At the end of last week, I wrote about the anime Frieren and walked right up to discussing why stories about immortals learning to deal with losing the people who were an important part of their life is of particular interest to me. I actually wrote a couple paragraphs about that, but it didn’t really fit in with talking about the anime in general or the specific parts of it that I found the most engaging while watching it, so I cut them out and morphed them into this blog post. After all, that idea, the core of why those kinds of stories are interesting to me, is what prompted me to write about Frieren and I want to explore the space a bit more than I could while discussing the show itself.
Continue readingMusing
Clearing A Low Bar With My Birthday Celebration
For most of my life, I haven’t enjoyed my birthday. Once the shine of new toys and celebrations wore off during my childhood (following yet another ruined birthday party) I was mostly only interested in my birthday as the vehicle my parents used to give their children toys. Most of the time, unless we got a gift of money from a relative (this only applied to cash since all checks were deposited in our college saving account), got a reward for good grade, or saved up our allowances, our parents wouldn’t buy us anything unnecessary. They’d take us to the library or to the video rental store (and eventually the video game rental store) once a week each, but we rarely got anything permanently ours outside of our birthdays, Christmas, and the one souvenir we were allowed during family trips that happened to go somewhere that had a gift shop. Which meant that by the time I was eight or nine, birthdays had become just a means of getting new toys and books that I could keep (being able to keep something as my own was a big deal as a kid with three siblings and a “we will buy ‘big’ things for the family but not a specific child” family rule). They stayed that for a few years and, after the month of August was basically ruined for me by a few years of consecutive traumas during the month, stopped being special. I mean, I was so detached from my birthday that I got through all but the last half hour of my eighteenth birthday before I remembered that it was, in fact, my birthday since I was so busy at college with my new friends and my family wasn’t the sort to reach out via phone calls or texts at the time.
Continue readingSummer Days I Can Finally Enjoy As It Comes To An End
After months of constant heat and too-warm mornings, we’ve finally had some days with lower temperatures. Heck, it even dropped into the low fifties overnight, just recently. We’re finally back in the range of what I’d expect for mild Summer weather and I’m only slightly worried that it’s happening in late August rather than September when I’d start to expect days like this [of course, this week, it’s already going back to temperatures in the mid-to-high 70s]. It’s nice, though. To be able to enjoy the breeze without tons of wildfire smoke, to be able to exist outside without sweating, to be able to bask in the warm sun while the cool breeze blows past… I’ve been missing weather like this for a long time. We used to see it more, but now we tend to leap past it, either because Winter ran long and Spring catapulted instantly into Summer or because Summer arrived early and ate what little Spring we might have hoped for, so I’m trying to enjoy it while I can. Not by opening my windows, of course. That would be a disaster for my allergies right now… I’m just trying to get back into the habit of my daily walks now that it’s less punishing to even step foot outside. I’m hoping this weather will stick around for a while, and that it’ll lead into a nice, gentle Fall, but I’m not holding my breath. Nothing about the seasons has been “gentle” in years.
Continue readingHow To Not Have An Opinion About Something On The Internet
Just don’t talk about it!
Now that this… I don’t know, fakeout? is over, I’m here to actually talk about Final Fantasy 14 and my suddenly rampant and runaway focus. I wrote out most of a blog post talking about not having an opinion about something and fell into the ancient trap that is talking about not having an opinion is still having an opinion, so I decided to delete all that but wanted to keep the title and the new opening “paragraph” because, really, this is advice that a lot of people out there need (myself included, clearly!). Thankfully, I managed to avoid contradicting my own advice since pretty much the only thing I think about these days is trying to get into some kind of actual loop in Final Fantasy 14 now that I’ve got the energy to do other stuff and have changed how I’m playing the game. My whole “take a relaxed approach and just do whatever” thing doesn’t really work anymore since my once-forgotten default (relaxed puttering) for that kind of approach is slowly morphing back into “just keep doing stuff without end” and keeping me up way too late at night. I need to create and enforce some structure on myself so I can still do fun things but maybe do them without also staying up past two in the morning–which I need to stop doing so I can actually take advantage of how much more potential energy I’ve got these days rather than my recent usual status of having a willing mind and soul but an incapable-due-to-complete-exhaustion body. Structure and a list of goals has helped with similar problems in the past–though they were coming at this from the other direction, of being so tired that I could barely push myself to do anything–so I’m hoping they’ll help again with my video game time so I can maybe return to getting a decent six hours of sleep most nights.
Continue readingStaggering Over The Finish Line After Today Kicked My Ass
Some days just kick your ass and all you can do at the end of the day is stick to the list of chores you gave yourself and hope that tomorrow will suck less. Today’s one of those days for me. Got to work a bit late (but no big deal, I’ve got no obligations so I can just stay late) and immediately got plunged into the shit. Catching up coworkers who were out, starting on things that I’ve been waiting for people to get back into the office to do, having to chase people down to get my testing setups fixed, losing hours and hours to a problem no one can figure out, having my boss skip our one-on-one meeting when I’ve got stuff to talk about, and finding out that my coworker who has been out a bunch will be out even more (and I can’t even just feel angry at him because he’s getting surgery to fix his knee, so I’m also a little scared about what this will mean for him since he’s nearly sixty and this could have a huge impact on someone who is, sure, a frequent source of frustration for me, but also someone I care about since I’ve worked literally side-by-side with him for the last eight and a half years). It’s all been a bit much today and yet I’ve still got to go grocery shopping since I won’t have a chance to do that again until thursday, I’ve still got to do my chores because I’ve got other ones every single day between now and when my friends show up (which I’m very excited for), and I still have to find time to eat dinner and have at least a little fun somewhere in there so I don’t go to bed hating my existence as much as I do right now.
Continue readingFire Drill Flight Risk
Every place that has some kind of fire alert system has a policy for what to do when that system alerts people to a fire. We start practicing this stuff as kids, in daycare or preschool or kindergarten or whatever you call your first educational experience, and continue into our adulthood. I missed a few years in there, since I was homeschooled. My mother tried to do a fire drill once, back when she was convinced that she could just have “school” happen at our house the same way it would at the local Catholic school that she would have otherwise sent us to, but it went poorly and she never tried again. We did get “fire escape ladders” to hang out our bedroom windows though, in case we needed to get out of our bedrooms and the door was blocked by fire, but I think the only one that got used was when my brother snuck out of the house using it, breaking the screen he dropped in the process. Anyway. I did fire drills in high school, in college (in various places: once while in class, thrice while in different dorms, and then yearly at the theater I worked at but that was a very different experience), at both my post-college jobs, and even at a couple apartments. They’re all basically the same, with a few important differences. In every single case, you get out of the building, attend to any people who might be on fire (to a degree), get away from the fire, wait for the all-clear signal, and then go back inside where you have to spend the rest of the day pretending your whole day has not been turned upside down by this disruption. Or, in my recent case, stare longingly at your car as it tempts you to just drive away since it’s unlikely that anyone will notice your absence.
Continue readingTreading Water At Work While Trying To Manage An Intern
The week I’m writing this, I am the only tester on my team who is in the office. The other two are away on multi-week vacations, coincidentally overlapping during what could be described as the busiest period of the summer so far. I’m sure neither one of them did this on purpose. It’s not like any of us knew this week was going to be busy until Thursday of last week and it was far too late to do anything about it then. So, to make up for the lack of other testers and the large amount of work that needs doing every day, I’ve been strictly managing my time at work and bouncing between a large variety of tasks. It is incredibly exhausting, I’ll be honest, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be have gotten less done than if I’d been able to just do my own thing rather than constantly need to reprioritize as something new crops up. Still, I’ve managed to keep on top of everything so far, for three days in a row, other than the testing intern. He’s supposed to be running some tests the senior tester gave him before he left, but I think he’s not actually doing that, given the lack of questions and how the two times I’ve gone to check on him, he’s had to wake up his computer and log back in to show me what he’s supposedly been working on. Since the first time that’s happened, I’ve been keeping on eye on him from the lab or my office, wherever I’m working, and noticing how little time he’s spending looking at his monitors and how much time he’s spending looking at his tablet. I’m not one to bust anyone for taking a break or not looking busy, and I can understand that he probably doesn’t want to have this job but is kind of getting forced into it since his relatives work here (they’re high up in the company, too, so there’s quite a lot of nepotism going on here since he’s been given the most nothing job assignment), but this work needs doing and all of us testers are counting on it getting done, so I’m going to need to figure something out for his last handful of weeks.
Continue readingThe Impending Disaster That Will Be The End Of Windows 10
Over the past few years, I’ve become incredibly familiar with the work of a lot of tech reporters. I am a worker in the tech industry, after all, so it makes sense that I’d be interested in the goings-on of the industry as a whole, but the primary reason I’ve added this to my interests is because of Windows and the rise of LLMs. I’ve had access to a computer of some kind or another for my entire life and have always enjoyed them. The first big thing I ever bought myself was a laptop I could use for computer games that ate up all of my carefully horded babysitting money when I was a teenager, and I’ve been spending a lot of time on a computer ever since. Most of the time, it has largely been a device I took for granted–something that I largely ignored except as a vehicle to deliver other things: video games, my writing, digital access to my friends, and so on. A few years ago, as I became isolated during the first summer of the pandemic, my relationship with my computer changed drastically, turning from the aforementioned vehicle into the portal through which I accessed all of existence other than the physical place my body occupied and the grocery store. Since then, it has shrunk somewhat, but computers still loom large in my life and I can say no cloud has darkened my horizon quite like the appearance of LLMs and every software company’s attempts to shoehorm them into everything. This capitalistic and ruinous desire, the appeal of these plagiarism and theft machines, is actively driving me away from everything to do with computers and would maybe even drive me back into being a console-only gamer except that I know for a fact that the console companies will also shoehorn that shit in if they can ever figure out a way to do it.
Continue readingCaught Between A Horrible Week And Another Rough One
Between this week’s cruel irony, yet more horrible back-to-back hour-long phone adventures trying to take care of problems caused by an incredibly shitty healthcare supply company, and a few knife twists at my day job in the same vein as the ones that started this worsening burnout, I have found a new depth of burnout. My back muscles are knotting up from the stress, it takes focused effort to not clench my jaw, my recently-normal indigestion is blossoming into full sourcelss nausea, and I’m so tired I could fall asleep in an instant. I am scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of what I can make myself do and I still have more stuff to do that I can’t get around. I need to go buy food for myself and my bird. I can’t put off taking the trash out for another day. I need to get in my usual overtime so I can remain financially solvent. I need to actually do stuff over the weekend so I don’t spend the whole thing wallowing in misery. I also really need to go for more walks, get more sun, and make sure I’m geared up for whatever horrible weather might or might not pass through my area this weekend (there’s lots of vague warnings about potential weather events but little that is certain [and basically none of that hit my area]). All while I’m so worn out and exhausted that there isn’t a single treat, little or big, that I can think of that would improve my mood. Everything feels like an equal hassle, which is usually a sign that I’m overwraught or dealing with a nasty depression spike, but knowing that doesn’t help me any. I have to figure out how to solve this problem because it’s not like anyone else is going to figure it out for me. I’ve got no one in my life who can do that work for me and I unfortunately saw my therapist the morning before this entire week went to hell, so I’ve got another week and a half before my next appointment.
Continue readingLaboring To Make Sure My Value Isn’t Only Seen In My Labor
I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be the sort of person who, in multiplayer video games, tends to be the one doing infrastracture projects. The best example of what I mean is back in my old days of playing Valheim with some of my friends. There was a lot of cooperative labor and effort put into what we were doing in that game because the very nature of the game demands it (or at least strongly encourages it), but we all had our own time to work on individual projects and it was very telling that all of mine were things like building new bases for us to share, creating pathways to ease travel to resource clusters, and setting up various mechanic-based game features (things like resource farms and safe places to go AFK (Away From Keyboard)). I’d make roads so that, when we were mining, it would be easy to move the cart back and forth with everything we’d gathered. I’d do research into how base raids would start and what prevents monsters from spawning so I could make what we wound up calling “AFK Island” so that the server’s owner could leave it running with his character in-game so the rest of us could play whenever we wanted to (and so we could go AFK without worrying about being swarmed by goblins or dragons or whatever the current threat was). I even set up monster farms with safe sprinting paths so that we could collect resources that were normally a pain to acquire without too much fuss or danger. I’d make minecart pathways and Nether roads in Minecraft. I’d maintain the group’s purse and resource allocation in multiplayer Stardew valley. And now, in Final Fantasy 14, I’m taking it upcon myself to craft a bunch of food we use for raiding.
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