While I wrote this a day after I wrote last week’s post, this one got to marinate for a week before it went up and while I didn’t change much beyond my usual editing (grammar, spelling, word choice: the basics), writing this without the sense of urgency inherent to last week’s post means I spent more time thinking and less time reacting. There’s a time and a place for reacting, of course. We should respond with outrage when something awful happens and the corresponding urgency should drive us to act when we otherwise might not. That said, that initial reaction or series of actions doesn’t mean that we’re done with it. We can’t blow up and then move on because that will let companies like Automattic get away with bullshit like creating an opt-out system for actively selling the media created and shared by their customers and userbase because they’ll know they can just ride out the first reaction and do whatever they wanted to do when everyone has moved on. After all, it would be incredibly easy to take more than they want and pretend to be magnanimous and caring when they dial it back down to what their actual goal was. It’s basic negotiating strategy, to aim high and then slowly work your way down to what you actually wanted. So I’m going to keep this particular topic fresh in my mind so long as I continue to use a service I paid for that is now trying to wring extra money out of me by doing whatever they can to benefit from the exploitative and extractive actions of Venture Capital funded plagiarism algorithms.
Continue readingBreaking People To Fit The Mold
To sort of pick up where I left off last Tuesday, railing against overly broad classifications that some people use to avoid doing any work to improve themselves, I’ve recently encountered another system of categorization that rankles. This one comes with more caveats, though, because I think the tools it provides for communication are more useful, but I will add that I’m even thinking about this at all because I saw it used poorly and in a way that stifled communication rather than fostered it. I think this might have something to do with the group that was discussing it, whose examples provided me with the minor frustration required to develop my normally casual disregard for this stuff into a blog post, but any system used to sort people or apply labels based on supposedly innate traits will be easily turned toward ill ends by someone with an agenda. This one, though, rather than playing out in the sphere of popular culture or online quizzes disguised as methods of determining interpersonal compatibility, is sanctioned by many workplaces the world over. This one is called “Predictive Index” and that’s an evaluation tool that even some of the experienced people who advocate for and administer the system won’t praise without a few caveats of their own.
Continue readingOne Busy Weekend Has Made A Huge Difference
Last week ended with me feeling incredibly overwhelmed and struggling to deal with what had mostly been a week full of good things [and I am once again reminded of the downsides that come with writing these things a week ahead of when they post since the week before this got posted went VERY DIFFERENTLY than the week before I wrote this]. A four-day work week, a week totaling only forty hours of work instead of my usual fifty, getting to leave work while it was still light out, some major changes at the company I work for, and even a new work computer and related peripherals. The whole week had a lot going for it, even if the exchange I’d negotiated with myself was that I could take it easy for a week in exchange for doing my taxes and taking care of the final receipt submissions for my 2023 Flexible Spending Account, and I got to end the whole thing by spending my weekend buried in video games with my friends, prep work for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, and then a successful (and incredibly delightful) first session of that Dungeon and Dragons campaign. Unfortunately for me, this did not fix my burnout. It did lessen my mental load by a huge amount [to be honest, I probably would have had a mental breakdown if I hadn’t had this weekend before everything went to shit], since I was able to take care of a bunch of tasks that where weighing on me (like activating my new FSA card, dealing with some junk mail, sorting through the records I needed to keep to close out my pile of 2023 documents, and ordering some replacement items for stuff that had worn out and I’d been meaning to replace for almost a year), but it was definitely not restful.
Continue readingNo New Infrared Isolation Chapters For The Foreseeable Future
As I said on Wednesday, I’m done posting my own creative fiction on this blog. Eventually, when I’ve figured out self-hosting and all that, the sequel to this blog will include my fiction once again. Automattic and all the other shitty algorithms won’t be getting any more of my work unless they come to my webpage, get past my filters and firewalls, and scrape it themselves somehow. I probably can’t stop this process from happening, no matter what I do, but I will not stand for this bullshit. I refuse to let this just happen to me. I will be taking all sensible precautions and working to safeguard my work as much as possible.
Which means I’ll only be updating five days a week for now. I don’t know how long its going to take for me to figure out what comes next, be it running this exact same site on a new hosting platform without all the shit that Automattic and Jetpack are using to sell my creations or an entirely new blog with an archive of my older posts. Only time will tell, but I’m sure you’ll be able to read all about it since I tend to post about exactly that kind of stuff. Right now, though, I’m taking a moment to rest, to work through the intense and difficult feelings I’ve got about this (since I view myself as a writer and storyteller at my core, this attempt to make money off my work feels like an attack against me) before I make any decisions. It would not be a good idea to rush into anything just because I’m upset about the bullshit being pulled here, so I’m going to take my time and act with deliberation. And write about it near-constantly here since I really don’t have a whole lot else on my mind these days.
Overwhelmed By Change
Today, I got a new computer at work. After seven years and two false starts, I finally got a new computer. Now, there was nothing horribly wrong with my old one, other than being kinda old already when it was refurbished and given to me seven years as I started my job, but it did occasionally shut itself off without warning and then refuse to turn on for about fifteen minutes, so I was fairly overdue for a new one. That issue never seemed to gain me much ground when it came time to discuss new computers, though, since it mostly happened while I wasn’t at work and happened less than once a month, on average. There was a known work around and it shut itself down safely, so it wasn’t much of a problem most of the time. Which probably sounds pretty bonkers to you, reader, but it had been happening since six months into my tenure at my current job and I got used to the occasional mishaps. That’s why I started shutting my computer down every night since, if I power cycled it every day after work, it lowered the frequency at which the problem happened and meant that it was usually night when my computer hit the “on for 3-5 hours so I’m just going to shut down” mark and the only downside to that was that my headphones might not be charged when I got into work. I’d adjusted. I was used to it.
Continue readingTrying To Take It Easy This Week
I took a day off this week. I spent all day Sunday convincing myself to spend one single day’s worth of PTO so that I could have an extra day added to my weekend. It was actually incredibly difficult and I only fully committed to my choice when it was one in the morning and I still wasn’t asleep. I just couldn’t imagine trying to do a day of work, much less one of my ten or eleven hour days of work, on so little sleep, so I submitted a PTO request, notified my boss, and changed my alarm time so that I’d wake up with just enough time to work out before my late-morning therapy appointment. I also had another appointment, to get some blood work done as part of monitoring a medication I’m taking, so it made sense to just take the day off, get some rest, and then, as a result of taking the PTO, force myself to work a week of normal, eight-hour days. Part of forcing myself to stick to those normal work days is the fact that I wouldn’t get paid for any overtime I worked until I passed the forty hour mark with non-PTO hours and doing so would also pretty much make taking a PTO day pointless since working those extra hours would negate whatever rest I got. So I’ve done my best to work eight hours days since then and mostly failed because this week wound up being so much busier than I expected, but at least I can just leave early on Friday come hell or high water.
Continue readingThe Nightmare Of This Capitalist Dystopia Can Always Get Worse
Every so often, some horrible shit happens and I have to interrupt my blog writing and posting cycle to insert something while it’s still relevant. Today is another such day, even if it feels much smaller in the grand scheme of things than most of the other stuff I’ve disrupted my schedule for. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it’s something that actually impacts my blog as a whole, so it would be incredibly remiss of me to wait a week to talk about it. Yesterday, the website 404media broke a story that the owner of WordPress (.com, specially) and Tumblr was going to start selling their user’s data to a number of LLM companies for use in training their plagiarism machines. That article is paywalled, unfortunately, so I can’t send you there, but The Verge covered the story pretty well and that isn’t paywalled (and believe me, I’d be paying for access to the original article if I wasn’t already overbudget for this month). The short of it is that the parent company, Automattic, has publicly said they’re going to allow people to opt out of having their data sold (all in the name of staying modern when it comes to creating “content” rather than, say, Art or Blogs or even the almost-as-meaninglessly-generic-but-still-less-shitty “Media”) and that there are already some settings to help restrict access to your data, but they can’t do anything to stop any company from taking whatever is publicly available on the internet. They add that “respectable” companies will respect your settings, but I think that’s a load of hogwash since no company running a LITERAL PLAGIARISM MACHINE is anything approaching “respectable” under any definition of the word.
Continue readingLove Languages Are No Substitute For Good Communication
Today, as I waited for a response from someone I know is not typically a swift responder to text messages, I started thinking about love languages. The whole concept is a pretty useful shorthand for talking about the ways in which people show and feel love, but I’ve grown to feel that they’re more limited than useful when it comes to communication in a relationship. Sure, a lot of people’s modes of affection, given and received, can be captured in one of the five categories (acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation, physical touch, and giving/receiving gifts), but they’re collectively broad enough that pretty much every type of action someone might take can be lumped into those categories. Where they become limiting is in the idea that people tend toward one over the others, sometimes with a secondary or tertiary option, and that this answer is, actually, an answer that will stay true for an individual. Most people are not boiled down so easily and I, personally, chafe under any attempts to take something as complex and nuanced as the ways people express and feel love and reduce it to a personality quiz where most of the questions can be honestly answered with “well, it depends on the situation.” Most of which means that I don’t particularly enjoy the whole concept, even if I can see it as a useful tool for opening communication or giving people a resource to express themselves while they’re still working through how to communicate better.
Continue readingMy Unplanned Break From Heart: The City Beneath Has Ended
Six weeks after our last session, my game of Heart: The City Beneath has finally come back around again. We even got through a full session, even if our metaphorical table wasn’t entirely full. One of the players couldn’t make it, since they have been firmly knocked out by a pair of sicknesses that have left them unfortunately unable to do much without needing to take a nap to rest up. We didn’t get much further through the delve than we were before, but I think we made some good progress overall, especially after being away from the game for so long. In total, they dealt with a difficult fight (which was the result of a fallout one of the players gained right at the end of the previous session) and then started in on the rest of the delve. They have not made much progress, so far, since they’ve rolled incredibly poorly on every single one of their delve roles save the very last one. They’re not super happy about that, either, since that delve roll brought them right up to another difficult fight and they no longer have the moves they used to make the earlier fight less potentially hazardous. Plus, due to the player missing the session and their character having a fallout come due right at the end of the session before, they party is once again split up. There’s a group of three and two isolated party members wandering around on their own, hoping to eventually meet up again. It’s a rough spot for them to be in.
Continue readingViolin Concerto in the Quay of Baldur’s Gate
Notes for the reader:
This is a piece of fiction I wrote almost two and a half years ago for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign I was playing in. This is about the same character that I’ve mentioned several times in past blog posts and even wrote another short story for. This is Lewis, my favorite TTRPG character I’ve ever made and the only one I still miss playing, even after about a year away from the game. What this piece is, more specifically, is me expressing my enthusiasm for this character to my fellow players and GM by writing about a specific night my character endured while waiting for his companions to return.
As a bit of background, this scene follows my character, Lewis, taking out a collection of local thugs and bounty hunters who belonged to an organization called the Zhentarim. He pretended to know where their target (one of his party members and another player’s character) could be found, lured them out of their base in smaller groups, and then ruthlessly murdered them all in the street while remaining entirely undetected until the last survivors hid in their base where he then killed the remainder.
It was not a fight that should have worked out as well as it did (it resulted in the DM nerfing one of the magic items I used in this series of murders) and it was the one time I made myself feel awful for actions my character chose. It was a turning point in the character’s journey as he realized he’d become what he hated: a powerful person hurting people because he could and he knew he wouldn’t be punished for it. Sure, he had a decent enough motive, but not everyone who died that day was a vile criminal. One was a petty criminal who still had a chance to turn his life around until Lewis ended it. That’s where the scene picks up, actually. Right after he left the bar where he’d offered weregild to someone who cared about the young man he’d killed.
As for the rest of what this piece is… Well, this format was one my friends and I used a lot while we were in high school, as we wrote stories or drew comics about our self-insert characters in the slightly fictionalized version of reality we collectively made up. This is as close to fanfiction as I’ve ever written and only isn’t fanfiction because I don’t think, by its very definition, that you can write fan fiction about your own characters…
Anyway. See this video for the vibe I’m going for (dude walking around playing music) with most of Lewis’ performances. Andrew Bird also did a pretty good Tiny Desk Concert that can give you a sense of his energy and the way he uses a violin, which is my mental image for Lewis making music. To show you the looping thing I mention a few times, and the way I see it, see this TEDTalk Andrew Bird did a while ago (the first song shows it off, you don’t need to watch the whole thing).
This information and the music is mostly about setting a tone and a vibe, sharing some stuff I use as a touchstone for the way I view this character in these moments and the music he creates. In the text below, any time there’s a link, just load the video attached and listen to it as you read (there won’t be any songs with lyrics unless the lyrics are incorporated into the writing somehow). If you get to a new song before you’ve finished the old one, you can pause and listen to the rest or move one. Just don’t, you know, overlap the songs.
Continue reading