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 readingMusing
Digital 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.
Continue readingTrying To Recapture The Joy In Old Hobbies
Once upon a time, just about four years and change ago, I enjoyed little more than spending some time muttering to myself while listening to a podcast or two and putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It was very fulfilling, incredibly engaging, and a different kind of mentally taxing than literally everything else I was doing at the time. It was mostly refreshing to be quite honest, and while I would definitely make my back, elbows, and shoulders ache with how much I’d hunch over my table to participate in this diversion, it was still a net positive that fell by the wayside when I moved into my current apartment. I still have the table I used, complete with padding I’d place on top of the puzzle so I could keep using the table without needing to carefully move the partially-finished puzzle around, but I just don’t spend much time on that floor of my apartment when it comes to my own entertainment. I should spend more time down there. I should stop committing myself to my upstairs area with my video games and office and start finding ways to be more comfortable in the downstairs area. Clean off the mail couch and vaccuum the chair next to my bird’s cage more often, perhaps. Move some books from my to-be-read pile to somewhere downstairs so I’ve got stuff to read and no longer need to feel like I’m making a choice I must commit to every evening. Dig out those puzzles. Maybe even just build a lego set. Anything to get me out of that office and away from my computer. I really need to stop spending so much time in there.
Continue readingWild Weather As Summer Nears
We’ve had a lot of ups and downs lately, weather-wise. Nothing quite as severe as earlier this Spring (which makes me think we’re due for something nasty soon), but a lot more leaping between the mid-70s and the 30s. So far, I’ve managed to avoid getting incredibly sick as a result of a temperature leap like that, but I’ve had a few close calls and only a bounty of rest and some extra days off have been able to keep a full-blown illness at bay. I’ve had two close calls, where I felt it coming on, but I was able to sleep both of them off. While my apartment was cold as hell, too, since each time arrived on the tail-end of a temperature peak, as it dwindled to its valley, which meant I got that good “mountain of blankets” sleep. In theory, anyway. I’m so tired and worn out that I genuinely can no longer tell when I feel this way because of tiredness versus when I feel this way from being worn down. And while the generally cooler weather we’ve been having is helping with that, I do wish it would settle one way or another so I could commit to a season and no longer have such achey joints every day or two, as the pressure rises and falls in front of whatever severe weather we get. Which has had a larger variety of late than the nigh-constant storms of a few weeks ago. Fire watch, severe gusts, pollution, and so one. Lots of the uncommon stuff on top of a pretty hefty looking storm currently slated to arrive early next week (though we’ll see if it ever shows up, given how rapidly things appear to change anywhere I can find a weather forecast these days).
Continue readingCommunity Management
I started my own discord server for Final Fantasy 14 stuff. Originally, it was a place for me and a small group of people to go in order to get away from a space that we shared with someone none of us liked and that kept dropping in when we’d hang out in one of the voice chats. They are close friends with one of the officers, who enables their terrible behavior (odious perosnality traits, not something actively harming other people by any means other than annoyance), so we didn’t really have a way to address the problem without causing a bigger problem in the discord. When we all realized that we’d rather stop hanging out with each other than continue to spend time with this person, I turned my idle musing about creating a discord server for my Final Fantasy 14 crafting workshop into a reality. They’re easy to make and, since it was just the four (eventually five) of us, there didn’t really need to be much to the discord. After a couple months, though, I started using it for other reasons: to handle alternate characters, my FC for said alts, and then as a safe place for a small selection of poeple to gather in private. Once that happened, I started building out the server a bit more, with roles and hidden channels and various pieces of infrastructure as I realized that this was quickly turning from a place for me and a handful of my friends into a small community space. Now, while I still keep the invitations locked down to just myself and single-use only, I am not necessarily super familiar with everyone in the server now. Which is how a lot of internet communities work, regardless of their size, but I am trying to keep it small enough that I can actually get to know people and better manage the community as a result.
Continue readingAll I Want Is For My Coworkers To Do Their Jobs
I feel like asking my coworkers to do their jobs should not be something I need to do on a regular basis. This doesn’t apply to all of them, thankfully, but a few that I work with routinely make me wonder I’m expecting too much of them. I mean, I’m the most junior of my coworkers amongst this cohort of irresponsible adults and yet it often falls to me to make sure that they’re doing their jobs and not letting things slip through the cracks. It would be one thing if it was an occasional slip-up, but I’ve routinely had to go to one coworker for a foundational aspect of his job that I need him to perform so I can properly do my job and the way he reacts every time I do this is like I’m making some kind of horrible, unreasonable demands of him. I get it. It’s not fun stuff to do. He’s not passionate about the maintenance project. But it is literally his job and his job alone to give me the information I need so I can tell if the developers I work with are doing things right, if they’re actually solving the problem, and if they even know what the problem is. And it should not be falling to me to do that. Every single other person in this group is either a Senior rank in their role or promoted high enough that “senior” positions no longer exist. I shouldn’t need to be the person getting the group together to address problems or fill gaps or figure out how to proceed from whatever mess we’ve landed in because no one else did something about a glaring problem I identified months ago but couldn’t get anyone to take seriously because I have no authority and even 12 years of experience isn’t enough to actually get these people to take me seriously without concrete proof of a present and pressing issue.
Continue readingActions And Reactions: Choice And Consequence
It has been an exhausting set of weeks. Someone took another shot at Trump, this time a bit more metaphorically than previously given that he was stopped before he got close enough to even try to injure Trump, and the news is full of talking heads and Republicans repeating the same tired suggestion that this politically motivated violence is a result of the Democrats inciting violence. Which is incredibly infuriating considering that only one side of the current political “dichotomy” in the US speaks of action and violence and overthrow and it sure isn’t the Democrats. That’d be far too active for any of them to advocate for, even setting aside the moral decrepitude required to direct your followers to visit violence on your political opponents. All the Democrats have in them to advocate for, during the rare moments they actually speak in support of something, is forgiveness, tolerance, and passivity. Which sucks so much especially since all that means them just sitting there and taking it while the Republicans and every political consultant without a shred of conscience attempts to alter reality by insisting that the Democrats tone down the heat of their rhetoric literally days after calling on their followers to kill people, after attempting to designate multiple minority groups as some kind of sub-human population, and generally spewing the exact sort of hatred they’re accusing the Democrats of espousing. We’ve had many attempts on prominent Democratic figures, a few of which have unfortunately succeeded, and an increasing level of violence aimed at any group that isn’t a welcomed part of the Republican party. Which makes it extra sickening to listen to those hypocrites accuse everyone they can name of doing the very thing they’re doing, and that’s saying something given the base level of Republican hypocrisy I’ve adapted to.
Continue readingNormal Spring Weather, Finally
Following all the storms and heat we’ve had the past few weeks, the weather has finally settled into something resembling mid-Spring weather. Days in the 50s or 60s and nights in the 40s, good breezes, occasional rain, and the recent addition to “normal” Spring weather: random heat spikes and intense blocks of bad weather coasting aorund the edges of said heat spikes. It has been nice to be able to open the windows and leave them open rather than constantly run the AC (though that might not last much longer as Spring fully arrives and delivers a metric ton of pollen into the air around me), so I’ve been trying to make the most of it while it lasts. There’s no telling when it will shift back to warm days and stay there until the fall, so I am doing my best to appreciate what I’m getting between needing to adjust how open my windows are so it doesn’t get too cold or the rain doesn’t pour in my windows. For Whatever reason, I’ve been blessed with breezes that actually enter my apartment, which is great until it starts to rain the the gusts of the storm whip it into my apartment to soak my curtains or collect on my kitchen floor. But it’s manageable and far more pleasant an experience than another snowstorm or heatwave. At least there’s been very little lightning and wind as a part of the rain we’ve had so I don’t need to worry about losing power or the potential for tornadoes.
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