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Infrared Isolation Will Return On April 8th

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As a result of how busy I’ve been and how busy I expect to stay, I’m not even going to try to get a chapter of Infrared Isolation ready for any Saturday this month. I’ve got a two-week skip planned for the end of the month anyway, since I’ll be traveling and am planning to not update my blog at all while I’m on the road (though I expect I’ll have plenty to write about after my trip). So I’m just starting this now. Gonna save myself a whole lot of mental effort and strife, and do my best to get rested before I have to go on my first trip to Europe.

To be clear, there will be no new chapter posted on the 11th (today), the 18th, the 25th, or the 1st of April. Aside from today, there won’t even be a disclaimer post. I will post a reminder on the 27th not to expect anything new until the 3rd of April. I’ll actually focus on my vacation and what my friends and I are doing for once, instead of trying to keep this place going constantly.

On the 8th, though, I’ll have the next chapter queued up and ready to go. Until then, enjoy your weekends.

You’re Probably Going To See A Lot of “No New Infrared Isolation Chapter This Week” Posts This Month

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Life is, once again, kicking my ass. I’d like to say that I listened to my friends for once and decided to take it easy rather than continue to work through the stress, exhaustion, and series of incredibly demoralizing events involved in the past five days, but I genuinely just have not had time or energy to do anything, no matter how much I’d like to. Work has been busy, life has had a series of unfortunate events for me (nothing emotionally destructive like most 2023 prior to last week, thankfully, but it has still been a lot to process and work through every. single. day.), and I’ve been struggling with depression again because of all that on top of returning sleep struggles. It has been a pretty miserable and unredeemable week only made manageable because I’ve been getting a sense of accomplishment (and utter mental/physical/emotional exhaustion) from my day job, so it’s been a bit easier to go without all the writing I normally do to get that.

Anyway, if I keep going too long here, it’ll turn into a full post and the whole “do less so I don’t hate myself, my life, and the entirety of creation” thing I’m trying to do will have failed, so I’m gonna go. Have a great weekend and get some rest. I’ll be doing my best to do that while also attending to the million other things I’ve got to do this month… No real rest for me until April, unfortunately. Who knew international travel took so much preparation?

Taking A Day To Rest After All That Bullshit

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No new Infrared Isolation chapter today. If you want to know why, you can just read yesterday’s post. Dealing with the folks who inspired that post, in the days before writing that post and the days following it, has drained me of pretty much every bit of extra energy and willpower I had. So I’m skipping today and just trying to desperately rest in hopes of breaking out of this continuing spiral of awfulness that has been my experience of 2023 so far. Honestly, there’s not much left that can do sour or bad, so hopefully it’ll stop before much longer. In the meantime, I’m going to play Minecraft, as much Splatoon as I can manage, and then try to enjoy a game of Star Wars 5e with the remaining members of my TTRPG group.

Saturday Skip

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I’ve barely had time to even eat dinner this week, I’ve been so busy and absolutely exhausted, so there’s no new post for today. I’m working (slowly) on the next chapter of Infrared Isolation and I’ve got a poem I wrote a couple weeks ago ready to go in case I don’t get that done, so there will definitely be something new next saturday. I just don’t have the energy to push out even a regular blog post for today, so I’m gonna focus on resting up. Hopefully the next week will be a bit more calm and less busy for me.

Happy Holidays! Also, Links for Holiday Escapism!

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Today is the day before Christmas, which is, I suppose, the winter holiday I’m observing this year. At least from a taking-time-off perspective. Personally, I celebrate Candlenights since it doesn’t have any emotional baggage like all the other holidays I’ve celebrated in the past, and the openly-embracing-the-made-up-ness of it appeals to me as someone attempting to create my own traditions. I’d probably celebrate any of the other winter holidays, but a lot of those are tied to specific traditions, religions, or religious traditions, and I’m not a part of any of those. I grew up catholic and white so my entire culture/heritage as far as the winter is concerned is Christmas (Jesus) and Christmas (Capitalism), neither of which appeal to me. All of which is to say there will be no post beyond this today and I’ll be taking three whole days off in the next week as I rest, prepare for the coming year, and probably try to figure out if I actually want to make Christmas cookies or if I just want to eat Christmas cookies that someone else made. My next post will be up on Thursday the 29th.

If you’re looking for an escape and aren’t familiar with my work, check out Infrared Isolation or any of my poetry for my more recent work. Otherwise I’ve got almost 900 posts of stuff on this ol’ blog for you. If you want some good, funny videos, I recommend Drawfee (This One is my favorite, but it’s a little PG-13+). If you want audio-only, I recommender either the Partizan or Sangfielle seasons of Friends at the Table (Sangfielle is horror-ish, but quick to start, while Partizan has a pre-season bit that is kinda important and also fun to listen to). If you want something to read, I suggest Vattu which should keep you plenty busy for a day or two.

If that’s not enough… well… I don’t know what to tell you. Friends at the Table and Drawfee should, in their entirety, take you about a year to get through unless you listen to an average of about 5 hours of audio programming per day like I do. In which case, combined, they’ll take you about a year. Regardless, I hope you get through your holidays and enjoy yourself at least a little bit.

Two Week Skip

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Well, I meant to do only one week of skipped chapters, but then life happened and now we’re at two weeks. I can’t promise it won’t go longer since the holidays are coming up and this period of the year is frequently tumultuous or at least emotionally complicated in a way that leaves me with little energy for anything other than surviving/resting between intense bouts of anxiety or coming up with ways for this time of year to suck less as a person without anyone to mark the holidays with in an immediate, nearby sense. Normally I’d just travel to where my friends are at, but that might be a bit more than I can muster this year on account of… well, everything. Still, I enjoy writing and will be choosing that over a lot of other options when I have the spirit within me to put forth effort, but I’m just saying now that maybe don’t expect consistent new Saturday chapters of Infrared Isolation until the new year is underway. Plus, there’s some major holidays that are Saturday Adjacent this year so maybe I’ll just take them off. Who knows. I’m clearly flying by the seat of my pants right now.

One-Week Pause

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I’m skipping another week of Infrared Isolation. I could have tried to get it finished in time for today, but with everything I’d got going on right now (more on that next week), I think it’s better to give myself less stress and take more time for things. So Chapter 12 will go up next week and, hopefully, there’ll be few interruptions over the rest of the month. Things have to calm down in my life eventually.

It Doesn’t Count As Resting If You Do All Your Normal Work

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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.

One-Week Pause

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I’ll be skipping this week’s Infrared Isolation post. Chapter 10 is going to need another week because, frankly, I’m pretty burned out and the thought of pushing myself to get it done and then asking my editor/alpha reader to get it back to me quickly felt like volunteerily going to hell for vacation. I’m not about that life so, instead, I’m taking a rare break and posting only this today. Not even gonna try to come up with some essay to fill the gap since doing OTHER work doesn’t really address the whole “too tired to do work” part of being burned out. Hope you’re all having a great weekend and that we’re not all drinking ourselves into a stupor following the apparent end of democracy in the US.