I’ve started this post a half dozen times this morning only to keep backspacing it away. So as a result I am just going to go with it as not to waste anymore time. I am not used to blogging while sitting downstairs, and I think that might be harshing some of my mojo. Either than or the fact that I am effectively writing the first blog post of 2019, a new year… and don’t want to mess things up. Regardless this morning I thought I would write a bit about some of my thoughts for the coming year. I am not generally one to do resolutions, so I am going to participate in the practice without actually calling them that. So here goes some of the things I hope for the next year.
Figure out Discord
I know this sounds like a silly topic, but I am being completely serious. No I am not meaning figure it out in a technical sense, but instead figure out how it fits in my life. Right now I am legitimately in fifty different discord servers, and have probably since its launch left about that many as well. Hell there are a half dozen that I set up myself for various reasons. This fragmentation means that I end up using none of them on a regular basis. While I use Slack and Microsoft Teams for work purposes… and that gave me a fixed reason to use the social Slacks I am in… I don’t have a similar need for Discord other than when I am wanting to use voice chat for some reason. As such we have a bunch of general purpose discords that serve as a ready voice chat option when we need one.
All of that said there are awesome people and interesting conversations going on there, and I would like during this new year to figure out how to become part of that. I’ve been pleased to see the Blaugust discord is still active, and I love hanging out with the Moogle’s Pom crew when I remember it is a place that exists. Unfortunately I think discord has way too much noise to really make it a constant destination. Too many people are scattered among too many different servers to have it feel like a cohesive experience. I think the other challenge is everyone is struggling to figure out how exactly to use it. Every single alpha that I am in wants to use it as their primary means of communication and as a replacement for the traditional forum experience. The UI doesn’t exactly help to identify what are things I actually should be reading, and what is just so much more spam.
It would be nice if there was a way to group servers into folders… so you could have a half dozen ones that you regularly use and then the rest neatly hidden behind a wall. This is a problem that I want to solve this year but I am not even sure where to start apart from simply leaving every server I am in and adding them back more judiciously.
Get Over Anxiety Tanking
I am not sure where it came from but lately I have been super anxious about getting back into tanking again. This is a big part of why I have been largely bouncing from Final Fantasy XIV is that I cannot seem to get over the hurdle of just tanking for randoms. That is what I need to do so I can get the currency I need to upgrade my gear to be able to run the dungeons to be able to finish the main story line. Yes I realize that was one hell of a run on sentence but I absolutely did that on purpose. Everything in that game seems to be gated by something, and the answer to all of it is just to tank queue as a Warrior and be done with it.
That said I keep logging in, playing the cactpot and then logging right back out. I think a lot of why I have not returned to World of Warcraft in earnest with the recent patch is that I have a similar wall that has built up against the responsibility of tanking. I want to figure out a way past this so I can get on with my life and start to enjoy MMORPGs again.
Organize My Vault
Another huge problem I am having with Final Fantasy XIV is that I am avoiding my inventory. I have six retainers full of shit and I cannot begin to figure out how to sort it all. I know there is a good deal of it that I can stick in the glamour chest and be done with it, but I am so paralyzed by the mountain of items that it is effecting my willingness to go do anything that might add more to it. I am similarly having an issue with Destiny 2 where I am running out of vault room. I need to go through and get rid of everything that I can buy back again through the collections… but right now I am willfully avoiding touching anything. I am struggling with an irrational fear that I might remove the wrong thing and with no undo system and no buyback vendor… I could accidentally get rid of something I can’t get back.
Quite honestly so many of the things I am dealing with are anxiety based… anxiety over interacting with people, anxiety over responsibility, and anxiety over possible loss. If I could figure out a way to solve that core problem a lot of these would disappear.
Figure Out Streaming
Another one of these anxiety triggered things is the fact that I would like to stream more… but always struggle to push that “go live” button. I think one of the big problems is that a lot of what I do on a nightly basis does not exactly make for “must see television”. I don’t play the type of games that lend themselves to streaming, because in a narrative experience… the fact that I am streaming seems to get in the way. Additionally does anyone actually want to see me grind public events in Destiny 2 for an entire night? I would love to come to terms with this and figure out a way to work it into my life.
Figure Out Social Media
As it stands I follow way the fuck too many people on Social Media and I have been paralyzed to start trying to tackle this problem. On Twitter I follow just shy of 1200 people and that is way too many to make it usable. Similarly I have allowed my Mastodon profile to balloon up to 226…. which means I am setting myself up for the same sort of problem there in the future. Again like so many of these I need to take the hard step and just start slashing those follow numbers, because it is completely unsustainable the way it is now. There is no way in hell that I can actually interact with that many people. Twitter vacillates between being extremely enjoyable and being a wall of noise that I cannot seem to push past. I need to figure out how to reduce the noise.
I have not done this thing because I have not been willing to risk upsetting some people in the process. I need to get over that and rip the band aid off.
Minimize
A lot of this has been about gaming or social media… but this one is more personal. I have reached a point where I am larger than I have been at any point in my life. I will never be a small person, but I need to be less big. So this year I need to get back on the wagon and reduce my calorie intake while also increasing my exercise output. I’ve done this numerous times in the past and I need to do it again. The problem is something will happen in my life that causes me to stop giving a fuck about it… and then this happens. Caring about my weight is not my default state, it is something I have to work at caring about. So this year I need to devote serious effort into fixing this before it gets worse.
Tomorrow I will return to games blogging, since the last few posts have been more on the personal and serious side… but I wanted to get them out of me as they appear to have needed to be written.