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Sick Days; Long Weekend; FF XIV
Jun. 24th, 2024 09:00 am I had an impromptu four-day weekend due to a summer cold, which are never fun. It started out with a cough that got worse over the week. By Thursday, I figured I was sick enough to take the day off -- but not so sick I couldn't take care of a few home projects that day.
So I finished folding up the laundry and took care of a few other things, but kept getting worse through the day. Friday was a "real" sick day; I was so cotton-headed and miserable I doubt I would have been able to do much good. I ended up sleeping a lot and playing Final Fantasy XIV as much as I could -- that carried me through the rest of the weekend.
We hosted Hyena-Pup and Book-Pup on Saturday evening; HP's husband is off to CO for a family visit, and it had been a while since BP had come over. We showed them Monty Python and the Holy Grail and an episode of 30 Coins, played a few Jackbox games. It was a fun time, though I slept through half of it on the quarantine couch. On Sunday, Sneppers, HP, and I visited a tiger and antlered-fox for beer; Ratty was feeling under the weather by then, and overall he didn't have a great weekend, poor thing.
There were two D&D games in there. On Friday, Sneppers ran Witchlight, which saw us to the final realm of Yon. There we met up with a shadowless elf, a rapier-wielding flower and his giant-bee paramour; after we established that we, too, would like to see the hag taken down once and for all we decided to join up and take care of things. At this point, my character is the last PC who needs to get back what was stolen (his sense of fashion), but I haven't minded this at all. We met a group of korreds and they taught me a special dance to control their hair! It was...delightfully strange. :)
Antler-Fox ran his homebrew campaign Saturday afternoon, where Ratty's ancient Gold Dragon friend told us we weren't ready for the particular fight ahead and it might be best to gather allies. So we happened upon a couple of jackalopes from previous adventures and decided to help them with their quest. Since Modrons were trying to stop us, they used Lair actions to reconfigure the entire lab so the room we needed kept shifting down corridors and the like. Very clever idea that, I think, didn't get as much use as AF would have liked.
I'm feeling...better than I have in a little while, overall. Sneppers' vacation was a nice respite for me as well, somehow, though I think the two days off last week might have had something to do with that. I've also been doing a lot of cathartic crying through Final Fantasy XIV, which I never thought would happen. I've finished Shadowbringers, the third of (soon) five expansions for the main game. In the story, my character -- the Warrior of Light -- had been summoned to an alternate world called the First, where an apocalypse has bathed the realm in eternal light. Creatures made out of light-stuff (here, everything is made of Aether energy, and that aether can be shaded by different "elements", like light) are attacking the survivors, who are torn apart from the inside by Light and then become more "Sin Eaters". The person who summoned my character also summoned my companions, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn (I know), completely by accident. That summoning snagged their aether, but not their bodies, which have been comatose back in the main world (called The Source).
We saved the First, of course, but the Scions' connections to their bodies are fraying with time. It took some doing, but we finally figured out a way to bring them back intact. That work dove-tailed quite surprisingly with the "true" end of the story, so there were big sacrifices and all kinds of weepy goodbyes. Now that we're back in the Source, the Scions are using the lessons they've learned in the First to work miracles back home. The first such miracle is curing people who've been...effectively driven mad by god-spirits called Primals. Even when the Primal is defeated, their worshippers are permanently-altered. Or so we thought!
Curing the first creature that had been turned was...the payoff to a long story, and something I honestly never thought would happen. But seeing this adorable little dude speak for the first time in (game time) years just broke something inside of me and I found myself weeping real tears of happiness over an MMO. It's not the first time XIV has got me in my feels like that, and it sure won't be the last.
It's such a special game. <3 I've never played anything quite like it; the story, the developers, and the community have all rallied around each other in this truly beautiful way. If any other MMO doesn't have at *least* one of these elements down better than XIV, I don't think I could be interested for very long.
Sneppers has taken up cleaning the kitchen after I cook, which is awesome. Today I woke up and walked out to an empty sink and clean counter -- and I didn't realize that the dirty dishes were a kind of pressure on my brain until it was lifted.
It sucks that I have to learn these lessons -- clean environment is a less-stressful one! -- over and over again. But that means they sink in a little deeper every time I re-learn them, right?
So I finished folding up the laundry and took care of a few other things, but kept getting worse through the day. Friday was a "real" sick day; I was so cotton-headed and miserable I doubt I would have been able to do much good. I ended up sleeping a lot and playing Final Fantasy XIV as much as I could -- that carried me through the rest of the weekend.
We hosted Hyena-Pup and Book-Pup on Saturday evening; HP's husband is off to CO for a family visit, and it had been a while since BP had come over. We showed them Monty Python and the Holy Grail and an episode of 30 Coins, played a few Jackbox games. It was a fun time, though I slept through half of it on the quarantine couch. On Sunday, Sneppers, HP, and I visited a tiger and antlered-fox for beer; Ratty was feeling under the weather by then, and overall he didn't have a great weekend, poor thing.
There were two D&D games in there. On Friday, Sneppers ran Witchlight, which saw us to the final realm of Yon. There we met up with a shadowless elf, a rapier-wielding flower and his giant-bee paramour; after we established that we, too, would like to see the hag taken down once and for all we decided to join up and take care of things. At this point, my character is the last PC who needs to get back what was stolen (his sense of fashion), but I haven't minded this at all. We met a group of korreds and they taught me a special dance to control their hair! It was...delightfully strange. :)
Antler-Fox ran his homebrew campaign Saturday afternoon, where Ratty's ancient Gold Dragon friend told us we weren't ready for the particular fight ahead and it might be best to gather allies. So we happened upon a couple of jackalopes from previous adventures and decided to help them with their quest. Since Modrons were trying to stop us, they used Lair actions to reconfigure the entire lab so the room we needed kept shifting down corridors and the like. Very clever idea that, I think, didn't get as much use as AF would have liked.
I'm feeling...better than I have in a little while, overall. Sneppers' vacation was a nice respite for me as well, somehow, though I think the two days off last week might have had something to do with that. I've also been doing a lot of cathartic crying through Final Fantasy XIV, which I never thought would happen. I've finished Shadowbringers, the third of (soon) five expansions for the main game. In the story, my character -- the Warrior of Light -- had been summoned to an alternate world called the First, where an apocalypse has bathed the realm in eternal light. Creatures made out of light-stuff (here, everything is made of Aether energy, and that aether can be shaded by different "elements", like light) are attacking the survivors, who are torn apart from the inside by Light and then become more "Sin Eaters". The person who summoned my character also summoned my companions, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn (I know), completely by accident. That summoning snagged their aether, but not their bodies, which have been comatose back in the main world (called The Source).
We saved the First, of course, but the Scions' connections to their bodies are fraying with time. It took some doing, but we finally figured out a way to bring them back intact. That work dove-tailed quite surprisingly with the "true" end of the story, so there were big sacrifices and all kinds of weepy goodbyes. Now that we're back in the Source, the Scions are using the lessons they've learned in the First to work miracles back home. The first such miracle is curing people who've been...effectively driven mad by god-spirits called Primals. Even when the Primal is defeated, their worshippers are permanently-altered. Or so we thought!
Curing the first creature that had been turned was...the payoff to a long story, and something I honestly never thought would happen. But seeing this adorable little dude speak for the first time in (game time) years just broke something inside of me and I found myself weeping real tears of happiness over an MMO. It's not the first time XIV has got me in my feels like that, and it sure won't be the last.
It's such a special game. <3 I've never played anything quite like it; the story, the developers, and the community have all rallied around each other in this truly beautiful way. If any other MMO doesn't have at *least* one of these elements down better than XIV, I don't think I could be interested for very long.
Sneppers has taken up cleaning the kitchen after I cook, which is awesome. Today I woke up and walked out to an empty sink and clean counter -- and I didn't realize that the dirty dishes were a kind of pressure on my brain until it was lifted.
It sucks that I have to learn these lessons -- clean environment is a less-stressful one! -- over and over again. But that means they sink in a little deeper every time I re-learn them, right?
