Well, we’re back in the shit again at work. Thankfully, that’s a collective “we” that actually has little to do with me and my current day-to-day, though there remains the chance that it will expand to include me as well [which has happened in the week since I wrote this, though mostly in a “you’re on your own for a bit, so don’t let any plates stop spinning” kind of way]. The crisis, such that it is, is technically another department’s crisis that has become ours as a result of what seems to be–from my moderately informed viewpoint–incredible mismanagement. I’ve been gone for two weeks and am swamped just trying to pick up from where I left off, so this new crisis that has overflowed into my department is not making it easy to figure out what the hell was going on with my project during the week anyone had attention to give it, all of which is made more difficult because the one tester who was covering this aspect of the project for me took a week off as well. By the time he gets back to work, I’ll have muddled through an entire work week without his information and whatever he knew before he left will likely be irrelevant thanks to the continued progress of this project [which is exactly how this has played out]. My only saving grace right now is that I know the project and my related testing equipment well enough that I don’t need to understand what has been going on to test the solutions for it. It’s not great, of course, but it’s all I’ve got right now and everyone else has been too busy to take the time I need to fill me in.
Continue readingMonth: July 2024
Lighting The Fires Of My Own Burnout
As a result of this past weekend’s tumult, I’ve noticed a habit in my life more starkly than ever before. I have, of course, been aware for years that I tend to deal with feeling poorly about myself or a loss of control in my life with some form of hard work. Either new projects to work on, an attempt to reassert control by just throwing myself at whatever is making me feel like I lack control, or just keeping myself working on a problem until it is solved rather than letting myself rest. This is not a new thing. What does seem new, at least to my eyes, is how pretty much everything I do comes down to this habit and how unhealthy that has gotten recently. I’ve always struggled with letting myself rest and with not taking on more work than I can handle, but I’d begun to work on doing less and punishing myself less for not doing everything I’d wanted to do in a day over the past two years, so I’d thought that I was making solid progress. Unfortunately, while I was making advancements in a few specific areas or with regards to a few specific cases (such as this blog and my personal projects), I’ve been losing ground elsewhere. The most easy examples are things I’ve written about recently. How stressed I made myself by doing what was, in retrospect, way too much work before I went on vacation. How I dropped all of my plans for two whole days to build my computer. Hell, I even spent my last week of my break pushing myself to get work done rather than letting myself actually continue to rest. Sure, all of this stuff is only as clearly over-the-top as it appears to be because I have the benefit of hindsight, but some time thinking and a therapy appointment have made it very clear that there were spots in all of those events where I should have stopped, all of which I recognized and then chose to ignore in the moment. Not only would I have been better off not doing as much work, but that nothing bad would have come of stopping to breathe or rest.
Continue readingLessons Learned While Building My New Computer
Last Friday, (two Fridays ago, as you’re reading this), the last of my computer parts (save the monitors) arrived and I began the laborious process of reading manuals, looking things up on the internet, and doing my best to put things together. I was confident that things would go better this time around (compared to my first computer build) since I’ve spent seven and a half years working at a job that involved a bunch of mechanical and electrical testing, so I’m much more familiar with how to put computers together than before. That, of course, overlooked the fact that I’m generally putting together devices that have a set list of parts that we already know work perfectly together and that my familiarity with the products my company makes gives me a very particular idea of what a computer’s interior should look like. An idea that doesn’t reflect a gaming computer much at all. Sure, I could easily find the ports on the motherboard I needed and I felt much more confident plugging in cables during this build compared to my first back in 2015, but I was still largely operating without being entirely certain that I was doing the right thing. All of which meant that I wound up missing something pretty important that meant my computer wouldn’t properly turn on once assembled and my incredible exhaustion (beyond the ability to make choices easily due to the anxiety of waiting for everything to arrive coupled with the fact that I only finished putting it all together almost six hours after I started, just before midnight) prevented me from seeing what I’d done wrong until I’d driven down to Chicago and paid a professional to take a look at it (ostensibly so I could just solve whatever the problem was an move on with my life, which is exactly what I wound up doing even if the problem was incredibly simple and kind of dumb).
Continue readingOur Second Day Of School In The Magical Millennium
After waiting another month, most of my group returned to playing The Magical Millennium. One of the players couldn’t make it again and another one vanished fairly quickly because they lost power about fifteen minutes after they joined the session, so there were only three of us for pretty much the whole session. This made getting through the group’s second day of magical class so much easier, since we only had to deal with three players instead of the original five. It also helped, of course, that we’d already done one day of school and were familiar with how the day would go. We were really set up for success. The only real event of note, since all the players wanted to keep their noses clean after the party just two days prior, was that the founder of the school–who also happened to be their homeroom teacher–introduced them to the concept of The Adventurer’s Guild and informed them that they were all licensed to operate within the guild under the auspices of the school’s membership. After that, the party started doing researching some jobs they could go on, to earn a little money and do their group homework assignment (go on An Adventure), but stopped short of actually picking one. We wanted the whole group to be there when any decision was made, so we opted to wait until the next session, when we’d actually be close to doing one of those adventures and would hopefully have our whole group of players able to attend.
Continue readingReflections On A Worthless Holiday
I’m writing this on the 4th of July. As some of you might know, either those in the US who pay attention to the workings of our government or those abroad who pay attention to at least the major events of US politics, there have been some US Supreme Court rulings that have happened in the last few days that are going to have enormous impacts on the US. While a lot of people on the internet seem to find it surprising or odd that the Supreme Court might recreate kings in the US while also hamstringing the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs in the week leading up to what is supposed to be a celebration of the US’s original declaration of independence from unjust rule, I find it pretty in-keeping with how the Supreme Court has acted in the years following the rise of the far-right in the US. I mean, it was only two years ago that they took down the right to abortion for absolutely no logical reason, also just before July 4th, and their entire history of actions and behaviors has shown not only a remarkable lack of self-reflection or knowledge of how they’re perceived by the wider public but an extreme and remarkable callous lack of regard for any of the ways our systems of governance used to work, much less actual history (as opposed to the fantastical history they make up to justify their actions). It’s discouraging to watch all this play out, especially as someone who has done what is within their limited power to work against this sort of this (calling senators and representatives, sending emails and letters, and trying to stay informed on local politics which will wind up setting the stage for national politics), so I’ve spent a lot of time this week just checked out of what’s going on in the news so I can preserve my sanity and try to get some amount of rest.
Continue readingNot Another D&D Podcast Is Worth Your Time
Of all the people I’ve ever talked to who got into the various tabletop gaming shows and podcasts created by ex-College Humor people (Such as Dimension 20 and Not Another D&D Podcast), I’m the only one who has followed my particular path. I’m sure there’s other people who have followed the same route given that there’s billions of other humans and millions of other people who fit into the same broad media categories that I do, but I’ve yet to find any despite keeping my eyes peeled. After all, most probably followed the various comedians or College Humor itself as it began to fracture in the collapse of the online advertising marketing (fomented, of course, by Facebook’s outright lies about video views), which makes sense! A lot of the modern Actual Play shows that quickly rose to prominence did so as a result of bringing an existing audience with them (one need not look further than Worlds Beyond Number for recent proof of this). I wasn’t really into the type of humor that College Humor relied on, though, and wasn’t really into internet comedians in general (and I’m still not, to be honest). They’re just not my thing. So I only discovered NADDPod (and through them the rest of the now DropoutTV network) three years ago, when they were about halfway through their second full campaign and I happened to stumble across a song from the finale of their first campaign on my Spotify Discover Weekly playlist.
Continue readingI Bought Myself A New Computer
I did not know spending a ton of money could be exhausting. I probably would have guessed as much if I’d really thought it through, but I didn’t and so the amount of sheer exhaustion I felt upon completing the last of my orders for new computer parts caught me by surprise. Mostly. I did set an entire day aside for planning out, researching, and then buying my new computer, so I clearly expected it to be a mentally arduous task. I just didn’t think that I’d have to fight my anxiety twice as I did it–first as I tried to figure out what parts I should buy and if they’d all work together properly and then second as I had to actually click the “place order” button in four different places. Once I was done, I wanted nothing more than to lay down on the floor in my apartment and do nothing for a couple hours. After all, between dealing with my apartment complex’s maintenance staff as they finished working on the leak in my closet and spending a bunch of money (that I’d set aside over the past year for explicitly this purpose), I’d done a lot of mental and emotional labor. I earned a rest. I earned some time laying down on the floor in an exhausted and unthinking heap. Instead of doing that, though, I ran some errands and did some laundry. Which is a lot like resting except for the parts where I was still doing stuff. Honestly, it was just nice to leave my apartment for a bit, before the next round of storms rolled through.
Continue readingPost-Vacation Stress Management
After taking a week away from life to rest up and try to recover from the soul-numbing burnout I was trapped in prior to my vacation, the main impression I’ve got is that it wasn’t nearly enough time. I was so exhausted and burned out that I couldn’t even feel tired and exhausted until the middle of the week. It took four days of rest to even begin to feel just how wrecked I was, mentally, emotionally, and physically. Now, another four days on from that, I’m still battling a deep and pervasive sense of exhaustion even as I’m forced to begin getting back to work. I mean, I could still take some time off to continue resting, but that would mean leaving things undone. I don’t think that’s in my best interest, especially given that I’m going to be walking into the second half of my project-based work-marathon the day this post actually goes up on my blog. After all, the stuff I’m doing this week is supposed to help with making that marathon easier on me, on top of finally doing a bunch of stuff that I’ve been putting off due to a lack of energy (like researching what the actual cost of a new computer will be, where to host my blog that won’t be more mentally taxing than I can afford in my daily spoon budget, and how to introduce more opportunities for in-person socializing). It’s all stuff that I will benefit from having done, but it’s difficult to convince myself to actually do it when I’m still so damn tired.
Continue readingBack To Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth Posting
One interesting factoid about social media is that far more accounts are created than are active at any given time. Most accounts will never post more than once or twice and most posts on social media are created by a relatively small number of uses. Something similar is true about video games, even if it’s often more difficult to observe or discover (or maybe I’m just following weird people on social media who talk about that stuff a lot and can get the numbers to back their assertion up): lots of people start but don’t finish video games. These days, that information is, if available at all, pretty easy to find since a lot of video games will have achievements of some kind (achievements, trophies, etc.) and a subset of achievements that are unlocked for completing sections of the game. You can go to your Steam profile and look at the global achievement numbers for a game you’ve played and while it absolutely doesn’t count every singe person who has played that game thanks to the proliferation of other sources for games, it still gives some interesting statistics about the people on the platform you’re using. Since useless statistics are one of my favorite things, if I get bored while I’m waiting for a Steam game to update or for a friend to come online so we can play a game together, I’ll spend some time looking into what achievements I’ve got that are rare according to Steam. Recently, as I’ve been playing more and more games on my PS5, I’ve taken to doing the same thing while winding down for the evening, once I’ve shut the game off. Which is how I found out that almost half of players never finished Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth.
Continue readingLeaving For Vacation Is The Most Stressful Thing I’ve Done At Work
When I initially imagined myself going on vacation at this time in the calendar year and the lifecycle of the big project I’m working on, I imagined myself gracefully exiting the scene that is my workplace with things either finished enough that there was time for a breather or with my coworkers prepared to attend to whatever trickle of work came in while I was away. Unfortunately, over the last two weeks (as I’m writing this as I sit in an exhausted sweaty heap in my home office far too late at night on the day before I leave on my vacation, this is actually four weeks prior to the day this post goes up) I’ve been absolutely swamped by work. I’ve been leaving work at increasingly late times as I’ve struggled to balance the work that’s been pouring in against trying to finish the items on my to-do list that have fallen by the wayside over the last month and a half of increasing business, all while trying to get my coworkers up to speed so that the work can continue while I’m gone since all of the different pieces of my project are at a crucial stage where they can’t just wait a couple weeks for me to return from my vacation. I finally managed to get the last things done tonight, at about a quarter to ten in the evening after an almost fourteen hour day. I’ll be able to rest easily, as a result, since I won’t have anything left dangling over my head, but I am so absolutely exhausted that I don’t even feel tired anymore. I’m found some state beyond even exhaustion where nothing matters and my numb sense of self can continue to push my body until I run out of things to do or I collapsed because my body refuses to listen.
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