After a couple weeks of relatively stable weather, we’re back to temperature jumps, storms, and the occasional severe storm warning. Thankfully, there wasn’t much to write home about during the two week period where everything started going to shit, went to shit, and started slowly recovering, but now, as I labor to get back into the swing of things at work and in my video gaming life, I am finding myself hampered by a day of relative uselessness that is the result of the shifting pressure. My joints, already worn from the work I’ve been doing the last few weeks and not nearly recovered enough thanks to my sleep troubles, are causing me pretty severe pain as the temperture drops fifteen degrees, a storm rages overhead, and the power blinks out briefly. It was bad enough around noon that I had a difficult time walking and moving around without groaning in pain, and I’ve walked off a broken ankle before. I’m no stranger to pushing through the pain. It’s just gotten really bad today.
Continue readingMusing
Work Continues Despite The Horrors
Work’s been hectic lately. While all of the bad stuff in my Final Fantasy 14 guild was happening, my day job was keeping me incredibly busy with bullshit. I got notified within fourty-eight hours of being given new test equipment that it needed to have a essentially eighty hours worth of testing done by the following wednesday. That wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if I hadn’t been getting ready to leave for the day on Friday afternoon. But I stayed, I did some testing, and I put all of my considerable experience and knowledge into figuring out how to cut down on the time between tests. I was able to get it from an hour to half an hour, but even that wasn’t perfect. There was still a hard cap on how much of that I could do in any given day and that was only because it was permissable for the stress of that testing to slightly change the behavior of the thing being tested since I’d be able to start the following morning by checking if the change in behavior was due to wear or due to the heat of the testing equipment.
Continue readingSlowly Heading Toward A New Normal
I am working without a buffer now. Between building a new free company in Final Fantasy 14, work kicking my ass for a project that wound up having its due date moved back only after I’d done all the hard work in a record-breakingly short time, collapsing in exhaustion, and struggling to process all of my emotions from all of this and more, I just haven’t had the time or energy for writing much of anything. Everything else has felt like a higher priority than personal blogging and while I do not like writing the day before a blog post goes up, I don’t think I made the wrong call about how to spend my time these last few days. I wish I’d had more time, I wish I’d been less exhausted, and I definitely wish things hadn’t played out the way they did (but again, I don’t think I made any bad choices), but I’m here now, still absolutely wiped out and trying to write a post while forcing my eyes open so I don’t fall asleep at work or standing at my desk. Which I’ve done before. Woke up in time to stop myself from falling down, but it was quite startling, let me tell you.
Continue readingPointless Arguments And Untennable Silence
I got into an argument in a discord the other day. I didn’t want to, but someone (the server owner) was being very pro-“AI” in a way that was frankly kind of insulting to the people who didn’t share his opinion, so I lightly weighed in and lent emote-based support to the people arguing against him. He kept shifting his position, arguing on behalf of “AI” being inescapable and a forever part of our future now while also hedging every time someone confronted him about its various issues with some variation of “I never said it didn’t have issues!” So, when he tried to pull me in following a comment where I said I completely agreed with someone’s lengthy, well-reasoned statement, I tried to disengage and my attempt do so only led to another branch of the argument forming since he turned to trying to pin me down to saying “AI” is impossible to remove. I can’t agree to that statement because I think that Artificial Intelligence doesn’t exist and might never while the algorithmic bullshit that is modern ML-based “AI” is bad enough that I think it might be worth doing whatever it takes to eradicate completely. Other than the programs modern “genAI” are built from, which always had a use and still have a use in their very specific contexts, of course. So I tried to split the hair because my stances requires it and he didn’t like that. Then things took a turn for the worse between him (as he continued to shift his position such that no one could ever tell him that he was wrong without ever really engaging with the arguments other people brought up) and another person (who was much less polite in his arguing than the rest of us were and has a bad habit of dismissing viewpoints he disagrees with) and now a friend of mine has been demoted in that server for doing their job as a moderator and forcing the argument to end by deleting comments after the final two refused to stop.
Continue readingSo Much For Resting
As it turns out, it is not that easy to take a week off. Any other week would have been easier, since this last week involved the in-game bonding ceremony between my dearest friends’ Final Fantasy 14 characters (now they are married in real-life and in this video game) and I was as involved in that as I had the energy to be. Plus there was another wrestling event to record and edit, all the busyness of a “normal” workweek, the sudden extra busyness of this past week, and then the complete screeching halt of all of the work stuff for at least a day due to me twisting my ankle. And while twisting my ankle sucked, it did actually force me to rest in a way I couldn’t make myself until I actually had an unavoidable reason for it. But there’s still more celebrations tomorrow (as of the day I wrote this), the imminent return of my delayed obligations and plans, and now the exhaustion of painfully hobbling around my two-story apartment to contend with, so I’m not out of the woods yet. To be honest, given everything I’d done this week, I’m not sure I actually took a break the way I meant to and maybe just… Stopped doing as much. Which definitely counts for something, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not exactly what I was looking for with this decision to step away from things for a bit.
Continue readingWearing Out My Shoes Just To Feel Something Change
I go for daily walks. Longer ones, now, thanks to a bit of an accountability push from a friend. But I go outside daily, at around more or less the same time every day. I drink the same number of cups of coffee every day. I work the same number of hours pretty much every day. I eat the same lunch every day. I cycle between one of five meals for dinner every night. Breakfast is the same almost every day of the week and then every weekend when I bother to eat it. I drink the same amount of water, take the same medications, eat the same snacks (thought the quantity varies), walk through the same rooms, drive the same places, do the same things, and on and on and on and on. Nothing changes. Sometimes I eat cereal for breakfast instead of a banana, but I still eat the banana eventually. Sometimes I have a can of soda instead of ice cream for desert after dinner on the rare days I feel like something sweet. I write at almost the same time every day. I stand the same way. Even my speech falls into similar patterns from day-to-day, given my relationships and the people I talk to. And sure, my clothes are different and while I often do wear different shirts on different days, sometimes I just wear the same shirt on a given day of the week. The only thing that really changes to make the passage of time is the weather and how worn out my shoes have become.
Continue readingBurnout And Fridays Off
I’ve been taking Fridays off of work lately. I probably shouldn’t, what with rising costs, but I’ve been so burned out that I needed to. Three weeks in a row, I was so worn out by Friday morning that I couldn’t make myself get out of bed on time or I slept through my alarms or felt so awful that I went back to sleep until I stopped feeling bad. It’s not great, to be quite honest. I really do need the money from my weekly overtime if I’m going to survive the upcoming financial crisis (in whatever form it takes) and while I haven’t spent vacation time to take my days off so far, I really need to find a more sustainable way to get through my weeks without entirely burning out by the end of Thursday. Work is demanding, sure, but I’ve also been taking a lot of burdens on myself that I don’t really need to, so maybe I need to dial it back there, or maybe I need to make sure my free time is spent better, in a way that is more rejuvenating or enriching. I really hope it’s the latter because I don’t want to do less stuff and I feel kind of like I’m on the hook for all of it anyway, considering it’s all commitments I’ve made. I could take breaks if I need to, I’m sure no one would begrudge me a week off, but I worry about the precedent that would set for myself. And that taking the time off wouldn’t actually fix things, only let me recover from them, since that means I’d be right back in the shit again the instant I went back to doing things. Work certainly isn’t going to slow down. It’s going to speed up, if anything…
Continue readingDigital Impermanence And Fading Memories
To have any experience with the internet is to know that there has been no greater lie told (mostly by accident) than “the internet is forever” (or it’s popular variant, “if you put that on the internet, it is there forever”). That was always what I was told when I was young. It’s what many of my friends were told. “Be careful with what you put on the internet! There’s no such thing as completely taking it down!” Nowadays, we know better. For things to exist on the internet, they have to be stored somewhere and digital storage is not as eternal as we were led to believe. Servers go down, backups get deleted, “AI” agents delete entire environments and then back that nothing up over the backups, and sometimes Amazon just deletes your account and all it’s digital licenses for no reason with no chance of recovery. Digital ownership is ephemeral and while nothing truly lasts forever, the half-life of things on the internet might be much shorter than everyone was led to believe. And sure, just because you can’t find it doesn’t mean it’s actually gone. There’s so much data tucked away in advertising companies, various archival efforts, and forgotten, dusty hard drives in some abandonded warehouse or server rack, so it’s difficult to tell when something is truly gone forever (like a video game I played via SNES emulator that I cannot find any mention or record of anywhere that I keep thinking is Secrets Of Mana but learn it isn’t when I go play SoM). I’m sure this game from my late childhood/early double-digit-years exists somewhere and I’m sure the version I remember is some modified ROM or a translated version of a game and that it is sitting tucked away on someone’s computer somewhere, forever out of my reach other than the few hazy memories of it I hold onto.
Continue readingGrowing Up Along But Outside The Internet
I’m in kinda of a weird position in regards to pop culture and the internet. I did, in fact, grow up in the 90s. I’m a millenial without a doubt. I got all the hallmarks of the generation save the avocado toast, expensive coffee drinks, and exposure to era-defining pop-culture and internet spaces. I was homeschooled, you see, so the only kids I interacted with were the ones from our monthly “co-op” days where all the affiliated Christian families would get together to socialize their children with other god-fearing families and hold regular meetings about permissable skirt length for adult women and if a sleeveless blouse was too scandalous to allow into a building with their children. So I missed out on all the kinds of pop-culture stuff you get by being exposed to a school’s worth of children. Instead of that, I had the kids of half a dozen incredibly conservative families (even in comparison to my own family) to spend time with and one thing I will say about having escaped that kind of life is that they’re all so boring. I’m sure plenty of them went wild as teens eventually, but as kids? We just talked about whatever christian films our parents let us watch, VeggieTales, and our school work. I didn’t know what a forum was until I was in high school, in the late 00s, even though I went to gameFAQs all the time when I was younger for game guides. Somehow I missed the entire forum part of that website. And even when I did get online for other stuff, it was only for the super-niche things I got pre-approved by my parents since the computer was in the family room and going to websites that weren’t pre-approved was asking to get your computer privileges revoked.
Continue readingLike A House On Fire
It feels like the world I live in (my sphere of influence, my ability to perceive and participate in areas I occupy, etc) gets radically altered every week or two despite how little changes in practical terms. I still work the same job, do the same tasks, entertain myself the same ways, and haven’t had to make many changes to my life as a result of the last two years of stuff. And yet it feels like everything is different. Democracy in the US is being shredded in front of our eyes by a partisan, extremly Republican supreme court, various political bodies that are failing to constrain the attempts to undermine any of the principles that this country once suposedly stood for, medications are flipflopping between being legal and illegal, and all while the ostensible opposition party can’t mount a defense to save anyone’s life, not even their own, such that it is not unreasonable to look out at the current political climate and wonder if it’s too late to fix things. I don’t believe it is, not yet, but it is going to take a lot more radical action from people currently elected than we’ve seen from any of them up to this point, and while that is definitely within the realm of possibility, I’m not sure how likely it is, at all. It would require them, all Democrafts really, to stop backing down without a fight over literally everything and yet they keep capitulating on every front.
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