It’s been a minute, eh?

It’s been busy in my life in a way that has meant that I’ve written and worked on some drafts, but haven’t posted anything here in a while. I’m planning to get things back running at least on an irregular cadence, but first a life update!

I’ve been going to school for game development and programming. I thought it was a mostly standard 4-year program, but apparently it is accelerated and I learned recently I actually graduate at the end of this year. That’s kind of crazy! I initially expected it to be done in August of next year, which is why this has kind of snuck up on me (in a good way!) and it has led to me taking some time to contemplate my next moves, build a portfolio, and focus on making sure I stick the landing. At some future point, I feel like discussing the whole process could be an interesting post, but for right now at least, I want to focus on getting things done.

Gameplay

A lot of the free time I could put into writing about games has, as a result of the prior item, gone into playing the games instead. For the two games I discuss most here, I’m in very different patterns. Final Fantasy XIV is very much a raidlog and forget game right now, as the story of Dawntrail hasn’t captured me which has flowed out into a lack of interest in many other activities within the game. While the raiding has been good, there have also been moments where I’ve considered downsizing my raiding obligations, as my alt team’s quality of play and lack of schedule adherence has left me feeling less desire to log on the extra two nights a week to crawl through fights I’ve already done, given my current lack of enthusiasm for the game. That’s not to say I am not enjoying my time in FFXIV, quite the opposite, but that enjoyment comes as a product of focusing in on the things I enjoy in the game and filtering out spending idle time in the game playing other less-enjoyable parts of it. At some point, I feel like I’ll want to go back in and get my Allied Societies done, work on Occult Crescent stuff, and generally engage with Dawntrail more than I already have, but on a content basis, the illusion has worn thin a bit for me, which will be the subject of one of the draft posts I will be mentioning later in this post!

As for WoW, it’s the opposite – on a gameplay basis, The War Within’s second season captured me so completely that I leveled more alts, pushed even more keys, and I’ve been working with new players to bring them in and run content with them, which has been a lot of fun. Mid-season events like Horrific Visions, Collector’s Bounty, even the reviled Dastardly Duos – all have held my interest and given me more reasons to play and engage with the game. My guild got to our AotC and did some alt raid runs, which were fun, and the preparation for Season 3 is in full effect. WoW kind of suffers for having too much going on right now, but also, I kinda like that about it – it gives me a list of goals and as one frustrates me I can move immediately to the next. Granted, some of that is down to having a lot of things already done – Collector’s Bounty was very generous to me (17 mounts total, which rounded out every buffed drop rate mount I had left to collect!), so I’ve been able to use the time not spent on that doing transmog farms and other events, which were also offset by the fact that I did a lot of the stuff while it was current so I have been done with Horrific Visions including the new 8-mask run, Dastardly Duos weekly progress, and leveling alts for a while. The benefit of having done my goals so early this season is that I’ve had a lot of time in my play sessions on the back end of the season to just kind of hang out and do newer stuff without conflicts, which is very nice!

Writing

I have…(counts tabs)…6 posts in drafts right now, 10 if I include a topic I only wrote down a base idea about. I’ve been sharpening some of these posts for literally months, especially since some of them confront some issues I see in commentary around the two games I play, particularly some frustrations with the way WoW Classic is discussed (especially the slop content-ification of “retail bad” content) and how FFXIV’s community has been on the defensive for most of Dawntrail. I also have writeups of my experiences in both games, some patch talk about the upcoming WoW patch, and a tech post discussing the AI-ification of Nvidia’s GPUs and how those features are shortchanging real generational leaps in performance. I don’t want to hard commit to any of them coming out but I have put too much work into them to not release the posts, so honestly, I’ll probably slow roll them out in the coming days after some finishing touches. Some of them are obviously on timers (talking about WoW TWW Season 3 content and release date only works if the patch isn’t actually out!) while others can cook a little longer and might very well do so.