It is done. After quite a while of trying to make this one every-other-week game stick around, I have brought it to an end. The campaign/group that included both The Demigods of Daelen and The Magical Millennium has concluded. Between my time off this past summer, general scheduling woes, and the slow withdrawal of half the players I’d tried to include in the campaign, there just wasn’t much left to keep alive. Especially considering how much we were probably going to struggle with getting the remaining folks together to play, a thing we wouldn’t be able to do if even one of them was missing. With only three players and the GM left, any single person missing makes it impossible to continue. We talked it over this past weekend, ironically with one of the remaining players arriving very late, and conluded that this was for the best right now. We might get the group back together in the future, when everyone’s schedule is more dependable and we’ve got more players to join us, but for now we are bringing it to an end. I’ll still have my The Rotten Labyrinth game on its every-other-weekend schedule, but now I am without one of my staple campaigns for the time being. We might yet get together for one-shots or to play games or hang out or whatever, but it won’t be on the structured, three-to-seven-Sunday-afternoon schedule we’ve been trying to maintain up to this point. It’ll be more ad hoc. Impulsive, even. Less regular. Which feels silly to say given how little this group has met. We couldn’t even get more than two people together on our play-Stardew-Valley-instead-of-D&D days.
Continue readingStorytelling
Breathing Life Back Into My Tabletop Games
As part of getting my life back together following the dual function of working antidepressants and some rest, finally, I’ve begun the slow, laborious process of getting my two tabletop campaigns up and running again. One has met already, to talk through things, and the other failed to achieve sufficient player availability, so we’re going to try again in a couple weeks. It’s been so long since I really thought about my two campaigns that I genuinely struggled to get back into the right headspace for them. I was able to do it, thanks to extensive preparation and a review of my notes, but I was still picking up the pieces of it all as we sat down to review what had been going on, refresh ourselves as to what the plan was, and ultimately decide how we wanted to proceed in and out of character. I plan to do something similar for the other one, but that campaign spun up in the middle of my worst brain fog and depression this past year, so trying to pick up those pieces feels a lot like groping around in the dark for something that might cut me if I’m not careful. I’m not worried about remembering something that would upset me or anything, but there’s a certain gingerness I feel when thinking back to that period of time because it’s one of only a few blurry periods in my memory and all the other ones are minefields of forgotten/potentially-repressed trauma. It’s difficult to fight the feelings of nervousness such periods of forgetfulness inspire in me while also trying to actually remember what was going on and what I was thinking at that time.
Continue readingFinal Thoughts On Hunter x Hunter: For Real This Time
I finished watching Hunter x Hunter (2011) last night. I took a couple months off due to depression since the last arc deals with some family-dynamic stuff that hits a little too close to home for me to deal with if my emotional fortitude is lacking, but I’ve been doing better lately and I really wanted to catch up on Media Club Plus, so I sat down and watched the entire last arc yesterday (a week prior to this getting posted). It was so much better than I remembered. Not just this arc, but the whole entire show. I get why people love it so much. I can also see why the person who introduced it to me spent so much time editorializing and cut some parts out. If you’re not clued in to the deeper layers of the show, the metaphors the author was making in the source material and the depth enhanced by the decisions the adaptation team made while converting the manga into an anime, it probably seems like there’s a lot of fluff. Sure, there’s some, mostly in the form of the dropped plot threads that started showing up once the author started condensing his story in order to reduce the toll it took on him to continue writing and drawing it, but most of the stuff my ex-roommate called “fluff” is important deep characterization, incredibly specific worldbuilding, and the appearance of a narrator in order to help move things along. It’s such a well-crafted story that even the dropped plot threads get at least tidied up a bit, if not tied off somewhere, by the end of what I’ve seen. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s definitely better than I thought it was after my first watch and I can clearly see why that’s the case now that I’ve watched it again.
Continue readingSemantic Circumlocution
There is a particular feeling that is incredibly important to me. It is like pain, but it doesn’t hurt. It sticks in me like a burr, almost tactile in that I can endlessly pick at it but intangible in that nothing I ever do can affect it. It settles in my chest, at the very center of my physical being–where we often depict things such as the soul being located when we must depict them as something within a body rather than something beside it–occupying the place I would have told you was my heart before I learned how human anatomy is laid out. It isn’t something I can conjure myself, I can’t do anything to keep it around, and it will arrive slowly and then suddenly, completely unnoticeable until it is fully there and undeniably present. I don’t have a name for this feeling, but I suspect that this is what a lot of people are talking about when they describe themselves as feeling inspired by something. I also suspect that this feeling is what people are talking about when they say that they have been moved. If I had to put into it into as few words as possible, I would say that this feeling is the sensation of being moved, but that feels reductive to the point of discomfort on my part since it is not only the sensation of being moved but also the thing that being moved pushes against and the place from which the force of this movement originates. A contradiction of sensations and feelings that I can’t make more sense of than this, despite having felt this cluster of feelings for as long as I can remember.
Continue readingBurned Out Beyond Storytelling
It has been almost a month since I ran a TTRPG session. I’ve been so exhausted that I just haven’t had the energy to plan sessions or do even a modicum of prep work, let alone actually spend the significant chunk of time and energy required to hold the session. I keep going into each new week feeling marginally better at most, so putting in the effort to run a game would leave me in even worse condition. Love of the game isn’t enough to make it happen, as much as I’d like to pretend it was, and thankfully my players have all been very understanding. I’m just coming out of my third skipped weekend in a row, still exhausted, and wondering when I’ll eventually have recovered from this burnout. In the past, when things would get this bad for me, I’d do a work from home day or two so I’d be able to sleep in later, rest more during the day, and spend a day working in comfort rather than having to exist in the constantly draining and uncomfortable environment of my office. I’m pretty good at masking so I doubt any of my coworkers know this, but the environment I work in can be very stressful and overstimulating in a way that saps me of all my energy pretty quickly, and the insistence by my boss that I spend less time in my office and more time being visible by working in the lab is only making it worse. I can’t escape the noise outside my office. I have to wear my mask (literal N95 and metaphorical over-emotive-pretense-of-neurotypicality) while I’m out there. I have to constantly watch where my coworkers are so they don’t sneak up on me and clap me on the shoulder heavily enough that I have to restrain my fight-response. It’s not great!
Continue readingWrapping Up Fruits Basket
At far too late at night (an admittedly subjective time), I finished Fruits Basket with my friend. We started Season 2 a few weeks ago, but got caught up in it as the second season came to a close and wound up watching the last season of it in about a week as we crammed it all in before she and her husband would be entirely unavaiable due to traveling for a wedding. I was desperate to finish watching it, swept up in the story as I was, and she was willing to sacrifice sleep to share one of her favorite stories with me, so we burned the candle at both ends and now I’m at a loss for what to do with myself once again. Less so than with Final Fantasy 14, but, unlike Final Fantasy 14, I still find myself thinking “I can’t wait to watch more Fruits Basket” and then remembering that there’s no more for me to watch and getting utterly devastated as a result. I wouldn’t really compare the two since one is a video game that took me 1100 hours to get to the end of the first major story arc that has completely reshaped the way I spend my free time every single day and the other was a 60-some episode anime that took a few months to watch only because we took a bunch of time away after my friends went to Japan for their honeymoon and I got super caught up in Final Fantasy 14’s story line (which didn’t leave much room for anything else, especially during a period when I was so emotionally exhausted even before dealing with the emotional complexity of Final Fantasy’s story). Feeling at a loss after Final Fantasy 14’s story is a result of not just storytelling but the end of something I’ve been doing for half a year, but the feeling following Fruits Basket is entirely due to the strength of the storytelling, the memorability of the characters, and the uncompromising manner in which the truth of the characters is laid out by the end of the show.
Continue readingI Cleared Endwalker In Final Fantasy 14
I took me 173 days and approximately 1100 hours of gaming, but I did it. I cleared the initial expansion that brought an end to nearly a decade of Final Fantasy 14’s storytelling. I fought a lot of big bosses, dealt with a lot of poeple who seemed unreasonable at first, and cried my eyes out, all but literally. I cried on and off (mostly on) for about four hours as I wrapped up the expansion. I’m still occasionally getting misty about it as I reflect on how it all wrapped up and I finished it five days ago (as of writing this, nine as of it getting posted). I do not think I’ve ever experience ANY kind of story that has gripped me like this one has. I have never been so moved, either. Even five days later, I am still struggling with the “story hangover” feeling of wrapping up the story that has spanned so many hours of my life and expansions of FF14 and normally that feeling fades after a decent night’s sleep! I’ve never had one that lasted more than twenty-four hours and I’ve already passed one hundred on this one, with no sign of it abating any time soon. Truly, the cathartic experience of this has left me hollowed out and in a new state of mind from which I might never recover/be shifted. Which isn’t a bad thing. I don’t have a problem being changed by a story about hope and perseverence and friendship and heroism. All those are in incredibly short supply these days, in my life in particular (save perseverence), and most media depictions even approaching anything like them is filed down for mass market appeal in the form of modern superhero and action flicks.
Continue reading“What Does It Mean To Be A Hero?”: The Converging Throughline Of Final Fantasy 14
This post is going to contain some pretty major spoilers for every part of Final Fantasy 14 up through the start of Endwalker because I can’t talk about Shadowbringers in any degree of specificity without talking about everything that led up to some of my favorite moments. So! There will be spoilers in pretty much every paragraph, both vague and incredibly specific, so many skip this one if you’re going to play the game (see this post if you’re on the fence) and hate spoilers.
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 readingFinal Fantasy 14’s Shadowbringers Expansion Brings The Storytelling To A Whole New Level
It took exactly five months, from January 1st until June 1st, but I finally cleared all of Shadowbringers. This is notable since that particular expansion seems to be widely regarded as Final Fantasy 14 at it’s best and is the first bit of game content you can’t access with a free account, almost like they know they’re sitting on gold and want you to have to pay for it. Which is fair, in my opinion. I couldn’t possibly blame them for it, but then I bought the full game the instant I hit the 3.0 expansion so I could fully invest in all the parts of the game I’d been denied up to that point, so I’m clearly not someone who is going to suggest it might be unfair for game developers to get paid for the great work they’ve done. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the storytelling being done by Final Fantasy 14 and how it reaches what might be it’s pinnacle in Shadowbringers and the related patch content. After all, this expansion represents a moment years in the making, tying things together that have been dangling since the early parts of A Realm Reborn. There is clearly more to come, more that is being built towards and more surprises to catch me off-guard, but that stuff all feels like the final book in a series, meant to wrap up the throughline story while Shadowbringers is the penultimate novel that brings it all together and points it at the finish line so the last book can wrap it all up. It’s an impressive bit of work and while I’ve positively crammed my days with FF14 in order to get to this point in five months, it makes it that much easier to notice everything that has been brought together.
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