Before you ask, no, I'm not having another "medical event". And no, I don't have Covid, either. The other week I spent my lunch time cutting down some bush/weeds that had grown in the midst of some "regular" bushes and was restoring that part of the yard to what it once was.
...and in true Redbeard fashion, I pulled something on my shoulders/back. Couple that with the next day having a surprise emergency deadline, and...
The past week was... not fun. Let's leave it at that.
Good thing that, given that I haven't healed in quite a while. From someecards.
I am the almighty wizard Ambien!! From Shane Plays.
I can feel this one, given that I've played Clerics for a very. long. time. From r/dndmemes.
When Tylenol is not enough, maybe I ought to listen to ol' Arthas... Wait, he's not talking about emptying your intestines, is he? From World of Warcraft Memes on FB.
EtA: How the hell could I have missed a misspelling in the freaking title?? Well, I did, and I corrected it.
There are days when I wonder just how some authors, such as Brandon Sanderson, can crank out novel after novel at such a high rate.
Sure, there are people for whom this is their job, and they get up and do it on an 8 AM - 5 PM basis. I get that. But for me, my writing goes in fits and starts, highly dependent upon whether the bug actually bites me and I can write in an inspired state. When I try to force myself to write, what tends to come out sounds like reports from work.
That might be because report and documentation writing is the least favorite part of my job.
The beauty of working from home is that I can be flipping off Lumbergh while he's telling me this. From makeameme.org.
It's not that I don't realize that the work is important --because it is-- it's just that writing that stuff is bland and uninteresting. It's... well, it's a job, and being forced to write is not nearly as fun as wanting to write something.
So when I see people like Brandon or Stephen King do the 8 hours of "work" of writing per day, somewhere deep inside my brain I hear screaming, as if my creative impulse was bound up and tossed over the walls of the Chateau d'If.
***
I will freely admit that I do have issues with description. There are days when I sit there and see something in my head and think "this would be so much easier if I had the capability to actually draw or paint what I see rather than describe it," but my artistic ability is worse than my writing.
"What does it look like?" I tell myself.
"Nice," I reply.
"Nice... That fucking helps a lot..."
I'm reminded of how the Apollo astronauts were trained to observe and describe objects on the lunar surface. They all had to learn how to describe landscapes the same way that they described activity in the spacecraft they flew, and it took a large amount of unlearning to then begin to build up their vocabulary and phrasing properly.
While I'm not on the caliber of being an Apollo astronaut, surely I can figure out how to write the turns of phrase needed to describe something properly.
Ha.
From colorado.edu.
I wish it were that easy.
My inner critic loves to tell me that I'm no good and that I should give up "playing at writing", but I've found that my addiction to putting words on the (virtual) page isn't so easily vanquished. I don't believe that my speed at writing fiction will ever improve, but hopefully I can actually complete a story without it turning into drudgery.
While my son and I were grabbing lunch before visiting our local game store for Free RPG Day*, he asked me if I was planning on playing Final Fantasy XIV any time soon. I'd created a Lancer a few years ago, but I'd never gotten around to playing him.
"I don't know," I admitted.
It's not that I don't want to give the game a try, I suppose, but it's more like I'm not sure if I'm going to like it very much. After all, I've expressed my displeasure on more than one occasion about the focus of WoW circa Wrath onwards of the player as the Champion of Azeroth.
From ifunny.co.
When the story doesn't involve a telenovela about the major faction leaders, that is.
From Pinterest. (And ifunny.co.)
I may not know much about the FFXIV story but I do know that your character is supposed to be the equivalent of the Champion of Azeroth, the Warrior of Light, which puts you on the level of a Godslayer or something. Given that we've been killing gods in Azeroth since 2006, this isn't exactly unknown territory. Still, that original C'Thun raid was a 40 person raid, and was a stand-in for an army in-game, even though it doesn't explicitly say so.**
In FFXIV, being called out as the Warrior of Light right from the beginning means that the focus of the story is on you in more ways than one. You're the protagonist in a fashion that's closer to being The Dragon Reborn (The Wheel of Time) or The Child of Light (The Belgariad) from a novel.
Even Google anticipates the inevitable Mary Sue question.
But that's neither here nor there, since one of the things I've learned as I've gotten older is the enjoyment I derive from being anonymous.
***
Being a redhead --and having worn a beard since roughly 1990 or so-- I know a bit about sticking out in a crowd. Beards are accepted now, but they weren't that common 30+ years ago. Couple that with a natural hair color that is also the rarest, and you have a recipe for being "that guy" who people notice in a crowd.
Even if I'm not trying, I used to be able to stand out in a crowd just because of what I wore. I remember one time I went to a Star Trek convention back in the late 80s and I stood out because I was one of the few people who did not wear a t-shirt with a logo, a jean jacket, or a Star Trek outfit of some sort***. I figured just dressing like I was going out to a baseball game or to Kings Island would be appropriate; who knew that wearing a pretty basic polo shirt and shorts would make me stand out like that? Oh well.
Fast forward about 30 years, and the older I've gotten the less I stand out. More people wear beards these days, more people dye their hair****, and my clothing is for the most part jeans and t-shirts unless I go somewhere where I have to dress up. I'm just Joe Average, and I'm fine with that.
It's quite freeing, being able to go places and people not really giving a fuck about you at all. If you've ever been to a car dealership and you're pestered by the sales force ad nauseum, you now understand the beauty of being invisible. Sure, it sucks when you actually want to speak with someone and you can't find anyone, but I'd rather have that problem than fighting off the vultures as they swoop down on you.
From @itsmariah.
But if you're famous for some reason or another, you can't just blend in with the crowd.
Maybe you don't want to blend in, but when you're famous or of high rank (pick an organization, any organization) your time is not your own.
This may surprise some of you, but back in the mid-late 90s to the early 2000s I was a member of the Parish Council at the Catholic church we attended. As such, I got to go over items such as the budget and planning for the next fiscal year. Let me tell you, it was pretty eye opening. But even more than that, it opened a window as to how the time spent by the Pastor was divided. What we saw, as handling Mass and other Church observations, was merely the public face of their activity. There was a ton of stuff (sorry, not at liberty to discuss) behind the scenes that took up a lot of their time. When someone asked during one of the Parish Council meetings about something concerning the Archbishop, the Pastor told us a story about one of his recent discussions with the Archbishop. During the meeting the Pastor asked about scheduling some time for the Archbishop to work on a particular line item, the Archbishop opened up his calendar and pointed out that his time was booked solid for the next three months, and there was a backlog just to get on the calendar for non-essential items. The conclusion of the story is that if we thought we could get to the Archbishop for anything, well... Good luck with that. "He has no time for himself, and it's been like that for him since be became Archbishop."
***
If you take that experience into MMOs, you begin to see how my own real life experiences have colored my in-game experiences. I've known teachers who have moved well outside of the school district they teach in because they want to have lives separate from their students,***** but that only works in the modern era where you can be that far away and still teach. If you're in Fantasy Land, you could potentially do that if you're a Mage,
Neve: "Of course I can." Me: "Oh shush. Shouldn't you be hunting on the plains near Garadar or something?"
but most everybody else would be stuck wherever they were at. And like celebrities everywhere else, you're not going to get a moment's peace from anybody who wants your ear.
So while it would seem at first blush to be pretty awesome to be the central character and the Warrior of Light, I'm not so sure that's a blessing. Being the hero and being able to rush out and do your own thing whenever you want is very much a best of both worlds for the player. It's like partying all the time while you're the king, because it gives the impression that there's nothing to ruling a kingdom: you just show up and things take care of themselves.
Having seen how it all works makes it that much more difficult for me to appreciate MMOs (or other video games) where you can be the hero without consequences, because my brain won't simply shut up and enjoy the ride. Kind of like me, the guy with a Minor in History, having to leave the room when I watched National Treasure for the first couple of times because I simply couldn't take the butchering of history that was done in the movie. (My wife can attest to this, as I did it while we were watching the movie together.)
I do have to admit it was very well acted and
plotted, however.
I guess I may eventually play FFXIV, but I need to push through the inevitable doubts that are going to crop up in my head.
*Last June 22, if you're curious.
**If you're in a 40 person raid versus a 10, 20, or 25 person variety, you can feel the difference in scope.
***They weren't cosplayers by any stretch, just people wearing a Star Trek jacket or shirt or wearing vulcan/elf ears. There were very few people who dressed up in costume (as we called it then), but quite a few people who at least made some effort to put their full-frontal nerdity on display.
****That's so they can either hide the graying of their own hair or so they can have it a funky color. Either way is fine with me, but you'd never catch me doing it myself.
I sometimes wonder about the YouTube algorithm and what shows up on my YouTube front page.
For every video that appears that's from a channel I subscribed to --or one in which I've watched videos of without subscribing-- I get some suggestions that came from out of nowhere.
Like this:
I don't play Final Fantasy VII, never have, and probably never will. But I ain't blind, you know.
Or this:
As if you didn't know, the picture --and likely the rain sounds-- are AI generated.
Or even this:
What I did not know was that tents that use inflatable "tubes" as supports are apparently a thing. Not exactly sure how that'd work, but it is a thing.
And that's not even counting the YouTube videos of women "trying on" see through clothing, which suddenly blew through my feed and then vanished after a couple of weeks. To which I had to ask just how those videos got past the YouTube "adult" filters.
I mean, I get where all of the screencaps of the videos above are similar --I am a guy, after all-- but why these videos suddenly made their appearance is beyond my understanding. But there they were, intermixed with videos about D&D, sports, woodworking, MMOs, and other forms of gaming.
Oh well. If I don't respond to their pretty obvious clickbait, they'll go away after a few weeks. But even my oldest has been getting these sorts of videos in her feed, and she's been annoyed by them as well.
I thought about having this Meme Monday cover one of the things people love to do during Summer, which is go to the beach.
Well, I started collecting a few of my memes I'd left over that cover this, and realizing I needed some filler, I went in search of some more RPG or MMO beach memes.
Given what I found --sometimes I can be quite naïve, particularly where fandom is concerned-- I think it's safer going to Plan B: trying to schedule an RPG game!
This is highly topical, since my game group that plays 3-4 times a year is having some difficulty with that Summer scheduling slot. We were supposed to play this coming Saturday, but conflicts by several people kept this from working. So... we worked on our July schedules, and... No go there either.
Oof.
So, it's a work in progress.
Yeah, that's another way of putting it. From d20.pub.
In a post-pandemic world, this actually works. From Pinterest.
