I have spent the last week working on a now months-long issue at work. I mean, I’ve been working on it for months, but over the last couple weeks it has become a particular focus for me as the mechanical engineers and I are taking some of my recent test results and reproducing them again and again, tweaking variables here or there, as we try to find a path out of this mess. Since I work on heavy machinery and the software that goes in that machinery, this means that I have spent my time working on gearboxes and the goop that goes inside them. Which means that I finally have a job that involves getting my hands dirty despite largely being a white collar worker (well, this job is a sort of interesting mix of white and blue collars but it’s still mostly white collar since it is still a knowledge job by-and-large) and that I’m also using all the engineering, math, and physics knowledge I’ve picked up over the years of being raised by two engineers and mistakenly believing that I was going to study math and physics in college because I was really good at calculus. It also means that my poor, sensitive nose has been assaulted by some of the most heinous scents I’ve had the displeasure to sniff. The only things that outdo them is raw sewage and the sulfurous chemical solution my chemistry teacher in high school made everyone sniff on the first day of class so he could threaten to put it under our noses if we ever fell asleep on him (which smelled so much like raw sewage that it is pointless to make the distinction between the malodorus mixtures). Even through a properly-fitted N95 mask, some of these stinks send me reeling, lightheaded and nostrils aflame, any time I’m unfortunate enough to stand over one of these suckers when we crack them open to check our test results.
Continue readingMonth: February 2026
My Workshop Is Working Too Well
It is done. After a solid week of pretty much constant effort in my free time, I’ve finished creating the document required to run a workshop in my Free Company in Final Fantasy 14. A lot of the basics were handled by the FC leader, in his previous iteration fo this workshop, but I’ve diversified the portfolio a bit, reworked some things, and adapted it to fit my needs and interests. It has been out in the world for two days now, as I’m writing this (and we’re rapidly approaching the deadline I set for people to let me know they’d read it before I go actively tagging the folks who’d answered my poll near the start of last month), and not only are people already sending me stuff to buy, but I’ve decided against my initial idea to hold off on starting a project until Sunday and put up a couple projects for everyone to get involved with right away. This way I get to try things out, everyone will get a little money at the very least, and I can see how much interest there is. I mean, it won’t be a perfect example of that because I’m trying to turn these things around in just a couple days and most people probably won’t want to stress out for a chunk of change, but it should give me an idea. And, if nothing else, it has spurred a bunch of conversation, gotten me some feedback about how to improve things, and taught me a lot about how to manage these things going forward. I like to learn by doing and boy howdy am I doing these days…
Continue readingI Really Like Ninety-Nine Percent of Dandadan
In continuing my burgoening tradition of watching something new every week, I finally gave in to the cultural zeitgeist (which makes it sound like I was resisting the cultural zeitgeist but, to be honest, I was just ignoring it like I was ignoring every TV show and movie for the last couple years) and watched Dandadan. It’s been on my radar for a while, even if all I really knew about it was “there’s a supposedly old lady with tall hair who carries a metal baseball bat?” based on some images I’ve seen on the internet, but one of my friends told me it was actually a really cute love story in addition to the slightly-more action-y episode-to-episode events and I was sold. Who doesn’t want to see a cute love story these days? So I watched it with that in the forefront of my mind, got swerved almost immediately, and then swerved more and more as the first season played out. It was a wild ride, but now I’m a diehard fan and dying on the inside because I’ve got to wait who even knows how long for Season 3 to come out. I suppose I’m lucky in that I only started watching it after the second season had been released so at least I didn’t have season 1’s horrific cliffhanger dangling over me for months and months while I waited. Which, if I had to levy a criticism at the show, it would be the way they’ve chosen to pace things. Not every episode has problems with it, but there’s enough that I kept feeling like I was being jostled around by the ending theme of the show, which is too bad because the opening and closing themes of both seasons are great and the sort of thing I chose to watch each time. It didn’t really impact the quality of the show for me, but I also can’t imagine this show coming out on a weekly schedule and would have been infuriated multiple times if I’d been watching it one episode a week.
Continue readingA Mixture Of Interest, Dread, and Exhaustion
There was a time in my life, a pretty long time actually, when I would have read the next Dresden Files book the night it came out. I’d have my acquisition strategy worked out, I’d have left work early, and I’d have powered through it in a single evening, staying up until an ungodly hour to finish it if required. Today, the book’s been out for a week and in my hands for five days and I haven’t even opened the package it was delivered in. I actually didn’t even realize it was coming out until a couple weeks beforehand, promptly forgot again, and only got it eventually because one of my coworkers brought it up when I was at my computer so I could order it immediately. I’m sure that my penchant for staying up to ungodly hours to play Final Fantasy 14 has something to do with my shift in priorities, but I have to admit that I’m just not as excited about the franchise as I once was. I’m still gonna read the book and however many more there are before the series comes to an end, but I’ll admit that the shifting scales and recent story events have kind of lost me. I mean, I understand that this kind of noir-adjacent story requires the protagonist to be the perpetual underdog, even as his competence grows (this is the 18th book in the series, after all. Harry Dresden HAS to be a power player at this point) and I understand why a major character was killed in the last book (age is an issue for a series that covers about a year per book and only SOME of the characters have special magical regenerative powers that slow their aging/divine blessings that keep them combat relevant as the baddies turn from local vampires to deities and deific figures), but I don’t have to like it.
Continue readingThere’s Always More Work To Do For Fun
Getting a workshop, even a digital one, off the ground is a lot of work. Even if I’ve got a spreadsheet I’ve inherited from my Final Fantasy 14 Free Company leader, getting it updated and ready to be used after most of it hasn’t been updated since 2024 is a pretty significant undertaking. Adding on to it the way I want to (and have been) in order to support other kinds of projects and an “I will buy this from you” list for my own purposes is an even larger undertaking. I’ve spent at least a few hours a day on it for five days straight and I’m sure that I’ll eventually be adding more to it tonight, once I settle down to “game,” since gaming these days is seventy-five percent idle crafting while I work on this spreadsheet, twenty-percent doing my daily grind for levels, four percent doing weekly reset work, and one percent doing things that are fun. I miss doing fun stuff and I can’t wait to get back to it once I have this spreadsheet updated, a project-management process in place, and all of my new projects humming along. It’s going to be difficult to manage at first since I don’t have the kind of in-game money needed to support the more proactive of my fellow players, but if I keep it up and have picked the right items to make and sell, then I should be able to translate all this effort into even more money. We’ll have to see if it actually works out, though. I might wind up losing a bunch of money and needing to shut down all parts of the workshop other than the group-contribution efforts, or just not making the money fast enough to keep up with the influx of materials (since I can only make things so quickly and can’t flood the market with them if I want to keep prices up). Only time will tell.
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