Things Happening in Fall 2025
Oct. 3rd, 2025 09:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freshfeelingThis is probably the most blog-like post this blog has ever had thus far.
There are some things that have been happening that are impacting me quite a bit, as well as the state of this site and my ability to play games, and I thought I'd just comment on some of it. Maybe we can all consider this a form of venting.
First of all, I work at a college in Ontario, Canada. Right now, the college support staff are on strike, and this is having a rather nasty impact on myself and other people I care about. It's an odd situation where the root cause is a lack of funding - which you could reasonably say is caused by our provincial government. You can also go ahead and blame the federal government, since they more-or-less quashed international student recruitment as a supplementary revenue stream. Thus, this whole issue is very much a non-partisan thing, since it's all levels and multiple parties causing the problems. The root causes of the strike absolutely cannot be addressed without revisiting the funding model so it's rough, as strikes go. My friend GamerDad talked about it nicely here.
Part of what this strike action is doing is causing issues with me getting to work. Getting into the office is taking roughly an extra hour daily. I still have to parent, so I can't "gain time" by going to work early, and I still have to run my household and/or take kids to extracurriculars when I get home. So what's going to give? Either the quality of my work, the quantity of my sleep, or my flexible time. So far it's a mixture but all of it is leaving me in a very unpleasant state. I have things I want to do, like programming projects related to variant runs (like the monster party) that I can't find the time for, and I generally feel like I'm running on empty.
Summarizing the above, the first thing that's happening is, due to local politics, I'm feeling crappy and have no free time. There's no clear end in sight but it will very likely wrap up before the end of 2025.
The next thing that's been happening lately is Imgur has gotten stupider. The auto-moderation got out of hand about a month ago and the users sort of protested, and things weren't looking good for the site. A fair number of users were leaving, although things seemed to settle in the last few weeks. Then, more recently, in response to a UK privacy law, Imgur stopped serving images to the UK entirely. I sort of knew the site was a sinking ship but this is sort of a breaking point for me.
Every gameplay image on this site to date - probably around 1500 images - is currently hosted on Imgur (yet another idea I more-or-less yoinked from sirsystemerror). At some point when I can manage the time, I'm going to be gradually migrating everything to a new platform. I think I've picked the one I'm going to go with but I won't name it here since (a) it could still change and (b) that platform will probably be enshittified eventually, too. Regardless, it'll take some time to get this site reorganized and hopefully still show images to people in different parts of the world.
Anyway... what is next?
The Final Fantasy Tactics remaster came out this week and I've got my copy but haven't started yet. When I can, I'm going to play it, but I'm not going to stream it mostly because of the aforementioned time constraints. My intent is to play a M4RM/O4RM variant, off the bat! I'll still document that but without video. It might be on the slow side... but honestly, probably still not as slow as my last Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough!
I hope I'll be able to do some other variant thing before the year is out. The idea backlog continues to grow.
Although it isn't variant play, I think I might also do a little write-up of some of the other games I've spent any substantial time with since the image transfer from the Switch 2 actually seems kind of dope. This year I've played a bunch of Mario Kart World, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and mostly recently, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line.
There are some things that have been happening that are impacting me quite a bit, as well as the state of this site and my ability to play games, and I thought I'd just comment on some of it. Maybe we can all consider this a form of venting.
First of all, I work at a college in Ontario, Canada. Right now, the college support staff are on strike, and this is having a rather nasty impact on myself and other people I care about. It's an odd situation where the root cause is a lack of funding - which you could reasonably say is caused by our provincial government. You can also go ahead and blame the federal government, since they more-or-less quashed international student recruitment as a supplementary revenue stream. Thus, this whole issue is very much a non-partisan thing, since it's all levels and multiple parties causing the problems. The root causes of the strike absolutely cannot be addressed without revisiting the funding model so it's rough, as strikes go. My friend GamerDad talked about it nicely here.
Part of what this strike action is doing is causing issues with me getting to work. Getting into the office is taking roughly an extra hour daily. I still have to parent, so I can't "gain time" by going to work early, and I still have to run my household and/or take kids to extracurriculars when I get home. So what's going to give? Either the quality of my work, the quantity of my sleep, or my flexible time. So far it's a mixture but all of it is leaving me in a very unpleasant state. I have things I want to do, like programming projects related to variant runs (like the monster party) that I can't find the time for, and I generally feel like I'm running on empty.
Summarizing the above, the first thing that's happening is, due to local politics, I'm feeling crappy and have no free time. There's no clear end in sight but it will very likely wrap up before the end of 2025.
The next thing that's been happening lately is Imgur has gotten stupider. The auto-moderation got out of hand about a month ago and the users sort of protested, and things weren't looking good for the site. A fair number of users were leaving, although things seemed to settle in the last few weeks. Then, more recently, in response to a UK privacy law, Imgur stopped serving images to the UK entirely. I sort of knew the site was a sinking ship but this is sort of a breaking point for me.
Every gameplay image on this site to date - probably around 1500 images - is currently hosted on Imgur (yet another idea I more-or-less yoinked from sirsystemerror). At some point when I can manage the time, I'm going to be gradually migrating everything to a new platform. I think I've picked the one I'm going to go with but I won't name it here since (a) it could still change and (b) that platform will probably be enshittified eventually, too. Regardless, it'll take some time to get this site reorganized and hopefully still show images to people in different parts of the world.
Anyway... what is next?
The Final Fantasy Tactics remaster came out this week and I've got my copy but haven't started yet. When I can, I'm going to play it, but I'm not going to stream it mostly because of the aforementioned time constraints. My intent is to play a M4RM/O4RM variant, off the bat! I'll still document that but without video. It might be on the slow side... but honestly, probably still not as slow as my last Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough!
I hope I'll be able to do some other variant thing before the year is out. The idea backlog continues to grow.
Although it isn't variant play, I think I might also do a little write-up of some of the other games I've spent any substantial time with since the image transfer from the Switch 2 actually seems kind of dope. This year I've played a bunch of Mario Kart World, Xenoblade Chronicles X, and mostly recently, Theatrhythm Final Bar Line.
