Today, I returned from a very long weekend. Five whole days off in a row, thanks to a combination of a holiday and two days of PTO to give myself as much of a break as I can (barely) afford to. I took it because I was unceremoniously told early in the week that my assistance was not needed and rather than wait around until that inevitably proved to be false (as it always has been), I decided to take some time off and let my coworkers deal with their own problems for once. I was right, of course. They realized they needed me a couple hours later, but my vacation time was already submitted and I wasn’t going to rescind it, so they were shit out of luck. Especially because my PTO meant I wasn’t going to do even a minute of overtime on any day last week and wound up leaving quite early both days. It was really nice. It felt great to leave the building while the sun was still up, while the air was still warm, and while there was still enough of an evening left for me to feel like I could do more than one thing before I was forced to give in to my overwhelming exhuastion. It was nice to sleep in as late as I wanted five days in a row. I didn’t sleep for less than seven hours even once in all of that and got about eight hours three times in that period. It was an unprecedented amount of rest. And was largely spoiled by a bad bout of tonsil stones that kept me feeling like I was choking when I tried to sleep last night and then further spoiled by coming in to work and realizing that a five day weekend wasn’t enough to fix my burnout.
Continue readingMonth: April 2026
Tired Of This Shit Coming ‘Round Once Again
The cursed franchise that won’t die the death that it should have years ago has returned to plague society once again. That’s right, I’m writing this the day of that the trailer for the new Harry Potter show dropped and I am so tired of this shit. I am so tired of the endless regurgitation of the same franchises over and over again, sure, but I’m more tired of seeing people spend so much goddamn time trying to find excuses or justifications for spending time and money on the latest method that JK Rowling has found to fund the fostering of her virulent transphobic views. The woman herself has made the tie between engaging with her creative work and endorsing her views, she’s spent millions advancing horrible anti-trans legislation, and turned “TERF” (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism) from a niche into a tentpole of modern “conservation” (but actually reactionary) politics. She has literally said that if people disagreed with her views, they’d stop supporting the franchise that propelled her into a position of money and power that appears to have entirely cooked her mind (not that she was a font of inclusivity ever, what with all the slavery, slurs, fatphobia, and thinly-veiled racism) in the way that anti-trans views seem to cook everyone’s mind when they begin to dabble in them. All of which is to say that all of these people looking for an excuse know that what they are doing is wrong or bad or hateful or antisocial or anti-trans and are hoping to find someone to absolve them of the guilt they feel by telling that it’s okay that they are prioritizing their nostalgia over the literal lives of a minority group that is no-longer-so-slowy being forced out of public life and, ultimately, killed (we’ve passed the point where we need to point to the definitions of genocide to call the eradication of trans people what it is since even the UN has started to timidly suggest that maybe the worst perpetrators, the US and UK governments, need to knock it the fuck off (emphasis mine).
Continue readingWorkshop Reflections As My Time In FF14 Stretches Onward
After four weeks of updates and tracking and filling out my tables and monitoring inventory, my latest workshop project in Final Fantasy 14 has concluded. I spent hours making the items over the weekend and now they’re up for sale, to be replaced as they’re bought out, in an effort to maintain a stock level rather than just craft a random assortment of things. I’m hopeful that this will all go according to my plan (the market is pretty low on available housing exterior options at the moment, so I was putting the only item up for a lot of them and could name my price), both in terms of how much all this stuff sells for an how much easier it will be to maintain a stock level than try to predict what is going to sell at any given time. It required an immense amount of up-front work, between adminstering the project and participating in it, but we managed to reach the end with only one miss-delivered item and my record-keeping made it easier to figure out what went wrong than to fix it (and fixing it was very easy). If I’d gotten more participants, I think it would have gone faster, but that would have also meant the work I did would have been more concentrated than it was and it was already enough to make me so tired that I am considering dropping the workshop stuff entirely. After all, the main people doing it don’t need more money and I’ve got my own means of earning money, so this just seems like a waste of time and effort sometimes. Less so if my pricing scheme works out (establishing a more controlled price across the board for some of these housing things rather than playing the “set the price lower than any current listing” thing most people seem to do), but I’m not super confident that it will. It’s worth a try, just like this entire project has been, but I’m not sure there’s much of an end-point to this other than me just quitting or turning it all into personal work rather than work for my Free Company.
Continue readingIncreasingly Bitter Reflections Of An Exhausted Mind
Work has been hitting me on all fronts lately. It has routinely achieved the burnout trifecta of inducing mental, emotional and physical exhaustion in me on a day-to-day basis for the last month (all of March, really) and it does not look to be letting up any time soon. Hopefully my latest email to my landlord results in me getting the answers I need so I can make a decision there [it did], about whether or not to stay at my current apartment [I’m going to, but I’m mad about it]. It would be nice to be able to put that particular issue to bed so I can focus on literally anything else (having a place to live kinda takes precedence). The next highest priority thing would be to find a new job if I can, since this one is killing me a little bit faster than entropy does, on average, and I’d really like to no longer have such a drain on my existence be such a significant part of my day-to-day. I am so tired after everything happening this week that I’m practically falling asleep as I write this. Well, a bit more than practically, actually. Just briefly dozed off there. I haven’t been sleeping super well, either, which has made me all the more susceptible to the exhaustion work has been bringing to bear. Every single aspect of my job that is incredibly exhausting has come up just this past week, too: pysical labor testing, repetitive testing, complex testing, my coworkers being unreliable, my coworkers leaving me to do all the work, my boss being unreasonable about something dumb, pro “AI” conversations, and on and on and on… It’s enough to make me want to lay down on my office floor face-first amd weep into the too-thin carpet.
Continue readingTaking A Couple Days Off
I am taking a little break. Got a holiday at work on Friday the 3rd (love a “non-christian” workplace that still somehow manages to only observe christian holidays) and took off an extra day to keep myself from working too hard and burning out. I need the rest slightly more than I need the money, so I’m going all-in and am going to spend my time doing some fun little video editing projects. Maybe I’ll share some of that eventually, but right now I’ve carefully avoided crossing the streams between my writing and meatspace identity and my digital identity in Final Fantasy 14, and the videos would eventually just give it away, I’m sure. Or at least provide enough of a trail that someone could follow it from one place to another. Right now, I appreciate the distance even if I also desperately want to show off the cool work I’ve been doing. I’m not amazing at the video editing thing yet, but I’m getting pretty good at cutting and pasting things into an interesting and cohesive shape, such that some people don’t even realize I’ve done it. Which is most of editing footage. Special effects are their own thing. Which I will spend my days off learning about! It’ll be fun!