Hello! It has been a while since my last post and I once again want to say thank you to anyone who has been reading anything on the site. I really hope that what I produced previously has been helpful for someone and I feel really grateful that people have been coming onto the site and viewing pages.
I have decided that I want to do something different with this site. When I originally started writing I wanted to try and approach topics surrounding autism looking at it from a personal, professional and academic standpoint to try and come up with something new to say. I started this just after I had left my job as a doctor and so I think I needed something to make that transition feel worthwhile. Being able to write about my experiences was cathartic and provided this feeling. Taking an evidence-based approach to my writing allowed me to start analysing academic papers again, which was good fun. Ultimately, this led me to finding my next job opportunity working as a systematic reviewer, a job that I just love.
That being said, this job is pretty taxing mentally. Systematic reviews require a lot of planning, reading, data extraction and manipulation (meaning loads of calculations), followed up by presenting results. These things require a lot of energy, and so I’m pretty tired. Due to this I haven’t really written anything on here for a while. However, I really enjoy writing and I have wanted to do something with this site so I can have some fun.
The last post I made was about my experiences with gaming and how that shaped my life (to an extent this was the swan song of my previous approach). I love gaming, and in particular I love the Final Fantasy series having played it for most of my life. It has had a huge role in my development as a person, being something I would learn lessons from as a kid and something I come back to again and again to learn more, and generally just have fun with. In the summer of last year I took part in the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta event, which was great fun and a great way of using my game playing for something good.
One of the things that I didn’t anticipate happening when I started this site was the creation of Darni. I have always loved the Red Mage job in the Final Fantasy series (for many reasons that I’ll write about at another point) and when I started doing a bit more drawing I produced a drawing of what became Darni and loved it. Darni as a character existed with me for years in different forms, but bringing it together with the Red Mage job brought something special to it. I started putting images up about Darni and other people seemed to like it too and that was really nice.
Bringing together all of these points, what I have found is that I want to write but I don’t think I can manage to do anything too mentally taxing, as I don’t have the space for it at the moment. Therefore, what I want to do is talk about gaming more, and in particular Final Fantasy. My plan on how I am going to do this is through doing game challenges designed around Red Mages. While not every game has a Red Mage class, I think that a lot of them can be messed around with to make characters into pseudo-Red Mages (including the first game that I am going to try this with, Final Fantasy VI). I have lots of ideas for this (and have writing up protocols and things like that, it’s been pretty fun).
How am I going to write about this? My plan is to do a slow and laid back playthrough of the game using the challenge rules and write about my experiences. I may go more into the lore of the game. I will mostly certainly share my frustration when things are not going well (as they inevitably will – Red Mages are versatile but inevitably suffer at the later portions of any game, something that the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta highlighted perfectly). But either way I just want to document my adventure and share what happened.
If you have been reading for the previous content, I’m sorry I can’t bring you more right now. I will be keeping all of the previous posts and I will have a section that links back to them if that is something of interest. But if you want to stay around and follow the adventure, then I would be thrilled to see you.
Thank you very much for reading and hope you have a fantastic day!
Red Mage Darni 