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 readingStorytelling
Burned 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.
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 readingAfter Four And A Half Months, I’m Finally Ready To Recommend Final Fantasy 14 (With Caveats!)
At this point in time (Monday the 12th of May, 2025), as I near the end of the base portion of the Shadowbringers expansion after four and a half months of playing Final Fantasy 14, I am hesistant to recommend it. You might think that odd, considering that I’ve written about the game more-or-less weekly for the entire time I’ve been playing it. Who would spend this much time on a game they didn’t like enough to recommend? Who would still be playing this game, with it’s monthly costs and life-dominating time requirements, if they’re not having a good enough time to recommend it to everyone they know? I can’t blame you for thinking that. I’ve been chewing that exact question over in my head pretty much constantly since I realized that I’ve passed the 750 hour mark with this game. How come I’m not telling everyone I know to play this game? For a long time, whenever the question of whether or not I’d recommend the game would come up, I satisfied myself with that answer that it was because I knew how much of my time this game was consuming. “I could not, in good conscience, recommend something that might take over a thousand hours of someone’s life just to mostly catch up to the modern content” is about the shape of that thought, more or less, that I’ve kicked up again and again whenever I’ve gone looking for why I’m not trying to involve all my video game friends in the game I’ve easily spend the most hours playing (thus far in my life, at least). But, as I’ve gotten further into the story and grown to appreciate it more and more–grown to love the game as a whole more and more–that answer has continued to ring hollow in a way I can’t continue to ignore.
Continue readingCreating The Mythos Of The Demigods of Daelen
We finally did it. We had our first session of the something new game I started up to replace The Magical Millennium (which remains on hiatus for the time-being) and even though two of our players couldn’t make it, we had a successful first session. I designed the campaign to be playable with as few as two player characters, so having a few people out isn’t a huge bother for me or the game I’m running. It’s still Dungeons and Dragons 5e, of course (2014 version for everything except I’m including the Weapon Mastery feature for 2024 because that feels appropriate for this collection of powerful characters), since most of my players aren’t that interested in going far afield, but I’ve done an intense bit of hacking and homebrewing to alter the basic systems to work on a different scale than the game was originally intended to run at. Most of this is just massaging numbers a bit (a thing I can do because the “Bounded Accuracy” of 5e allows me to alter the numbers in ways that have predictable outcomes), but there’s a few changes to how the rules play out, how success and failure should be interpretted, and how the mechanics of the game are designed to interact. Most of which is not stuff my players need concern themselves with since I’m the one running the show and I know how to alter everything appropriately. What my players are supposed to be concerned with is building the myth of their semi-divine character!
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