the destruction of so much of the good parts of the US–such that they were–and this process can’t even be described as breaking a bone again in order to set it properly. It feels very “conspiracy theorist” to say it, but it’s difficult not to be aware of how the US is finally breaking along lines that have been slowly chiseled deeper and deeper over the last fifty years.
Continue readingDreaming Through It
For the past few years, I’ve been dealing with an increasing number of dreams. For a lot of my life, I didn’t really dream much aside from a few repeats. I had one when I was younger about being swallowed by a blanket that showed up every time I got sick (our family called this specific blanket “the sick blanket” since, as little kids, we got bundled cosily into it when we weren’t feeling well), a weird warped-perspective dream about being a tiny dot that couldn’t move around my parents house every time I got sick after I was ten or eleven, and some weird tons-of-armies-fighting-a-giant-war dreams that were basically my imaginary play games given life and ridiculous scale by my sleeping mind. I’m sure I had other dreams from time to time, but I really didn’t have many and it was only in high school that I realized that most people dream much more frequently. These days, though I still don’t dream often, I now have about as many dreams a month as I used to have in a year. Generally speaking, they’re a much wider variety these days, having replaced the old “got stuck in high school as an adult somehow” anxiety dreams of my college years and early twenties with a much greater breadth of mental fiction. Unfortunately, this uptick in dreams coincides with me starting to finally process the trauma of my childhood and so most of my dreams since then have a dual attachment to my present and something I’m working through or have mostly worked through from my past. It’s kind of exhausting, to be frank, but I try to stay focused on it being a good sign that my mind is actively healing from the stuff I went through as a child.
Continue readingGrowth, Change, and The Illusion Of Both
It has been a bit over a month since I first wrote about it, but I haven’t stopped thinking about the Ship-Of-Theseus-Of-The-Self in regards to myself, my biological family, and my experiences with them. It’s not really an active, all-consuming thing, but the entire train of thought hasn’t been far from my mind in a while. Historically, summers have always been rough for me, especially in regards to family issues, due to a string of birthdays and how often the worst events of my childhood happened during the summer, so it’s not surprising that I can’t really get these thoughts that far from the surface of my mind. I’ve also been encountering a bit of family issues in media recently, what with watching Fruits Basket and finishing Final Fantasy 14’s Endwalker expansion, so that certainly hasn’t helped keep it off my mind. It was actually the stuff from Final Fantasy 14 that prompted the latest branch of this thought tree. In Endwalker, there’s a difficult family situation that is resolved by the end of the expansion and, as I played through the post-expansion patch content, the thought occurred to me that the family member causing problems in the expansion “lived long enough to grow into a better person.” Which got me thinking about my grandfather, who probably did the same thing, and my parents, who might never. It’s a grim thought, that, and one that filled me with a great deal more grief than I expected it to when it popped into my head, but I genuinely have no idea if my parents will accomplish that particular feat or not.
Continue readingFalling Asleep, Waking Up, Or Staying Up
For a few years now, I’ve had the end of Friends At The Table’s fourth season (Twilight Mirage) bouncing around in my head. Not the way the story played out, though I’ve thought of that plenty, but the very end of it. As the season wraps up and the last bits of the game they played slowly fade out, the final theme starts to play over what turns out to be one of the characters from the season interviewing his allies. He cycles through a bunch of questions and the person answering them usually changes from one question to the next with very little repetition, with one notable exception. This final question lends itself to the name of the song that’s playing as the season winds down and the various characters answer questions posed by the interviewer, and is what has stuck in my mind for so very long. The interviewer asks the crew if they prefer falling asleep or waking up. Everyone answers with their own thoughts on the matter, providing information about not just their answer but also their view about the world and the part they have to play in it, because they’re not just answering the question but speaking about why they prefer their given option. The way this question and series of answers are framed makes it clear that one answer isn’t “correct” or that one mode of thinking isn’t preferable to another. Instead, it leaves you, the listener, to consider their words and reflect on how these interviews, which ostensibly occurred at the halfway point of the season rather than the end of it, might change or alter how you feel about these characters and the events you’ve been listening to for some thirty-ish episodes. It’s really well done and has stuck with me as much as anything Friends at the Table has done (and that’s genuinely a lot).
Continue readingWishing I Could Sail My Own Ship Of Theseus Into The Future
This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I discovered a pile of sleep shirts that I’d forgotten to put away last night after I finished folding my laundry. Absently, barely dressed and still damp from my morning shower, I split the shirts into stacks that would fit in my dresser and moved to tuck them away when I noticed that the shirts I’d split the stack at both probably needed to be thrown out (because the armpit holes had become visible while the shirts were folded). One was a shirt I’ve known for a while I’d need to throw away but have resisted doing so because I really like the graphic on it and there’s no replacing it. The other one was a shirt I’d gotten some years prior, after doing a canoe-marathon-fundraiser event with my father for an organization that maintained a large stretch of the Des Plaines river in Illinois. As I thought about throwing it away, I realized that I would be disposing of a connection to my parents and replacing it with some other shirt that is too stained or holey for regular wear. That thought spiraled out and I realized that, like the proverbial full refreshing of your body via cellular replacement every seven years and the Ship of Theseus that leant it’s name to the paradox, it would not be long before all the connections I had to my parents would be gone. Perhaps this thought was circling my subconscious already since I made myself a big meal the night before using a recipe I’d inherited from my mother, but I’ve thought about little else since it came to mind this morning.
Continue readingA Self-Sustaining Writing Process Might Also Be A Runaway Writing Process
One of the most common but also most useless creativity tips I’ve even been given, given to someone else, or seen literally anywhere is “you just gotta do it!” I’m incredibly guilty of giving that one out, even if I do try to couch it in terms of building discipline and creating a routine you can rely on. It all boils down to “just do the thing!” in the end. It’s not a very good explanation and building it piecemeal via the whole “make time to write every day, and slowly challenge yourself to write more in that time or expand that time so you can create more” is a bit more helpful, but it ultimately doesn’t really do much beyond make you capable of the mechanics of the work you’re doing. Generally, you need some kind of goal or target to inform why you’re creating in the first place since just wanting to create (or to have created) isn’t always enough to push you through the difficulty of forming good creative habits. You need something that speaks to you or that creates drive within you to help you over that hump. Once you’re in the habit, though, it gets a lot easier. Discipline will carry you as long as you maintain it and maintaining it is so much easier than building it. Unfortuantely, you might wind up in a situation like me where you’re maintaining your discipline just to keep your discipline working rather than because you’re trying to make progress towards a specific goal and you wind up writing just because you are in the habit. The habit fuels itself and its own maintenance, even if the larger purpose it once served is no longer there.
Continue readingBurnout And The Joy(lessness) of Creation
I haven’t actually enjoyed writing these blog posts in a long time. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that in any of my posts reflecting on my current burnout or creative process or whatever. I don’t really enjoy doing these. I don’t dislike writing them and I do still get a sense of satisfaction out of writing them, but I haven’t really felt the joy of writing in a while now. I’ve done it because I’ve felt the need, to help figure out what’s going on in my head, and to provide myself with a sense of satisfaction after a day largely devoid of anything resembling that. But I haven’t felt any of the joy or passion I once I did. I’ll be the first to say that it’s better to rely on discipline than passion or inspiration since discipline will never abandon you like passion and inspiration might, but I think it’s worth considering that enough discipline will also enable you to actively harm yourself if you force yourself to keep performing past the point where your body is telling you to stop. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I can’t deny that my burnout hasn’t gotten any better in months or years and that I just don’t really enjoy any of my creative pursuits anymore these days.
Continue readingDwindling Daydreams Of Just Less Work Are All I’ve Got Left At My Day Job
Sometimes, as I’m standing at my desk and sweating while I try to focus on my dumb little tasks on days that I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my job, I let my mind wander through potential futures or alternate timelines. Twelve years ago, when I graduated college, I had very different plans for my life. I’d spent the four years of my college education finding out what I was interested in, what I was good at, and what I cared about, and planned to eventually return to scholastic pursuits so I could earn myself an advanced degree in some kind of writing thing and eventually further that with some kind of further degree focused on medievalism or the development of language or something. I was going to work for a few years, pay off my student loans by the time I was thirty, go back for more education, and spend my life burying myself in my beloved writing and research and education (of myself and then of others). That, of course, didn’t happen, but my dream of living a life of telling stories lasted until pretty recently and now I find myself adrift with no future I’m really working toward beyond being debt-free, no attachments to my present (geographic or occupational) and so I wonder what kind of life I might be living if I hadn’t been shackled by debt or might yet live should I find a way to remove my need to spend most of my time and energy on being a cog in a machine that does not value me.
Continue readingDoing Little Tasks At My Job (Bad) So I Can Go Home And Do Little Tasks In Final Fantasy (Good)
It has been nearly a month since I last wrote about Final Fantasy 14. I started the subsequent expansion not long after my last post (and might have dipped my toes into it just before that post went up), but progress has been pretty slow. It’s not a lack of interest mind you, but perhaps because of an abundance of it. I’ve been consistently putting off certain bits of progress in the main story until my friends could play through them with me, which has sometimes meant needing to wait a day or two to get through the next plot-blocking dungeon or trial. I also took a bunch of time away to level up a class so I could do all of the combat job quest lines simultaneously, and getting something from twenty-ish to seventy is a significant undertaking. I’ve also had a lot of little money-making tasks to pursue, some crafting to do, attempts to update my character’s various glamours, more wrestling events, and so on. I’ve played PLENTY, I just didn’t get back to the Main Scenario Quests until last week on account of all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Even now that I’ve been back at it, the going has been a bit slow as I’ve had to level up additional jobs every night so I can do their quest lines, which means I’ve been poking at the MSQ in small increments here or there every night once that is all done. I also did some raids, took most of a day off Final Fantasy, and gotten back into working all my usual overtime at my job, so I’ve just not been able to bring my focus to bear in the way I’d like to.
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