And We’re Back

I return!

I’ve tried to write this post at least twice now, over the past year-ish. So now I’m going to try and just write the short, FAQish and/or bullet points filled version of my comeback post.

Where did you go?

I mean, still Seattle. Moved out of the place I was in last time I posted, shared a building with good friends for a bit, and then moved to Capitol Hill to make it easier for my girlfriend and I to see each other.

Wait, girlfriend?

Yep. And we’re monogamous, so you all missed your chance. I know, you’re heartbroken.

So, like, what happened?

A bunch of people close to me died in quick succession at the start 2021. Okay, three, but that’s still a lot. Jabberwocky made a feint for being the 4th, but pulled through, thankfully. There was also a pandemic, you might have noticed, and that was Not Good for my mental health. Neither was that apartment. So I couldn’t bring myself to write much.

Oh no, Jabberwocky!

Odd for that to be the thing you pulled out of there, but okay. No you’re avoiding the bigger thing. At any rate, she’s still alive and well and has just fought off a long infection. As my friend puts it, she’ll probably never die just out of pure anger. I maintain she’ll bite, tail whip, and fight Death itself when it tries to come at her. She probably already has. So while she’s an old lady at this point, she’s doing pretty well.

What else happened while you were away?

Ah, finally, bullet points!

  • Transferred to an IT service desk job at the company I was working for. Got promoted after my first year. Did a pretty damn good job. Though I developed a skillset that gave me a lot of job security. Found out I was incorrect when 5 of the 8 members of the US team, including me, were laid off at the very start of May. It was, if I’m being totally honest, a pretty bad place to work by the end there, so probably for the best. Still, I like my teammates from there and am sad I won’t get to work with them anymore. Hell is best faced with a good team at your back, and it makes you closer and bond and shit.
  • Started dating a wonderful woman, been together for over a year, feels good. I promise this isn’t meant as a humblebrag, I Just want to give an important life event its due.
  • Got on much better brain meds that have seemingly kept working.
  • Got out of shape, back in, back out, back in. Something like that. Consistent working out is hard, though thankfully I’m currently on an upswing.
  • Managed to not get COVID, at least as far as I and a multitude of anxiety-induced tests can tell.
  • Also got vaccinated, boosted, etc. If you’re not vaccinated: what the hell, go do that. I’ll wait. Go!
  • Started a podcast! And it’s a good one! That’s still going! :O

Podcast?

Yeah! It’s a Castles & Crusades actual play podcast called Primary Attribute. You can check it out at https://www.primaryattribute.com . We’ve been at it a good long while now and have hit over 100 episodes. Castles & Crusades plays a lot like older editions of D&D, but we somehow turned it into something of a dating and civic maintenance simulator alongside the standard adventuring and occasional (*sniff* *single tear*) combat.

Also the audio for the first dozen-ish episodes sucks ass, so be warned. At least some remastering is in the works. I’ll post here when that’s done, if you want to hold out. Or try starting with Episode 83, “All Dream Copse are Bastards.” If you do that, let me know how jumping in there goes for you!

It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and for direct RSS subscription or download from the site itself. If you have a favorite platform we’re not on, let me know and I’ll see if I can make it happen.

Did you break the podcast details out into their own section to escape the bullet points?

You can’t prove anything.

Hey, I thought you said this was going to be short!

Yeah, but my morning pages practice has a word count of 500 words and I wanted to hit that. And we did! Mission accomplished, everyone go home.

Wait, are you going to start posting again?

That’s the hope! There’s a lot of stuff I’ve wanted to write over the past couple years, but I felt like I needed to do this first. Does that make sense? No! But here we are.

And we’ll actually wrap here. See ya soon.

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Checking In

I’m alive. I’ve just had a whole bunch of stuff going down for the past like six months. Which I will unpack some other time. But I at least want y’all to know I did not evaporate completely. Not yet, at any rate.

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A Good Day to Blog

An image of a tree that's fallen on some power lines.

Seen on my run yesterday. Not the cause of *my* power outage, but I’m sure the cause of someone’s.

My internet’s been out for the past 36 hours. Except my phone, which doesn’t have enough bandwidth or data for me to do my day job. But you know what a phone connection is perfect for? Tethering to my computer and doing some blogging with. So here I am.

(My power was out for 12 hours on Wednesday morning as well, hence the sharing of the above image.)

I wrote a previous version of this post where I went into detail about the stressors in my life lately. But, honestly, I had a reaction of “I’m not sure I want to share all this” and “who would care to read about it in this much detail” while drafting it. So here we are, draft two: electric boogaloo.

I’m never sure what to do with days like this. I should probably clean my apartment. Despite some progress it’s still a mess and even though it’s already noon there’s still a lot of time left in the day. I’d work on editing the podcast, but pulling down everyone’s files is at least a few gigs and will be slow as molasses on this connection, so I kinda have to wait until everything’s back up. Or I could do some writing. Or some reading. I’ll probably do a combination of the four. Continue reading

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Rough Start

I’m writing this from under a cozy blanket on my couch, propped up on a good pillow, and wearing a nice warm fleece pullover. The space heater’s going again after keeping it off most of the day, and I’m starting to feel a little more mellow without, hopefully, nodding off. It’s a nice mental space to be in, especially since it’s been a rough start to the year.

Not as rough as many people’s, I’m sure. But there’s been stress. Mostly my anxiety messing things up for me, as previously mentioned. I got ultra-stressed about how to do laundry so things would be “clean” (my mom helped reassure me, thank you, Mom). Last night I lost an hour to (mostly fruitlessly) researching what cleaners would be food-surface safe. And another couple hours to wrestling with a bunch of indecision when finally buying enclosure supplies for Jabberwocky that I’ve needed ever since I moved. Continue reading

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The Start of Things

The starting screen/text of the game Zork.

The start of a somewhat different thing.

I decided on a lark today that it might be fun to blog more this year. That’s the only goal I’m going to official commit to: just do more posts than last year. Which shouldn’t be hard. I’m currently thinking daily or near-daily, and I want to give that a shot, but we’ll see how it goes. It might end up being once a week. Hell, if it ends up being once a month I’ll beat it. It looks like I only posted 11 times last year.

Today is, obviously, the start of the New Year, assuming you go by the Gregorian calendar system. I’m sure a lot of people are making resolutions and all that. I haven’t really, yet. I want to set goals, but I don’t want to rush it, and I want time to properly think them through. Instead of throwing together a list today and then failing in at least one thing on the first day because I didn’t consider my time/energy/spoons enough. Hopefully I’ll manage to do that this weekend.

The real trick of it is going to be managing expectations while there’s still a pandemic going on. It’s a lot of extra psychic pressure, which in turn limits my ability to do as much as I’d like. Even just not being able to get out of the house to go to a coffee shop or something is an obstacle. I used to do a ton of writing in a couple of weekly writing groups at coffee shops, for example. So I’m not going to have access to as many of my mental tools as I’m used to, and will be stressed on top of it. So I should be relatively gentle with my expectations and goals, allow for potential failure (and not let it stop me), and ramp up as needed. Continue reading

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Reflecting on 2020

A small christmas tree on a crowded coffee table.

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

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I Made a Game: You Need to Build a Fire

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.

You Need to Build a Fire

I hope you like it!

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Lasagna, and Other Things

A lasagna fresh out of the oven. The top is nicely browned and only a little burned!

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.

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Updated My Portfolio

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!

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I’m Back

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

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