I’ve started this post a half dozen times this morning only to keep backspacing it away. So as a result I am just going to go with it as not to waste anymore time. I am not used to blogging while sitting downstairs, and I think that might be harshing some of my mojo. Either than or the fact that I am effectively writing the first blog post of 2019, a new year… and don’t want to mess things up. Regardless this morning I thought I would write a bit about some of my thoughts for the coming year. I am not generally one to do resolutions, so I am going to participate in the practice without actually calling them that. So here goes some of the things I hope for the next year.
Figure out Discord
I know this sounds like a silly topic, but I am being completely serious. No I am not meaning figure it out in a technical sense, but instead figure out how it fits in my life. Right now I am legitimately in fifty different discord servers, and have probably since its launch left about that many as well. Hell there are a half dozen that I set up myself for various reasons. This fragmentation means that I end up using none of them on a regular basis. While I use Slack and Microsoft Teams for work purposes… and that gave me a fixed reason to use the social Slacks I am in… I don’t have a similar need for Discord other than when I am wanting to use voice chat for some reason. As such we have a bunch of general purpose discords that serve as a ready voice chat option when we need one.
All of that said there are awesome people and interesting conversations going on there, and I would like during this new year to figure out how to become part of that. I’ve been pleased to see the Blaugust discord is still active, and I love hanging out with the Moogle’s Pom crew when I remember it is a place that exists. Unfortunately I think discord has way too much noise to really make it a constant destination. Too many people are scattered among too many different servers to have it feel like a cohesive experience. I think the other challenge is everyone is struggling to figure out how exactly to use it. Every single alpha that I am in wants to use it as their primary means of communication and as a replacement for the traditional forum experience. The UI doesn’t exactly help to identify what are things I actually should be reading, and what is just so much more spam.
It would be nice if there was a way to group servers into folders… so you could have a half dozen ones that you regularly use and then the rest neatly hidden behind a wall. This is a problem that I want to solve this year but I am not even sure where to start apart from simply leaving every server I am in and adding them back more judiciously.
Get Over Anxiety Tanking
I am not sure where it came from but lately I have been super anxious about getting back into tanking again. This is a big part of why I have been largely bouncing from Final Fantasy XIV is that I cannot seem to get over the hurdle of just tanking for randoms. That is what I need to do so I can get the currency I need to upgrade my gear to be able to run the dungeons to be able to finish the main story line. Yes I realize that was one hell of a run on sentence but I absolutely did that on purpose. Everything in that game seems to be gated by something, and the answer to all of it is just to tank queue as a Warrior and be done with it.
That said I keep logging in, playing the cactpot and then logging right back out. I think a lot of why I have not returned to World of Warcraft in earnest with the recent patch is that I have a similar wall that has built up against the responsibility of tanking. I want to figure out a way past this so I can get on with my life and start to enjoy MMORPGs again.
Organize My Vault
Another huge problem I am having with Final Fantasy XIV is that I am avoiding my inventory. I have six retainers full of shit and I cannot begin to figure out how to sort it all. I know there is a good deal of it that I can stick in the glamour chest and be done with it, but I am so paralyzed by the mountain of items that it is effecting my willingness to go do anything that might add more to it. I am similarly having an issue with Destiny 2 where I am running out of vault room. I need to go through and get rid of everything that I can buy back again through the collections… but right now I am willfully avoiding touching anything. I am struggling with an irrational fear that I might remove the wrong thing and with no undo system and no buyback vendor… I could accidentally get rid of something I can’t get back.
Quite honestly so many of the things I am dealing with are anxiety based… anxiety over interacting with people, anxiety over responsibility, and anxiety over possible loss. If I could figure out a way to solve that core problem a lot of these would disappear.
Figure Out Streaming
Another one of these anxiety triggered things is the fact that I would like to stream more… but always struggle to push that “go live” button. I think one of the big problems is that a lot of what I do on a nightly basis does not exactly make for “must see television”. I don’t play the type of games that lend themselves to streaming, because in a narrative experience… the fact that I am streaming seems to get in the way. Additionally does anyone actually want to see me grind public events in Destiny 2 for an entire night? I would love to come to terms with this and figure out a way to work it into my life.
Figure Out Social Media
As it stands I follow way the fuck too many people on Social Media and I have been paralyzed to start trying to tackle this problem. On Twitter I follow just shy of 1200 people and that is way too many to make it usable. Similarly I have allowed my Mastodon profile to balloon up to 226…. which means I am setting myself up for the same sort of problem there in the future. Again like so many of these I need to take the hard step and just start slashing those follow numbers, because it is completely unsustainable the way it is now. There is no way in hell that I can actually interact with that many people. Twitter vacillates between being extremely enjoyable and being a wall of noise that I cannot seem to push past. I need to figure out how to reduce the noise.
I have not done this thing because I have not been willing to risk upsetting some people in the process. I need to get over that and rip the band aid off.
Minimize
A lot of this has been about gaming or social media… but this one is more personal. I have reached a point where I am larger than I have been at any point in my life. I will never be a small person, but I need to be less big. So this year I need to get back on the wagon and reduce my calorie intake while also increasing my exercise output. I’ve done this numerous times in the past and I need to do it again. The problem is something will happen in my life that causes me to stop giving a fuck about it… and then this happens. Caring about my weight is not my default state, it is something I have to work at caring about. So this year I need to devote serious effort into fixing this before it gets worse.
Tomorrow I will return to games blogging, since the last few posts have been more on the personal and serious side… but I wanted to get them out of me as they appear to have needed to be written.
I like serious posts once in a while.
I have similar issues with Discord although I do remember to turn it on sometimes when I’m gaming and it launches automatically when my gaming PC boots–that’s probably what keeps me in it the most. I actually left or at least muted most of the channels in the slack groups I’m in that aren’t specifically related to work because I found them too distracting. I’m probably not going to have Discord on all day while I’m working–it’s more of logging in and catching up on what I missed since the last time I logged in.
After spending over a decade playing MMO’s and having touched all traditional roles doing so, DPS (both magic, ranged and melee)/Healer/Tank, I can say that I know what you mean with tanking anxiety. Yet the longer I’ve been playing MMO’s the more I’ve come to realize that tanking is by far the easiest job for me to perform.
I set the pace for a dungeon.
My only focus is keeping aggro on mobs and surviving.
I can ignore most idiotic mechanics that DPS and/or Healers have to deal with.
I get free commendations (in FFXIV) for just doing my job for no extra effort.
I think people acknowledge that it takes guts to take up the tanking role because in general people rather lead than follow. It’s easier to follow someone else instead of taking the initiative. When I’m feeling extremely lazy I do exactly this and retreat to a Healer which for me is the role of comfort.
However playing tank gives so many benefits that I tend to just bite the bullet and go for it and the more I tank the more certain I become of my skills and the hurdle gets ever smaller to take to the point that I enjoy the Tanking role above all else.
I really hope you can somehow bite the bullet yourself and pick up Tanking again. In the end I find it to be the most stress-free job and especially when you have a chatty group, or are with friends on Discord, tanking is the most rewarding thing there is.
“Additionally does anyone actually want to see me grind public events in Destiny 2 for an entire night? I would love to come to terms with this and figure out a way to work it into my life.”
Here’s what I’ve decided about streaming (and this is more from the point of view of a watcher, not the person streaming). It’s hardly about the game, at least until you develop a massive audience. Think of it as a chat room with you playing the game being like the TV on at the local bar. It’s something for people to watch between snippets of conversation. And you are the bartender in this analogy so part of your job is to kind of nudge people into starting conversations.
I’m the exact opposite of an expert when it comes to streaming, but that’s the best logical explanation of the phenomenon that I’ve been able to put together.
Now for me personally, I never watch people stream a narrative-based game unless I’ve always played it, because I don’t want the story ruined in case I later decide to play. I know others will watch all of a narrative-based stream so they don’t have to play that game for themselves.