Unwanted Sandstorm

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Good Morning Friends. I am going to write this post in what I hope is the least “poor pitiful me” manner I can muster but I am still pretty freaked out. I’ve said that this blog is part therapy for me, and honestly… this is one of those blog posts that I do not plan to syndicate widely as a result. There are a lot of disabilities that I think I could figure out how to work around and still do the things that I love. The two that freak me out the most however are the loss of my sight and the loss of my mental capacity. I also have a hefty fear of not being able to breathe but that comes from growing up severely asthmatic and having so many moments in my life where I could not catch my breath. If you listened to this weekend’s podcast, and I seemed out of sorts at all… I was pushing through a pretty major panic attack to record it.

A few hours before we started recording I was upstairs playing Guild Wars 2 and I kept trying to brush what I thought was a thread caught on my glasses out of the way of my vision. I was in the Inner Nayos zone and there was already a lot of black crap blowing around in the air so at first I thought it was just a visual. However, no amount of cleaning my glasses seemed to remove whatever this visual obstruction was. I went downstairs to stare uselessly into my eye in the bathroom mirror because I thought maybe it was a stray lash… when all shit went wrong. It felt like I was looking out through the world in a sandstorm and there were all of these individually distinct black dots appearing all over my vision and swimming around. To some extent, it felt like I was looking out through one of those clear bottles of gel-based hand sanitizer that had all of the suspended air bubbles.

It was around this point that the world started spinning as I went into a full-blown panic attack. My mind was racing… “What do I need to do before I completely lose my vision”. This seems like an irrational thought pattern, but there is some additional history that you need to understand in order to make sense of that. My family has a medical history of having their retina detached, and I have always been paranoid about it. My grandmother(dad’s side) had hers detach when I was in high school, my dad had his detach when I was in college, and my aunt (dad’s sister) had hers detach at some point during my early career bound adulthood. I feel like I have been waiting for this shoe to drop for quite a long time, which admittedly colored my opinions.

To be fair this line of thinking is not one that is entirely new for me. During my Junior year of High School, I had this sinus surgery that was working up against the brain case. While prepping for the surgery they had prepared us for all of the worst-case scenarios like a tool slipping and cracking something and causing a leak of fluid that could lead to brain damage and the like. So it was in this fertile ground for terror and paranoia… that I started having an allergic reaction to the specific combination of anesthesia and reagent used to wake me up. It was delayed by a few hours… but I started to have stroke-like symptoms as I lost control of the left side of my face and my eye started pulling up into the corner. I remember having a very similar thought “What do I need to say while I still have my mental facilities, because I am going to lose myself”.

Zoom forward to Saturday night… I am trying to keep my shit together and record a podcast. However, as I am back upstairs trying to calm down and be personable a new problem starts to occur. When I move my eyes to shift focus between my two monitors there is this flashbang off the left side of my face. It sort of looked similar to the eyelash thing from earlier but bright white and disorienting. I got through the show but I fumbled the intro as I tried to stop looking at the monitor and missed Thalen’s name from the list I read down every week. It’s really hard to keep your shit together when there is a rave happening in your eyeball. While this was going on my wife was searching for any possible ophthalmological emergency services in the area but came up empty. She specifically checked our local emergency room… which is still dealing with the after-effects of a ransomware attack… and largely came up empty.

As soon as we wrapped the recording I logged out and went to bed, trying to calm the fuck down and sleep was harder than I would have expected. I was concerned about medicating myself to sleep with melatonin or something of the sort because I was not sure how it would interact with whatever the hell was going on with my body. I probably got around half of a night’s sleep but by morning things were more manageable. Now I am basically in a state where I have way more pronounced “floaters” but they have largely coalesced into a dark ink spot that appears floating around in the lower right corner of my vision and a black thread made up of individual dark pinpoints that appears in the upper left edge of the field of vision. There is also what I can on describe as a ” piece of cotton on my eyelashes” that occasionally appears which mostly just makes me feel like constantly cleaning my glasses or rubbing my eye to remove debris.

The positive is that whatever is happening seems to be limited to my left eye, which is ultimately the weaker of the two. I’ve needed a new prescription for a while and my doctor’s office opens at 8 am this morning I intend to beg and plead for them to see me quickly. The other positive is that things seem to have normalized a bit and I have not had any more of the “flash bangs” since Saturday night. I am not sure what happened to cause so many more floaters to appear in my vision but hopefully, we can get to the bottom of it today. The other thing that gives me a bit of hope is that so far nothing that I am experiencing is anything like either my dad, aunt, or grandmother described. They all talked about a curtain closing off their vision starting from one side and going to the other. Right now I just have way more floaters than my brain can cancel out. I think I could eventually get used to this albeit it will never stop being annoying.

Nothing really new happened when this all occurred. I was not exerting myself or being exposed to some new stimulus. I was sitting upstairs playing video games like I have done for large swaths of my adult life. I was not playing through a segment that involved flashing lights or anything like that. I can only assume this is a physical thing and not neurological because it does not seem to be impacting my right eye in the least. Anyways… I think partially I am writing this all out in case something happens to me or things proceed much worse… there will be a written record of what happened before I disappear. Like I don’t mean that to sound as ominous as I am sure it does, but I have no clue what the next few days will hold for me. I know my dad had to deal with this nitrogen bubble in his eye that was attempting to hold the retina back in place until it healed enough to reattach on its own.

Anyway I mostly threw in non-sequitur images just to have something to break up the giant block of text. For those unable to follow my train of thought the last one is Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopes from the 90s musical act TLC. I didn’t want to put a photo of an eyeball in this post because honestly… they are kind of gross to look at. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you all have a wonderful week and I hope I either get a clean bill of health and have to just learn to live with this nonsense or some sort of medical intervention to stop things from getting worse. Until this is resolved I am probably going to be in a more volatile than normal state, and I am pre-emptively sorry if I do anything odd.

AggroChat #480 – Number One Fan

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! Bel crash lands the introduction by completely managing to skip over Thalen.  We have a pretty packed show as several things got bumped from the previous show. We start off the show with some discussion of Luck Be A Landlord, a game that was compared to Balatro.  From there we talk a bit about Summer Games Fest, admittedly in a disjointed manner while also talking about the Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail Media Tour Embargo lifting.  Bel has now wrapped up the Post Endwalker content ans is significantly more excited for Dawntrail.  Grace talks about the Alan Wake II DLC and her experiences so far with Number One Fan.  Tam talks about Star Trek Resurgence.  Collectively we talk about some One Shot TTRPG Ideas, and Kodra shares some thoughts about Dropout TV.  Finally we talk a bit about Kodra’s experiences with the Kitsune Tails Demo on Steam.

Topics Discussed:

  • Luck Be A Landlord
  • Summer Games Fest
  • FFXIV Dawntrail Media Tour
    • Bel Wraps up Post-Endwalker
  • Alan Wake II DLC
    • Number One Fan
  • Star Trek Resurgence
  • RPG One Shots
  • Dropout TV
  • Kitsune Tails Demo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Worst Part About FFXIV

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Good Morning Friends! Remember yesterday when I said I was hesitant to finish up the Final Fantasy XIV storyline? Well… sometimes I contradict myself because I did precisely that. I was about maybe a third of the way catching up on the story when I started this mission over the weekend. I am honestly surprised at how fast that I managed to catch myself up. I went into this not being certain I would actually play Dawntrail, and now I find myself rather pumped for it. Truth be told I would have rather the Thirteenth storyline tied into the expansion, but I guess I am relatively happy to see it concluded for the time being.

As happy as I am with where the story wrapped up, I want to talk a bit this morning about the worst freaking part about this game. At two points last night I had to stop the flow of the story, to run to the market board and buy a piece of gear so that I could get over the arbitrary item-level gating requirements. Now I came back before the last set of crafted gear was put into the game so when I bought my way to relevancy I bought most of a set of 610 gear for a few million gil. This meant that my item level was sort of all over the place. I bought a new weapon when the last gear set went in giving me a single 640 item level item, and this mishmash was good enough to get me all the way to the last dungeon of the expansion.

When I set forth to do The Lunar Subterrane I needed an item level of 620 and I was sitting at 617. So I went to the market board, replaced my lowest-level item, and was able to get past this gate. It cost some 300k gil, but I figured I was probably good to go for a bit and could at least finish out the story. Then a few minutes later when I unlocked the final Trial… I was hit with a 5-level jump and again needed to make up the last two points to get over that hurdle. So once again I had to break my way out of the flow of the story to go pay my way to freedom again. It just feels awful to know that you have to keep getting nickeled and dimed by the market in order to see the conclusion of the story.

What I find most frustrating about this situation is… that Final Fantasy XIV has some rather damned good scaling tech. It would likely be trivial to scale players up to the minimum item level for a dungeon so that they can complete the story. Yoshi P has freely admitted that a large chunk of the player base returns right before the launch of a new expansion to catch up on the story… plays through the new expansion… and then disappears again until another expansion launches. It seems somewhat ludicrous that this has been a problem for EVERY expansion… and yet there has been nothing done to ease the pain. I am not saying that scaling should always be there… but folks catching up on the MSQ should be given a one-time pass of that gate so that they can actually see how things sort out without a lot of grinding. I have plenty of gil… it was easy for me to buy my way to freedom but not everyone has that option.

I think what makes all of this worse is that I am really rather pleased with how the post-Endwalker content was resolved. I had a lot of fun playing it. But there is this base level of resentment that I feel towards the game for draining my wallet just so that I could see it to its conclusion. Maybe I am just too used to Guild Wars 2 at this point where I set up a single set of gear several years ago and have been able to do everything in the game without ever needing to change it. I’ve gone through this with Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and now Endwalker so I knew what I was getting myself in for. That does not make it feel any better to keep having to return to the Market Board to try and limp through the story gates, however.

All of that said… I am legitimately looking forward to Dawntrail. I am looking forward to seeing the new continent and I legitimately like Wuk Lamat. She reminds me of my friend Shandrah but with a Spanish accent. I don’t love some of the setup where we will be on opposite sides of a conflict from our friends, but I feel like before all is said and done we will end up together. I am very much looking forward to adventuring with Krille, and I am hoping that before all is said and done we get to see Zero once more. I became really invested in that character and want to see far more of her story and that of the Thirteenth. I’m also curious how the fuck Solution 9 fits into all of this because a weird cyberpunk city does not seem to make sense.

Problems With Goals

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Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a tangent post, but given that, I don’t have anything terribly pressing to talk about… I am going to roll with it. I have a problem with goals. What I mean by that is not that I necessarily have a problem setting goals, but that I have a problem with accomplishing them. There is something baked into my brain that upon accomplishing a goal that required quite a bit of work… I suddenly want nothing to do with the thing after achieving it. This has been a curse for me throughout the years, that upon cresting that hill and accomplishing whatever it was that I thought I wanted… I no longer want it anymore. For example, I set forth the goal of getting to level 100 in Diablo IV this season, and instead of reveling in the accomplishment and joining in all of the reindeer games that are gated behind that level… I mostly checked out of the experience.

Similarly, I had a blast with Mists of Pandaria Remix in World of Warcraft while I was grinding towards an objective. I wanted to unlock all of the gear slots, which required me to complete all of the heroic dungeons, and heroic scenarios, and complete all of the normal mode dungeons that I had to get groups for manually. Once I completed that… I fell into the routine of farming World Bosses every day and then checking out… basically losing all forward momentum. It isn’t just that I lose focus and fail to set a goal… I began to reject whatever activity it was that I was doing and hop furiously over to something else. In the case of PMIX I tried leveling a few more alts but never really gained the same level of enjoyment out of it.

Honestly, I am not sure why I am so surprised by this each time it happens. I know I experienced the same thing when playing through Dragonflight. I finished the story, did a few days of world quests, and then decided that I was mostly done with the game in its entirety and bounced. Even in my beloved Path of Exile, I have experienced a bit of this. I’ve made far fewer characters in this league than I have in any previous. I set forth a series of goals but the major overarching one was completing the Gruelling Gauntlet Grinds challenge, and after finishing that I mostly checked out of the league only to return recently when a friend needed assistance with something. It is like there is a toggle switch in my brain that flips when I have checked something off my “to-do” list and then immediately wants to shed any presence of that thing from my brain.

I think in part this is why I occasionally drag my feet when I am enjoying something. For example, right now I am having a blast in Guild Wars 2 again. I am slowly working towards crafting my third legendary weapon but trying not to grind it out so much so that it becomes one of these overarching goals of mine. Similarly, I’ve yet to finish up the Secrets of the Obscure campaign because I am somewhat afraid that once I do so I might check out of the game again for an indeterminate amount of time. It is like I am trying to keep the fun going for as long as I can before finishing things up. There is something about that finality that I have never liked. I hate finishing a book series for example, and have been dragging my feet on reading the 4th book in the Stormlight Archive series because I know… that is all we have for the time being.

I’ve been back in Final Fantasy XIV playing through the post-Endwalker story and have honestly been having a lot of fun with it. I did not expect to become emotionally invested in it quite in the manner that I have. Similarly, I am afraid that when I catch up to the story, I am going to “nope” out of the game as I have done before. Prior to the launch of Endwalker, I went on this whole mission to level everything to 80, and I accomplished it… then was mostly done with Endwalker the second I finished the story. Basically, I know that I do not personally have a healthy relationship with finishing things. I am not exactly certain how I played World of Warcraft for as long as I did. A lot of that was the fact that I was heavily engaged in a raiding community and with that many goals that were never fulfilled. As a solo player, I find that I get easily distracted by the next thing on the horizon when I finish with anything.

Maybe all of this is okay, and I should just learn to accept myself. However, I find myself jealous of folks who can stick with the same thing day in and day out without wavering. The folks who get super engaged in a single community baffle me, especially given that I was once one of those people. I am not sure what changed in my brain and whether or not I can recuperate the part of me that used to stick with something for years at a time. Granted I tend to hyper-focus on a single thing at a time, but also quickly burn through it. I am hoping to delay the inevitable with Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV for as long as I can so that I can at the very least see my way through Dawntrail and see the content drop for Janthir Wilds.

All of this said… I know that major distractions are looming on the horizon that will claim me. I know I will play Last Epoch Cycle 2 when it drops in early July. I also know that I am very likely to play my way through Path of Exile 3.25 when it drops in late July or early August. So maybe it is okay that I keep jumping ship to the next thing because ultimately given enough time… I return refreshed and ready for more. At some point, I want to dig back into Valheim or New World, because I feel like I am never 100% done with a game that I have hyper-fixated on in the past… I am just done with it for the moment. Maybe I am just living that content locust lifestyle.

I’ve joked and said that blogging is often therapy for me and that I don’t set out writing a post with a fixed ending. This is one of those cases because I started out the post pretty down on myself because of my inability to follow through after accomplishing a goal, and now suddenly feel less bad about that practice as I near the end of this post. Anyways if you have made it this far… thanks for sticking around for my nonsense.