While a large amount of my life feelings like a blazing dumpster fire inside a burning apartment at the center of a city that was recently transported into hell (specifically the firey kind of hell), there are a few things I can take some amount of comfort in. Like being able to afford living my life, even if sometimes that feels less true than it used to. Or having enough food to eat. Friends to play games with. Final Fantasy 14. All kinds of stuff, really. A lot of which is just finding the silver lining in my current moment, but there’s nothing wrong with that. Better to appreciate what I’ve got when I’ve got it rather than find myself wishing for when times were better and cursing myself for not appreciating them when I had the chance. Plus, I can still recognize that all of the products marketed as “AI” are absolute garbage and that all these LLMs are just really powerful and confident autocomplete algorithms with no ability to truly “understand” anything. It’s very comforting to know that, especially as more and more news reports come out about people having breaks with reality as a result of the tripe they’ve been fed by their emotional support “AI.” It’s not great that they’re an increasingly huge part of daily life and that more and more corporations are starting to move from “please use our garbage generator” to “you HAVE to use our garbage generator,” but at least I haven’t fallen for this spiel yet.
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Looking For A Silver Lining Amidst The Smoke-Filled Sky
While I’m still pretty bitter about my new work schedule and wakeup time, I’ve begun trying to find a positive spin I put on it for myself. This isn’t working super well since I know I’m lying to myself about it, but at least my attempts to find silver linings are working out a bit better. The primary silver lining I’ve found as of my second consecutive day of this crap is that I’ll now be getting off work at a time where I can more easily participate in group Final Fantasy 14 activities. This is especially relevant almost immediately because today, the day I’m writing this, marks the first instance of a weekly even I helped to schedule. Last week, on a saturday, my FC (Free Company, which is the FF14 version of player guilds) wound up getting a group together to do one of the “exploration zones” for the expansion I’d just finished. Since we planned this activity out ahead of time, I was all ready to go when the event started and had a pretty good time playing around with my friends. It was fun, even if I didn’t really know what was going on since I had to skip the cutscenes in order to not hold everything up for all the players who had already done that stuff, and we wound up getting such a large group together that someone said we should try to make it a weekly event. Since there was already a different weekly event for doing the latest “exploration zone” (which was recently released and is still very new content) and a lot of chat back and forth about when it was going to happen, I decided to just set up a poll and let everyone pick what time worked best for them. Which turned out to be Thursdays, the one day each week that I’d previously reserved as my “get to work whenever and work super late to make up for any short days” day.
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