Sometimes, as I’m standing at my desk and sweating while I try to focus on my dumb little tasks on days that I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my job, I let my mind wander through potential futures or alternate timelines. Twelve years ago, when I graduated college, I had very different plans for my life. I’d spent the four years of my college education finding out what I was interested in, what I was good at, and what I cared about, and planned to eventually return to scholastic pursuits so I could earn myself an advanced degree in some kind of writing thing and eventually further that with some kind of further degree focused on medievalism or the development of language or something. I was going to work for a few years, pay off my student loans by the time I was thirty, go back for more education, and spend my life burying myself in my beloved writing and research and education (of myself and then of others). That, of course, didn’t happen, but my dream of living a life of telling stories lasted until pretty recently and now I find myself adrift with no future I’m really working toward beyond being debt-free, no attachments to my present (geographic or occupational) and so I wonder what kind of life I might be living if I hadn’t been shackled by debt or might yet live should I find a way to remove my need to spend most of my time and energy on being a cog in a machine that does not value me.
Continue readingMusing
Doing Little Tasks At My Job (Bad) So I Can Go Home And Do Little Tasks In Final Fantasy (Good)
It has been nearly a month since I last wrote about Final Fantasy 14. I started the subsequent expansion not long after my last post (and might have dipped my toes into it just before that post went up), but progress has been pretty slow. It’s not a lack of interest mind you, but perhaps because of an abundance of it. I’ve been consistently putting off certain bits of progress in the main story until my friends could play through them with me, which has sometimes meant needing to wait a day or two to get through the next plot-blocking dungeon or trial. I also took a bunch of time away to level up a class so I could do all of the combat job quest lines simultaneously, and getting something from twenty-ish to seventy is a significant undertaking. I’ve also had a lot of little money-making tasks to pursue, some crafting to do, attempts to update my character’s various glamours, more wrestling events, and so on. I’ve played PLENTY, I just didn’t get back to the Main Scenario Quests until last week on account of all the other stuff I’ve been doing. Even now that I’ve been back at it, the going has been a bit slow as I’ve had to level up additional jobs every night so I can do their quest lines, which means I’ve been poking at the MSQ in small increments here or there every night once that is all done. I also did some raids, took most of a day off Final Fantasy, and gotten back into working all my usual overtime at my job, so I’ve just not been able to bring my focus to bear in the way I’d like to.
Continue readingThe First Casualty Of The Summer Heat
Somehow, despite the temperature hitting the upper 70s (or 26ish for you Celcius folks), my employer hasn’t turned on the air conditioning yet. In fact, given how warm and stuffy my office is, the heat might still be on. The temperature gauge outside my office says it is 75 in the lab, but I can feel the temperature drop a couple degrees the instant I exit my office door, so I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that my office itself is 80 or higher. I mean, I can’t even stand around my desk without sweating a little bit, despite having a desk fan running on high (which doesn’t count for as much as I’d like it to since I need that thing running constantly just to counter how still and stuffy my office gets without it). Honestly, it’s so warm in here that I’m having a difficult time not falling asleep immediately any time I sit down in my chair or when my attention starts to drift while standing at my desk (have you ever dozed off while standing up? It’s quite startling but apparently not so startling that I won’t do it again within five minutes). It’s almost unbearable and the only thing keeping me from leaving the office to work at home is that my apartment won’t be much better (though the air will be moving a bit more than it is here, which isn’t nothing). And, you know, the fact that I’m sure it’d become a thing with my coworkers.
Continue readingA Perfect Morning Ruined By Casual Reality
Last week (today, as of writing this, I guess, but over a week ago as of this getting posted), I woke up incredibly peacefully. I’d gotten decent sleep and struggled to get out of bed because the temperature was perfect for staying beneath my blankets as I listened to the sound of the rain outside. It was, perhaps, the best morning I’d had in a while, especially because I was able to haul myself out of bed before long and get ready for work without too much of an issue. It was pleasant, that first hour and a half of my morning as I ate breakfast and got ready for work, but it quickly spiraled downhill from there. You see, when I went to go get into my car around half-past-eight, I discovered that my underground parking garage had flooded. Nothing terrible, or disastrous, mind you, but it was at least ankle-deep water that had backed up out of the drain and I don’t have shoes waterproof enough to handle something like that. So, I returned to my apartment and planned to work from home for an hour when I remembered a conversation my boss and I had a couple weeks prior during my yearly review. Apparently, people had been taking notice of how often I worked from home for a couple hours in the morning or how often I was gone part of the morning for doctor appointments–enough that they’d spoken to my boss about it. While my boss understood my reasons and knew I was getting my hours in and my work done, he suggested that I do what I could to cut down on how often it happened at least for a while. I didn’t say much in response because I was processing the fact that my coworkers formed opinions about how often I wasn’t present in the office but chose to speak with our manager about it rather than see if there was any kind of reason for my time away from the office. I didn’t exactly have the bandwidth to bring any of that up yet since I was still reeling from learning this and hadn’t gotten to the point of being able to express why it upset me so much.
Continue readingSubtext And Performative Extroversion Are The Key To A Good Work Schedule
On top of everything going on, all the woes of society and my on-going issues with finding a decent antidepressant that works for me, things at my job are picking back up again. Our project has been announced, we’ve gotten through all the manufacturing hurdles, and it is officially released to production as of a couple weeks ago. Which means that development can finally resume. That’s right. It’s released and actively being sold, but we’re back to working on it again. This isn’t terribly unusual for a lot of products (especially on stuff with lead-times as large as ours are–multiple months). A lot of things will be announced, get demonstrated or marketed, and have their designs shipped to factories to be produced long before development will stop working on them. Some of that work is, of course, designing future versions of the product, making improvements, and incorporating feedback based on customer experiences. A lot of it, though, is just the same work that’s been done the whole time but now focused solely on trying to remove as much material from the project as possible in order to bring down the cost of producing it. Sometimes that means chasing down ideas developers and engineers had but didn’t have a chance to try out during the initial development phase. Sometimes that’s just making choices to combat newly discovered problems that only came up after the product existed and was being used long enough. Regardless of the specifics, I’m now entering into what is going to be the longest period of heavy physical labor on this project, albeit at a much different pace than I was doing it earlier this year.
Continue readingThe Economy And Society At Large Are Failing Artists
Recently, an… associate? Community member? Friend of a friend? Recently, someone I know vaguely in that way you know people who are in your community but with whom you’ve never had much of a direct interaction published a graphic novel (or second of three collections of a comic they’re publishing on the internet, depending on how you want to define things) and got not only zero support from her publisher but a string of such unhelpful responses that it would be easy to suggest that she was actively hindered. I’m not going to name the person, the publisher, or even the comic because I don’t want to drag any mud into her business, but it was absolutely infuriating to hear about what a shitty time she’d had in the publication of this latest book given that the one freaking thing a publisher actually does, aside from making the editing and printing aparatuses available to creators, is help to sell the book! All they’ve done so far is make sure copies show up at businesses and that’s the bare minimum for a business! You’d think that a company that was going through the actually significant hassle of receiving, editing, proofing, and printing an entire graphic novel would also spend some time and money marketing it so they can, you know, make some money of the damn thing! But no. This released with no fanfare, the creator was absolutely stonewalled when she tried to get the ball rolling, and she’s been left to do any amount of marketing by herself via social media. It’s absolutely infuriating.
Continue readingI’d Rather Let My Coworkers Waste Our Time Than Bail Us Out Of A Horrible Meeting
I had a testers meeting last week. It was a bit impromtu, but such meetings usually are. My little team of testers is only three people these days, and while we do have an obvious senior tester who should be in charge, he’s not really the commanding sort. The next most senior tester, who has a few years in the job at the company on me (but I might have more total years testing thanks to my job before this one) and is the same “rank” as me tends to be the one to call the meetings. Usually because he’s got a lot of work coming up and knows he’ll need some help from someone else because our lab assistant (who usually helps him) won’t be available or because it takes a degree of expertise the lab assistant lacks. It helps him to sit down and talk through all this stuff when he needs more than just one-off help, which is why he calls most of these meetings. My other coworker and I just call on each other as needed and talk through that kind of stuff on a day-to-day basis, but we share a great deal of expertise and can ask each other to do things without worrying about how well it’ll get done. Which, unfortunately, is not something we can expect from this other guy since he has done his best to avoid learning anything about the deeper aspects of our testing over the years whereas all three of us are fairly proficient in most of his testing. Beyond that, we also have status update meetings from time to time, just to get together and talk about what’s going on and what’s coming up, but we haven’t done any of those meetings in a while because it has been pretty much the same stuff going on for over a year at this point.
Continue readingGetting Back To Work And Thinking About The Future
I’ve been taking it easy for about a month now. Maybe a little more than. After we found out that the final release meeting of my project got delayed until just this past week (as this gets posted), I decided to take my long put-off week of vacation. I unfortunately did it after a full day of work on a Monday, but I still got a decent week away from work by taking the next Monday off. Since then, I’ve been dealing with the fallout of pushing myself as hard as I did and my current medication-induced exhaustion, all of which means that I’ve been avoiding overtime in my work weeks. Mostly by taking days off every week, forcing myself to avoid even doing the “here’s how much overtime I could get” calculous because I can’t get overtime until I’ve got 40 non-PTO hours allocated to a week and I’m not going to work eight “extra” hours without getting my overtime pay. It’d be better to just not use the vacation time in the first place. Anyway, I’ve taken at least one day off each week, mostly dictated by my messed up sleep schedule, overwhelming exhaustion, or my poor physical health. I expected, initially, that I was only going to take it easy for the first two weeks, the ones involving my planned week-off of work, but something has come up every single week since then that has left me with one or more days where I could not force myself into the office.
Continue readingLooking For Reassurance As The World Threatens To Crumble Around Us
Despite being a part of the economy of the United States of America, both as a person producing value/wealth for others like a good capitalist cog and as someone whose retirement is largely dependent on it’s health due to the broken way that retirement is set up in the US, I feel a sense of satisfaction every time the stock market loses value. I understand this is the perversity within me making itself known–it is my one source of schadenfreude even though it is far from harmless–to a life mostly spent setting it aside in order to do what I know to be right (for example, I did actually vote in the latest election in Wisconsin despite wanting nothing more than to not vote at all because I was being harassed and hangued at all hours of the day, by phone and mail, about note just voting but how just ANYONE could look up whether or not I voted in any particular election by those messages that always feel more threatening than motivational). I understand that and do not set it aside because, for all the harm it does, it has a greater impact on those so wealthy that their “worth” is tied up in the bullshit confluence of imagined value known as the stock market. It is the only time I get to look at the world and know that while the actual impact on my life is greater than it will ever be on a billionaire’s, at least my changes are measured in four or five digits while a billionaire’s changes are measured in at least double that many digits. Cold comfort, to be sure, given that I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be able to actually retire in the modern sense of the word, but it’s the only comfort I’ve got as my country and economy shake a rattle at a scale beyond my ability to influence.
Continue readingGotta Switch 2 A Different Way Of Economic Planing
Well, we finally got the Switch 2 news that everyone wanted. And a whole lot of news people didn’t want. According to the reactions after the fact, the Switch 2 is far too overpriced, the games are overpriced, and Nintendo has ruined everything! That’s quite a lot of responsibility this one console release has to bear, especially considering that a launch price of $450 is fairly reasonable considering the other consoles on the market. I mean, sure, Nintendo has, historically, been the cheaper option and the underperforming console in general (in regards to the technical specifications, I mean), but I figured it wasn’t going to last forever. Screens are actually really expensive and including one on a console is a pretty pricey part, even if the rest of the console has cheaper parts to make up for it. All of which is to say that I’m not surprised, this is what I expected given the price increase in some of Nintendo’s most recent games, but I was a bit surprised by the lack of anything that made me actually want to acquire one on launch day. I mean, I got the Switch on launch day because of the new Legend of Zelda game that was launching with it and while the Mario Kart game coming out as a launch title for the Switch 2 is interesting enough to make me break my habit of ignoring every new Mario Kart game, I don’t think it’s enough to make me want to go through the hassle of trying to get one on the day of release. A month and a half after that, there’ll be a new 3D Donkey Kong game for the first time in decades and THAT is definitely intriguing, but I’m not sure it’s interesting enough to contend with scalpers, waiting in line for several hours, or endlessly refreshing a webpage in hopes of getting a reservation.
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