I wound up taking today off work (the day I wrote this, which is about two weeks before it got posted) because I was just so burned out and exhausted that my body physically refused to operate correctly. Which is a bad state to be in, considering that I have plans to drive about five hundred miles in two days, another five hundred two days after that, and then a thousand in a single day four days after that. I don’t need to be in tip-top physical shape going into all of that, but it would certainly help make the total thirty-two-or-more hours of driving more bearable if I didn’t feel like crap. So I stayed in, played some video games (to wrap up some Final Fantasy 14 stuff before my week away from the game), and had a mostly relaxing day. Unfortunately, it was not entirely relaxing. I found out about an event my favorite wrestling group was doing a literal hour before it was supposed to start and scrambled to reorganize my evening so I could attend the event. It was a lot of fun, but I was not prepared to record and I was not mentally prepared for the shear amount of stuff that was going to be happening. Wrestling events can be a little overwhelming because there’s two chats to watch (the Wrestling chat and the crowd chat), the action to follow, the event’s music to listen to (used to help set the emotional tone for scenes), and usually my recording to monitor (and related camera work). While I wasn’t recording this time, there was a lot more mixing of chats than usual, a lot more attendees, just as much music, and I wound up in a discord voice chat with some people I’ve been getting to know, all of which left my fried and overstimulated after the first two-hour event.
Continue readingMusing
An Embarrassment Of Riches: Figuring Out What To Do With A Second Desktop Computer
Every year, my workplace holds a raffle to give away the computers that the IT department is retiring that are still in good working condition. I’ve participated without fail every year since I joined the company in the hopes of getting one of the actually pretty-decent computers for my personal use or a laptop that will get me through a few years of mobile computer usage (aka, writing) now that my old laptop can’t handle running a word processor on top of the OS. Eigth years in a row, I lost. There’s not a lot of computers and this is a popular program. This year, though, I almost missed it because I’ve been so distracted with other stuff going that I forgot about it completely and only managed to sign up at the last minute because the IT department sent out a message saying that not many people had signed up for the raffle. Since it was simple, thanks to the addition of a digital sign-up form, I filled it out and then promptly forgot about it again. I’ve had enough other stuff going on lately that some little lottery I wasn’t going to win didn’t seem like it was worth the mental space it would take to remember it. Which is why I was so surprised when I got the email congratulating me on winning the drawing. It took a little messaging back and forth for me to be certain this wasn’t some kind of scam or phishing attempt (seriously, both the IT and DevOps teams write their emails and messages like some kind of crappy phishing scam), but I was able to fill out the form and go pick up my brand new, 9-year-old-but-refurbished PC.
Continue readingFamiliar Disappointments Still Sting
Today (the day I wrote this), was the day that tickets for Final Fantasy 14’s Fan Fest went on general sale. I’d signed up for the pre-sale lottery (to get a chance to buy tickets early) but struck out there and then struck out again when I queued for tickets and got assigned the 8000th (and change) spot. I was not able to get tickets. Which, on one hand, is going to save me a bunch of money. On the other hand, I didn’t realize how excited I was about the idea of going to the convention until I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it. It was a pretty heavy blow. Much, much heavier than I expected, to the degree that losing out on this opportunity has cast a bit of a pall over my day. After all, I don’t really have a lot of stuff to look forward to, most of the time, so any time one of those things gets taken away, it hits harder than it ought to, and there’s been a lot of it lately. A lot of stuff has not been working out. lately. Siblings cancelling plans, friends getting sick and needing to cancel, missed opportunities, and so on. All I’ve really had that’s dependable is my gaming, work, and the inevitability of bills. It feels silly for this to be hitting me as hard as it has been, to rather completely sidetrack me for multiple hours today, but I have spent a large portion of the last couple years not planning stuff because of how often people flake on me or cancel last minute and I’m probably just a little overly sensitive to this kind of disappointment. I just wanted it to work out, despite all the evidence it wouldn’t, and now I have move on from this. Eventually.
Continue readingHoliday Travel Preparations: Changed Oil And Managed Expectations
I am preparing for a bit of a long car trip. I’ll be driving about two thousand miles, all told, over the course of a week, so I’ve been trying to get some things in order to make this trip happen in a way that isn’t going to destroy me. Primarily, I’ve taken my car in to get serviced. Thankfully, despite passing 111,111 miles just the other day and being almost twelve years old, there’s nothing really wrong with it. An oil change, a new oil filter, and an appointment to change out the weatherproffing seal around the driver’s door for after the holiday. Pretty small stuff, all told, and little enough that the anxiety I’ve been ignoring about needing to replace my car any time soon (which I absolutely cannot afford to do) has faded thanks to its clean bill of health following a full inspection. It is, of course, entirely possible that some significant issue is just one pothole away from bursting this sense of security, but I’ve been going to this mechanic for nearly a decade and they came well reviewed when I first started bringing my car to them. I trust their work and their thoroughness when I asked them to make sure I wouldn’t run into any problems during my holiday travels. I might still need to check the air in the tires since I prefer to put them at a higher pressure than I think they put them at (I like the top of the range of the acceptable tire pressure and they usually only fill them to the bottom), but I did forget to ask about that this time so I wouldn’t hold that against them.
Continue readingThe Story Of Senate Democrats: Turns Out It Was All For Nothing
I am writing this monday morning, between tasks at work as I try to pace myself through a day full of frustration. Last night, a bunch of Democrats capitulated to the latest Republican bullshit as eight of them (none of whom are up for relection next year, “coincidentally”) voted to pass the current Continuing Resolution (which is like a budget except it just kicks the can down the road for a couple months). Forty or so days of a government shutdown causing untold hardship for so many people and they gave up without getting anything other than a promise that there will be a vote on healthcare stuff. All of which ignores just how many people are going to lose healthcare as a result of this CR and makes the suffering of federal employees and low-income households getting food assistance a complete and total waste. There was no reason to shut down the government. The Dems got nothing but an empty promise for a future conversation that will likely have as much benefit as anything the Dems have “done” up to this point. It’s just so galling to see, especially on the tail of such a big blue wave not even a full week before they threw in the towel! The people said they want fighters, officials who stand for something, and the current crop of senators replied by instantly giving up. It was all such a waste. A pointless waste.
Continue readingI’ve Even Stopped Wishing I Could Put An Optimistic Spin On These Posts
It has been a rough… Well, couple of months in particular. Years. Decade. Etc. But the last couple months in particular have been very draining and extra exhausting. Having all of this stuff with my family hanging over me isn’t helpful at the best of times and these are not the best of times. The world looks increasingly awful as fascism continues to rise. Sure, we had a really good set of election results this past week, but we’ve got a long ways to go before anything starts to really change and the actions of various senatorial elected officials have made it pretty clear that this doesn’t change anything in their eyes despite how clear of a call to resist this should have been [I wrote this before they gave up, too, but more on that next week]. I don’t know how it could be any more clear than it is that the people of the US want our elected officials to resist every single one of Trumps moves, heinous or mundane. Throw is increasing work loads, a messed up sleep schedule, and it’s no wonder that I can’t seem to shake the dogged exhaustion I’m feeling. What the hell am I supposed to do about any of that? It’s all I can do to even think about sending a letter back to my aunt, the one who responded in what I’d call a positive manner, let alone write it and manage all of the other stressors that are taking up space in my mind with no relief on the horizon. All I want to do is lay down and surrender to unconsciousness until something has happened to resolve at least one of these things because I’m not sure I’ve got it in me to actually do anything about any of them.
Continue readingThe Rot That Is “AI” Keeps Spreading Into Things I Love
Square Enix, the company that publishes (and makes, for the most part, but it’s also a little more complicated than that because of how companies are structured) Final Fantasy 14, has announced recently that they’re partnering with a bunch of local academics in Japan to study current “AI” products in an effort to have seventy percent of all Quality Assurance (testing, aka the work I do) and debugging fully automated sometime during 2027. Now, this is, of course, patently ridiculous and not something that will actually work out or is even possible in the way they want it to work, but the past years of watching the tech industry get gutted and people begin to lose their jobs to “AI” bullshit has taught me the obvious lesson that it doesn’t need to work for it to be adopted. It doesn’t need to be good for people to lose their jobs. It just needs to be good enough that someone can pretend it’s great and fire all of their QA staff in order to “reduce costs” so that shareholders can get a fraction of a decimal percent more money at the end of the fiscal year. It’s bleak, I know, but all of the studies done on it, every post-mortem on “AI Workflows” and almost every single company to adopt it have all shown that it is a neutral move at BEST and a net loss in every other case. People hate needing to check over the work of “AI” because of how often its wrong. People hate being forced to use tools that don’t work properly. As I watch it chip away at the industry I work in and watch it start being focused specifically on the work I do, I can’t help but feel like I’m staring down the barrel of a loaded gun every time it comes up. Which means that, every time someone jokes about it trying to take my job, I feel like they’re joking about the gun pointed at me going off and then insisting that it will never actually happen whenever I try to talk about how all this feels or why it’s bad to have around.
Continue readingThe Power Of A Laboriously Prepared Meal
In my many years of living as an adult in this crazy world of ours, I’ve learned that the number one thing I can do when I’m stressed or feeling like I have no control or just too anxious for my usual methods to handle is to take some time to rest and, most importantly, to spend some of that time cooking a large, elaborate meal. Growing up as part of a Catholic, Midwestern family, providing people with food was an expression of love, with more volumnous and/or more elaborate food making a statement about the depth of your care for the person (or people) getting the food you’ve made. After all, the much/elaborate food acts as a display of the time and resources you’re willing to spend on someone else’s fleeting, but still life-sustaining, experience. This hasn’t always turned out well for me, considering how much it ties into the whole “earn love through service/giving to others” thing that has fucked me up my whole life, but I’ve been able to reclaim it as an adult as a means of showing myself, in a way that hits all my senses and displays a degree of care about myself, that I can afford to spend a decent amount of money, time, and effort on something I absolutely do not need and merely want. It’s a lot like retail therapy–an assurance of your comfort and safety–but with the explicit reminder that this will only ever be a fleeting thing you’ve done for yourself. Additionally, the engagement of the senses is an excellent grounding technique, the effort of cooking an elaborate meal is involved enough that my mind can’t wander elsewhere, and I usually wind up with a bunch of good food to eat over the course of a few days.
Continue readingA Project I’ve Been Considering For Years Has Been Stymied By How Much “AI” Crap There Is
After about three years of deeply considering it (which is a long time, even for me and my whole “think about getting a tattoo for a year before I can get it” thing, or my “think deeply about my personal indentity and how I wish to be referred to, testing things out in my head for nine months before mentioning that I was considering it even once” thing), I’ve decided to get into video editing. Not in a huge way. I’m not going to change careers or even get into the super fancy stuff. I just want to be able to do some basic editing: trimming, stitching, simple visual effects (like text on the screen), the occasional blur, and maybe some audio mixing for sound effects. Nothing major, just stuff that would help turn my many video-based ideas into a reality. I mean, I still want to make my “XX Ways To Die In Hyrule” Breath of the Wild video from that time I streamed playing through BotW wearing only hats right before Tears of the Kingdom came out. I also want to take the recordings I’ve made of wrestling events in Final Fantasy 14 and clean them up a bit so I’m not stuck trying to manage the start and end of the files by clicking the start/stop recording button. It’d be nice to be able to clean those up a bit and maybe hide my Party Chat stuff from the video so I can keep it private AND actually participate in it during wrestling events. I’ve also got a lot of ideas for other things bumbling around my head that would be fun to put together, if I could find the parts I need, so I’ve finally started directing a little bit of time and energy towards figuring all that out. And no, I’m not just doing this because I hit the downhill glide portion of my FF14 crafting project and still need to keep myself distracted (well, maybe a little, but it’s entirely coincidental).
Continue readingThe Joys (And “Joys”) Of Being Good At My Job
All of last week’s chickens have come home to roost. The letter I sent got responses, the work I was doing has come around back to me, and all of my crafting in Final Fantasy 14 has culminated in my plans for tonight. I’ll write more about how all that goes later this week, I’m sure, but suffice it to say that I’ve been very productive and, after lots of effort, I’m finally ready to actually make the gear itself. I’m also going to hold off on writing more about my letter responses and my subsequent therapy session for a bit longer, until I’ve had the time to process it all a little while longer. Instead, today I’m going to talk about the absolute nightmare that is this one bug I found at work. Thankfully, I found it and, since it’s my job to do that, things are going well for me in terms of my career. This will not pose any problems for me in that direction and will more likely be a feather in my cap than a hindrance since I found a horrible problem in an unorthodox way that would surely have eventually happened in the field but might otherwise have never occured in a testing environment. It’s just going to be a lot of work for me and I can’t even take satisfaction in foreseeing a thorny issue since I just sort of bumbled into this. I mean, I absolutely made the decisions that resulted in me learning that it’s possible to burn out an essential component of this product in a way that is safe but only because it renders the entire thing unuseable, but I didn’t think it was going to go poorly. I was actually looking for something unrelated that I still haven’t pinned down, but such is the life of a tester. You do a lot of inexplicable or unlikely things and stumble into bugs you never could have anticipated.
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