After months and months of summer, fall arrived in a single week. I had my AC on not that long ago and now I have to close my windows because it’s getting too cold in my apartment. And yet we’ve got temperatures in the seventies coming up next week [or in a day or two, as this post goes up]. It has been an absolutely wild Fall, so far, and I’m reminded of that Spring from a few years ago where we went from cold, wet, and snowy to hot and humid in a week and a half in May. We had exactly one week of Spring after a very long Winter and then went straight to Summer. Sure, we’ve had more Fall than that already, and it looks like we’re going to have plenty more as the temperatures change up and down (which is usually a sign that most of the heat it coming from the sun rather than from the weather and prevailing winds), but it was a rather drastic shift to go from weather routinely in the high seventies and eighties that rarely dropped into the fifties to weather dropping below freezing and barely breaking out of the fifties for a few days at a time. It looks like, finally, a couple weeks into October, Fall is here to stay.
Continue readingMusing
Coffee Grinders Hate This One Weird Trick!
On the same day (the day I’m writing this as I doze off in my office at home, barely able to keep my eyes open), both my coffee grinder and my kettle briefly met their end. I was able to get my coffee grinder working again by slapping it, but the fact that it failed three times in the few seconds I used it this morning means that I’m on the hunt for a new one [and have already picked one, by the time you’re reading this]. Then, later that evening, I went to de-scale my stovetop kettle and the handle broke right off. There didn’t appear to be much holding it on, in the first place, so I’m kind of surprised it lasted almost a decade. I was able to get it in usable condition, but I’ll need to be very careful with it since the handle is only holding on to one side now, and that’s the side that allows you to detach it from the metal for the purpose of cleaning the spout. I can’t help but imagine myself dropping it or having the kettle, full of boiling water, slip off the handle somehow while I’m moving it from the stove to where my French press is set up. It’s nightmarish, which means I’ll be ordering a new one tomorrow, no matter what. I don’t want to have to use this disaster waiting to happen any longer than I absolutely must in order to get the caffeine I require to survive each and every day right now. All in all, it has not been a great time for my ability to make my daily coffee and quart of iced tea (I got a PERFECT mason jar for the iced tea and the self-sealing nature of it means that loading it up with ice to chill out seals it perfectly for the trip from my apartment to my workplace) and I’m looking to improve my setup now that the appliances I’ve been using have both broken.
Continue readingThe Sleep(less) Saga Continues: This Time With Some Answers
While I took some time out yesterday to write about some good old Legend of Zelda stuff in hope of buoying my mood, it only helped a little bit and most of that got undone by sleeping only four hours again. So, rather than get stuck in a negativity spiral, I’m going to write about what’s going on in a more informative than claiming manner. Or, I should say, I’m at least going to try that. Only the writing of this post will actually tell if I manage it, which is uncomfortably close to the process of going through physical therapy to fix my back problems. All you can do is try and see if it works out the way you want. The parallel is pretty apt, too, since I am a decent writer and am directing this blog post and my physical therapist seems to know what he’s doing, so he’s guiding my treatment in a direction that should help with what he believes to be nerve compression. It sounds pretty tame for what it is, to be honest. Or at least for what it feels like. From what I can gather (and I apparently only get to see my physical therapist on days I’m incredibly exhausted and barely coherent, so my understanding might be lacking), the short of it is that sleeping on my old, bad mattress trained my muscles a certain way and that muscle training means that I’m currently putting a bunch of pressure on the major nerves on the right side of my spine (since I went from sleeping in a bowl with a curve that stretched those muscles open to sleeping on a properly supportive surface that keeps my back level and “tightly” closes those muscles on my nerves for hours at a time). It’s sort of like constantly pressing on the nerve in your elbow–your funny bone–for hours until it becomes painful. I’ve been given some exercises to do to help strengthen and stretch my muscles while relieving the pressure they place on my nerves, which will hopefully be enough to eventually counteract the pressure I’m still putting on them.
Continue readingEvery Time I Think Things Are Calming Down, A Rich Asshole Shows Up To Ruin Something
Every time I think the internet is going to calm down and I can maybe figure out some kind of plan for what I’m going to do once I’ve gotten enough sleep for complex thought and proper long-term planning, a new bit of bullshit breaks. To be completely honest, I figured that the guy running Automattic, that owns WordPress .com and Tumblr, and who also runs the WordPress Foundation (which owns and maintains the trademarks on WordPress and does some oversight on the open-source WordPress project), was at least some kind of asshole give the way that WordPress and Tumblr are doing their damnedest to sell user data to shitty plagiarism machines, but I really underestimated how much of an asshole he is. Turns out he’s allegedly trying to extort another company that he recently called out, threatening that he’d go “scorched earth” if they didn’t give in to his demands for changes to their business model or some kind of financial support. Reading some of these exchanges is absolutely wild and I’m really not sure how to feel about all of this, considering my plan to leave WordPress .com was to set up the open-source WordPress .org software on a different host. I’d even begun to do a bit of research about what hosts I could turn to, when the time came to make the change, and have bookmarked the research some of my friends on Cohost did for their own purposes. Now, I’m not as certain.
Continue readingFarewell, Sweet Cohost
Today, the day this blog post is going up, is the last blog post I will be sharing before Cohost goes read-only. I’m sure I’ll have at least a little more to say over there that will be unique to Cohost and written the day-of, but I wanted to carve out a little space on my blog to say a final farewell. After all, as I’ve said in the past (just two weeks ago, actually, though the experience of that time felt much longer than the calendar says it was), Cohost was my new home on the internet and I will sorely miss it. There really aren’t a lot of places on the internet that aren’t focused on the numbers. Even this place has a numerical metric that I can’t help but constantly look at… It was a place to just exist without any kind of ambition or motive. I could go there, read posts, occasionally comment, learn something new, and find something that piqued my interest. I don’t know if I’m ever going to push myself to invest in a website as much as I tried to push myself to invest in Cohost (something that started tapering off over the past year due to work stress and then seeing the writing on the wall with the mid-Spring funding scare that presaged Cohost’s eventual shuttering), but I think I’m done looking for a “home” on the internet. I will probably still look for community, of course, but I think it is time to acknowledge that the current state of the internet is incredibly toxic to most people’s well-being and perhaps mine in particular. Cohost wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was a much nicer place to be than any other website I’ve visited regularly and miles beyond any other social media site. I’ll keep my blog going, of course, since I’m too stubborn to ever given up something valuable that isn’t also harmful to me, but I think I’m going to try to make some spare time and save a little energy for finding a way to make a social home offline.
Continue readingThe Dangers Of Prescriptive Language In Self-Help Texts
After a long summer break from class, I have once again returned to my “management interested course” and I am just as underwhelmed by it as usual. I’m still going to participate in it and put in an honest, good-faith effort since I want to one day do some kind of management stuff, but it is difficult not to look at the course I’m taking and the classes I’ve sit through with the jaded eye of someone who has watched management make mistake after mistake once the person who’d historically held the reigns passed away. Most of those mistakes were largely harmless and the rest are eased by the number of competent people involved who are able to negate–or at least reduce–any potential harm that might be done. Plus, they’re infrequent enough that the company I work for is still doing great. It’s really not a bad place to work most of the time, even as miserable as I can sometimes get when the stress piles on and I’m struggling to continue working at all, but it is undeniable that there is a huge amount of survivorship bias clouding the judgment of large swathes of the upper administration here, almost all of which becomes nakedly visible during these courses as one VP after another presents something they’re supposedly an expert in. That said, there are a few who clearly know what they’re talking about and while I might take issue with their presentations for other reasons, there’s no denying that the person presenting the current bastardization of the “7 habits of highly effective people” self-help/philosophy course knows his stuff.
Continue readingFailing To Adjust To A New Mattress
I’ve fallen a bit behind on my blog post buffer. I’ve regained some ground thanks to a bit of a herculean effort on my part, but I’m still writing posts only a few days ahead of posting them right now and I’m not sure when I’m going to be able to start gaining enough ground to stay ahead. The problem isn’t a lack of post ideas or time to write but a lack of adequate rest. I have plenty of ideas, I just don’t have the energy, focus, or mental fortitude to write more than one blog post in a day and sometimes struggle to even do one. Best I’ve managed was two on last Friday and I barely managed that. Turns out that two weeks of terrible sleep following months of uneven sleep will really wear you down. I wrote about it a little bit for a post that went up last week, but things haven’t improved as much as I’d like in the two weeks I’ve been sleeping on my new mattress. I’m reasonably certain (intellectually, anyway) that this is just the pain of adjusting to a new, good mattress after years on a bad mattress that was starting to cause back problems, all slowed down because a medication I’m taking has negatively impact the ability for my muscles to rest, recover, and strengthen themselves. I’ve done enough research and figured a few things out (given that this experience is similar to ones I’ve had sleeping on other mattresses in the past) to know what is probably going on. Emotionally, though, I can’t really grasp that likelihood. I’m so exhausted from interrupted and poor sleep over these past two weeks that it’s all I can do to keep myself functioning at all. I almost had a minor breakdown over the weekend because of how tired I was due to how little I’d slept and how the various interruptions in my weekend meant that I couldn’t take a nap to make up for any lost sleep. It’s difficult to emotionally process things and to keep my emotions in check so I can handle them in a healthy and constructive matter when I’m this tired, but I’ve managed to hold on by a ragged finger this long and I THINK things are finally hitting a point where they’re starting to improve.
Continue readingAutomated Water-Saving Faucets In The Bathrooms
In an all-too frequent turn of events, I wound up spending a couple minutes trying to scrub soap off my hands. The automated soap dispenser in the bathroom at work, which usually dispenses too little soap, dumped more than twice as much soap as usual on my hands. After scrubbing them clean and going to rinse them off in the sink, I had to move my hands away from the spigot, wait a couple seconds, and move them back under the spigot a total of four times in order to get all the soap off my hands. You see, for whatever reason, the company I work for decided that THESE bathrooms, in this part of the building built specifically for said company, would have water-saving automatic faucets that not only turned themselves off if there wasn’t enough of your hands DIRECTLY in front of the sensor, but would also turn off if the water was running for ten consecutive seconds AND then refrain from turning on until you moved your hands away, waited a couple seconds, and moved them back in front of the sensor. You have to let the sensor deactivate and only then can you reactive it. Ostensibly, this is a water saving measure that works to compliment the low-volume faucet (that mixes in a bunch of air to make the little bit of water you’re getting look more voluminous than it is) so that it either doesn’t get stuck on or encourages people to not keep the water running when they’re not actively rinsing their hands. However, as an owner of a large pair of hands with a very clear conception of what it takes to actually clean your hands after using the bathroom, I find it incredibly frustrating to be in need of more water so often.
Continue reading“Just Another Wave In The Ocean… Destined To Disappear”
Much like the post that talks about the video game I’m quoting in this post’s title, today’s post is about grief. After all, today (writing, not posting) is the day that Cohost has announced that it will be closing down at the end of the month. As of the announcement, the active users on Cohost had three weeks (now two) to make our peace, to publicly grieve, to figure out how to stay connected, and to figure out what to do now that our home on the internet is going away. So far, there’s been a mix of starting webrings (collections of personal blogs and websites), people migrating to other social media sites and finding each other with established hashtags, handing out discord usernames so people can still keep some form of contact, and even some people simply deciding that they’re done with social media in its entirety. There’s been so many posts (many of them tagged into the “global feed” which is incredibly rough on the website and something the staff running that site have asked people not to do too much) that the website is failing to load about half the time (this lasted for about eight hours and still struck occasionally after that). It’s a mix of mourning, the aforementioned planning of where people will go next, and shitposting as people swear they’ll keep playing music until the ship sinks. As for myself, I’m following the people I care about, exchanging contact info with the people I’d like to keep talking to, and mourning the end of the one place on the internet that I felt comfortable calling my home.
Continue readingThe End Of An Era: I’ve Sworn Off National Novel Writing Month
You ever have one of those mornings where you wake up, casually decide to blast your eyeballs with some blue light courtesy of your phone in order to wake up more quickly, and then immediately regret every decision you’ve made in the short time you’ve been conscious because the first thing your brain comprehends in the day is some completely unexpected and emotionally destructive news? That was me on Labor Day, when I woke up and learned that the organization behind National Novel Writing Month had not only decided to officially allow LLMs and “AI writing tools” to be legitimate sources of text for their various month-long writing events but also tried to get ahead of anyone calling them on this bullshit by saying in the same statement that not allowing LLMs and these “writing aids” is both classist and ableist. Which is also bullshit. The whole thing is complete and utter bullshit. How the hell does an organization built around the idea of encouraging people to write not only allow text that wasn’t written (no LLM writes text, it generates a complex version of autocomplete) but allows it using tools built off of stolen writing? And, to top it all off, it turns out that a likely reason they’re taking this stance is that one of their major sponsors for the year is one of those now-allowed “AI writing aid” tools! One of the tolls built from ChatGPT and an ever-increasing amount of stolen work! It’s absolutely staggering.
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