Every place that has some kind of fire alert system has a policy for what to do when that system alerts people to a fire. We start practicing this stuff as kids, in daycare or preschool or kindergarten or whatever you call your first educational experience, and continue into our adulthood. I missed a few years in there, since I was homeschooled. My mother tried to do a fire drill once, back when she was convinced that she could just have “school” happen at our house the same way it would at the local Catholic school that she would have otherwise sent us to, but it went poorly and she never tried again. We did get “fire escape ladders” to hang out our bedroom windows though, in case we needed to get out of our bedrooms and the door was blocked by fire, but I think the only one that got used was when my brother snuck out of the house using it, breaking the screen he dropped in the process. Anyway. I did fire drills in high school, in college (in various places: once while in class, thrice while in different dorms, and then yearly at the theater I worked at but that was a very different experience), at both my post-college jobs, and even at a couple apartments. They’re all basically the same, with a few important differences. In every single case, you get out of the building, attend to any people who might be on fire (to a degree), get away from the fire, wait for the all-clear signal, and then go back inside where you have to spend the rest of the day pretending your whole day has not been turned upside down by this disruption. Or, in my recent case, stare longingly at your car as it tempts you to just drive away since it’s unlikely that anyone will notice your absence.
Continue readingTreading Water At Work While Trying To Manage An Intern
The week I’m writing this, I am the only tester on my team who is in the office. The other two are away on multi-week vacations, coincidentally overlapping during what could be described as the busiest period of the summer so far. I’m sure neither one of them did this on purpose. It’s not like any of us knew this week was going to be busy until Thursday of last week and it was far too late to do anything about it then. So, to make up for the lack of other testers and the large amount of work that needs doing every day, I’ve been strictly managing my time at work and bouncing between a large variety of tasks. It is incredibly exhausting, I’ll be honest, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be have gotten less done than if I’d been able to just do my own thing rather than constantly need to reprioritize as something new crops up. Still, I’ve managed to keep on top of everything so far, for three days in a row, other than the testing intern. He’s supposed to be running some tests the senior tester gave him before he left, but I think he’s not actually doing that, given the lack of questions and how the two times I’ve gone to check on him, he’s had to wake up his computer and log back in to show me what he’s supposedly been working on. Since the first time that’s happened, I’ve been keeping on eye on him from the lab or my office, wherever I’m working, and noticing how little time he’s spending looking at his monitors and how much time he’s spending looking at his tablet. I’m not one to bust anyone for taking a break or not looking busy, and I can understand that he probably doesn’t want to have this job but is kind of getting forced into it since his relatives work here (they’re high up in the company, too, so there’s quite a lot of nepotism going on here since he’s been given the most nothing job assignment), but this work needs doing and all of us testers are counting on it getting done, so I’m going to need to figure something out for his last handful of weeks.
Continue readingThe Impending Disaster That Will Be The End Of Windows 10
Over the past few years, I’ve become incredibly familiar with the work of a lot of tech reporters. I am a worker in the tech industry, after all, so it makes sense that I’d be interested in the goings-on of the industry as a whole, but the primary reason I’ve added this to my interests is because of Windows and the rise of LLMs. I’ve had access to a computer of some kind or another for my entire life and have always enjoyed them. The first big thing I ever bought myself was a laptop I could use for computer games that ate up all of my carefully horded babysitting money when I was a teenager, and I’ve been spending a lot of time on a computer ever since. Most of the time, it has largely been a device I took for granted–something that I largely ignored except as a vehicle to deliver other things: video games, my writing, digital access to my friends, and so on. A few years ago, as I became isolated during the first summer of the pandemic, my relationship with my computer changed drastically, turning from the aforementioned vehicle into the portal through which I accessed all of existence other than the physical place my body occupied and the grocery store. Since then, it has shrunk somewhat, but computers still loom large in my life and I can say no cloud has darkened my horizon quite like the appearance of LLMs and every software company’s attempts to shoehorm them into everything. This capitalistic and ruinous desire, the appeal of these plagiarism and theft machines, is actively driving me away from everything to do with computers and would maybe even drive me back into being a console-only gamer except that I know for a fact that the console companies will also shoehorn that shit in if they can ever figure out a way to do it.
Continue readingTrying To Take My Time In Final Fantasy 14
Over the weekend, after about six or so weeks away from doing any kind of Main Scenario Quest progression in Final Fantasy 14, I’m back at it again. For the first time in my seven and a half months of playing the game, it ACTUALLY feels like I’ve been away for a while when I meet back up with the main cast of NPCs and they all remark on how well I look like I’m doing (and I look GREAT, btw, since my main glams all got updated renders in the latest patch) and how nice it is to meet up again after all this time. Generally speaking, there’s usually at least a few months between an expansion and each of its patch updates, so people playing the game as it came out got to experience the passage of time that the game softly implies–albeit usually a truncated version given the way people talk about finally seeing each other again (the game’s actual timeline is incredibly unclear, but I’d guess it’s maybe a fifth of the real-world passage of time if I had to suggest something). When you play through almost the entire main story arc of the game that exists today, you don’t really get the same breaks and breathing space that the game was (eventually) written to reference. It was interesting to see the way they went from tightly-spaced events with a degree of implied continuity that mmade it feet like there wasn’t much time between each major event to events spread out by gaps the characters suggest were significant when they reconvene. They took the nebulousness of in-game time and went from ignoring it–which implied not much time passed at all–to doing enough soft framing around the start of each expansion and certain patches that it implied a moderate passage of time. Perhaps most notably, this was a major component of Endwalker’s conclusion and, given my own feelings at the time, it felt like it would be doing myself and the game a disservice to once more dive into the plot immediately.
Continue readingCaught Between A Horrible Week And Another Rough One
Between this week’s cruel irony, yet more horrible back-to-back hour-long phone adventures trying to take care of problems caused by an incredibly shitty healthcare supply company, and a few knife twists at my day job in the same vein as the ones that started this worsening burnout, I have found a new depth of burnout. My back muscles are knotting up from the stress, it takes focused effort to not clench my jaw, my recently-normal indigestion is blossoming into full sourcelss nausea, and I’m so tired I could fall asleep in an instant. I am scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what I can make myself do and I still have more stuff to do that I can’t get around. I need to go buy food for myself and my bird. I can’t put off taking the trash out for another day. I need to get in my usual overtime so I can remain financially solvent. I need to actually do stuff over the weekend so I don’t spend the whole thing wallowing in misery. I also really need to go for more walks, get more sun, and make sure I’m geared up for whatever horrible weather might or might not pass through my area this weekend (there’s lots of vague warnings about potential weather events but little that is certain [and basically none of that hit my area]). All while I’m so worn out and exhausted that there isn’t a single treat, little or big, that I can think of that would improve my mood. Everything feels like an equal hassle, which is usually a sign that I’m overwraught or dealing with a nasty depression spike, but knowing that doesn’t help me any. I have to figure out how to solve this problem because it’s not like anyone else is going to figure it out for me. I’ve got no one in my life who can do that work for me and I unfortunately saw my therapist the morning before this entire week went to hell, so I’ve got another week and a half before my next appointment.
Continue readingLaboring To Make Sure My Value Isn’t Only Seen In My Labor
I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be the sort of person who, in multiplayer video games, tends to be the one doing infrastracture projects. The best example of what I mean is back in my old days of playing Valheim with some of my friends. There was a lot of cooperative labor and effort put into what we were doing in that game because the very nature of the game demands it (or at least strongly encourages it), but we all had our own time to work on individual projects and it was very telling that all of mine were things like building new bases for us to share, creating pathways to ease travel to resource clusters, and setting up various mechanic-based game features (things like resource farms and safe places to go AFK (Away From Keyboard)). I’d make roads so that, when we were mining, it would be easy to move the cart back and forth with everything we’d gathered. I’d do research into how base raids would start and what prevents monsters from spawning so I could make what we wound up calling “AFK Island” so that the server’s owner could leave it running with his character in-game so the rest of us could play whenever we wanted to (and so we could go AFK without worrying about being swarmed by goblins or dragons or whatever the current threat was). I even set up monster farms with safe sprinting paths so that we could collect resources that were normally a pain to acquire without too much fuss or danger. I’d make minecart pathways and Nether roads in Minecraft. I’d maintain the group’s purse and resource allocation in multiplayer Stardew valley. And now, in Final Fantasy 14, I’m taking it upcon myself to craft a bunch of food we use for raiding.
Continue readingSemantic Circumlocution
There is a particular feeling that is incredibly important to me. It is like pain, but it doesn’t hurt. It sticks in me like a burr, almost tactile in that I can endlessly pick at it but intangible in that nothing I ever do can affect it. It settles in my chest, at the very center of my physical being–where we often depict things such as the soul being located when we must depict them as something within a body rather than something beside it–occupying the place I would have told you was my heart before I learned how human anatomy is laid out. It isn’t something I can conjure myself, I can’t do anything to keep it around, and it will arrive slowly and then suddenly, completely unnoticeable until it is fully there and undeniably present. I don’t have a name for this feeling, but I suspect that this is what a lot of people are talking about when they describe themselves as feeling inspired by something. I also suspect that this feeling is what people are talking about when they say that they have been moved. If I had to put into it into as few words as possible, I would say that this feeling is the sensation of being moved, but that feels reductive to the point of discomfort on my part since it is not only the sensation of being moved but also the thing that being moved pushes against and the place from which the force of this movement originates. A contradiction of sensations and feelings that I can’t make more sense of than this, despite having felt this cluster of feelings for as long as I can remember.
Continue readingI Have Never Experience Irony As Bitter And Cruel As This
Content Warning: mentions of my childhood trauma, focused on threats of violence and non-specific references to violence.
I’ve had a very weird twenty-four hours. I was just minding my own business last night when one of my siblings texted our little “middlest siblings” groupchat to let the other two of us (who are largely estranged from the family) know that our eldest sibling had been targeted by a scammer. Given the proliferation of scammers and how little is done to prevent them these days, that alone was hardly surprising. What was surprising was that the scam was the “Mexican cartel threatens violence against the target and the target’s family if money is not sent” and the family members listed to shock the target into compliance were myself and my younger sibling. The two estranged members of the family. There’s plenty of explanation why the two of us would be called out by a scammer. We’re the two who have moved the furthest from the rest of the family and I’ve put a lot of effort into keeping my digital footprint small, so I would appear more distant and less likely to be in contact. Levying threats against me, by dropping my name and vaguely reference the potential for violence, could be difficult to confirm or refute since, due to distance, it’s more difficult to visually confirm that there’s nothing wrong. And while my younger sibling’s digital footprint is larger than mine, it’s still much smaller than most people our age and they’ve done a lot of the same work to create distance from our family even if they didn’t move as far away. By all accounts, anyone with access to one of those phone number lookup databases (which I used once a long time ago to confirm that I’d managed to largely excise my recent information from the internet) would be able to look at the available information and see that the two of us are far removed from the rest of the family and probably the best names to drop for unverifiable threats.
Continue readingHindsight Regrets Following A Mostly-Fun One-Shot
This past weekend, I had the opportunity to play (as a player!) in a tabletop roleplaying game for the first time in a long while (long enough that I can’t remember when that previous time was, but that might be the general fog of the last year more than a measure of a long time). It was a one-shot that a frequent player and friend of mine put together that was a sci-fi, star wars/trek game run in Dungeons and Dragons 5e–because that was the system that everyone was familiar with–but everything was given a sci-fi twist rather than a fantasy one. The GM herself admitted later on, as we talked at the end of the session, that this particular game was basically the rough draft of a concept she had for something that she’d like to run in the Star Wars 5e ruleset, but it had been a long time since she’d looked at the rules and none of us were terribly familiar with them either, so simple and straight-forward with a system we all knew already was the order of the day. I had a decent amount of fun, even if it was a bit of an RP-light session (it kinda had to be, since it was a one-shot), but I definitely oveprepared in ways that were both incredibly useful for the group and a little personally frustrating. I have a tendency to do this sort of thing since, as a forever GM, I’m always offering to fill-in wherever I’m needed and while I got to chase my preferred idea for this game, I wound up doing it in a way that was technically interesting to build and run, but not particularly satisfying or fun.
Continue readingA Whole Lot Of Maybes
I wish there had been a call to action and a rise to meet that call like there often is in stories. A moment of clarity, of undeniable need, that drove the hero/community/leader to action against the foe that had appeared on the horizon. A series of events that would create a moment to inspire a movement. A tipping point where the imbalance was so undeniable that it inspired a mad scramble to fix the scale. Reality isn’t like that, unfortunately. Calls to action are usually ignored, excused, or defused, preventing the necessary rise in response in order to preserve the status quo. We’re all too tired, too poor, too scattered, to divided to respond to a call, for the most part. There’s so much between the people who need to rise and the thing they’re rising to meet that it often feels impossible to ever effect change. I know I often feel that way, like I’m fighting for a hopeless cause or that there’s no reason in putting up a fight because I’ll never gain ground, let alone win. Too much bad stuff keeps happening in the US unopposed by those who were supposed to safeguard against this kind of fascism and consolidation of power for me to seriously believe the idea that our current leaders will ever take meaningful action of any kind. It’s kind of devastating, to be honest, because of the things I was raised to believe about this country and people in general that I somehow still clung to after all these years. I don’t know what I’m going to do about these large scale things as they break beyond repair (but hopefully not beyond replacement).
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