Holiday Preparations

I just spent most of the last three days cleaning my apartment. Got everything sorted out, finally, before I sat down to write this post following my post-cleaning shower (I tend to break out pretty bad if I don’t shower right away after doing all the vacuuming and similar dust-disturbing chores). My apartment is clean, tomorrow is a holiday, and I have zero time-sensitive obligations. I’m on my own for Thanksgiving this year, but that’s fine. I’ve had practice the past few and this means I can eat whenever I want, don’t have to get out of my pajamas, and can mix up the mashed potatoes with a bunch of little extras just the way I liked it. It also means I’m going to have a boatload of turkey since I bought a turkey breast (bone-in) and then a frozen boneless turkey breast as a backup in case I mess up the bone-in one. I usually do ham because it’s easier and doesn’t require the delicate finagling that a whole turkey demands, but I figured I’d just do a more simple version of turkey this year.

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Vaccines and Convenient Healthcare

Today, after many delays due to scheduling issues, not being able to handle downtime from potential side-effects, and being just too tired and out of spoons to handle anything other than what I absolutely had to do in a day, I’m finally getting my second booster shot of the Covid vaccine. I was eligible a while ago, but I’d wanted to wait for the much-touted version to come out since it had proven effective against the strains of the spring and summer, but now I’m wondering if the current strains of the virus have mutated so much that we’re going to need a whole ‘nother booster to be as effective at countering them. I went to do some research, since that’s usually what I do with questions like this, but I discovered it had gotten difficult to find information that talked about vaccines and the pandemic as an on-going concern. In fact, the manipulation of SEO meant that I had to scroll a few pages down to find anything useful that wasn’t about economics or how the current administration in the US is to blame for how tired people are of the pandemic and so on.

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The Latest Pokémon Game Comes With A Whole New Collection Of Fan Complaints

I played a lot of the new Pokémon game over the weekend. I picked up the Violet version of the game, agonized briefly over my starter (I wound up going with Fuecoco because his adorable empty head felt very aspirational to me as I struggled my way through the side-effects of my Covid booster), came to despise the rival-type character for her constant condescension, and got lost in exploration. I wound up collecting about 160 Pokémon in my play over the weekend and only a single badge. After all, I was too busy losing myself in classes, sandwich-based picnics, and the intricacies of locating new Pokémon to bother with pursuing badges, titans, or the downfall of Team Star (who mostly seem harmless so far). Plus, I found myself resisting my usual level of immersion and drive after spending most of the day the game came out reading about performance issues, visual glitches, and the sundry other complaints it feels like the most vocal people on the internet have raised against this game, Game Freak, and Nintendo in general. Even after several hours of play, I still feel trepidatious about investing myself in the game given all the negativity I’ve seen online. Maybe I’ve just gotten lucky, so far?

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You Don’t Need To Hit The Ground To Know What Will Happen When You Fall

Last night, I engaged in a choatic bacchanal during what some alleged might be the final hours of Twitter’s life. Of course, the site is still up this morning and I don’t think most people truly believed the website was going to abruptly vanish at some point. It was (and still is) pretty clear that Twitter is going to diminish and fade into obscurity or diminish and transform into something else, just like every other social media site that has fallen by the wayside over the years. After all, it’s not like MySpace is entirely unavailable, it’s just irrelevant. Things on the internet tend to not vanish completely so much as fade from public reckoning or change so completely that they’re actively abandoned. Thus far, neither has entirely happened yet, but last night marked the end of an era as, if the reports prove true in coming days, most of Twitter’s employees have left the company.

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It Doesn’t Count As Resting If You Do All Your Normal Work

Today is a holiday in the US. As is typical of many “ancient” and “traditional” US holidays, it has a bit of a troubled history. But, as a low-end white-collar worker buried in debt and being slowly ground to dust by the cogs of capitalism, I’m going to just enjoy a day off that doesn’t eat up one of my precious days of PTO. I’m also not going to have any kind of blog update beyond this one because I’m tired, I’ve got food to cook for myself, I thought it might be fun to just, you know, rest. I’ll be back with normal blog stuff tomorrow, but the post I wrote to post today is actually going to cover the post I would have written today so expect some additional thoughts on the latest God of War game in another seven days.

(In)Adequate Staffing In The Workplace

I think a lot about the way that workplaces are staffed. My previous job specifically hired people who hadn’t worked anywhere else and then basically ground then into dust for way too little pay, relying on quantity to make up for a lack of quality (specifically to rely on the quanitity of employees to make up for the lack of quality training they gave to those entry-level employees). Some people thrived in that environment and some people, myself included, did not because they didn’t fit in perfectly. My current job tends to work very hard to avoid getting rid of employees but seems to be struggling with figuring out how to retain employees, especially young-ish ones. At thirty one, I’m one of the youngest people on my team and, until this week, at almost six years, had worked at the company for the shortest amount of time. Throw in a bunch of horror stories about working at Amazon facilities, coffee shops, university systems (to name a few high-profile employers who have achieved a level of notoriety thanks to the recent surge of labor violations on their parts and the resulting union drives) and I’ve got a lot of different data about what it’s like to work for an employer that has staffing issues.

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The Question of Humanity and Cyberpunk 2077

I beat Cyberpunk 2077 last weekend. Managed to accident my way into the secret version of the final questline as well, which was interesting considering it was the result of decision paralysis and the need to do my laundry that made me take the correct steps to unlock it. I wound up going back to play through a few different options for the final quest just to see what else was out there since the choices I made left me feeling a little sad given the way the game ends. Still, I don’t think I really expected it to end any other way. It’s a cyberpunk story. They rarely end neatly or happily.

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Election Reflection as Things Stay Mostly Blue in 2022

A week later and most of the election results are in. The heavily gerrymandered places represent huge miscarriages of democracy and, for the most part, weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they’d be in my home state of Wisconsin. I will say that it sucks to see so many people disparraging my state for leaning so heavily toward the facists without considering the fact that more than fifty percent of the population voted for democratic candidates and still wound up with barely a third of the seats in the state government. Which, you know, has been the case for about the last four or more years now (I really can’t remember when the gerrymandering happened, but it feels like forever ago).

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