I’ve been busy. Normally, I’d dig deep and find the time or energy to write a blog post no matter how busy work was, but my days and nights have had a lot going on. Monday, after I wrote the one blog post I published earlier this week, I had my weekly hangout with my friend. Tuesday was my night away from my PC (though I still wound up spending some time there to take care of a few things) to watch more of The Sopranos so I could listen to the next Media Club Plus episode. Then Wednesday night I worked right up until I had to leave so I could scarf down some kind of dinner and then go do wing farming with my group. After that, I realized I was behind schedule on producing some stuff for my free company, so I spent a bunch of time on that and crafting collectibles to turn in. Tonight, I haven’t got anything planned, but it is my third super busy work day in a row and I’ll admit I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to energy. I just… Haven’t had the time or energy to write. So I didn’t.
Continue readingMusing
Stepping Back Into The Same Mess I Left Two Weeks Ago
A two-week break. More or less, anyway. It’s difficult to take a break when you have to justify to yourself, your harshest critic, why you’re taking so much time away from work when you’re already just a small step away from financial precarity. Hard to justify rest at a time in your life when little is certain and there are always things to do. I remarked to my therapist, as I was entering my second day of this unplanned break and realizing that I needed more than just a couple “normal” work weeks would provide, that part of the reason I hesitated to do anything like this is because the problem at the core of my exhaustion is burnout. I’ve given everything I had and more to keep going on now there’s nothing left but enough of a spark to sputter along enough to keep myself financially solvent and alive. Little remains beyond what I can scrape together on a day-to-day basis. Nice as this two weeks of rest have been, they can’t solve that problem. Typically, this kind of burnout requires multiple months of rest, which requires a degree of financial stability I’m not sure I will ever have at this rate. That I won’t have for another few years at the earliest. It is better than nothing. It will help me get through the next couple months at least. I hope. I don’t know how long it will last, actually, since a rough week at work could burn through everything I’ve recovered.
Continue readingKeeping All The Plates Spinning As I Work Through My To-Do List
Rushing to get everything into place so I can make money again in Final Fantasy 14 is exhausting. I have so much crap stockpiled that is valuable! That I will work through and make a bunch of gil on! But it is difficult to make the time for that amongst everything else, especially when I was pretty worn out on crafting random junk to sell even before all this drama happened, so it is gathering dust and everyone is clamoring for ways to make money while I’m still trying to get my systems in place so I’m not just buying junk I’ll never use and trying to keep up with my depleting funds by selling the high-value stuff. If I’m not going to benefit from this in any way, I should not constantly deplete myself for the sake of others. Both in terms of energy and my characters’ material wealth. After all, I’m already spending a lot of my character’s potential for income on providing things for the Free Company to make money on, free of charge. The whole thing pretty much only works because I’m not charging for the stuff I am providing. Which is fine. I just need to set limits somewhere or else I’m going to burn out again.
Continue readingPacing Myself Through The Endless Busyness
I cannot remember the last time I was this busy. I mean, a lot of this is stuff I’ve chosen to do and could technically choose to not do, but I’ve made commitments to myself and other people already and I always follow through on my commitments when possible. Work’s been constantly lately. All the chances for breaks and letting my mind rest are done except for the time it takes for software updates to do their job. That’s the only time during my work day when I can let my mind wander and it’s generally not enough time to do much of anything other than have a stray thought or check my discord notifications. After work, I’ve got errands or chores (especially now that I hit the point where I can’t keep putting things off), some kind of plans usually, and then the endless work of trying to get things up and running in my new Final Fantasy 14 FC so that I can eventually take a break, which it’s own set of almost endless tasks that just need a little time and attention when I can spare them now that all the urgent stuff is done. Plus, of course, my crafting workshops, my desire to play other video games, two episodes of The Sopranos to watch, various podcasts, and whatever other entertainment options I’m forgetting since my time away from work is currently focused on whatever plans I’ve made, recording wrestling shows every week, doing stuff for the FC, and then doing stuff so I don’t wind up hating Final Fantasy 14 because all I do in it is work (which currently means jostling my priority order a bit every day so I can do some of the “fun” work rather than just whatever is most important and/or urgent).
Continue readingReminders Of Past Decisions In The Workplace
Once again, the calendar has rolled around to the midway point in the year and I have gotten information about how my next year of financial life is going to shift. That’s right, it’s raise time. I got a decent raise this year. Objectively not stellar, considering my experience and the work I do and so on, but my employer is not known for paying well and I got pretty much the maximum possible raise I could get without getting promoted as well, which is rather uncommon for someone in the upper half of the pay bracket for my current position. My boss seemed pretty surprised by the numbers, but he might have been goofing around. I literally have no idea if any of the things he said were jokes or genuine. I actively interpreted them as jokes in the moment, because my boss is the kind of guy who will let anything slide as long as he’s got you laughing, but I genuinely can’t tell if they were if maybe he’s a lot less involved in how people get raises than I’ve been lead to believe these past nine years.
Continue readingShouldering An Old Burden
There is a particular pain I live with most days. Nothing profound, at least not in this case. I just come from a long line of people with bad joints and, as a result of taking after that side of the family so strongly (physically, anyway: I represent all of the mental health issues on both sides of my family rather than leaning in any one direction), I also have bad joints. Thanks to a lifetime of largely avoiding high-impact sports save for a period in high school and preferring cycling and swimming as my forms to cardio to running, I’ve managed to get pretty far into my life without joint issues. In fact, in the last few years, I’ve had a great deal of success improving my joint health thanks to regular excise targeted at maintaining flexibility and improving joint strength. Unfortunately, all of that has gone out the window due to the medication I was on a couple years ago and my subsequent struggles to get back into a healthy exercise routine. Which means an old foe has reappeared after quite a few years away: my right shoulder pain.
Continue readingSummer Has Arrived
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 readingWork 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.
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