Find Your Own Nonsense

Sometimes the YouTube algorithm is creepily accurate. Over the weekend it decided that I needed to be exposed to a channel called “TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin”. I watch a lot of crafting videos because while I am far too lazy to actually do many of these things, I do daydream about one day following through on some of my real-world ideas. I love toys, more specifically action figures, and big vinyl toys, and apparently, I watched enough crafting videos and toy videos to where they have morphed together into a single entity known as the Crafsman. This channel is presented as a puppet and all of the close-ups of the work is a human wearing a pair of gloves in order to keep the illusion. There was a Q&A video that at one point hinted that the gloves became a thing because the creator was embarrassed by their ashy calloused hands. Whatever the case it is this delightful experience of a mild-mannered relatively child-friendly puppet making awesome crafts.

There are times that you have memories buried so deep inside that you have not thought about them in decades. While watching these videos, it finally hit me like a bolt of lightning why I was bonding with them so heavily. When I was a little kid we would occasionally go visit my Great Aunt and Uncle in Witchita. Next door to him was this super nice old black man named Flip, and I loved Flip so much… even though in truth I realistically spent a very small amount of time with him. The character that the Crafsman plays… reminds me almost exactly of my memories of Flip. The sad thing is I don’t even know what his last name was, but I do know he passed away probably when I was in middle school and I was fairly devastated. It is bizarre how such short encounters can have such formative experiences in your life that are rooted deep enough that they stick around in the background to come bubbling to the surface decades later.

There is a lot of me that wishes I spent more time on physical products. There is a version of me from the past that used to really like to sculpt, and always wanted to create my own action figures. This Crafsman does exactly this and while the videos are extremely entertaining, they also bring forth a lot of easy to understand information. For example this video shows you how you can take a mold and either grow it to increase the size of the casting or shrink it to refine details. I knew my entire life that toy sculptors actually sculpted in a larger format and then shrunk the model down to make the details more tightly packed, but I never understood how that worked until watching this video. The dude reminds me a lot of my own wandering nonsense, because he seems to flit back and forth between a bunch of related disciplines, using whatever he needs in order to get the desired effect.

Speaking of nonsense and side projects, yesterday at some point I realized that I have been informally cataloging my journey since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV in screenshots of my character jobs. I was stuck on a very boring conference call yesterday and I opened up Google Sheets and started tabulating all of the times when I took a picture of the state of my jobs. Looking back through all of my blog posts since returning to the game the weekend of July 4th, I had eleven different data points… twelve including one I took this morning.

I created a spreadsheet with jobs across the top and dates running down and a snap shot of what level I was sitting at which which jobs at a given point. Trying to figure out a way to track growth, I decided to simply add all of these levels together into an aggregate total. It would be way too complicated to track a trendline for each of the jobs and I also lack enough fine granularity between samples to really make something that is reasonable.

When I take all of this data and chart it with a logarithmic axis, you end up with something like this showing the general trendline of my leveling since the first data point on 7/6/2021. Why the hell did I spend time doing this? I have no idea. I mean remember I was manually charting Covid-19 numbers as they were being released on a daily basis, so apparently there is a part of my brain that likes to see how things are progressing and be able to play with the data myself. This isn’t nearly as cool as crafting a figure from scratch and then casting dozens of copies of it… but it is still some of the nonsense that I get up to that is largely only useful to me.

To close out this mornings post, I ran into mister Pine Sternn for the third time last night. This is the first time I have used his name in a post, and is the guy that is willfully choosing to level a bunch of classes without ever turning them into jobs. It was a few minutes into the run when he recognized my name, I was waiting to see if he would remember me. I guess I have reached a point of peace with this aberration because it is something he is doing on purpose and not just because he doesn’t know better. He has a number of jobs, just more that have never finished the quests needed to get the job crystal. My theory is still that he has been no-lifing the Deep Dungeon systems and simply has not taken the time to pop out and do the job quests and at some point in the future these will all end up as their proper jobs. For the time being however it seems like he is making the most of his nonsense.

The thing is… just like Craftsman and my stupid charting of things no one cares about but me… leveling a bunch of classes without ever turning them into Jobs is absolutely related nonsense. Once I realized this… it made me realize that this is probably something that I would have tried. This is no less weird that my self imposed goal of trying to level everything to 80 before Endwalker, when there really is no actual NEED to do this. So I guess my advice is find whatever nonsense makes you happy and stick to it, because life is too short to worry about what appears to be normal.