Last night, I engaged in a choatic bacchanal during what some alleged might be the final hours of Twitter’s life. Of course, the site is still up this morning and I don’t think most people truly believed the website was going to abruptly vanish at some point. It was (and still is) pretty clear that Twitter is going to diminish and fade into obscurity or diminish and transform into something else, just like every other social media site that has fallen by the wayside over the years. After all, it’s not like MySpace is entirely unavailable, it’s just irrelevant. Things on the internet tend to not vanish completely so much as fade from public reckoning or change so completely that they’re actively abandoned. Thus far, neither has entirely happened yet, but last night marked the end of an era as, if the reports prove true in coming days, most of Twitter’s employees have left the company.
Continue readingIt Doesn’t Count As Resting If You Do All Your Normal Work
Today is a holiday in the US. As is typical of many “ancient” and “traditional” US holidays, it has a bit of a troubled history. But, as a low-end white-collar worker buried in debt and being slowly ground to dust by the cogs of capitalism, I’m going to just enjoy a day off that doesn’t eat up one of my precious days of PTO. I’m also not going to have any kind of blog update beyond this one because I’m tired, I’ve got food to cook for myself, I thought it might be fun to just, you know, rest. I’ll be back with normal blog stuff tomorrow, but the post I wrote to post today is actually going to cover the post I would have written today so expect some additional thoughts on the latest God of War game in another seven days.
(In)Adequate Staffing In The Workplace
I think a lot about the way that workplaces are staffed. My previous job specifically hired people who hadn’t worked anywhere else and then basically ground then into dust for way too little pay, relying on quantity to make up for a lack of quality (specifically to rely on the quanitity of employees to make up for the lack of quality training they gave to those entry-level employees). Some people thrived in that environment and some people, myself included, did not because they didn’t fit in perfectly. My current job tends to work very hard to avoid getting rid of employees but seems to be struggling with figuring out how to retain employees, especially young-ish ones. At thirty one, I’m one of the youngest people on my team and, until this week, at almost six years, had worked at the company for the shortest amount of time. Throw in a bunch of horror stories about working at Amazon facilities, coffee shops, university systems (to name a few high-profile employers who have achieved a level of notoriety thanks to the recent surge of labor violations on their parts and the resulting union drives) and I’ve got a lot of different data about what it’s like to work for an employer that has staffing issues.
Continue readingThe Question of Humanity and Cyberpunk 2077
I beat Cyberpunk 2077 last weekend. Managed to accident my way into the secret version of the final questline as well, which was interesting considering it was the result of decision paralysis and the need to do my laundry that made me take the correct steps to unlock it. I wound up going back to play through a few different options for the final quest just to see what else was out there since the choices I made left me feeling a little sad given the way the game ends. Still, I don’t think I really expected it to end any other way. It’s a cyberpunk story. They rarely end neatly or happily.
Continue readingElection Reflection as Things Stay Mostly Blue in 2022
A week later and most of the election results are in. The heavily gerrymandered places represent huge miscarriages of democracy and, for the most part, weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they’d be in my home state of Wisconsin. I will say that it sucks to see so many people disparraging my state for leaning so heavily toward the facists without considering the fact that more than fifty percent of the population voted for democratic candidates and still wound up with barely a third of the seats in the state government. Which, you know, has been the case for about the last four or more years now (I really can’t remember when the gerrymandering happened, but it feels like forever ago).
Continue readingInfrared Isolation: Chapter 10
New to the series or certain you’ve missed a chapter? You can find the introduction Here and the table of contents Here.
Continue readingPreparing for Pokémon and Another Splatfest
As I’m writing this, we’re a week away from the release of the next entry in the main line of the Pokémon franchise and, to mark this release, Splatoon 3 has a new Splatfest where the theme at hand is which Pokémon type makes for the best partner. The three types involved are Water, Fire, and Grass, representing the three starter Pokémon that will be available in the new game. All of which I have incredibly mixed feelings about since my usual option (Grass) is turning into another antropomorphic cat according to the recent leaks. While I know it’s possible that the leaks aren’t actually leaks but clever fakes, everyone I know has been expecting the new grass type to turn into an anthropomorphic cat this entire time (myself included), so I’m having a difficult time convincing myself that there is still hope I can cling to that we’ll get a cool tiger or something instead of ANOTHER ANTRO CAT. There’s so many of those suckers already and that sort of design doesn’t really appeal to me (though I know it appeals to lots of other people) even when it doesn’t feel as played-out as it does in Pokémon.
Continue readingInitial Thoughts on “Dad of Boy 2: Dad and Teen” (AKA God of War: Ragnarok)
Spoilers for the first two or three (depending on how quickly you play, I suppose) hours of God of War: Ragnarok. There’s nothing in the paragraph below this one, but most of the post dicusses the events of the intro to the game and what happens immediately afterwards. Honestly, if you’ve seen through the opening credits of the game, then you’re probably good to keep reading. If you don’t care about spoilers, then carry on regardless. There’s enough information in the post below that you won’t need to have played the game to get it.
Continue readingCoping Mechanisms In My Daily Life
As I move around my apartment, scrubbing the walls around my windows in preparation for my yearly tradition of covering them in a layer of insulating and draft-blocking plastic, I am struck by how much of my life is taken over by what are essentially coping mechanisms for things beyond my control. I’m also struck by how many bugs have died in the three weeks since I last pulled my carpet back to sweep the half-inch of space between said carpets and my patio door, but that doesn’t really make for an interesting blog post topic. The entire process I’m going through is one meant to mitigate the fact that my apartment complex has absolutely terrible windows that not only leak cold through them like a sieve (thanks largely to their terrible metal frames) but that are so poorly installed or maintained that they don’t even block the wind. It’s much more difficult to detect when the entire frame is uncovered, but putting the plastic over them makes it clear that there’s wind blowing through them almost constantly.
Continue readingA Normal Amount of Election Day Anxiety
I spent most of today trying to avoid spiraling. It is election day as I’m writing this, though this is going up a week later, and this election feels particularly fraught. Perhaps more telling, though, is that this level of anxiety is starting to feel normal for elections. After all, the past four major elections (two presidential elections and mid-term elections, specifically, since there’s been a lot more of the local ones than just these four) have been either a step directly toward fascism and authoritarianism or a desperate attempt to move further away from it. I know that the situation we’re currently in is the result of decades of effort so it’s not like any of this stuff came out of nowhere, but that’s not really comforting to know that given how much of it happened before I had any say in the matter. What would be comforting would be knowing that our elections are fair and safe from a bunch of far-right facist fuckers worming their way into enough positions of power that they can thumb the scales by disenfranchising voters or outright meddling in the elections. What sucks the most about that thought is it feels on the same level as all of my “what if I won the lottery” fantasies.
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