Last night, I engaged in a choatic bacchanal during what some alleged might be the final hours of Twitter’s life. Of course, the site is still up this morning and I don’t think most people truly believed the website was going to abruptly vanish at some point. It was (and still is) pretty clear that Twitter is going to diminish and fade into obscurity or diminish and transform into something else, just like every other social media site that has fallen by the wayside over the years. After all, it’s not like MySpace is entirely unavailable, it’s just irrelevant. Things on the internet tend to not vanish completely so much as fade from public reckoning or change so completely that they’re actively abandoned. Thus far, neither has entirely happened yet, but last night marked the end of an era as, if the reports prove true in coming days, most of Twitter’s employees have left the company.
Continue readingReflection
(In)Adequate Staffing In The Workplace
I think a lot about the way that workplaces are staffed. My previous job specifically hired people who hadn’t worked anywhere else and then basically ground then into dust for way too little pay, relying on quantity to make up for a lack of quality (specifically to rely on the quanitity of employees to make up for the lack of quality training they gave to those entry-level employees). Some people thrived in that environment and some people, myself included, did not because they didn’t fit in perfectly. My current job tends to work very hard to avoid getting rid of employees but seems to be struggling with figuring out how to retain employees, especially young-ish ones. At thirty one, I’m one of the youngest people on my team and, until this week, at almost six years, had worked at the company for the shortest amount of time. Throw in a bunch of horror stories about working at Amazon facilities, coffee shops, university systems (to name a few high-profile employers who have achieved a level of notoriety thanks to the recent surge of labor violations on their parts and the resulting union drives) and I’ve got a lot of different data about what it’s like to work for an employer that has staffing issues.
Continue readingThe Question of Humanity and Cyberpunk 2077
I beat Cyberpunk 2077 last weekend. Managed to accident my way into the secret version of the final questline as well, which was interesting considering it was the result of decision paralysis and the need to do my laundry that made me take the correct steps to unlock it. I wound up going back to play through a few different options for the final quest just to see what else was out there since the choices I made left me feeling a little sad given the way the game ends. Still, I don’t think I really expected it to end any other way. It’s a cyberpunk story. They rarely end neatly or happily.
Continue readingElection Reflection as Things Stay Mostly Blue in 2022
A week later and most of the election results are in. The heavily gerrymandered places represent huge miscarriages of democracy and, for the most part, weren’t nearly as bad as I thought they’d be in my home state of Wisconsin. I will say that it sucks to see so many people disparraging my state for leaning so heavily toward the facists without considering the fact that more than fifty percent of the population voted for democratic candidates and still wound up with barely a third of the seats in the state government. Which, you know, has been the case for about the last four or more years now (I really can’t remember when the gerrymandering happened, but it feels like forever ago).
Continue readingCoping Mechanisms In My Daily Life
As I move around my apartment, scrubbing the walls around my windows in preparation for my yearly tradition of covering them in a layer of insulating and draft-blocking plastic, I am struck by how much of my life is taken over by what are essentially coping mechanisms for things beyond my control. I’m also struck by how many bugs have died in the three weeks since I last pulled my carpet back to sweep the half-inch of space between said carpets and my patio door, but that doesn’t really make for an interesting blog post topic. The entire process I’m going through is one meant to mitigate the fact that my apartment complex has absolutely terrible windows that not only leak cold through them like a sieve (thanks largely to their terrible metal frames) but that are so poorly installed or maintained that they don’t even block the wind. It’s much more difficult to detect when the entire frame is uncovered, but putting the plastic over them makes it clear that there’s wind blowing through them almost constantly.
Continue readingA Normal Amount of Election Day Anxiety
I spent most of today trying to avoid spiraling. It is election day as I’m writing this, though this is going up a week later, and this election feels particularly fraught. Perhaps more telling, though, is that this level of anxiety is starting to feel normal for elections. After all, the past four major elections (two presidential elections and mid-term elections, specifically, since there’s been a lot more of the local ones than just these four) have been either a step directly toward fascism and authoritarianism or a desperate attempt to move further away from it. I know that the situation we’re currently in is the result of decades of effort so it’s not like any of this stuff came out of nowhere, but that’s not really comforting to know that given how much of it happened before I had any say in the matter. What would be comforting would be knowing that our elections are fair and safe from a bunch of far-right facist fuckers worming their way into enough positions of power that they can thumb the scales by disenfranchising voters or outright meddling in the elections. What sucks the most about that thought is it feels on the same level as all of my “what if I won the lottery” fantasies.
Continue readingNo NaNoWriMo This Year, But I Think I Wrote More This Year Than Any Other
I’ve been avoiding the topic for a while now because I don’t really want to think about it that much, but I decided not to do National Novel Writing Month this year. Which means it is the first time in ten years that I haven’t even attempted it. It will be the second time in that period that I didn’t succeed. The last time I didn’t complete NaNoWriMo was back in 2016 while the election and its results were happening on top of job hunting and dealing with an increasingly difficult roommate situation. I realized after only a couple days that I couldn’t handle writing on top of everything else that was going on, so I stopped. This year, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do it a few days before the month started and resigned myself to skipping it.
Continue readingSocial Media Migration
I wrote a whole post about what feels a lot like passing the point of no return on Twitter’s decline and eventual collapse, since the day I wrote this is the day that the world’s richest man showed up to make “good” on a dumb-shit promise he made because he’s actually also a moron and has only managed to get this far because consequences don’t matter to rich people. I went on a whole rant about corporate dystopia and the collapse of modern civilization because there’s less and less metaphor separating us from sci-fi and cyberpunk dystopias every day. It was cathartic, but probably not helpful to read since most people probably don’t care. Twitter, despite how large it feels to me as an active user, is not that big. Lots of people rarely or never go on that site and, honestly, we’d probably be better without it.
Continue readingCompliments That Sting and My Short-Sold Self
I had what felt like a funny, appreciative moment at work today. One of my coworkers was introducing a new engineer we’ve hired to everyone, making the rounds of the folks who were present at the time. When he got to me, he introduced me and said (quote edited to use my correct pronouns since I’m not out at work and I’m not going to use the wrong ones on my own dang blog, even in a quote) “I don’t know what [they] do, but [they’re] great in conversation.” I laughed, the new engineer laughed, my coworker laughed, and I shook the new person’s hand before explaining that I’m a tester AND that I have an extensive collection of anecdotes about what you can prepare in a waffle iron. After a bit more small talk, my coworker moved on and I returned to my lunch.
Continue readingWearing New Clothes Can Be Exhausting
I bought some new underclothes recently. I haven’t gotten new underwear in years and new undershirts in even longer, to the point that my supply of those clothing items was dwindling to dangerously low levels as I was forced to toss things out as they disentegrated past the point of wearability. I put this purchase off for a long time, not because of money or any of the usual reasons people don’t buy socks or underwear or undershirts or bedsheets or whatever (I mean, c’mon, those are some of the most boring things to spend money on, most of the time). I put it off because I have issues with the textures of clothing and I knew that even replacing the items I owned with the same cut, style, and brand would be a problem. This is also the same reason I’ve been using the same deodorent for the past decade and live in constant fear of it being discontinued like my last brand/scent were. I just can’t filter out the sensory input in the way that most people can.
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