I kept this little tree from my old place and it made Christmas feel nice and cozy. A nice moment in a hard year.
We did it! We made it to the end of the year. And what a shitty year it was for pretty much everyone.
I’m having a hard time reflecting on the past year. My brain just doesn’t want to focus on it. That said, some good things happened. And some bad things. And some thoroughly mediocre things. So let’s do a little reflection if we can. Continue reading
Image used under CC BY-SA 3.0. Original here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Campfire_and_sparks_in_Anttoora_12.jpg
Hi everyone! I made a little Twine game this evening called You Need to Build a Fire. I’ve uploaded it here to share, so if you want to give it a whirl just click on the link below. It’s a very rough first draft, so please forgive any typos and the like.
I hope you like it!
Made this lasagna today. It uses zucchini instead of noodles, and hopefully won’t taste absolutely terrible or be a soggy mess, if I’m lucky. It’s one of the more complicated dishes I’ve made for myself in a while. The pandemic has a way of causing me to just not really cook in a new and different fashion than when I normally get down. But both during covid times and not, cooking for other people is when I make more than the basics, and that hasn’t been happening a lot recently. Because Covid. Yup. Uh, yay lasagna!
I spent a little bit of time over the weekend just thinking about myself and what I’m doing in life. Which is a real good way to bum yourself out, but I think it actually helped a little bit. The biggest revelation was that because the pandemic isn’t ending anytime soon (if there was a vaccine tomorrow, I imagine it’d be 3 months before things got the semi-normal anyway), I should try to focus on being happy on my lonesome. I still want to find a teammate or teammates, either in the form of romantic partners or more friends (or, ideally, both). But holding off on doing stuff until those people walk into my life from offstage seems like a good way to feel like I’m just bummed with no way out. And fuck that.
So I made myself a little list of projects I want to finish by the end of the year. It’s mostly finishing up things I’ve been working on: getting things edited, self-publishing stuff, making a game. Little things that will both let me have a Finished Project for the first time in a while, and free up the brainspace of wondering when I’m going to get back to it. And one of them will hopefully be a computer game that other people can play! Because I miss game design, and Twine seems interesting.
Beyond all that, I’m happy the election is over over, and that Biden won. He may be a little centerist for my taste, but he’s certainly better than the alternative. And seeing all of my friends’ stress levels just drop like 50% is worth it on its own.
Just a little update today, but I’ll leave you with this track, Deep Like Airline Failure, by Proem. I remembered it existed yesterday and it’s just as gorgeous and lovely as I remembered. Plus it’s the kind of track I think would be cool to choreograph a dance to.
Hello everyone! Have you ever wanted to read some samples of my technical writing? See that I removed a broken link to the former Nautilus website? Look at some text?
Then my newly updated portfolio page is for you!
EXCITING TIMES, my friends!
Inspirobot just seems appropriate.
*Sheepishly walks back in, turns on the lights, starts taking chairs down off the tables and getting them set up*
Hey all. It’s been a while since I last posted. The world’s been on fire, in one notable case extremely literally. Covid’s messing up the entire country extremely badly, and the rest of the world badly, but notably less so as they tend to have more competent leadership. And there’s been the usual struggles: difficulty getting myself to click with my current job, isolation (made much worse due to covid), moving, self-image and self-esteem issues in a whole passel of forms, and good old-fashioned depression and anxiety.
Good times, good times.
But I don’t want to neglect this blog any longer, even if in the moment I don’t have a ton to say beyond the updates above. I’d worry that going into details about what I’ve been doing would make this blog too sad-sack, but the benefit of not having a personal brand is that I can be a downer as much as I want! The downside is no one outside of people I know personally has any idea of who I am, but that’s okay, there are worse fates and I can always try to change that situation if I need to. Hell, if it’s anything like The Sims 3 I’ll end up changing it on accident by talking to a celebrity a single time. Continue reading
Shit’s weird, y’all. Frustrating, tiring. I’m in a real time of flux. Looking at moving pretty quick here, likely just into another part of the city. Been on new meds that have been working out nicely. Want to shake up my personal style. Slowly starting to make projects again.
It’s something, at least. I’m headed to bed, now, but I missed blogging and wanted to post something.
Hope you’re all staying safe out there. <3
MOSS TOTEM. ALL HAIL THE MOSS TOTEM.
So, this is fun. And by fun I mean pretty shitty.
“This” is, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes known as coronavirus. Which is admittedly a much catchier name, if less accurate. And, what luck, I get to live in one of the major infection zones!
Things aren’t so bad for now, though there are definitely negatives. I have to work from home, which I dislike with a fiery passion. But I wasn’t wild about a lot of aspects of this job anyway, so that’s probably no surprise. I think I mostly an irritated that I have to make literal space for my dayjob in my home, and that I lose the light-duty social contact I got with my coworkers sometimes. By the time they kicked us out of the building, only three or four other people were still coming in on my team, out of about ten people still coming in on our floor of the office. So we were probably pretty safe anyway, but I understand wanting to practice an abundance of caution. Continue reading
Feeling moody, because I’m a trash goblin and more importantly it’s Sunday and I overslept/generally stayed in bed too long. Which is like every Sunday, and a problem because if I’m not up and at ’em with my first alarm I feel pretty off for the rest of the day. Plus, I was super late to my writing group, mostly because of oversleeping but in part because Jabberwocky was laying with her chin on her food plate like “human, these greens are not fresh. What should you do about it?” So I had to feed her before I left. She went for the fresh stuff immediately, proving that she has discerning, if sometimes inscrutable, taste.
This last week has been good and bad, as weeks are prone to be. I got in a lot of exercise compared to most weeks, which is good! Even went running/walking yesterday, and weekend days are usually a gap in my schedule. I’ve also now been lifting weights long enough I’ve caught up to the “this is actually hard” and/or “I’m sore now” weights, which means I’m improving again.
I’ve been doing significantly better productivity-wise at work, too. Slight mental shift in wanting to do a better (aka adequate) job, plus being able to shift how I’m thinking about our (still terrible!) bonus system (~~see top image~~ just kidding I left it on my work computer). Oh, and keeping a running tab on paper of how many things I’ve each hour, which is a good way to know if I’m on pace or not.
My manager at work is also trying to help me move into a more tech-oriented position, which is grand. It was also surprisingly emotional for me, as this the first time I’ve had such a supportive boss since…ever? Yeah, ever. Lots of bosses want you to grow, very few will put in the effort to help it happen, in my experience.
The bad was mostly a pile of mixed successes. I lost a lot of evenings to playing Death Stranding, which is a rad af game but I’ve also put in like 35 hours in three weeks, which is probably Too Much Gaming given the other stuff I need to be doing. Which, sadly, is not playing Grumpy Norman Reedus: Post-apocalyptic Delivery Man Simulator 3000. Even if I’m discovering I want his job. Which is probably bad, given that his job is “haul dozens to hundred of pounds of stuff across a ruined USA where most everyone lives underground and pays you in Likes.”
Then again, it is a post-capitalism society… [1]
I also got knocked on the track of “I should get a dumbphone, cancel my internet line, and go back to fuckin’ DOS or something.” I think because I’m just not keeping up as well as I’d like with stuff, and my first instinct is to Blame the Internet. Though in this case it was mostly video games. Which weren’t on that list, but I don’t have the heart to throw my consoles into the ocean. Plus at least them I’m doing something, rather than just mindlessly scrolling on my phone. Think, if I had a dumbphone I could replace all that scrolling with taking 10x as long to send a text! Or I could read a book or something, I GUESS. A world of possibilities!
I’ve also been struggling with the SD card I ordered because I refuse to fully admit it’s probably just a lemon. Linux keeps chewing it up and spitting out input/output errors and making it a read-only filesystem when I try to copy a large amount of files onto it, until I reformat it. The FAT32 formatting probably isn’t doing it any favors, but it’s all I can use since I want to use it with Rockbox on my Sansa Clip+. I’m in the process of reformatting it on my Windows machine, in case there’s something Linux is doing in the reformat that isn’t fixing the problems its having, and try copying files from Windows then before I try with Linux. If it doesn’t work then then I’ll suck it up and order a new one. 256GB, someday you will be mine on a media player! This also might be a lesson in not ordering no-name SD cards from ebay, but why would I want to learn that lesson?
Last bad thing has just been not meeting goals. I’ve got Shivering Deeps to work on, and school (aaaaaAAAAAAAA), and coding, and learning Scottish Gaelic, and a million other things. So hopefully I’ll get more of that in this next week. I’ll have to do my best!
How were your weeks?
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Footnotes:
[1] As far as I can tell, Likes aren’t used in exchange for anything, just to rate your performance and make you feel good. And the “make you feel good” part is actively called out in the lore. It’s a weird game, y’all, and I love it to pieces.
Ed note: It took a little longer than I expected to get to it, but here’s the post about looking towards the future, also known as 2020. Which is 1/12th done now, but hey, another month of existential dread wasn’t that different from all of 2019, so I’ll just count it as a 2019 bonus round so I’m not behind. 😛
To think about the future, I did what any good and right-thinking person would do. I stole my friend Marianne Kirby‘s brainstorming diagram, changed a couple of bubble titles, and filled it out. Marianne is wise, and it seemed like a good format. Even if my handwriting is illegible by comparison. I’m not going to republish it here because it’s been a minute since I wrote it and I’m betting there’s some too-personal stuff scattered in there, but each section below is a bubble. So here’s my brainstorming for 2020. Continue reading
This is the only image in my google photos dated 2010. Honestly, accurate to my writing experience for the past decade. IT CAN STAY I’LL ALLOW IT.
*loud sobbing noises*
Okay, enough of that. Sort of. But that, in and of itself, is not a post.
Fun fact: 2010 – 2019 encompasses my age being 20-30, give or take. (I was 20 at the start of 2010 and hit 30 in the last months of 2019.) Which is convenient when it comes to thinking about decades. Benefits of being born in 1989, I guess. That, and my birth heralded the Berlin Wall coming down. That was totally all me, and not the result of a bunch of people resisting very hard and working together. Totally. Continue reading