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 do this work, 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 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 readingMusing
Wild 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.
Continue readingDrawn-Out Breakdown Or Recognition Of My Need For Rest
I am struggling to make it through my “normal” work weeks these days. Fifty hours of work was once the norm I lived under but now I can barely make it through a ten hour day. I know how bad that sounds, but working 50-hour weeks was my devil’s bargain for living alone in this expensive modern era. It was the thing that gave me the hope that I’d be able to pay off my student loans “early” (which feels dumb to say considering it has been thirteen years since I graduated college as of the second weekend of May). It is what has enabled me to live with the rising cost of a not-shitty apartment and my unceasing eleven-hundred-dollars-a-month student loan payments (which have finally begun to snowball thanks to paying off one loan with a particularly large quarterly bonus last year). I have depended on it for five years and counting, and I don’t know how I’m going to keep it up anymore. I’d have to move someplace much cheaper if I stopped. I’d have to trim back what few luxuries I allow myself like decent coffee, fresh chicken (that I then freeze, sure, but it’s still better than the already frozen stuff I used to buy), and enough vegetables that I sometime don’t eat them all before they go bad. And the “expensive” frozen pizzas instead of the cheap, crappy ones. But I am so burned out and tired that I can’t really force myself to keep this pace up most weeks and I’m not sure if failing to work that much is me recognizing I need rest more than I need money, or if this is a drawn-out breakdown due to overwork, stress, and isolation combining into the most gnarly, horrible burnout I’ve ever experienced.
Continue readingStruggling To Maintain A Healthy Entertainment Diet
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 readingThe 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.
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