While my feelings really haven’t shifted all that much since my first State of Things, I have been busy both in and out of Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been very slowly working on a project in lieu of Dawntrail that I believe I mentioned during the benchmark about a couple of new PC’s to replace my aging ones. That project I started back in mid November with it coming into fruition in a couple of weeks.
However, what I didn’t wholly consider along with this is where and what I was going to with them or place them when this was all said and done. Where I miscalculated was deciding to completely rearrange a room I really didn’t utilize for all of this (I wanted to do this over a year ago, but tabled it), so deciding to start this part back in mid-April, wasn’t a wise decision.
This basically boils down to since by not allowing the proper amount of time has now caused a time-crunch of sorts. Sure, I could let this go into June and cut it close to Dawntrail, but that in itself would cause more stress and plan-shifting. Rather keep letting this linger out even farther than it has and continuously generate a knot in my stomach, I’m just placing the hard deadline for Memorial Day weekend.
In doing this, it just means that us here may or may not be posting regularly until the end of the month when this is all said and done as I’ll have to spend time on the weekdays playing catch-up sort to speak to make sure everything is set enough to get it all aligned and running properly. There might be another Star Bunny this week but I’ll probably hold off on posting the backlog of Fashion Reports so it doesn’t look like a bunch of them were put up at once.
Just bonkers for a bit longer and back to relaxing/adventuring around Eorzea like we all used to, and I’m very much looking forward to it.
I really can’t believe I’ve hit this threshold. When I decided to take my hiatus from Mastodon nearly six months ago, and soon thereafter started up this blog, would not I have thought I’d have kept up with it as frequent as I have. I remember some bloggers I follow over on Mastodon, one being Belghast, mentioning posting something at least once a day whether it was something small or more grandeur. I understand why they all had recommended that as it does become easier over time to sit down and write something out on the regular.
I do know some of them are just slice of life screenshots of our adventures across Eorzea, but evolving even those into little small tales has been so much fun to do! Alongside that, being able to sit down and write out longer thoughts and stories has really been a wonderful treat too as I have really missed writing altogether. It has been a rather long time since I had written anything really; the last thing I wrote was my manuscript back in 2011(ish), and I do eventually plan on getting back to that. That’s a whole different topic though, and it does need a few more look overs before the eventual self-publish then off to work on the sequel story.
Here’s to the next 100, 500, 1,000 posts about whatever comes to mind really; whether it’s directly related to Final Fantasy XIV or another game entirely, looking forward to sharing the tales with everyone who comes across my little corner of a colossal world.
There will probably be more of these as time goes on, but this is a departure from my usual types of things I post here. Sort of a “how I’m feeling” stylized written thingamajig I suppose. What I didn’t want for this to be was something more emotionally driven than anticipated and I’ve been mulling over exactly how to write/say what/how I’ve been feeling. Way back in the beginning of November 2023, I departed Mastodon on a much needed break from social media.
The Social Media Departure/Break
The apex as to why I departed was caused by getting into another quibble with another person in the Final Fantasy XIV community that was saying that parsers (a 3rd party tool used to check how well someone’s damage output is) were okay due to their wide usage within the community. I countered back stating it’s not as it’s still against the Terms and Services of the game itself. Both of us doubled-down on our sides of the debate, and something just clicked that it was time to leave.
It wasn’t the first time, and I doubt it will be the last time I got into a discussion that changes to something more heated, but in that moment I think I just finally realized it wasn’t worth it to have this keep happening. Before this ‘final’ one was another having to do with someone perpetually liking practically 100% of anyone/everyone’s discussions/posts, which triggered memories of someone who was attempting to stalk Aikirees within FFXIV (even if that wasn’t their intention, it was still an unsettling feeling.) As a result I said something, not well stated, and that in itself resulted in a not-so-great ripple effect. I still feel bad about how I handled this to this day.
These were the two big ones that made me realize it was time to step away. There were, of course, incidences and typical drama that online communities have that happened before these two. Even from within our little group of friends we had made there were things that happened as well; however those were resolved, resolved themselves, or happened outside of what I knew was happening and ultimately resolved there too. I did step into some of them to help cool down heated parties, which sometimes worked and other times it didn’t.
Starting up this blog site and posting here as regularly as possible has really been good for me though, and whatever I end up doing in the future, I’m going to keep posting here because I really like doing it and it’s pretty therapeutic. Eventually EOCA’s Eulogy will go up and that will tell the tale of how that started and it’s eventual closure, and that will also touch on some other things as well.
How I’m Feeling in General Towards the Final Fantasy XIV Community
Generally speaking, my feelings towards the FFXIV community as a whole have really begun to deteriorate over the last few years. I’m not flat out saying the FFXIV community has become completely sour by any means because there are so many lovely and wonderful folks out there that I’ve come across, and the community as a whole is very friendly and welcoming. It’s just since the community has gotten so huge over the last few years, that the bad actors are starting to appear a lot more often than they used to, which is unfortunate but expected.
I’ve made mention of this in passing of times of the past where when doing even content folks were more warmly welcoming and content runs were light jogs with talking banter sprinkled in as opposed to now with the mentality of ‘go go go!’ being the primary driving force. Anyone with a ‘Legendary’ title or has one of the weapons from those series of Ultimate fights seems to very much amplify this. I realize this is a very generalize statement, as I do still see the more fun laid back style of runs, but I just wish it was the norm again.
The Modding/Plugin community I fully detest now as opposed to just having sour feelings towards – and this debate has been done to pieces with the argument being a near stalemate from both sides of it, which is unfortunate because it really does split the community up into separate camps. A community close to me decided to ditch traditional methods of making dances & performances via macros and go full-blown into using a plugin really didn’t help my feelings towards any of this either.
Content creators I personally feel are becoming another sour space in the community with I think only a small margin that are alright and genuine. Even one that I was a guest on, a simple podcast, fell into that trope the rest tend to of just looking at numbers and statistics. I understand that may not be the case in its entirety, but when that’s all you hear continuously is “look at how my numbers/followers I’ve acquired” as a status symbol, then there’s something off-putting about that. Chasing after more popular content creators/players within the space is something else that could be debated as well, but I know this is well beyond what I can discuss aside from what little observations and hearsay but that’s not helpful.
One last thing that comes to mind since you cannot get away from them in city-states are the perpetual spamming of Venues. To the best of my remembrance, venues started to really pop up during the pandemic, with before that I’d only hear about small tavern-like RP oriented places. I really miss those and I know they still exist, but seem to be on a much smaller scale nowadays. I stylized having small events like that over at EOCA HQ’s fire pit because it reminded me of an old cafe I used to go to and do the exact same thing. Nowadays, at least of this writing, they’re full of adult-themed pleasures and twitch-streaming DJ’s. I know I can just disable shout in chat, but they do come in handy to hear on occasion in city-states and while out adventuring.
This is really exhausting to keep seeing these every. single. time.
“Keep Moving Forward“
I suppose it comes down to ‘what now?’ I’m still not exactly sure, and I’m still hurting a bit.
As for Mastodon, I miss the little group/community we started and created within it, and I will return to Mastodon eventually. Just, not exactly sure when yet – it could be a day or two after writing this all out, or it could be another month or so. There’s no other social media I’m involved with (Instagram I kind of used to parallel, but stopped long ago), and if there’s a time that I depart from even Mastodon, then that will more than likely be the end of any social media for me. Without Mastodon and the friends I’ve made there, EOCA would still not be a home and just a house, nor would I have had so many wonderful memories and moments throughout most of 2023 and late 2022 when I departed Twitter.
These and so many more wonderful memories & moments, all thanks to our little community on Mastodon.
As for the general Final Fantasy XIV community, I’ll probably stay on the side of extreme caution as I have been doing. Normally all of the above doesn’t really bother me, and I know it should never, but sometimes it just all hits me and doesn’t… feel as warm as it once did. It’s disheartening to think about sometimes, and then just adding in all of the perpetual venue spam as a reminder, hits it a bit harder.
Regardless, I won’t leave Final Fantasy XIV for the foreseeable future as I really and truly do love/enjoy the game. Even with all these rougher spots appearing and happening, there is such a vast and larger more positive force within the community still and we’re all here just trying to have fun and enjoy the world, share our adventures & stories, make some wonderful friends & meet folks along the way, and look out for one another.
I know there’s a lot of wonderful & helpful folks out there, and I’ve met so many along the way as that’s the majority. I’ll keep moving forward, taking care of my lovely small FC, enjoy making new adventures, remembering all of the wonderful ones prior, and listen/share them with all of the friends I’ve made along the way. ♥
A smidgen late since the holidays have begun, but this took a little bit of work to get up and running this year. This is the first year I put together a permanent track for my small holiday tree, prior to this I would just use Bachmann’s E-Z Track. However, over the years those poor connectors gave out and the electricity didn’t flow throw it properly any longer.
Last year I took a break from even decorating the tree since I wasn’t able to get the train up and running, but took that sadness and converted it to determination to make darn certain I was able to do both this year. Overall I’m pretty happy with how the track came out and allows for the tree to sit in the middle with all of the wires feeding underneath it fairy well. The next thing now is to get the steam locomotive repaired and try to expand the track to allow for both to be running at the same time for next year.
Some of the highlight ornaments on the small tree.
Every year, along with mentioned about expanding the track itself, I want to add one or two decorative village pieces around the board too, making it look like a small town with this massive tree they festively decorate every year kind of vibe to it.
The N-Scale model train passing by in the foreground
I hope everyone is having and has a wonderful holiday season and here’s to a great New Years’ ahead!
I meant to do this shout out last week once it was initially posted, but derped out with everything else happening (sorry!!) Over the course of 2023 on Mastodon, we started up a community that is wholly within the social media platform for all of us who adventure around Eorzea and beyond. It’s a fairly loose and very low pressure community with no mandatory obligations of any sort; we just gather from time to time for social events and getting together to do group content as well.
Bearmine, the wonderful artist and good friend behind the work above, suggested creating a Cross-World Linkshell (CWLS) to make it easier to keep in touch while in-game. The group of us agreed and made some remarks that adding our friends to the CWLS would be akin to collecting everyone in a Pokedex from Pokemon. Nearly moments later, I chimed in with the comment ‘Frendedex!’ which became the name of the CWLS and our little (at the time) community.
A little bit later on, I decided to create a logo for our community for folks to use in various things: whether it was for posts, flyers, blogs, etc., and I got feedback from everyone in regards to the design. After a few revisions based on said feedback, the logo was completed soon thereafter. Bearmine asked for a vector copy to do something with it, and what came of it is that absolutely beautiful scenic rendition!
I highly encourage y’all to check out their work, and the link directly to the Tome of Frendedex with higher resolutions renditions is right here!
While not necessarily a ‘bad’ thing to be in a perpetual state of busyness, both in and out of RL work, it does tend to make the ears a bit on the heavier side sometimes. Ah well, the holidays will be here soon and they’ll be some nice downtime then. In the meantime, just need to rest when I can, and hopefully soon. Hope everyone out there is doing well! ♥
Survived the week before Thanksgiving, it’s typically pretty bonkers and this one was no different. Looking forward to the weekend now and playing a lot of Super Mario RPG for Switch that got released today! Here’s to a nice relaxing one with a wonderful holiday week after that!
Also think I got all of the elements either up and running where I want them or, at they very least, in place to expand as more things go up in time. Haven’t done this in quite some time, and since a lot has changed over the years, it’s been a bit of a learning curve. Glad to be doing it though.
