I’ve been continuing to chew through books at a steady clip, though my pace has slowed down a bit since I finished moving. I can do other things easily now, so I am spreading my reading time out more and not going through a book every day or two. Now I’m down to a book or two every week. It’s about the same number of pages every week, seven or eight hundred, but sometimes that’s one book, sometimes that’s two books, and I’m sure I’ll find a monstrous book where that will only be a part of a single book. Most of that time is when I finish a game before I’m ready to go to bed, when I’ve got a meal that only takes one hand, when I’m killing time between things, and evenings when I want to avoid screen time. It’s nice, even if I’m mostly rereading books these days rather than digging through anything new, but I’ve been so stressed and tired over the past month that I wanted something familiar and simple rather than anything particularly trying. I did not want to find myself stressed out by not knowing what happens next. Which has definitely made for some mental rest, but it also means I haven’t had anything new to mentally chew on from my reading time. It also means most of my thoughts about my reading experience are a reflection on where I was and how I was sitting rather than the novels I was reading.
Continue readingMusing
Living In My Apartment One Month Later
After nearly a month of being in my new apartment (at least it will have been a month as of when this goes up), things have continued to settle into a comfortable pattern. I’m still adjusting my apartment bit, since I prioritized rest and relaxation over finish up hanging art and string lights, but I’m getting close to being done. Plus, there’s some stuff you only ever figure out as you live in a place, like what constitutes an adequate number of curtains, which sections of the floor really need a carpet, whether or not you need more lamps (or just need to move around the ones you’ve already got), and so on. There’s plenty that I’m only figuring out as I move from my recovery period to my comfortable occupation period, so it might be a while before I’m one hundred percent done. I will say that sleeping without earplugs is great and that finally getting the right curtains set up (with two sets layered atop each other in my bedroom) has really improved my sleep. Now I just need to fix my horrible broken sleep schedule and I should be good to go. All those late nights from moving and then stress have really messed up my body’s sense of when to go to sleep.
Continue readingA Rant About How Much Things Suck Today
I’ve got more coming on this on Friday, but the Supreme Court has once again decided that people need fewer rights, not more of them, by ruling on some absolute bullshit. Normally I say that because I’m too mad to go into detail or just don’t have the spoons to run through it all, but this time it is actual bullshit. They ruled on an entirely fictitious situation that had no place being in front of the supreme court and, as a result have not only removed protections from the LGBTQIA community, but basically signaled to all the bigots and their astroturfing financial masterminds that they can take whatever the fuck they want to the supreme court because having an actual legal case doesn’t matter anymore. Throw in all the other dumb shit that’s happened, the absolutely bananas-pants rulings this body of unelected partisan hacks has passed down, and the great issues the right-wing asshats are pushing in every single state, and maybe this country we live in isn’t worth celebrating. Maybe this country is bad. Why celebrate independence day when my freedoms, the freedoms of people like me, and the freedoms of so many people who didn’t have the privilege of being born white, masculine-passing, and (well, probably “lower” at this point) middle-class are being slowly stripped away?
I mean, hell, children are being “allowed” to work in factories because this capitalist machine is breaking down its populace into a bunch of cogs meant only to perform labor. Can’t have people getting an education or improving themselves. Gotta trap everyone in a cycle of poverty so the ruling class can stay seated at the top. Fuck, this country sucks. And it’s not like we’ve got a monopoly on this, either. So many countries are chasing profits and the capitalistic pipedream that is eternal growth by allowing themselves to put GDP and corporations ahead of doing right by their people. It’s disgusting and disheartening. Maybe we should just put a whole moratorium on celebrating countries until they actually get their shit together and stop making the world a worse place for everyone.
Originally, I wasn’t going to have a post for today. I was going to take a day off and continue the resting I’ve been doing since this is one of the few breaks I get to disentangle myself from the capitalist machine of constant labor. After Friday, though, I felt that this day can’t go unremarked. So yeah, fuck the bigots. Fuck your religious defense of bigotry. Every single one of you should be ashamed of yourselves. Fuck independence day specifically, because there’s going to be a lot of people out there celebrating this country who see the actions of the supreme court as a victory rather than the symptom of an ill and failing government that is allowing the wealthy few to rule the masses. A majority of whom, at worst, are totally willing to let people live their lives however they want so long as it isn’t endangering other people. Just as properly Good people are rare, so are Evil people. Now if only we could get all the Neutral folks to take a stand for letting people live in their harmless truths.
I’ll celebrate independence day again when I no longer feel ashamed of my country. Until then, fuck it, fuck the bigots, trans rights are human rights, and your religion isn’t worth shit when it comes to deciding the value of other people.
The Plight of the Modern Artist
My coworkers an incredibly excited about the potential of the various algorithms that many tech companies have been incorrectly calling “artificial intelligences.” I’ve argued with them about the definitions, the massive number of ethical issues involved, the fact that they’re actually useless if you’re trying to create something, and how they’ve essentially become a fad since now anything that needs to be sold to the public is described as somehow using AI or an algorithm even when it doesn’t really make sense. All I’ve gotten for my effort is the official title of team luddite. Apparently no one cares that almost all of these algorithms are built on theft or that they’re already being used to take the jobs of artists. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of them even think that’s a good thing, given how they all seem to be falling into the same side of the issue as every single shitty techbro who thinks that artists are snooty, stuck up, smugly superior, and need to be taken down a peg. I’ve tried to explain to them that capitalism and modern society have been devaluing art and artists for so long that it’s almost impossible for someone to make a consistent living in any art career without more luck than is fair to need for the category of jobs that produces the entirety of popular culture.
Continue readingI’m Finally Figured Out My Streaming Schedule
I spent most of my weekend streaming and trying to get back into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. It wound up working, thanks to me stumbling from what I thought was just exploring something that looked interesting into recruiting a new sage. I sat down at just before midnight on Saturday with the thought to take an hour, work out how much ground I’d maybe need to go over again thanks to playing my first eighty hours without the sensor, and then do my actual best to reinvest myself in my existing save file. The deal I’d made with myself was that if I put in a genuine effort and still couldn’t get myself caught back up in the game, I’d allow myself to start the game over and then spend most of my stream time doing major quests and storyline stuff while my offline gaming would be exploration, shrine hunting, and resource collection. About four and a half hours later, as I blearily looked out my window at the lightening sky while I finally shut my Switch off, I knew I was back in it for good. Being back into the game felt nice enough that I didn’t even mind royally messing up my sleep schedule during what was supposed to be a proper recovery weekend.
Continue readingSettling In To My New Apartment
I have learned a lot about my apartment over the last week. Between painting, moving, and unpacking, there is little I’ve done since the beginning of the month except pay attention to my apartment, the space it provides, and the way I exist within that space. While the space might have felt empty, generic, and difficult to occupy initially, I’ve come to know it better since then. I have learned many of its quirks, realized a few of my own, and figured out how to best inhabit the space. While all my packing is not yet finished (and does not even feel close, even though I know I should be done by the end of the weekend following the writing of this post), I know how best to use the space I’ve got with the various pieces of furniture I have brought with me. I might shift some of that around, since even my excellent ability to tell how objects can fit within a space is not infallible, but for the most part I feel like I have figured out my space.
Continue readingI’ve Been Too Tired For Anything But Books
As I’ve slowly gotten parts of my new apartment in order and done what I can to create space for myself to relax, I’ve found myself turning back to books more and more. My video games and TV shows are fun, of course, but they have a layer of separation between myself and them. Video games require a certain degree of skill or mechanical separation. You must know how to play the game and think about how to play the game for everything but the most immersive experiences, and even those are frequently broken by reminders that there is a mechanical separation between you and your experience. TV shows and movies lack this interactive layer, but most modern movies require subtitles (at least for me, since I often can’t understand the actors over the sound effects) and there’s always this nagging thought in the back of my mind that this experience has a volume that could intrude on the lives of other. Mostly because of how often other people’s movie experiences have intruded on my life. There is nothing between me and a book.
Continue readingUnpacking My Thoughts On Unpacking
The slow, arduous process of unpacking is taking me so much longer than I thought it would. It probably doesn’t help matters that I’ve been largely confined to working between the time I’m finished with work (sometime at or after 6pm) and before “quiet hours” start in my apartment at 9pm. Sure, I could keep working after that, but I refuse to be the noisy upstairs nieghbor that I tried to escape. I will not be bumping and thumping around my apartment until all hours of the night. Sure, I can sometimes find something quiet to do, like last night’s folding laundry and unpacking clothes, but I also have to contend with the continued exhaustion from my packing and moving. It’s not like my rest is any good when I finally collapse onto my bed for the night since the mental residue of my life being disturbed prevents me from falling asleep easily. Plus, the most relaxing thing I’ve done all week was go to a friends’ for 2 hours to attempt to play D&D where we wound up just shooting the shit for the whole two hours. After which, I went home and continued to unpack.
Continue readingPost-Move Exhaustion Blankets My Mind
I survived my move. As has most of my stuff (so far as I can tell, anyway, about 48 hours after just getting it all into my apartment and then being forced to leave it alone for about 48 hours due to needing to clean out the old place, drive my sister home, and then go to work the day after all that). It was rough, since we had merciless sun in 90 degree (fahrenheit) weather and went from 10am to 4pm, basically. There were plenty of breaks in there and I encouraged everyone to hydrate and rest as needed, but I think several of us wound up with mild heat exhaustion despite my best efforts to keep everyone rested and hydrated (I am one of the people who had it, so clearly I was not pushing people enough). Still, we got it all moved and into my apartment. We then all pretty much collapsed after pushing ourselves to make sure that myself, my sister, and my friend had places to sleep that night. It was a rough evening.
Continue readingShifting Relationships and Rebuilding My Support Network
I was talking to someone about my move (upcoming as I’m writing this but past as this gets posted) and mentioned that I’ve got half a dozen people coming to help me with the move. Their response was appreciation that I had such a robust support system. It wasn’t really a response I was expecting, so I was a bit caught off guard by the shift in the direction the conversation was going and it took me a few moments to respond. I managed to do so graciously and warmly, since that’s what the conversation’s tone and depth called for (and it is true that I love and appreciate the friends and family member who are helping, some of them coming from a few hours’ drive away to lend a hand), but there were a few bitter thoughts that popped up so quickly that I barely caught them before they made it out of my mouth.
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