Consuming new media, by reading or watching or playing or listening or whatever, is an important part of any creative person’s life. You need new input, after all, to avoid stagnating. Something fresh to liven up your mind and shake the cobwebs from your soul. The Oatmeal, of fart joke and semi-inspiring illustrated essay fame, called it “breathing in.” A whole host of other creative types have likened it to feeding your creative body/soul. I like to think of it as enrichment in my enclosure since I often feel like a zoo animal these days, pacing around my apartment as one of the last observers of the horrible illness still looming over the world no matter how hard everyone tries to ignore it, and wishing I could be free again. I struggle to keep up a healthy diet of new media, though. It’s difficult to be in the right frame of mind for something new all the time. I’m often too tired to invest myself in anything and while I do plenty of new-to-me stuff, playing a different combat class in Final Fantasy 14 doesn’t really count, nor does something Pokopia because while both are fun and stimulating, neither really feels “new” or really gives me much to think about when I’m not playing them. And not everything needs to give me that, but I really do benefit from having something new and interesting to chew on. Right now, most of that is coming in the form of Dorohedoro Season 2 and my slow rewatch of Frieren as I meander my way toward Season 2 of that. And also Trigun: Stargaze. I also have a pile of books and movies to watch, other shows on my to-watch list, and a host of unplayed video games. I just… have a difficult time overcoming the inertia of my established habits and tend to just fall back into those when I’m too tired to really figure out what I want to do.
Continue readingMusing
The Value Of My Time And Effort
I don’t know what my time and effort are worth. If you ask my job, it’s $31.53 an hour and one-and-a-half times that after forty hours in a single week. If you look at my gaming time, it’s probably not worth a whole lot considering how much time I spend on Final Fantasy 14 and how little I pay for it (each hour equates to about seventeen cents spent, by my calculations). If you look into my game files, my time is probably worth an average of eight hundred thousand gil (Final Fantasy’s in-game currency) since that’s about what I make when I’m actively working on stuff. On average, anyway. I tend to do a lot of work in that game that doesn’t ever get paid out for anything. Making gear and consumables for friends, providing materials and consumables to my Free Company, organizing things, etc. So when someone asks me to make something where the material cost is neglible and wants to pay me “for my time,” I don’t really have a good answer for them. What is my time worth? Not a lot, sometimes. Quite a lot other times. And I usually don’t know which of those is true until I’ve picked the wrong one and am upset about it. Probably because I keep picking “not a lot” and yet I somehow still feel ill-used or taken for granted a lot. Not just in Final Fantasy 14, either. At my job, with the friends I hardly see any more, and even in some of my non-video-game-but-still-digital social activities. It would probably go a long way to resolving those feelings if I could get that particular question worked out in some way, if I could figure out what my time is worth, since I’m spending it so freely and… well, unjudiciously at the moment. I really need to get past my reflexive “Sure! Let’s make it happen!” response when it comes to people asking things of me and actually take a moment to check in with myself about how I’m feeling before I answer.
Continue readingChased Into A New Day By Last Week’s Problems
This past weekend (as I’m writing this, anyway) was just long enough for my exhausted mind to forget everything that was going on at work. Unfortunately for me, what was going on was investigating a bevy of bugs I’d found and all of them were waiting for me when I got in on my Monday morning. As was one of the German software developers I work with (the one I get along with better, thankfully). I then proceeded to spend seven hours on the phone with him, some of them testing and some of them just shooting the shit while we waited for the very slow test (that was supposed to be much faster) showed whether or not we’d managed to eliminate the bug by changing on of over a dozen variables. It was time-consuming and exhausting work, and honestly some of the most exacting testing I’ve done in a while since the project I’ve been working on for a while now is more of a “does it feel alright? Cool, next thing” type project than a “change dozens of tiny variables one at a time and review the results of a repeated action with each set of variables, all of which must be recorded for historical purposes and further investigation by my developer coworkers. It has left me drained even after getting a couple decent nights of sleep, moreso even than I felt the week prior when I was dead on my feet from not sleeping enough at all. Mostly because the busy afternoon wrapped up with me returning to my desk to find that a recently departed (for the day, not from this mortal coil) coworker had set up a meeting for us to learn about how other departments us AI testing tools.
Continue readingSummer In Early Spring
I am writing this (late) in the first half of April, less than a month after the start of Spring, and we’ve got our first week fully in the 70s every day. Not only that, but there’s chances for thunderstorms severe enough that whatever weather app I look at has some kind of warning for every day and daily forecasts with cocerning things like “Scattered severe thunderstorms” or “destructive winds” or “high likelihood for tornadoes” which is kind of a lot. I had to wear a sweatshirt when I went outside just a week ago and I’m a weirdo who wears shorts and short-sleeve t-shirts in the winter! It was cold enough to warrant wearing warmer clothes for the drive out in the morning or while I waited for my car to heat up in the evenings. Now, we’ve got weather more in line with the first month of Summer than any part of Spring except maybe a few rare (but more and more common as the years progress) occasions toward the end of the season. And all I can really do is plan when to close my windows to capture as much of the cool air as possible before it heats up, turn on my AC, and flip my ceiling fans to spinning in the summer/cooling direction. And enjoy wearing the new shorts I bought since I finally, after wearing every pair I had to rags, found a new line of shorts that have the same heavy-duty feeling and loose, comfortable fit I prefer. As it turns out, Youngster from Pokemon Red and Blue wasn’t entirely correct. Shorts CAN BE comfortable and easy to wear. Anyway, it’s Summer as hell right now and I’m not about it even if I do have comfortable clothes and working AC in the office for once [which has broken between writing this post and editing it].
Continue readingEternal Internal Conflict Over How To Feel About… Everything, I Guess
A lot of my favorite stories and bits of wisdom shared therein tend to revolve around the idea that we, ultimately, are the ones who choose our mood and outlook. From the “I choose joy” speech by Merle Highchurch in The Adventure Zone’s first season to “life does not have to be a perpetual conflict” from the excellent webcomic Little Tiny Things, and all throughout the lexicon of stories from varies points of my life, the idea that we are the one who gets to set the tone and timbre of our response and attitude towards the world is one that appeals deeply to me. It’s one I believe in, with a degree of faith that I’ve rarely managed to muster for anything else except my days of devout Catholicism (when I didn’t know there was anything else out there). A comparison I make because I’m not sure it’s true and it’s definitely not a pearl of wisdom I am living by. As you’ve probably seen by the weekly posts on my blog, I tend to react strongly to the world around me. My emotional state is often dictated by the situations I’m in and the events that occur around me. I have little emotional… inertia, let’s say. I will cry at the drop of a hat if you tell me the hat dropped because it couldn’t stay on a head no matter how much it wanted to. I will get incandescently angry if I see someone mistreated. Whatever mood a room takes will bleed into me no matter how else I’m feeling. I rarely feel like I am in control of my emotions these days, despite how skilled I was at emotional control earlier in my life.
Continue readingCursing What I Once Would Have Called A Blessing
Today, I returned from a very long weekend. Five whole days off in a row, thanks to a combination of a holiday and two days of PTO to give myself as much of a break as I can (barely) afford to. I took it because I was unceremoniously told early in the week that my assistance was not needed and rather than wait around until that inevitably proved to be false (as it always has been), I decided to take some time off and let my coworkers deal with their own problems for once. I was right, of course. They realized they needed me a couple hours later, but my vacation time was already submitted and I wasn’t going to rescind it, so they were shit out of luck. Especially because my PTO meant I wasn’t going to do even a minute of overtime on any day last week and wound up leaving quite early both days. It was really nice. It felt great to leave the building while the sun was still up, while the air was still warm, and while there was still enough of an evening left for me to feel like I could do more than one thing before I was forced to give in to my overwhelming exhuastion. It was nice to sleep in as late as I wanted five days in a row. I didn’t sleep for less than seven hours even once in all of that and got about eight hours three times in that period. It was an unprecedented amount of rest. And was largely spoiled by a bad bout of tonsil stones that kept me feeling like I was choking when I tried to sleep last night and then further spoiled by coming in to work and realizing that a five day weekend wasn’t enough to fix my burnout.
Continue readingTired Of This Shit Coming ‘Round Once Again
The cursed franchise that won’t die the death that it should have years ago has returned to plague society once again. That’s right, I’m writing this the day of that the trailer for the new Harry Potter show dropped and I am so tired of this shit. I am so tired of the endless regurgitation of the same franchises over and over again, sure, but I’m more tired of seeing people spend so much goddamn time trying to find excuses or justifications for spending time and money on the latest method that JK Rowling has found to fund the fostering of her virulent transphobic views. The woman herself has made the tie between engaging with her creative work and endorsing her views, she’s spent millions advancing horrible anti-trans legislation, and turned “TERF” (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism) from a niche into a tentpole of modern “conservation” (but actually reactionary) politics. She has literally said that if people disagreed with her views, they’d stop supporting the franchise that propelled her into a position of money and power that appears to have entirely cooked her mind (not that she was a font of inclusivity ever, what with all the slavery, slurs, fatphobia, and thinly-veiled racism) in the way that anti-trans views seem to cook everyone’s mind when they begin to dabble in them. All of which is to say that all of these people looking for an excuse know that what they are doing is wrong or bad or hateful or antisocial or anti-trans and are hoping to find someone to absolve them of the guilt they feel by telling that it’s okay that they are prioritizing their nostalgia over the literal lives of a minority group that is no-longer-so-slowy being forced out of public life and, ultimately, killed (we’ve passed the point where we need to point to the definitions of genocide to call the eradication of trans people what it is since even the UN has started to timidly suggest that maybe the worst perpetrators, the US and UK governments, need to knock it the fuck off (emphasis mine).
Continue readingIncreasingly Bitter Reflections Of An Exhausted Mind
Work has been hitting me on all fronts lately. It has routinely achieved the burnout trifecta of inducing mental, emotional and physical exhaustion in me on a day-to-day basis for the last month (all of March, really) and it does not look to be letting up any time soon. Hopefully my latest email to my landlord results in me getting the answers I need so I can make a decision there [it did], about whether or not to stay at my current apartment [I’m going to, but I’m mad about it]. It would be nice to be able to put that particular issue to bed so I can focus on literally anything else (having a place to live kinda takes precedence). The next highest priority thing would be to find a new job if I can, since this one is killing me a little bit faster than entropy does, on average, and I’d really like to no longer have such a drain on my existence be such a significant part of my day-to-day. I am so tired after everything happening this week that I’m practically falling asleep as I write this. Well, a bit more than practically, actually. Just briefly dozed off there. I haven’t been sleeping super well, either, which has made me all the more susceptible to the exhaustion work has been bringing to bear. Every single aspect of my job that is incredibly exhausting has come up just this past week, too: pysical labor testing, repetitive testing, complex testing, my coworkers being unreliable, my coworkers leaving me to do all the work, my boss being unreasonable about something dumb, pro “AI” conversations, and on and on and on… It’s enough to make me want to lay down on my office floor face-first amd weep into the too-thin carpet.
Continue readingMundane Burdens Of Responsibility
Over the weekend, I made some alterations to my cell service plan and added one of my younger siblings to it. Since they wanted a new phone, I had to upgrade my plan and that, unfortunately, meant that the way that I understood cell phone service plans no longer applied. Instead of just “adding a line” to my existing plan and paying a reduced fee for the additonal line, I basically set up a copy of the plan I upgraded to for my sibling. A complete duplicate of all benefits, fees, costs, and everything. I’m still saving a bit of money thanks to adding them, but I’d have saved the same amount of money just changing my plan from what it was to what it is now, a thing I only put off as long as I did because it wouldn’t save me that much money and I simply did not want to think about it. But, years after my initial offer, as they’ve grown further from our parents, my sibling wanted to leave our parents’ phone plan and join mine, so I had to think about it. And am still thinking about since it will take a while for all of that to settle out (as coverage changes, plans update, new numbers/lines become accessible, and so on), which has gotten me thinking about the role that (cell) phone service plays in our lives. After all, when I was young and learning to use the phone, cell phones weren’t as common as they are now. Cell phones became common while I was in high school and smart phones rose to the fore while I was in college, so I’ve gone from having access to an old rotary phone in my parents’ garage to having a front row seat for the rise of voicemail and then the ultimate takeover of smart phones.
Continue readingFamily Like An Open Wound
A bit over a week before writing this, I got a chunk of skin taken off by a thing I was working on at work. A ratchet slipped and my hand banged into a hard metal edge in a way that gouged me pretty deeply. The wound was about the size of a dime (which is a bit less concerning when I tell you that my fingers are at least as wide as a quarter) and I spent the three days after that taking special care of it. I wanted to keep the wound clean while I continued to work and to keep it from getting irritated by coming into contact with anything. Once I was through the work week, though, and just spending time in my apartment, I stopped covering it and let it air out a bit. Now, a bit over a week later, it mostly doesn’t hurt. There’s still some tightness when the heat of my office dries out my hands, there’s the occasional twinge of pain if I bump it into anything, and there’s the dull ache of it every time I was my hands. It’s healing well, it looks much less horrible than it was, but a closer inspection reveals the true depth of the wound, as does running my hand or fingertips over it. So while it mostly doesn’t hurt, every so often, I am reminded of the severity of this injury and am inflicted with the full pain of the injury all over again (I never realized how much I use that knuckle for tapping things until doing that shot a lance of pain deep into my finger and arm). Which is kind of like the experience of cutting off contact with my biological family, just compressed down into seven days instead of seven years.
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