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 readingReflection
Slowly 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.
Continue readingSo Much For Resting
As it turns out, it is not that easy to take a week off. Any other week would have been easier, since this last week involved the in-game bonding ceremony between my dearest friends’ Final Fantasy 14 characters (now they are married in real-life and in this video game) and I was as involved in that as I had the energy to be. Plus there was another wrestling event to record and edit, all the busyness of a “normal” workweek, the sudden extra busyness of this past week, and then the complete screeching halt of all of the work stuff for at least a day due to me twisting my ankle. And while twisting my ankle sucked, it did actually force me to rest in a way I couldn’t make myself until I actually had an unavoidable reason for it. But there’s still more celebrations tomorrow (as of the day I wrote this), the imminent return of my delayed obligations and plans, and now the exhaustion of painfully hobbling around my two-story apartment to contend with, so I’m not out of the woods yet. To be honest, given everything I’d done this week, I’m not sure I actually took a break the way I meant to and maybe just… Stopped doing as much. Which definitely counts for something, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not exactly what I was looking for with this decision to step away from things for a bit.
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 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 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 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 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.
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