In a week from tomorrow, I’ll be going on vacation. I’ll have some errands to run in the morning, including getting a blood test and doing some grocery shopping, but then I’ll be loading myself up for a trek northward to spend some time in a cabin in the woods with two of my siblings and one of their partners who’ll actually only be there for part of the trip. It’ll mostly be my siblings and I. I’ve also got additional time off of work after that, for post-trip recovery, resting up in my place of ultimate comfort (such that it is), and probably trying to get through my massive backlog of books, movies, and video games. A week of escapism, in as many ways as possible, followed by a week of rest and reordering of my life in whatever ways I can think of while also playing a bunch of video games, reading whatever books I’ve got left from the first part of the trip, and probably watching Delicious in Dungeon since I should be all caught up on A More Civilized Age by then. The possibilities are not exactly endless, but they’re pretty enormous, considering most of my two-week vacations over the past decade have been in the winter, around the holidays, and have suffered from the emotional angst that goes with them. This time, it’s all summer and all freedom to rest or do whatever. Maybe I’ll even stream! There’s so much I could be doing.
Continue readingInformation
No Post Today
Today is a holiday in the U.S. (Memorial Day) and I’ve decided to take the day off because I’m sorely in need of some rest after the last few weeks. And last week especially (which you’ll read all about over the next two days). So I hope you’re having a fun day off if you’re in the U.S. and don’t need to work. If you aren’t off work or aren’t in the U.S., I hope you have an alright day anyway, and that no one makes unreasonable demands on your time or energy.
No New Infrared Isolation Chapters For The Foreseeable Future
As I said on Wednesday, I’m done posting my own creative fiction on this blog. Eventually, when I’ve figured out self-hosting and all that, the sequel to this blog will include my fiction once again. Automattic and all the other shitty algorithms won’t be getting any more of my work unless they come to my webpage, get past my filters and firewalls, and scrape it themselves somehow. I probably can’t stop this process from happening, no matter what I do, but I will not stand for this bullshit. I refuse to let this just happen to me. I will be taking all sensible precautions and working to safeguard my work as much as possible.
Which means I’ll only be updating five days a week for now. I don’t know how long its going to take for me to figure out what comes next, be it running this exact same site on a new hosting platform without all the shit that Automattic and Jetpack are using to sell my creations or an entirely new blog with an archive of my older posts. Only time will tell, but I’m sure you’ll be able to read all about it since I tend to post about exactly that kind of stuff. Right now, though, I’m taking a moment to rest, to work through the intense and difficult feelings I’ve got about this (since I view myself as a writer and storyteller at my core, this attempt to make money off my work feels like an attack against me) before I make any decisions. It would not be a good idea to rush into anything just because I’m upset about the bullshit being pulled here, so I’m going to take my time and act with deliberation. And write about it near-constantly here since I really don’t have a whole lot else on my mind these days.
The Nightmare Of This Capitalist Dystopia Can Always Get Worse
Every so often, some horrible shit happens and I have to interrupt my blog writing and posting cycle to insert something while it’s still relevant. Today is another such day, even if it feels much smaller in the grand scheme of things than most of the other stuff I’ve disrupted my schedule for. Honestly, I’m only doing this because it’s something that actually impacts my blog as a whole, so it would be incredibly remiss of me to wait a week to talk about it. Yesterday, the website 404media broke a story that the owner of WordPress (.com, specially) and Tumblr was going to start selling their user’s data to a number of LLM companies for use in training their plagiarism machines. That article is paywalled, unfortunately, so I can’t send you there, but The Verge covered the story pretty well and that isn’t paywalled (and believe me, I’d be paying for access to the original article if I wasn’t already overbudget for this month). The short of it is that the parent company, Automattic, has publicly said they’re going to allow people to opt out of having their data sold (all in the name of staying modern when it comes to creating “content” rather than, say, Art or Blogs or even the almost-as-meaninglessly-generic-but-still-less-shitty “Media”) and that there are already some settings to help restrict access to your data, but they can’t do anything to stop any company from taking whatever is publicly available on the internet. They add that “respectable” companies will respect your settings, but I think that’s a load of hogwash since no company running a LITERAL PLAGIARISM MACHINE is anything approaching “respectable” under any definition of the word.
Continue readingHappy New Year!
I’m taking today off writing, so there’s no big blog post today (it is a holiday in the US, after all, and I’m trying to get better at resting when I need it). Instead, I’m just going to remind you that my Infrared Isolation series will start updating again on Saturday the 6th, that you should check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube for some fun videos of hilarious moments from a variety of media (including media that is VERY AWARE of him, often to a hilarious extent). That’s all I’ve got. Happy New Year and I hope you’re taking some time to start the year off in a way you find fulfilling!
Happy Holidays!
Today is the official winter holiday that my workplace observes (Christmas), so I’m choosing today to not do any writing, so instead of a blog post, I’m going to direct you back to my post from US Thanksgiving for some ways to escape if you feel the need to do so this holiday season. If you’re disappointed that I don’t have anything to entertain you, I suggest checking out Infrared Isolation, which will return to updating every Saturday (assuming I can keep up with the weekly demand for chapters, which is NOT a given even though I’ve got four weeks of updates already written, reviewed, and scheduled) on January 6th. Now is a great time to get caught up, review the story thus far, or dive in for the first time if you’ve not read my near-future, apocalyptic sci-fi story about a band of guides and survivors who made a living navigating the tundra that used to be the Midwestern United States as they find themselves facing off against everything the apocalypse has to throw at them after years of uneasy but safe living.
If you’re just here because you saw I updated then, well, thanks for stopping by! Happy Holidays and I hope you’re having or have already had a great winter holiday season.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I’m taking the day off to spend time with my siblings and, aside from cooking a huge meal, take a break for a day. So, instead of a full post, I’ve got some suggestions for people looking to escape today. If you can only read stuff, I suggest checking out The Order of the Stick for some D&D themed fun and Erfworld (which has mostly shuttered for the time being, but the full comic is still up for viewing, which is where the link SHOULD take you) for some fantasy-themed fun that quickly turns into incredibly complex story telling with a great deal of heart and (intermittently, due to the main artist needing to focus on her family’s health rather than work) beautiful art. If you’ve got video and audio access, check out DeepBlueInk on YouTube! Every video is excellent! If you need to chew up more time, check out Drawfee for some friends making art together! Sort by popular or just scroll until one of them sounds interesting! You really can’t go wrong if you like seeing artists work (though, personally, I’d definitely recommend the Drawtectives series, my absolute favorite thing they’ve done). If you’ve only got audio, I suggest checking out Andrew Bird’s music for something cerebral and chill or Bug Hunter for something upbeat, fun, and sometimes emotionally difficult but still beautiful.
Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t forget, all colonialism is bad and genocide is even worse even though they’re almost always found walking hand-in-hand! Work to fight against their influence even today as we in the US celebrate a story we made up to attempt to make it seem like our entire country isn’t built on murder, pillaging, and the destruction of other cultures!
Infrared Isolation: Hiatus
I genuinely do not have it in me to do the work this project requires right now. I barely have it in me to keep regularly blog posts up and those actually get views. I’m sorry if this is the sole reason you’re here, but I need to stop trying to work on this project for a bit so I can focus on resting and recovering. I’ll, of course, keep trying to work on it in the meantime, but not having self-assigned deadlines that fly past will lessen the mental load of this process. Once I’ve gotten a few chapters done and no longer feel quite as emotionally exhausted and just ABSOLTELY knackered all the time, I’ll go back to posting them. I’ll even let you know ahead of time, so you can set your alarms.
Continue readingTaking a Birthday Break To Rest Up
This is the weekend after my birthday and, complex feelings about the day itself aside, I am absolutely going to use that as an excuse to rest. We’ve got a holiday in the US (Labor Day, which feels more and more important with every passing year) and I’m just taking some time off. I’m just going to have a quiet, guilt-free day of relaxation and video games on Monday, since I’ve got Baldur’s Gate 3 to finish and then Armored Core 6 or Sea of Stars to play. Plus all the other games I’ve started and left unfinished because something else came along (I’m looking at you, Cassette Beasts). And a new playthrough of Chained Echoes, inspired by the blog post that went up yesterday. I’ve got a lot of fun games to play, books to read, puzzles to do, and I’m just gonna set everything aside for now so I can just enjoy my three-day-weekend. It’ll be a couple months before I get another work holiday and it’s not like I’ve got much vacation time left after how much I was out in the first half of the year, so I’m doing what I can to maximize my relaxation right now.
There will be another Chapter of Infrared Isolation next week (I was almost finished writing the chapter when I wrote this post, so it should be done and edited and I’ll even be partway through the next chapter by the time this post goes up) and my normal blog posts will resume on the 5th of September. Have a great weekend!
No New Chapter This Week
Maybe I should just make the “every other week” schedule thing permanent. I’ve fallen into that pattern these last few weeks, so it would be a bit of a relief if I removed that pressure from my shoulders. That said, I’ve also fallen into the habit of not working out in the morning and not getting out of bed until eight in the morning on work days, so maybe accepting the habits I’ve formed due to stress and on-going exhaustion isn’t a good idea. Maybe I should keep trying to fix my habits and regain full control of my life. I really think getting my sleep and waking cycles into a more healthy pattern will help with all the other stuff since this constant lack of sleep is my primary source of exhaustion these days. Not my only one, unfortunately, but being able to remove this source should make everything else manageable. After all, it’s not like I don’t want to write. It’s not like I’m not interested in finishing this story. I want to do it, I’m just either too busy with work or too absolutely exhausted to push myself to do more than a couple lines of story writing at a time.
So yeah, no new chapter this week but there should be one for next week. I’m going to keep trying for weekly updates, but I guess we’ll just have to see if I can swing it.