#albatrosities

[thalassarche]

About loving something so much for so long that the chance to share it with someone reignites a great joy within you. Or something along those lines.

I have re-emerged. Again. Here, to this space that I still occupy, despite having focused so much of my attention elsewhere. I keep saying I'll spend more time here and then I don't.

And I got a lot to yap about. It's about fandom things that I am excited about, so it's all good stuff, so no need to be concerned about anything bad happening in my life. It's not bad. It's just gonna be long. Okay, so, here's the deal.

I play FFXIV, the second MMO Final Fantasy. I love FFXIV. I love my Warrior of Light that I made, I love the story from A Realm Reborn through Dawntrail and I am extremely hyped about Evercold launching Winter 2027. I love the battle encounters and raids, I love the people I meet in the game and through playing the game, I love fishing in the game, fishing is honestly an important part of all of this in a weird way. I'm gonna write about this in a way that I hope is accessible for the people who are not familiar with XIV specifically so if you do know there'll be a lot of basics here. Anyway, it's fun. It's where I spend a lot of my free time.

(It's Zin! She's a Dark Knight most of the time, because I have been in my tanking era.) I attended GATEway FATE, a FFXIV+other FFs fan convention held in St. Louis, this past October. I got to meet several of my XIV friends in person for the first time, and also met a lot of new ones, while doing such things as learning how to play riichi mahjong, finally getting to say hi to someone I met playing the game who is a professional voice actor and was a guest of honor at the con, getting abruptly introduced to one of the vocalists for some of my favorite XIV songs, and also attending a Final Fantasy themed drag show. It was great, cannot wait for this year, if you like XIV and want a great convention to go to, go to GATEway FATE.

One of the new friends I met at GwF later asked in a mutual discord server if anyone wanted to do TEA with them. TEA is The Epic of Alexander, a reimagining of a previous raid series about the steampunky primal of time, in the format of a marathon-level highest possible difficulty single-instance raid encounter: an Ultimate. I said...sure, if it's okay that I only have one Ultimate under my belt, UWU (Ultima Weapon Ultimate). TEA was actually the first Ultimate I had ever stepped into, back when I was being trialed for the raid static I was in at the beginning of Dawntrail, they threw me into the first phase of TEA to see how I learned mechanics. I had cleared that different Ultimate first, but I really wanted to go back to TEA and give it a serious clear attempt.

(The majesty of Perfect Alexander.)

I was taken on into the static for TEA! I studied hard. I laughed myself to tears at the dumb jokes we made, and how funny it was to do dollskip where you utterly disrespect one of the phase 1 mechanics by just doing a lot of damage really fast before you get killed for your disrespect. I held my breath at time stop. I respected Stillness. In the space of a month, we had cleared TEA. One of the best times I've ever had doing content in XIV.

(My screenshot of the clear screen cutscene message when we cleared TEA.)

My lovely new friend, Em, then said that their raid static was looking for a tank for the upcoming savage tier and would I be interested. Having gone through my static disbanding after our first clear in the first tier, and trying to clear through Party Finder going so poorly in the second tier that I stopped halfway through and went to clear UWU instead, I was very down to join a static, especially one that had them in it.

The static? Has been wonderful. We've cleared the Arcadion, I had an absolute blast cotanking with my dear new friend, the rest of the static is great, I love making new friends and I love playing the game with them.

(This is us, having cleared M12S! I bet you can pick out Zin in here!)

So it turns out at one point before I came along, Em had expressed that they wished to experience the stories of the earlier Final Fantasies but personally struggle to engage with turn-based combat. Another staticmate, Caly, had been playing the games for them via discord stream, and the two of them took turns voicing characters as he played. They were finishing up FF4 when I joined in. I said that I would love to play FF6 when it came time for that one because it's my favorite FF game, and I owned the Pixel Remaster but hadn't played the game in a very long time. They said there were plans to do FF13 series next but after that, yeah!

Then the FFXIV dev team dropped the teaser for the next Ultimate fight.

Kefka.

He had been a boss in a raid tier several expansions ago, as a "creation" of the Omega Weapon (so not like, a full on crossover event, more like a manifestation of a character from a story that an alien robot heard about...XIV lore is great). Sigmascape 4.0 was before my time in raiding, which I have always regretted, because they did an amazing job translating the SNES origins of the FF6 Kefka fight into modern MMO design, with an utterly incredible transition to the final stage that pans up the statues as the skybox turns golden, and God Kefka descends.

(Seriously, look at this final stage cutscene transition. I bet if you know it, you hear the ascending organ notes in your head.)

Well, it turns out, the dev who designed that fight felt like he could do even better than he'd done back during Sigmascape, he loved the fight but wanted to really give it what it was worth, and Yoshi-P (the P stands for Producer) said okay then, let's see it, give us a Kefka Ultimate.

Dancing Mad Ultimate, or UMAD as the playerbase is rightfully calling it, debuts Tuesday, June 2nd.

In light of this, we decided to move up our FF6 playthrough. So for the past....month or so? I have been streaming it one or two days a week, voicing characters along with Em and Caly. And the experience of getting to share something that is this important, this beloved, this deeply woven into my experience as a person who regularly engages with fiction? Yeah, it reignited how much I fucking love this game.

I love it so fucking much.

Sometimes you experience a piece of fiction when you are 11 years old that you do not fully understand but it takes hold of you and becomes utterly foundational to your experience with fiction from that point forward.

Sometimes it makes you understand a whole lot more about yourself in the process.

I'm deeply loving this revival because I can go digging around for all the fanworks that I simply didn't pay enough heed to enjoy in the time since I last connected with this. I'm also, well, making fanworks myself!

Which is also to say that I have revived my writing for it, a fic that has it origins in writing done in a five-lined notebook during free time at the end of class when I was in middle school. A fic that existed in some form or fashion on LiveJournal, Fanfiction.net, and AO3. A true Ship of Theseus of which only the outlines remain of its original form, and am writing all over again, so fervently that I am staying up late writing, I am sneaking breaks at work to write on my phone, I have not had this much fun writing in too long and it's great.

I am enjoying myself so much. Sharing something you love and having it also be loved is such a powerful human experience.

Em loves Locke, too. You always hold your breath hoping your friend will like some of the same things that you love most about your beloved thing, and I really hoped she would at least like him. Well, when we hit the backstory sequence in Kohlingen, Em lost it. Straight up laughing on the call for like a minute straight. It turns out several of their absolute favorite tropes are on display in Locke's story, and they were utterly delighted to find them here in this story.

We haven't quite finished the game. We're in the second half, we've assembled most of the crew, the Phoenix Cave remains unvisited, and we will not finish before the UMAD World First Race begins, which is a shame, but they will be busy helping to track and cast for the race, so that sort of takes precedent.

By the way. If you're MMO World First races at all, or play XIV and are curious about it, please consider watching the race via Mogtalk! They're doing a charity stream with a lot of incredible incentives, two of my staticmates will be casting (Em is one of them!) as well as a good friend of mine, Mr. Fruity Snacks himself, the one who got me to GATEway FATE in the first place and was the small domino on this whole chain of me being here writing this post, also he's deeply involved in the XIV fishing community so that's why I said fishing was important. I gotta thank that guy some more.

(The excellent trailer for the Mogtalk coverage.)

I am so excited for this Ultimate and for when I eventually step into it myself. (It’ll be a while, after the strats have been worked out, because I do not believe myself to be up for bleeding edge Ulti prog).

I am so excited to be loving FF6 so actively again.

And I'm going to continue writing. Because I love this story and I love Celes and Locke and I love being able to share what I love and have loved for so long.

If you got this far: thanks. Really neat of you to read all this. Especially when I've been barely-present at best over here and a lot of you probably followed me because I used to post birds a lot.

(I'm most active on my xiv-specific bsky account, disesteem.bsky.social, if you wanna check me out there.)

Anyway. Love the things that you love, and sometimes you get to share them with someone else who will love them too.

Also that one load-bearing Reddit post from three years ago about what an Ultimate is like now needs a revision to +1.

[thalassarche]

So yeah, hi. I'm still around. Anyone got any book recs?

[thalassarche]

So, I'm sleepless at 1am and I'm tired and I'm upset so I'm going to get out the shit that has been going on for me the past month and a half, because it keeps leaking out in tags and I guess maybe I should not do that. This is going to be long and it's a huge bummer. I just don't feel like I can come out and talk about it directly to anyone because it is indeed a huge bummer and I just. can't deal with like. the feeling of unloading this on someone and then what. but throwing it into the tumblr void and hiding it behind cuts feels less like I'm throwing a bunch of gross stuff at someone's feet so like, yeah. Content warnings for uh, facing the mortality of aging parents, the American healthcare system being a fucking nightmare, mentions of strokes, infections, and other huge medical problems, and basically stuff being awful.

I have lived with my mom as her caregiver for the past three years, since losing my job during covid. She is six years in remission from breast cancer, diabetic, and in end stage renal failure, meaning her kidneys don't work and she needs hemodialysis 3 days a week. I came in mostly to do things like shopping, the majority of cooking and cleaning, be present in case of falls, things like that. It's worked out, mostly. It sucks that she had to move to AZ to live near her brother simply due to the fact that her cozy little house in MT that she got remodeled to her needs has no dialysis centers within an hour's drive and the closest ones had no open seats anyway, not even for a summer stay, because of the nationwide nursing and technician shortage in healthcare. So she lives in AZ and goes to dialysis 10 minutes away. It works out, sorta. But. Since August 1st:

she had a stroke, which affected the language centers of her brain and made speech, writing, and complex communication difficult

she spent a week in neuro ICU for follow up; this was at a hospital 20 miles away in Phoenix. yes I drove there every day to see her.

she was transferred to a rehabilitation center after that week, where she had several good days but then started to experience severe lower back pain.

the back pain got so severe that she was crying and even screaming when being helped into/out of bed, or having the head of the bed elevated so she could eat.

myself and her other present family were very upset about this, because she was in pain! and also it was preventing progress in her PT/OT after the stroke! we wanted them to do something and find out what was going on!

an xray was done. "no significant findings."

we asked for a CT scan or MRI if an xray found nothing.

it didn't happen. maybe insurance said no, maybe assumptions were made that it wasn't necessary.

but mom spent the rest of her 15 days at that rehab facility on tylenol and then oxycodone.

she was then discharged, and yet in no state to come home.

we found a short-term care facility for her that she'd actually stayed at after her initial ER stay that discovered her renal failure. we thought that she'd do okay there.

she didn't. she declined. she was still in severe pain. MWF for her dialysis, she was basically just, done. and they had scheduled her dialysis at 6am. so. the day was just over, no ability for therapy.

they still just gave her oxycodone so even on good days she was sleeping a lot and very out of it.

we asked to speak to the physician and her case worker. we were not able to.

we asked for her to get further testing instead of just this pattern of throwing narcotics at her and watching her decline. it didn't happen.

at the end of her second week there, she was becoming less responsive and more inclined to just sleep.

she wasn't eating. I tried so hard to encourage her to eat, I even fed her. she still would eat a few bites and then be uninterested in more.

one day she only ate a cup of yogurt.

then she was so badly out of it and barely responsive that I demanded that they do something. so they gave her narcan. because maybe she was too lost in the oxycodone sauce. didn't help, they gave her more. didn't help. they called EMTs.

she ended up in the ER, where they did a CT, MRI, and bloodwork.

(this was a week ago)

turns out she has an infection in her spine. which is osteomyelitis, an infection in the bone and bone marrow that just constantly hurts. oh also numerous pressure sores, including a bad one on her heel, and a bad one on her lower back. either could have introduced the infection into her spine.

that infection has spread to her blood. yeah she's got sepsis.

she also has had at least one additional stroke and her speech has degraded even further.

she spent several days in the ICU and it was very touch and go.

it is still very touch-and-go but she's now in progressive care (pcu) which is a downgrade from ICU in terms of how serious.

but yeah. sepsis is very dangerous for young and relatively healthy people. she is 74. her diabetes means her healing is very slow. her renal failure means that her system can't handle a heavy load of antibiotics so they have to be given more spaced out and in lower doses.

it. sucks.

I still go to see her every day and talk to her even if she's not responding. I sing songs she knows. I put on videos of the church services in her hometown for her to listen to. - it. sucks. so. much.

oh yeah also her place here in AZ is in a retirement park and I can only be here because she resides here. so if something happens even in terms of her moving her permanent residence elsewhere I can't stay here.

I have no income I basically just lived here with her and she covered my expenses as my pay for being her caregiver. so like. looks at the potential need to get independent housing, looks at bank account with $30 in it, laughs darkly and decides I can't think about that.

besides I need to think about how this could be the last time I have left with my mom.

it. sucks.

[thalassarche]

Actually new birds photos in the queue now, themed on Valentine’s Day! So of course I started with bleeding heart doves.

[thalassarche]

I fully intend to put some more New Birds in the queue rather than dig through my many years' worth of already-posted birds, but the holidays, you know? Anyway, new birds will be on the way, please look forward to it, and if you have requests you are quite welcome to make them!

[thalassarche]

Hi, if you're here from Twitter, this is RareBird, aka Zin from FFXIV, I really like birds and I also just dusted this thing off after three years of not using it, so I'm a little untidy around here. Expect bird content and FFXIV content and also Pokémon content since I'm playing Violet right now. I don't know if I'll do the birdposting the way I used to do it, but I've got a ton of stuff I can reblog out of my own archives that are always worth seeing again. Like the roulroul. And the satanic nightjars. Also, some gila woodpeckers keep raiding my hummingbird feeders and the Anna's hummingbirds are pissed and keep divebombing them over it, it's hilarious except that the woodpeckers keep spilling sugar-water all over and drain the feeders so friggin fast.

[thalassarche]

Thalassarche turned 11 today! Of course I get this after my return. JFC 11 years. Help.

[thalassarche]

Whoops, one slipped the queue early because I’m rusty at this, but yes, gearing up for a bunch of owls to celebrate Superb Owl Sunday. Hope y’all enjoy.