I really dislike electronic waste. I work for a company that produces electronics (coming up on my eight-year anniversary in about a month, actually) and I’ve never much cared for how much stuff gets thrown out. I have a cell phone that is over six years old because it still works alright and I don’t want to add it to the collection of useless old devices I’m holding onto because they’re all too old or too broken to be donated to any charities or to be given to anyone but I don’t want to just toss them out. I am still using a TV that is about a decade old and wasn’t even a very good TV at that, back when I got it, because it still works just fine and I don’t want to add it to my growing collection of TVs that sit in various rooms of my apartment should I ever, for whatever reason, want a TV in that room. I gave my old Switch away to a friend rather than sell it because it was old, heavily used, and I didn’t know how much more life it had in it. I still have all my old iPods. I still have all my old CD players and stereos. I don’t throw electronics out because I don’t want them to be added to the ever-growing piles of electronic waste, but I’m rapidly reaching the point where this kind of behavior isn’t sustainable anymore. So, when I built my new computer in July, I had no where to put my old computer, no desire to continue using it for anything, and I didn’t want to just throw it out.
Continue readingMusing
Two Months Of Physical Therapy Later, I’m Mostly Sleeping Better
I’m about two and a half months into my physical therapy and sleep recovery efforts now. As I’m writing this (a while ago, actually, but I’ve done a more thorough editing pass to get it up-to-date), I’ve finally hit a point where I was able to sleep for seven consecutive hours. Which isn’t as much as I’d like, of course, but it’s nearly double what I was getting back in September and early October, when things were at their worst. Also, while I’m still waking up due to pain and soreness, I can now go do a few stretches and then go back to sleep for another two or three hours. Or least I could back when I was getting a maximum of six hours of sleep at a stretch. I’ll have spent the last few weekends trying (with mixed results) to get as much sleep as possible since the week before US Thanksgiving (the second-to-last week of November) was physically draining in a way I haven’t experienced in years, as was the week after US Thanksgiving, but that was very clearly due to work stress in a way that the aforementioned week wasn’t. I managed to get several nights of quality sleep while I was away from work, but I’ve still been dozing off at my desk every single day so it clearly wasn’t enough (or wasn’t of sufficient quality) to make me actually feel rested. As it turns out, since there is an unfortunate intermingling of issues I’m dealing with, I’ve hit the upper-limit on how much sleep I can get and the worsening of those intermingling issues has actually started to cut down on how much sleep I can get, thanks to the once-again-worsening back, shoulder, and now general joint pain I’ve got going on.
Continue readingMy Website And I Are Both Travelling This Holiday Week
Well, I’m finally on the verge of getting four whole blog posts ahead [well, I was close… this week’s cleaning has crashed into my exhaustion, so I’ve done little beyond making my apartment nice and clean so far]. I’ve managed to slowly build up a three-post buffer (this post is maintaining that, not building on it, but I’ve got a topic and everything picked out for the next one and enough time to get it done today [this was incorrect]), but I’ve got a bit of a mix-up coming what with US Thanksgiving and visiting with my sister and our sibling. Which means this is the last post for this week since I’ll be taking tomorrow and Friday off to spend time with my family and not lose the buffer I’ve been painstakingly building these last few weeks. It’s been a real busy week, as I’m writing this, so I haven’t been able to make much progress on the goals I’ve set out for myself in last week’s post. I have spent some time doing research for where to host my blog and I expect that, by the time you’re reading this, I’ll have most of that set up or at least figured out. I’ve only got a couple more weeks until my current plan on WordPress .com expires and I’m sticking by my decision to not given them any more of my money, even if my mind has been wavering. It’s not easy to go to self-hosting and I’m already so tired, so burned out, and so low on energy to do anything at all, so making the process of blogging any more difficult or complicated than it already is might just leave me unable to keep up with it’s demands. I mean, right now, I’m barely able to balance work and blogging on top of getting some amount of necessary rest in my evenings, so more steps aren’t going to make it any easier…
Continue readingThe Only Good Thing About Social Media Today
I’ve been trying to take it easy on the news front lately. I’ve been super busy at work and don’t have the emotional resiliency to wallow in online misery like I did back in 2016. Plus, the last place I go online for social media, bsky.app, has been struggling all day every day this week as it gets flooded by new users who are either clogging the servers, attempting to remake the existing culture on the website, or blathering on and on about how they’re crushed that they have to rebuild their followings while also spamming the world with new starter packs (groups of users collected by the person who made the starter pack that you can choose to follow in their entirety if, for some reason, you want to just blindly follow a dozen to a couple hundred people). These people need to sit down, take some time to adjust, and get used to the idea that they’re called “skeets,” as gross as that is. I resent anyone showing up after a goddamn year of hanging out in a nazi bar (aka, Twitter) who tries to dictate how the people who BUILT this website into the haven they’re now seeking use that same website. I don’t care what other people call a post to Bluesky, but they don’t get to tell anyone else what they’re called. We settled that in the great posting wars/posting strike of 2023.
Continue readingAn Exchange Of Beliefs To Reflect This Upcoming Political Era
Content warning for discussion of childhood abuse and the lingering effects of that trauma.
Continue readingI’m Tired and Sad, So Let’s Talk About The Legend of Zelda: Episode 31
I’m out of blog posts, exhausted, and super depressed about everything going on in the world (which is why I’m out of blog posts, but I’ll write about that later). So, rather than try to kick my ass into gear in order to pretend that I’m still writing these a week ahead of time, I’m going to fully admit that I’m writing this on the eleventh, that I’m probably going to have to edit this after it posts tomorrow, and that all I can seem to do right now is take refuge in what scant comforts remain to me after I burned through them in the first year of the pandemic… [this is why I try to write them early enough that I can edit them before they go up since the rest of the post doesn’t really support this idea here]. The primary comfort amongst them being The Legend of Zelda and Majora’s Mask in particular. I feel a little weird, writing about it right now, but it also feels kind of appropriate given that it is a game about preventing the end of the world while the world is constantly ending. About finding joy or love or peace as the world falls down around your ears. About grief and endings and healing throughout them. I’m pretty sure that all the recent thoughts buzzing around my head are a result of something I read and a discussion I had rather than something I wrote, but it still feels like I’ve touched on this recently even though I have clear evidence I haven’t.
Continue readingNovember Without A Writing Project
Today is the first day of November. The eighth, as you’re reading this, I guess [it got bumped due to election bullshit]. Normally, I’d be deep in my feelings about my writing challenge for the year or how I had to set it aside due to personal issues happening in my life. This year, though, is different. I’ve already written about how National Novel Writing Month has compromised their integrity in a number of unforgivable ways since the start of 2023’s NaNoWriMo, so I’m not going to rehash everything in too much detail, but suffice it to say that they sold out to Large Language Model garbage (still masquerading as “AI”), decried pushback against allowed generated text by saying that not allowing it would be classicist and ableist, doubled-down, and then fell apart as people withdraw from supporting the organization. All of which is terrible but doesn’t come close to the harm done that came to light in 2023–NaNoWriMo hadn’t been protecting its youngest writers, allowing them to be groomed by people who were representing the organization in location-based chats and writing groups, not doing anything about it until the community blew up about it in the middle of November that year. Both of these events were real shitshows, to put it lightly, and a lot of people, myself, included, have sworn off participating in any future NaNoWriMo events. I stand by the decision, of course, but I do find myself missing the excitement and distraction the yearly writing challenge usually brings me. I wasn’t aware of how much I relied on it to buoy my spirits as fall and its attendant early nights come crashing down on the Midwest.
Continue readingA Bunch Of People Are Either Pro-Fascist Or Really Fucking Stupid. Or Both.
The last couple days have been rough. Rough enough that I’ve not only failed to fix my post buffer but let it entirely disappear. Sure, I’ve got drafts aplenty, but most of them are ideas from a week ago or from earlier this week, back when the world looked different. More anxiety-inducing, sure, but better. I’ve never handled uncertainty well because there’s really not much you can do about that, you know? Once you know, once the many possibilities have collapsed into a single reality, at least then you know what you’re dealing with. Today, though, as I’m wearily writing this post after a couple long nights of not sleeping very much, I miss the way I felt on Monday, as I went to bed before the day of the election. Sometimes uncertainty is better than reality. Not yet knowing is better than knowing. I’d rather go back to before I knew that the majority of US voters wanted fascism. Or at least were stupid enough to fall for the fascist con-man’s spiel. Because that’s the thing, you know? It is literally only one or the other at this point. There’s literally no excuse for choosing to vote for Trump other than wanting authoritarianism, fascism, bigotry, and hate to win, OR being too stupid to tell that the giant orange doofus is lying to you when he says that he’s not going to do all the things the people who are going to be in his administration say he’s going to do. Sure, he SAID he’s not going to ban abortion care, but he literally spent part of his presidency setting it up and is a part of the whole goddamn political party who has been relentlessly trying to do that ever since Roe v Wade. What the fuck did you think was going to happen?
Continue readingToday Is Election Day In The United States Of America (2024 Edition)
And what an absolute crock of shit it is. On one hand, we have a candidate who is supposedly left-leaning but would be seen as being to the right side of the center-right position in most European countries, not to mention some of the human-rights violation stuff like supporting Israel’s genocide efforts and somehow supporting whatever the hell is going on at the US border. On the other hand, we had a literal fascist felon who supposedly has a secret plan to become president even if he doesn’t win the election, running on a far-right platform that is more and more exactly the nazi platform. It’s fucking wild, let me tell you, to be a person in this country who has to help pick between these two miserable human beings. I mean, the choice is clear and super easy to make, but it sure feels bad that this is where my country is at. This asshole (Trump, to be specific) should have been laughed out of the area a decade ago. He should have been in prison even longer ago, given all the fraud. Only by the virtue of being a “rich” celebrity has he managed to get this far in life without any time in prison. The man’s a wannabe mobster and is so blatant about it that the entirety of US culture has shifted in order to not lose their minds over how much blatantly wrong and illegal stuff this man and his campaign for presidency have done over the last ten-ish years. I really wish I could say that I don’t and can’t understand how anyone could think of Trump as a viable president or as anything beyond someone who deserves life in prison, but I do and can because I’ve seen it happen. I watched it happen.
Continue readingRose-Tinted Glasses In The Gathering Dusk Of A Quiet Night Alone
It is difficult to not look at my life from the past and not feel diminished in some way. The siren song of nostalgia is a difficult to tune resist, as I find myself feeling more isolated and alone than I have in years. I speak with fewer people on a regular basis these days. I have fewer recent conversations in all of my communication channels. I have no weekly events except the one I have laboriously scraped together every Sunday. I barely have the energy to even think about making any kind of positive changes to my life, let alone actually making any changes. I am in a rough patch and the thought that yesteryear was better is a difficult one to deny when I am watching the sun set while I fill up my water bottle for my final hour of work as the building settles into silence and darkness on a Friday evening. I am not the only one working still, but, like me, we all work in isolation and silence, largely unaware of each other’s presence. I do not know their life situations, but a part of me wonders if they, too, have little waiting for them but a trip home and a quiet weekend doing their own things. Sure, I’ll do some grocery shopping and get my weekly takeout before I settle into my apartment for another weekend, but that’s not much of a social life. The events I have this weekend will hopefully keep me from falling into the silence and isolation I’m increasingly familiar with these days, but it’s little comfort as I feel the building’s heat shut off and the temperature begin to drop while I’ve still got work to do.
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