Take a Break
Took today off. Was feeling under the weather. Not sick, exactly, but not good enough to go to work. I think after a few hours of rest, it’s clear that it’s basically just “accumulated stress”. I’ve been trying to be cognizant of how stressed I get, because after 2014, I think I did some significant damage to my long-term well-being by being wildly overstressed for far, far too long. It’s taken years to recover from that, and if the way I feel right now is any indication, if I’ve recovered from that, I haven’t left a huge amount of buffer.
The job’s good – but it’s stressful. There are a lot of things going on, and one of the challenges has been to not feel responsible for all of them. It’s an odd situation, because I’ve been basically responsible for the whole shebang in the past, and it’s odd – I don’t think it’s less stressful to not be responsible for it. It might not be the worst idea to actually just ask to be officially responsible for all of the software side of things, because ultimately, I have the expertise, it’s the way I’m used to working, and there’s almost nothing I hate more than knowing what should be done & not having the authority to make the call.
*sigh*
Still, it’s a great job. Great team.
Spent the day tidying up little things. I donated a box of kids’ toys, and a bag of diapers we never used to Oakland Elizabeth House, which was nice. I hope some people have good times with those toys. Still a little wistful to see some of those things leave.
Otherwise… yeah. Not a ton going on. Work, kids. Summer’s coming up in a hurry, but we’ve got camp plans organized, which is good – it’s basically just Sarah’s Science *all summer* for J, which is what he asked for. It’ll be interesting to see if K is interested in the same thing next year.
Been playing some board games with friends, which is nice. we’ve recently played Unlock, Exit, Lanterns, and Sagrada. I think next time we might either continue Pandemic Legacy or hit up TIME Stories.
Break
I find myself taking a break from Facebook, again. I basically swore off Twitter after the election, and while I check in every now and again, because Twitter’s a place where a lot of marginalized voices can be heard, I don’t miss it. Specifically, what I don’t miss is the constant angst, and its persistent presence in my mind. Like, “Oh, I’m doing X, I should tweet!” No, I shouldn’t, because what I’m doing is irrelevant. And while sometime there’s that sense of catharsis when you can get a frustrated/angry thought out, I think net, the fact that I end up “vocalizing” those thoughts doesn’t actually help me feel better or be better.
The same kind of thought happened re: Facebook. I like a lot of political rants, because it echos what I’m thinking. It feels good. But it isn’t actually good. It gives me a little dopamine hit. And FB then sells that info to advertisers so they can better tailor how they sell me stuff. I don’t like the business model, because I don’t like how the business model drives their optimization.
I know it’d be virtually impossible to create a business that does this, but if you could pay $20/month for a FB-alike that showed nothing but chronological content from my friends and had zero ads, I’d pay it in a heartbeat – the catch is that I’d have to have my family & friends there already for it to be worthwhile, and I imagine that’s a tricky proposition. But it’d allow for a social network that’s designed primarily around *socialization*, and not around optimization for engagement and advertisement. If you only check on once a week, that’s fine – I could care less – because you’re paying a fixed, sustainable amount. I’d love to see something like that. It’s just so astonishingly high-risk that I have no idea how you’d actually do it.
But FB does have tangible value to me – some of my family’s on there, and it’s one of the primary ways I keep in touch with them. Which means that while I’ll take a break, it’s unlikely I’ll be off it for good. Which I have mixed feelings about, because I don’t think it’s a good organization overall. I know a bunch of people that work & have worked there, and they’re uniformly wonderful people. So it’s not that I think that it’s an evil organization run by nefarious masterminds – I think that the problem is that some of the core assumptions about how a business like this should work were done without a lot of thought for the unintended consequences, and it turns out the unintended consequences are globally destructive, and I don’t feel great about participating.
I have similar feelings about Reddit. I love a lot of the front-page level content, but it’s also a site that hosts some of the absolute worst trash the internet has to offer. How do I justify that, vs. something like Twitter or FB? I don’t know. Part of it is that they’re not selling my specific personal information, at least not in quite the same way. But it’s not great, either, and I waffle on whether it’s just a vile cesspit of garbage, or full of delightful jokes. It’s both, simultaneously, and sometimes the positive wins, sometimes the negative wins.
On a purely solid note, though, Ei-Nyung and I watched The Good Place, and got to the end of S1 last night. It went from being “delightful” and “charming” to one of the greatest things I’ve seen in a long time. We ended up immediately buying S2 without a second thought & watching the first three episodes of that before going to sleep, and it’s amazing. S1 has some moments where it seems like the show’s just kind of goofy and charming but not much more than that. Stick with it. Trust me.
I’ve been doing some music-y stuff recently. Nothing too deep, just because I’ve got a limited amount of time, but between practicing the drums, and firing up some of the old electronic music gear and giving it some effort… it’s just something I genuinely enjoy doing.
Also went swimming with Charles & Sean this morning, and that’s also something I genuinely enjoy doing, though waking up at 6:20 to go work out is definitely not among my favorite experiences.
And right now, my computer’s backup drive keeps “pinging” like something’s mechanically wrong with it. I think it’s time for a new backup drive. :\
Vote
One thing that seems consistent re: media coverage of Trump is that look – maybe strict collusion is difficult to prove. And maybe you’ve gotta go pretty far down to say someone’s a racist. And maybe you can hem and haw as to whether his public, on-the-record comments about sexual assault are jokey locker-room fun times or evidence that he’s an abusive piece of shit. And maybe you don’t care that he appears to have paid a porn star, among potentially multiple women, to cover up affairs he had while his new wife was pregnant with, or had just delivered his youngest child.
There are a lot of things you *could* say are the final straw. There are a lot of ways you could interpret these things and say, “Maybe there’s some extenuating circumstance, or maybe he meant it this way instead of that way…”
But you know what? That’s not what I want in a President. That’s not what I want in a leader.
In my *job*, I won’t tolerate a leader who doesn’t act with integrity and honesty, who’s not of decent character, who doesn’t treat their people well. And that’s just in my *job*, which is something where *they* are paying *me* to deal with it.
We (collective we) chose this guy as our leader? This characterless, ethics-free, perpetually lying, serially philandering, racist, sexist, dumb-as-a-sack-of-rocks, incurious, scientifically illiterate, practically *actually* illiterate, egomanical shitbag, and there’s nothing in the structure of our government that says, “Hey, this jackass is too lousy-of-character to serve in this office.”
What a country.
Point being, the media keeps looking for the straw that’s gonna break the camel’s back. There is no straw. And by focusing on the straw, they’re ignoring how completely he’s fucking tarnished the office of the President, and what a laughingstock he’s made the country to the rest of the world. Much less to ourselves. They’re so focused on “When will he cross the point of no return” that they don’t report that he rocketed past that at full speed *literally in the middle of the announcement of his candidacy*, and there’s nothing he can say or do that will get people to hold him to account, because as a country, we have no standards, we have no ethics, we have no morality, we have no decency – nothing that is inherent to the system or the office. Nothing will break Donald Trump but us.
It is up to us to say, not just “no more,” but “this hasn’t even been remotely okay since day ZERO,” and to vote the GOP into utter oblivion.
This is a party that needs to be utterly obliterated, and run out of government so thoroughly that the tea party-era Fox News/Breitbart/InfoWars era GOP is held up as a warning sign to anyone who’d dare exploit our worst impulses that if they do so they will be fucking destroyed.
It’s just disgusting. Every day it’s more disgusting. And everyone who touches this administration is tainted forever. Paul Ryan’s name will be an epithet – a name you invoke when you want to call someone the basest of weasels, to say they have no courage, no redeeming value, to say they can look genuine tragedy in the face and feel nothing while taking millions of dollars from those who profit from it and then stand there in front of the people and lie like a motherfucker. The name Trump will be a black mark – the kind where people unrelated to him change their name out of abject shame. Where the name “Donald” dies for a generation because people can’t bear to name their beautiful children after this kind of grotesque id monster.
Vote. Vote in 2018. Vote in 2020. Vote every goddamn chance you get and wipe this party out of existence on every level in every office throughout the land.
Work Work Work Work Work
Settling in to the new job. It’s stressful, but enjoyable. The stress is good, it shows us that we’re pushing in the right directions. I kinda wish some stuff had lined up better, but circumstances are what they are, and there are things (mostly re: people availability) that you just can’t do anything about. I pushed as hard as I could, and that’s all I can hope for.
We’re making progress. It’s odd, since working at a secret project at a public company means actually keeping secrets, where when I was running the show I more or less didn’t care because no one gives a shit about secrets from an unsuccessful-yet company. But whatever. The project’s really neat, we’re trying something extraordinarily ambitious that has never been done before, and I’m pretty sure we’ll have a really interesting, high-impact result.
So! Good times.
On the personal front, things are going well. Kids are happy & healthy, drawing all the time, working well together, blah blah blah.
I have trouble sleeping most nights due to shoulder pain. However, I know the shoulder pain goes away when I swim regularly. So the problem is that I’m not disciplined enough, or able to find time to swim regularly. I suppose it’d be easier given some fictional pool that’s open ’til 11pm, but since I don’t have that, it is what it is.
Been printing some 3D models – Omnom and the Rocinante – which in a handful of years I probably won’t even remember what those are – but whatever. It’s fun. Painted Omnom’s eyes & teeth, and reminded myself that I actually really like painting weird little models and maybe I should do more of it. Picked up a Macross Tomahawk (you’d know it as the Battletech Warhammer) on eBay. Maybe it shows up, maybe it doesn’t. Probably missing some parts. But it was $25, where newer model kits are in the multiple hundreds of dollars, so even if all it comes with is what’s in the picture, nothing major looked missing. We’ll see. I hope to stick that whole thing together & paint it up nicely.
Lair
Ha. This finally came out. I expected not to get quoted, as I made it pretty clear I was only on the tail end of the project. But there ends up being a blurb about the control/FOV issues.
This is probably the single feature I wasn’t able to get through that I regret the most, as I think it’d have had a massive impact on how people felt about the controls.
Basically, if you were turning, trying to follow an enemy as they flew around you, even if you had a *perfect-to-the-frame* reaction time, you’d overshoot the target (over-rotate), and have to turn backwards to correct your aim.
This wasn’t a subjective thing – if you were actually relying on your eyes, and not a built-in knowledge of where an enemy would be, the FOV was so narrow, and you turned so fast that you didn’t have enough time, given a standard human’s normal reaction time, and given the momentum of how the dragon slowed their turn, to hit a target. This was made worse by the fact that the game ran in the low-teens/high-single-digit FPS for the bulk of the tail end of development, which made things significantly worse.
So the fix was pretty simple – we added a “camera look-ahead”, where the camera would turn *in addition* to the dragon turning, by a tunable number of degrees, and it’d ease in/out of the dragon’s orientation over a tunable time. Think of it as the dragon pilot turning their head to “look-ahead” as the dragon turned.
It gave us a bit of wiggle room to keep the dragon turn rate independent of target acquisition, and then tune the damping of settling back to a neutral state independent of the dragon’s animation. The result was that if you had decent-but-human reactions, you could get the target dead center of the screen every single time, even from a maximum-speed turn.
It didn’t make it into the final game, which is, I think, a real shame. There are valid reasons why, of course, but I’d have made a different call than the one that was made.
Rando Stuff
Busy week. A bunch of stuff happening at work, almost all of which is awesome. But it’s a lot, and it’s just the start. Once we get into a rhythm, it’ll be easier, which is great – but we’re making a bunch of progress (rather, the *team* is making a bunch of progress, since most of this week I feel like I didn’t have time to actually *do* anything). But it’s great. I’m still kind of flabbergasted that this is what we’re doing & how we’re doing it, but it’s … just really exciting. Wish I could share more with everyone, but that’s one of the weird things about working on a secret project at a public company – it’s actually gotta be kinda secret.
Today was mostly just a day of lying around & not doing much. Lindsi, Adia & Co. came by, and we got to hear in literal real time about the Hawaii missile alert, which was, even though it wasn’t real, a very strange microcosm of “Oh, this is how everything ends.”
Having a President who I think is basically an insane four year old idiot (idiot *for* a four year old, not for a 70+ year old man) in a moment where it feels like WW3 is literally minutes away is not a comforting thought.
It really drives home how fragile I think the US has become. I’ve been listening to a lot of Pod Save America, and one of Jon Favreau’s recurring themes is that he’s impressed by how well a lot of our institutions are holding up, and while yes, there are examples, the institutions that should be really nailing the first line of defense are either categorically weak (the media, cowed once *again* by the right wing shouts of “bias”, as though the ones shouting have any integrity or are even good actors *at all*), or have completely abdicated their responsibility (most of Congress), or are actively treasonous & covering up or complicity in crimes (Republican investegatory committees like the one dealing with the Steele dossier led by Grassley, who after reading that transcript, I think should be run out of the country with pitchforks and torches.).
So I don’t feel that sense of faith that our institutions are holding up. I think I *may* feel better about them in 2018 if we can successfully wipe the slate clean of GOP members. This is a party that should be *utterly annihilated*, politically. It should be as poisonous as declaring yourself a Nazi, and declaring yourself a Nazi should be as fucking poisonous as *fucking declaring you’re a god damned Nazi*.
It’s insane that this is where the discourse is at. It’s insane that we take for granted that half the government is so utterly, completely partisan and so totally unconcerned with anything actually related to the well-being of the country as a whole that the assumption is that Trump is un-impeachable no matter *what* he does – that there’s *no* standard the GOP is willing to uphold. They need to be, politically, destroyed.
So yeah, oddly stressful day. Tomorrow we’re headed over to my parents for a bit to do the usual stress-relief-valve for their relationship, which is really getting on my nerves. I just want an uninterrupted weekend. I don’t mind work. I love spending time with the kids. I don’t mind occasionally spending time with my parents. But having the weight of starting a job AND the kids AND the parents AND the rest of life… one of those is pushing itself over the edge a bit.
My mom’s been great about it – but my dad’s periodic “everything is wrong and exploding and you have to pay attention!” texts at 11pm, which force me to get really wound up, and them constantly being over phantom nothing bullshit… it’s getting tiring.
BUT.
Still. Work is good. Kids are great. Rest of life is pretty darned good. Picked up a “legacy” style game called Charterstone that looks really interesting, but I’m wondering if it’s taken us 2+ years to get through a third of Pandemic Legacy S1 when I might be able to get anyone to actually give this a shot. 
Been reading through The Expanse – finished book 2, then switched over to a book called “The Rook” (Christy’s recommendation, I think) which I’ve been enjoying, for a thematic break. Trying to get Ei-Nyung caught up on the TV series, but it’s slow going because it’s a pretty stressful show.
Watched the Lego Ninjago movie with the kids, which does manage to completely break the streak of charming Lego movies, despite Jackie Chan’s presence. The story is *terrible*, even if there are a few good jokes, and the animation is still pretty charming. I liked the TV series (which the kids watched last year) a lot better than the movie, which is disappointing.
Oh, have I mentioned how great Hawking Bird is? No? Go check it out. Basically near Bakesale Betty. Get the Hawking Bird w/ an egg & chicken fat rice. And the Tater tots. You’re welcome.
I’m gonna try to cook something marginally ambitious on Monday. Don’t know what yet.
Time Off
Today was more reorganization & cleaning. Also played frisbee with J&K – got a knockoff Aerobie at Target. The kids don’t like throwing a ball around, but for whatever reason, frisbee is right up their alley.
Cleaned out the foyer closet, which is where I discovered all the hats. Got rid of a few jackets, and a 20 year old suit that was both too small and the shoulder pads were … not good.
Also grabbed my dad’s old briefcase, which has been in that closet for something like 10 years. It holds all the stuff I need to go to work. So I’m using it. It’s ridiculous, sure, but whatever.
Played a bit of Fortnite Battle Royale – I’d picked up PUBG a few days ago, because I figured it’s the kind of thing I should know about (and indeed, it’s fun!). FBR is a bit more up my speed than PUBG – I like that it has something that feels like style and character, but PUBG has a nice tension that comes, I think, in part from the realism.
Also picked The Division back up again, for reasons that are somewhat beyond me – it’s fun, but one problem with jumping in after a year away is that I have almost no idea what the fuck is going on. I didn’t play it a ton when I originally got it, since no one else I knew was playing at the same times I was playing, but since the shine’s really come off of Destiny 2 recently, it’s a sort of loot-based game that’s similar, but different enough, and I’ve got a long way to go before the endgame, so it’s a nice change of pace. Also played a little bit of Horizon, and man – that game is just jaw-droppingly beautiful. The design, the character art, the environments, the enemies – it’s all just really, really damn good.
Started up another bottle of the Sol Food hot sauce again. It’s a couple days of soaking jalapenos in vinegar to start, so I’ve got time to get the rest of the stuff I need.
All in all, it’s been a pretty great two weeks off. We had a few days here before heading out to ATL, then a few days after we got back when J’s school was still off, so it’s felt almost like three vacations back-to-back-to-back, even if two of ’em were just puttering around at home taking care of shit.
Parents
One thing we’ve been doing when going to my parents’ house with the kids has been to basically incentivize them to want to go to the grandparents’ house. Despite my dad just sitting on his iPhone the whole time, my mom will hang out with the kids – they played Qwirkle this afternoon, and they have a pretty good time. They often get sweets from my mom, and they like running around on the flat yard, which is a nice change from our house – they played frisbee for a bit this evening.
I, on the other hand, have been anti-incentivized to go to their house. Every single time I go, I’ve got literally hours of manual labor to do, and every week, it just piles up and up. More, every time a weekend passes and I *don’t* go, by midweek the next week I get some text from my dad saying that he & my mom got in a fight, and she’s a.) so stressed she’s going to leave him, b.) has obvious memory problems and I need to take him seriously, or c.) some other shit.
And no, none of those things are true. But they always weigh on me. So the only associations I have now are a.) lots of difficult, often frustrating physical labor, and b.) being the only bulwark holding back my parents’ implosion.
Every goddamn week.
And it was alright before I had a job. But I have a job now. One I like, sure, but it’s still got a lot of stress & effort, and now I get to go from that to a job I’ve grown to despise, sacrificing what amounts to half my weekend to deal with them.
I get why my mom feels trapped. It’s driving me bananas. And I feel terrible for feeling this way, but also, fuck – half of this shit they can take care of on their own, they just don’t because I’m here. And Ei-Nyung posited that maybe they do this to have an excuse for me to come over, but if that’s the case it’s a terrible plan, because it’s going to explode in their face in a hurry. Or it won’t, because I don’t have any fucking choice in the matter regardless.
Random Photos
I think I need to get off of WordPress. The site’s just too junky to be considered a modern blogging option. The way it handles media files is garbage, and its interface is just … ugh.
Anyway. Here’s some recent photos.
