It has been (almost exactly) three years since I started posting to this blog again. The first post officially went up on August 4th, 2021, but I’d begun writing posts the week prior, setting up my “write the posts one week ahead of them going up” plan so I could focus on my editing skills and the delayed gratification of working ahead of my deadline rather than right up to it. Now, it is three years later and though I’ve down to five posts a week and am not posting any more creative writing work (poems, stories, etc) on my WordPress .com page since those fuckers are still willing to sell my data without compensating me (using a setting that is on by default, the absolute worst way they could put in a setting for this shit), I’m still going strong. I’ll admit I’m struggling to keep these posts written a week ahead of time, but I can mostly keep it up and the days I fall behind aren’t really a big deal since that’s usually a result of me being so busy that my brain was too tired to actually participate in writing something. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to write moderately interesting blog posts without using your brain, but nothing good has ever come from it for me. Better to take breaks and rest without recrimination than to try and fail to produce something even modestly interesting. Which is a lesson I’ve only just learned over the course of these past three years, actually, so clearly this version of the whole blogging thing is working out pretty well for me.
Continue readingStar Wars: The Acolyte Makes For Great Light Watching
I finished watching The Acolyte last week. Not the week I wrote this, but the week prior. Pretty much two weeks prior to the day this went up. I was watching it in chunks to match up with the Patreon episodes of A More Civilized Age, so I watched shortly after episode 5 came out and then the Friday after episode 8 came out. I’ll admit I struggled a bit with the show initially, but one of the things Austin Walker said in the first episode of AMCA’s covered of the show reframed the entire thing for me in a way that made it much easier to enjoy: The Acolyte is a YA show. Once I started treating it with the same level of seriousness and mindset as I treated most of the CW-type YA shows I’ve seen in my life (which is not many, to be honest), the whole thing felt way more enjoyable (which even applied in retrospect, given that I started listening to the podcast episode minutes after I finished episode 4 of The Acolyte). Once you stop expecting deep character motivations for every decision and can silence the voice in your head comparing the show to Andor, it’s actually quite enjoyable. I’d call it a good show, even, in the way that chips are a good food. It’s not the most substantive thing out there and you can easily find issues to pick at if you want to, but it’s mostly fun enough that none of that really matters. To once again paraphrase Austin Walker from multiple episodes of AMCA, there was enough interesting stuff going on most of the time that I didn’t really care about the stuff that didn’t work (with a few notable exceptions). All-in-all, I’d definitely recommend the show to anyone who likes Star Wars and especially to those interested in stories about how the Jedi (individually) aren’t always good people and how the institution as whole is pretty rotten.
Continue readingThe Slow, Grinding Burnout Of Constantly Finding Problems
One day deeper into the week, one more day of fruitless work on a project I can’t talk about behind me. I’m not as upset about everything as I was yesterday, though I’m still a little upset and frustrated, but now I’m feeling extra worn down because we’re still unable to figure out why things aren’t working the way we want them to and how nothing we do that improves those results makes any kind of sense. It has everyone stumped and while we have been able to make slowly improving progress over the past two months, we haven’t really fixed things yet. It is exhausting to work on, mentally and emotionally, because we’re just beating out heads against a problem, and it is exhausting physically because any proposals about different methodology or improvements require a decent amount of heavy labor from me. This work has become every kind of exhausting and I can feel myself less and less able to spring back from it with every passing day. Sure, nothing I’m doing is wrong or a failure or anything like that, but it sure feels like a failure when I’ve been working on a problem this long and this consistently but haven’t been able to figure anything out. Sure, my job is to collect data and tell people that things are wrong, but I clearly understand the problems and how they play out better than everyone else (as my repeated explanations prove almost daily) so it feels like some part of the solution is my responsibility. Regardless of whether that is right or wrong, it is how I feel and these repeated days of zero progress despite my efforts have me feeling incredibly drained.
Continue readingVenting What Steam I Can From Work Frustrations
Today has been shitty and exhausting. Not the usual kind of shitty where it’s mostly my depression, my despair at the world in general, or me needlessly spiraling over some unlikely anxiety, nor is i shitty in the sudden-crisis-at-work kind of way. No, today, I got to spend four hours doing manual labor I can’t talk to anyone about to test a project I can’t talk about in any level of specificity while being watched by a bunch of people who frequently ignored my advice and all but shouted me down when I suggested that something they were worried about wasn’t actually a problem based on the hundreds of hours of experience I’ve gotten with the product at the heart of this project. I had to spend ten minutes enduring their nattering and catastrophizing about how what they observed could be the source of all these problems we’ve been trying to solve for months now before I could prove myself correct (that it was an optical illusion caused by their point of view and multi-directional movement of the thing I was moving around). I wasn’t going to let them interrupt my data collection to do the unnecessary thing they wanted to do, since that would require dismantling the current test, doing an entirely different test, setting my current test back up again, and then calibrating the measuring tools again. It took me all of a minute to prove they were wrong when I finally set their test up in a much faster and easier way than they thought it had to be done. As I moved to continue testing following their reluctant agreement that I was correct, one of them said “and now we’re never going to hear the end of it.” That really soured my mood, which is worth remarking since I wasn’t in a great mood already based on the whole “hours of manual labor while those coworkers stood around and wrote down numbers or pressed buttons” thing.
Continue readingEverything Is Too Much All The Time
Well, the day my last post about living in unprecedented times went up, all I could do was sigh miserably as I felt today’s post come bubbling out of the stress from, once again, a weekend of wild shit. Mostly one wild event since everything kind of pales in comparison, but some of “smaller” stuff bears mentioning anyway. Sure, as time passes and more of what was going on behind the scenes emerges into the light of day, it looks like President Biden’s decision to step aside from the US Presidential Race was a calculated move that could have some positive effects [which seems to become more and more clear with each passing day], but I really don’t know that there’s any world in which changing horses mid-race will do anything but ultimately hinder the jockey’s attempts to win. Maybe in a few weeks or months, I’ll be walking all this back and crowing about the easy victory of (presumably ) President Harris, but that seems like too good of a future to be true. Sure, Vice President Harris might win against Trump (I doubt there has been a more detestable presidential nominee from a major party in US History than Trump in 2024), but I bet the next three and a half months are going to be exhausting. I mean, it has been only a little over twenty-four hours since the announcement and I’ve already gotten more campaign solicitation text messages, emails, and phone calls than I’ve gotten in the calendar year up to this point (I’ve unsubscribing and blocking zealously for the past three years). I would really love it if things could calm down for a bit, you know? I’d love one of those “nothing” decades.
Continue readingOne Week Into Pursuing Stability Amidst The Chaos Via New Routines
I’m now one full week into my new stress management process and while I do not care for how much time I have to spend thinking about and planning things (despite loving to do both of those activities), I really love being done with dinner and evening chores by nine every night. Prior to this week, I’d sometimes not get home and through with dinner until ten or even eleven. It was rough, to feel like I needed to cram at least some amount of relaxing into my evenings after dinner when I’d still be finishing up at the time I should be starting to prepare for bed, but this past week has been free of that. Which isn’t to say that I’ve gone to bed at a good time every night this week. I’ve had two nights this week where I was just too stressed and anxious to relax enough to even think about going to bed at my normal time, but I think those have more to do with some emotional stuff going on in the background rather than anything to do with my new routine. What I have gotten every single night is the realization that I have enough time for at least two activities before I should start getting ready for bed, even after doing some extra chores around my apartment. It makes it a lot easier to sign off for the night when you don’t feel like you’re desperately trying to cram something into the tail end of your day so you didn’t spend the whole thing dreading work, going to work, working, and then being so exhausted from work that it took you an hour to make dinner. It’s really nice to be able to just walk into my kitchen, spend five to thirty minutes sorting out my dinner, eat it, and then get on with the rest of my evening, even on days when I had to work until eight.
Continue readingStarting Up Playthrough 3 of Baldur’s Gate 3
There will be some spoilers for the Dark Urge endings of a Baldur’s Gate 3 character in the latter half of paragraph 3 (this is paragraph 0 and the one below this is paragraph 1).
One of the questions I repeatedly asked myself while ordering the parts for and building my PC was what game I was going to play first. As a bit of a joke, I tossed Stardew Valley and Valheim into the hat for consideration, but the real choice was between Baldur’s Gate 3, the last new and intense game I’d played on my PC that had possibly shortened the life span of my PC by pushing it harder than it could reliably handle, and Cyberpunk 2077, the first game I wanted to play but couldn’t because the major update they did in 2023 changed the minimum specifics into something my computer couldn’t handle anymore. Rather than really try to choose, I opted to play both. Technically Cyberpunk 2077 first, but since all I was doing was making a character in both games, I technically played Baldur’s Gate 3 first since that was the one that I played beyond my first chance to save and quit after completing character creation.
Continue readingSocial Media In The Year 2024
Using any and all social media feels like crap these days. Very little of it is interesting or particularly engaging. I’ve made little traction with making new friends on places that aren’t Twitter (still not going to call it the new thing) and most of the sites I’m on look like they’re speed-running the whole rise and fall of every social media site from the last two decades. One is struggling to remain afloat as they adhere to their values over what sometimes seems like good sense or reasonable planning (which is a criticism, but I mostly like when they do this so it’s difficult to really fault them for it outside of one or two specific instances where they probably should have seen a problem coming) and another is being filled to the brim with people who will just tell you that you’re wrong, without any evidence, about everything from your own life events, basic facts about the world, and your expressed emotions.
Continue readingCatching Up On The Magical Millennium
After a little bit over two months, I finally had all of my players back together again for The Magical Millennium and we not only got to catch up on what one of the characters was doing in the background of every scene previously discussed by the other players, but get through the entirety of the second day of school for all of the players who couldn’t be there last time. My players also picked out their first quests, discussed their homework, and dealt with the small revelations that came from catching up the other player (and worked on catching her up on the small revelations that come from everyone else’s scenes). We also got to have a few discussions that had been put off because one of the required players wasn’t there. It was a great time, even if we started half an hour late and spent most of the session focused on catching up rather than doing something wholly new. I’d have preferred to get some completely new stuff into the game, but there were a few scenes that came up that needed time and attention for reasons I’ll be keeping to myself for now (though I’ve already revealed to one of my players that something important happened that their character only really noticed in retrospect). Fully caught up, now, I’m excited for us to continue forward with a sort of parent-teacher conference to discuss one student’s accidental spellcasting, one or more new adventures, and the eventual introduction of the first threads of the larger plot I’ve been cooking up.
Continue readingReeling From A Wild Weekend
This is sort of going up a week late (which is fine, because there’s exactly nothing I can do about any of this in any kind of active sense and keeping my mouth shut in the moment is probably for the best given how many people are absolutely fine with exposing themselves to potential issues in the future by speaking aloud some potentially illegal things (or at least some things that could make them a target should the worst happen)), but what a fucking wild weekend we had. Nothing quite like a former president who is currently running for president getting shot at while he’s giving a campaign speech. Nothing like spending a weekend watching the political party of calls for violence, virulent hate, and increasing violent rhetoric decide to flip the script and blame their rivals for supposedly creating a world in which a hateful bigot gets shot at by another hateful bigot. Nothing quite like watching most of the internet and media either move on from an assassination attempt incredibly quickly or spend an unbearable amount of time luxuriating in the dunks (internet) or endless punditry (media) of the presidential candidate who was shot at and the hateful bigot in the audience who died. Just completely unprecedented times. Genuinely, the only part of this that is playing out exactly as it always does is the fact that this latest instance of gun violence will do absolutely nothing to change gun laws in my country of birth. The United States of America is pretty dang fucked. Not, like, in a hopeless “we’re fully in fascism” kind of way. We’re not there yet. Just in the “shit is so wild that everything just seems normal now” and “guns are more valuable than human lives in the US” kind of ways. Which, you know, are pretty fucked up.
Continue reading