Getting A Grip

4 July 2025

What's up y'all?

I'm gonna be upfront, I've been better. The transition between academic and professional life is ROUGH, to say the very least. I've been getting by, but just barely. But things are looking up on the horizon!

I've recently got some, albeit temporary, employment. It may not be extremely long-lived, but it is extremely profitable. I can work really hard for some time coming up and hopefully put a lot of money away before I can get situated in a normal job. It's stressful, but it's not as stressful as being unemployed! Small wins!

I've been talking with some friends about the prospect of setting up a ttrpg game, for the first time in a while. I'll be GMing this new system, Fabula Ultima, for them. It's a fairly simple, theater-of-the-mind oriented system designed to feel and play like console JRPGs. The system is designed around the idea that the players should be contributing to the setting as they play, spending a resource called "Fabula Points" to just establish a fact about the setting.

I tried to set up a YouTube channel while I was away from the Blog, something vaguely BrainScratchComms in format, but operating system issues and hardware failure have caused me to lose like hundreds of gigabytes of footage, basically an entire game's playthrough before commentary. It's made me want to just abandon the project, but I don't know. I'll keep trying.

I'm about out of things to say. I'm doing good, just barely. I'm going to take this time to shill HorizonXI to anyone who may be reading but hasn't played it. Ever since I've given Final Fantasy XI a good sit down and try, I've been in love with it. It's got such an interesting, charming, strange, funky setting. The worldbuilding, though simple in some places, is jus extremely captivating. The gameplay is extremely engaging for being a laid back, slow classic MMO. It is the peak of the Post-EQ, Pre-WoW MMO space, and an actual masterclass of the sub-genre. The subjob system and ways that gear influence your character lead to an extremely deep variety of builds and gameplay experiences. HorizonXI is a FFXI private server, free to play, that aims to emulate the game as it was during its peak (when the level cap was still 75). If you're interested at all in weird old online spaces, please check the game out.

I'll leave y'all with a song that has pretty much summed up my lived experience for the past couple months. I don't know where to go, what to do, and baby, I don't know when I'm supposed to stop.