Last week, I could bounce back from how drained I had become. This week, thanks to the Sun (of all things), the draining never stopped, though I couldn't stop laughing throughout it. Here's what happened:
This week's tier list: sitting positions. Please believe me when I say this isn't about my own sitting positions I do the most often, more what I wish I did more or what I like to do more. Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, unordered within tiers. I know I should have better posture, I really do, but I do get a little self-concious about what it looks like when I do so. Some have told me off for both slouching and not slouching , and I fear that it might be too late. All the time, I find myself sliding all the way down my chair at work when I'm focused, or with my back actually looking like a "C" when I write bloghan late at night. It may be too late to fix... what was I talking about again? Ah yes, the tier list. Actually, you know what? No. This time, the meaning behind the placements is left as an exercise for the reader.
Monday morning was a tired one, and one with not much time to do much. I had forgotten to eat dinner last night, but my usual oatmeal alleviated that well enough. Upon opening my blinds, I was greeted by sunlight puring in. Oh, it's going to be one of those days! My bus was going to be late too, so I didn't have to worry about skipping my morning tea, perfect! That bus was late because it seems like this bus driver is still learning the route... they swap out the driver on this route so frequently for some reason. He also had the darkest eyebags I've ever seen, for anyone in any role. Yikes. Walking between my final bus stop and the office, I talked with one of the full-times on my team, just about the weather and about the week feeling fresh. Those company holidays really do make a difference! At work, I ended up talking a bit with my mentor (more issues with Absconder stuff... lovely), my predecessor (Absconder, classes, and about the friend I talked with last night), and the compatriot ('Love Live! Sunshine!!' and lunch). My work rival wasn't in, neither was Steve, and my Japanese coworker was on call, so outside of those conversations, I was able to just work. I had 'HAPPY PARTY TRAIN' on loop and just made sure that the various Absconder things that my manager and the not-manager wanted were ready for submission. Probably ended up skipping going down to lunch, so while I waited for an ideal opportunity to submit, I ate and wrote bloghan. Lots to do, lots to do, but for now, the sun is shining through this massive windows around me, and I feel like everything's going to be alright. The rest of the work day was focused on waiting for a good opportunity to do that submission for my manager's request. I had my own tests running and I was waiting for the next few submissions to be approved, and while I waited I ended up reading the entirety of the 'Zou' arc. It's pretty short and I don't have all that much to say about it, but man I love the lore drops that we're getting here! We're finally getting into major parts of the part I love most about stories, which is the whole history and lore of the setting. Yes, the main plot is all good and fine, but what I'm most excited to see when I'm engaging with some fiction set in another world is seeing how the past and the current events happening away from the main protagonists eventually interacts with the main protagonist. I love hearing abuot things happening in far off lands or in the distant past! This arc was full of it! I also have begun to notice a small pattern with this second half of 'One Piece,' in the New World: it seems to be paralleling the first half, with the events taking place in Paradise. 'Fish-Man Island' parallels 'East Blue' in that it's where powers are getting introduced, ending with the defeat of a racist fish-man, and also takes place before entering the Grand Line; 'Punk Hazard' and 'Drum Island' seem to revolve around doctors and health and such, and about powerful people making those things commodities; 'Arabasta' and 'Dressrosa' are about taking down a Warlord that's got control of a country, and restoring happiness to the people and the original royal family to power; finally, 'Zou' feels a lot like 'Skypiea,' as we're getting some major lore drops regarding Roger, and we've got this whole unity between species thing going on again, and it takes place on an island way high up. This would imply that the next part of the saga will be analgous to 'Water 7,' which does make sense, since the Straw Hats are out to rescue a crew member! I've done it! I cracked the code. And would you look at that, the tests are finalyl all passing, so I can submit mine too. Once I do that, I start work on updating the Absconder I made for the not-manager, but I mostly end up distracted by my phone as I wait for it to finish testing too. After some conversations with the compatriot and my predecessor, and watching the sun begin to set from my desk, I head out for the day. I feel pretty good about today! The decisions I make when I get back to my place will probably end up determining how the rest of my week goes though... and I don't make great ones. It's nice and sunny as I walk along, but my thoughts become embroiled with those of silly little nothings, and I end up even releasing a tear just before I get back, with 'Nawatobi' playing into my ears. One back, I spend a long time distracted with not writing, only finishing off that short quiz before I decide to cook dinner. My friend who streamed himself playing 'Persona' on Saturday did so again today, and I tuned into that as I cooked my pesto pasta. We had a fun time even though I had to cook, standing quite a bit away from my desk, an issue solved by me muting myself and him pretending as if he was streaming. When I got the opportunity for comments, taking breaks in between cooking, we made it fun by pretending I was the donation messages. Childish, I know, but it was fun, so it's alright. After the stream, I finally decided to lock in, writing bloghan and finishing half of my part of the assignment. I thought about prepping D&D... eh, it's probably fine. I'll go to bed - oh, I should also mention one of my goals this week is to end up sleeping 30 minutes earlier each night than the last night, which I did today! Tonight? Yeah, tonight.
Last night, I decided to leave the blinds open, so that I could wake up to sunshine coating the floors. This indeed did happen, as well as causing me to wake up half an hour before my alarm. Fun. Getting to work was fine though (another driver for the first bus, different from yesterday, also brand new!), and once at work, it was back to business as usual. I was getting ready to submit my changes to the not-manager's Absconder request (he had done some stuff behind the scenes so I had to quickly adapt to it), and my work rival was about to help me with the thing I was supposed to do for his team, but abruptly called all of it off when he had to take a call from someone on that team. Oh that's just great. It also turns out he completly misled me in what I actually needed to do for this task, making me do a bunch of extra commands for nothing. So great of him, really. As I waited for my changes to the not-manager stuff to be tested, I watched outside, admiring the tall blue sky I could see from my desk. I really do think I got the best seat in the office. Well actually... maybe it's the VP. There's someone outside by the sign outside another building, one of those fancy stone signs that detail which companies are in that building. Looks like he's removing a company, and my predecessor (who just came by to visit) and I talk about the business signage that we can see from here, and about the work taking place below us. He leaves me to my work, and I do just that. Well, not all that much. As I wait for tests to finish I start to work on another assessment, this one being a self-assessment that my manager will see and comment on. It's not too bad to identify three things I've done in the last few months, but saying how'd I'd improve those things is a bit trickier. The compatriot just tels me to use generative AI to answer it. I'm sure I could just use Google, but I'll give it a shot. Once the form is done, it's back to bloghan, and choosing to eat lunch once again at my desk. I don't really feel like eating with the others this week for some reason. I've just been feeling sort of... justified in being alone? Not sure if that's the best way to describe it, but I''ve recently just felt way better about living alone, and doing things alone. Maybe it has to do with the sun being more present in my life as of late? This requires further study... For now though, I eat lunch and wait for the tests on my Absconder submission to finish up... then my work rival's manager asks for an update on the task she gave me last week. Oh no. I have 0 progress on that. In desperation, I turn to my work rival, asking if he's available to call now, to tell me what to do, to save me. Which he does! He's actually out of the office due to sickness for real this time, and his voice sounds real rough, but he does give me the full set of instructions, and it just works! I start up the first of nine that I need to do, and go back to eating lunch and catching up on other work. After a bit, I finally respond to my work rival's manager about my progress on this task, and I start up 2 other runs out of the 9 I need to do so I can tell her that I'm doing 3 at the same time. One by one, the results of those come in, and they all report some sort of failure, which I'm pretty sure is not suppsoed to happen. But in her follow up to my reply, she said to let her know about passing runs, so what do I do about failing ones??? When I ask, she points me to my predecessor. After a very long, involved conversation with my predecessor visiting my desk, he points out where the error is (came from that one thing I was asked to merge with the project months ago, that I was eventually told to not end up doing, but then people outside our team got mad and made us merge it in anyways) and pointed me to some other senior member. Him and the compatriot helped me form my message to that senior employee, and he told me to regenerate some list again. I really hate doing things for my work rival's team, I really do. You just watch things get generated and regenerated and then you watch what you generate get used by something. What else is there to it? At this point I was so tired of all this. My submission of the Absconder for the not-manager was stuck in a queue for some reason, I've been getting nowhere with this task from my work rival's manager, and my manager sent me an email saying thanks for submitting that Absconder from last time but also with a critique of how it did its output stuff. Ugh. I cheer myself up a bit by starting to plan out D&D for tomorrow, and things are coming together nicely. I think ever since I started reading 'One Piece,' my skills with worldbuilding and using old details for storytelling has unironically gotten stronger. There's just so many ideas for how I can involve characters and traits and events that they have encountered but not really given a second thought. Tying all these things up neatly will be tough, but I think it will be very very worth it. Near the end of the day, my mentor visits me, asking about those WARNINGS. AAAAAH. I hate those warnings. So. Much. Everything would be so much easier if they weren't there, sowing doubt in everyone here. He basically requests if there's anything we can do to get a better idea of how they can be identified, and dealt with, but Absconder doesn't let me know that info. I give him a very detailed description of how Absconder does its thing, and while I pull up the websites to do that, he notes the picture on my desk, asking if it's my dad. Ah, he would be an excellent father I'm sure, but no. He also nails right away that it's a professor, and I think the strangeness of that detail is what causes him to ask no follow up questions. The end result of our whole interaction is that I have no idea where Absconder gets these warnings from, and that it's so very strange that they show up in the first place. I'm tasked with figuring out a way to get even a bit more infromation about them, but thankfully it's low priority. He leaves, and I leave the office nearly right after, walking in the sun and getting back to my place. Once back, it's back to getting distracted, but I get a little work in, so it's at least a little ok, right? Right? After a nice shave and a long shower (feels good, feels fresh), I actualyl do manage to catch up on bloghan and finish the D&D planning I needed to do, catching up with friends at the same time. I end up breaking my commitment to going to be a half-hour earlier, but I got so into the planning, even after cooking, that I didn't mind so much. It was so much fun building this world, and connecting events and things both forwards and backwards! I may have only done a little on the assignment, but it's still miles ahead of what eveyrone else has done. And now that the planning is done, tomorrow my breaks can be used for assignment work instead! That means I get to go to bed all satisfied.
Wednesday morning is a tough one, with very little sunlight, me going to bed very late last night, and waking up a half-hour before my alarm AGAIN. There's not really any other issue though, and even at work things are relatively normal. After my work rival arrives in a mask and a very rough voice, he and my predecessor both help me get one of those nine runs I'm supposed to do for the former's manager up and, well, running, and after that I just put on my headphones, loop 'La Isla Bonita,' do some work on Absconder and on some of the other remaining 8 runs, and think about someone sweeping me off my feet and taking me on a trip to Central America. So many if onlys in my life and so many fantasies... it really is just too bad. Steve interrupts me a couple times to talk about his task and about one of our projects being broken at the moment, which means I can't submit my Absconder for the not-manager, which is a bit frustrating, but what can I do? Once the work is mostly finished (until it finishes running that is), I spend some time fleshing out a little bit of the D&D session for tonight, adding in extra details to connect with things they won't see until the future. For once, I decide to go down for lunch with everyone, and it's a bit lively. I mostly go over the session with my co-DM, who won't be joining us tonight, and I provide stimulation to the bored work rival with "what beats rock" (he is a filthy C-tier paper user and comp. sweat), while talking a little bit with the gregarious about Dolly Parton and the recent news. It's nice to have a lively lunch once again. When I go back up, I see that two of the three runs I set off failed, and that the one that I got help with this morning just succeeded. Well, can't say that I'm all that surprised. While I wait for things to, y'know, start or finish working, I catch up bloghan and work on the assignment. Although if I'm being honest... there wasn't actually alll that much I did on the assignment, instead just kinda staring at various screens and talking to the D&D players about what time we wanted to do tonight, with my work rival about vegetable comsumption, and with Steve and my Japanese coworker about how our team handles projects breaking so often and people not bothering to wait for someone to fix it before submitting their changes. That's what keeps every day on this team fresh and exciting in my eyes. Only after this did I truly start doing anything remotely productive. As my work rival talked with Steve about anime and such, I wrote quite a bit for my part of the assignment which no one else on my randomly assigned team did. At last, it was time for D&D. The session was only 2 hours, but it didn't feel like 2 hours. The amount of worldbuilding I did for this session really paid off, as the sheer amount of detail helped to reduce the amount of clarifying questions I needed to give (or maybe that was the multiple diagrams I drew to explain things, and the lined paper I gave to the players for notes). The worldbuilding was most handy to connect things that had happened in the past (or could have happened in the past) to current events, and current events to things that will happen in the future. Ever since I started reading 'One Piece,' my skill with worldbuilding and telling a story with this sort of large world where things are happening away from where the current focus is. Everyone really liked the session too, especially with all the detail and hints towards big things happening. They would report to me later that they were missing some of the action though... heh heh, that's for next session! DMing without my co-DM wasn't too bad either, though I really do hope this doesn't drive her out of it more than I feel like I've already been. Since she wasn't here to drive me back, I took the bus. It was pretty dark out, but the walk and the wait wasn't so bad. When I got off the first one though, I saw the second one I was supposed to take drive off. Checking the app, I realized that it would be a 20 minute wait for the next one. 20 minutes??? I'm just going to walk home!!! And walk I did. I knew the way back without looking at a map, becuase this was simply half of my walk between the two towns I visit, and I walk into my place within 15 minutes. Walking in the dark alongside a highway isn't actually all that bad, you only have to sprint a couple of times. When I got back, I realized that one of my friends wanted to stream 'Persona 3 Reload' for us all, so I joined in that VC, looping 'La Isla Bonita' the whole time, as I was this morning. Here I first admitted my whole "my emotions feel so much more intense all of a sudden, ever since the sun started staying in the sky longer," which I had only noticed in the last week or so. The giggling fits, the overwhelming sadness that jsut randomly hits, none of them would have felt as intense just a couple months ago, I'm sure of it! This whole day had a net affect of bringing me down, and it was really just not leeting me work on anything. I don't really remmber if I've felt a despair and melancholy this strong before, but at this moment, even though I had these friends on call with me, it was really quite rough. WHat ended up happening was that I helped backseat/coach the gaming friend with the Reaper boss fight, and then we all ended up watching some random videos really late into the night. All that helped to cheer me up a little, but when my mind eventually wandered back to the group assignment due this Saturday, it sent my mood careening right back down to Earth's core. After a bit of panic ranting, and one last vidoe, we called it a night. It was significantly late for me though, and I just wasn't in the headspace to cook ro clean right now, so I decided to just go to be without eating. It was easier, just like how I wish a lot of things right now were.
The sun had returned for Thursday morning, and things were seemingly fine, though I knew they weren't. The one run I did for my work rival's manager ran to completion for the first time, and it was a failure. She asked me some questions about it, and my work rival struggled for a bit with file names and such, but eventually we got the answers to her. Her reponse was to just run an intermediate version to figure out where the original went wrong. I also decided to ask the Absconder expert/developer about those warnings, because I've truly hit a wall. Now, I'm back to waiting, and while everyone went to lunch, I stayed upstairs to wait for responses and to work on my own things. Mostly, redoing the parts of the assignment that I didn't like how I orignally wrote. I don't really know how long I worked on it, but everyone finished their lunch when I was about halfway done with my rewrites. The greagarious visited me to ask about why, and I told her about how it's not really abut work, but mostly my group members for this assignment bringing me grief, and how the changing seasons were bringing back my mood swings and intesifying all the emotions I was feeling. Maybe I'm pregnant again? My predecessor came to visit next, and we talked a bit about the tasks that we were working together on. He need to ask my work rival stuff, but since my wokr rivla was still downstairs, he asked if I knew anything. I didn't, but I tried to do the things he needed to run on my device: no luck, I didn't have the permissions. That's too bad... As people filtered back into the corner, I distracted myself with a decomposition of the lyrics to the first chorus of 'Datte Datte Aa Mujou' (surprise surprise, this is my loop song for the day now I guess!?) and got back to writing. Over the next few hours I would find myself more drawn to work, simply because it was engaging me more. There was a short talk with my mentor about how to setup Absconder quickly, a reply from the Absconder dev, some helping out with my work rival's work, and even some collection of feedback from yesterday's D&D session. As I tried to examine some Absconder stuff, and behind me Steve was managing a large group with his subteam, my work rival and the compatriot just started taking about girlfriends and about how much they hate their roommates, and everyone in the office heard, including those in Steve's call. Afterwards, a short trip to the break from with Steve turned from a small tea making expedition to more chats with the D&D group, collecting feedback. When I finally got back to my desk, I put my energies into doing up some documentation for my various Absconder works that I've submitted to my team, up until it was time to leave for the day. At home, it was back to regular programming, back on call with my friends from the home city. The original plan was to play 'Danganronpa,' but I was just so busy with taking care of my assignment (the group assignment which felt at this point like it was just my own) that we ended up making this call more work focused. One person played 'Persona' again, and we had a little fun with commentating/doing skits on that, but myself and the other friend were working and yapping like always. We stayed up quite late again, and while I finished most of what I needed to, there was still so much to take care of. Once again, I felt so drained and so stressed that I couldn't bring myself to wash dishes, to cook anything, so I just went to bed hungry.
Friday and Saturday were similar days, but there were some big differences so I can't really use the same paragraph to describe what happened on both. Both mornings, I woke up a little earlier than my alarm, but both times I ended up staying in bed after waking up to just rot on my phone. Friday morning was sunny. Also, it was a work from home day, but if I'm being real, I haven't really been given much other than "watch these things run and write documentation too," so this day was mostly balancing random chores, work on the presentation assignment, and a lot more documentation. I helped my work rival and Steve with some stuff having to do with a forced reboot of all our computers tomorrow, which would cancel a bunch of things that they wanted to run over the weekend. That's too bad... That was morning to evening for Friday, and the evening was a call with one of my friends from my home city, where we were just kinda talking about the school stuff we were doing, watching random videos, watching me play 'Yohane the Parhelion: NUMAZU in the MIRAGE' (I got even closer to finishing all the quests!!), and hearing my complaints about my group members (who told me they'll definitely finish their stuff for tomorrow). As it got later, we kinda just switched to just working on school stuff while listening to mellower music: things like 'Open Arms,' 'Soul Provider,' 'Get Here,' you know? Oh the words hurt to hear sometimes, yes, yes, but music for the living has a comforting effect that doesn't just apply to the living. That, or my mood swings this week had me currently swung towards a sort of lonely despair? Ah, but that just seems to be like the centre of emotional pendulum now and forevermore, mm? Midway through the call, I realized that Umi's birthday would be tomorrow. In all my busyness, I nearly forgot! I rushed to make my usual preparations, including a PFP change on certain apps, but I accidentally overwrote my image reference file for all 9 members of μ's with just Umi. I couldn't reverse search it, because it would only give me Umi art, but I figured out a great solution that worked: I put the pieces back together, using Google Drawings to place all the members from that one piece of art in the corerct orientation, minus the ones I hadn't yet cropped out of the reference file. Reverse searching that gave me back the original image! It wasn't at all difficult to put the pieces together, and I feel like this explantion of mine made very little sense, but I thought it was a kind of strange and funny story that you all would appreciate. Near the end of the call, really quite late, I even got her to try one of my cryptics, and she managed to get quite a few clues with less and less handholding as we went on. Soon though, she went to bed, and I decided to do the same, also not eating dinner. Three's the charm or something like that right? I don't remember the expression. Saturday morning was quite rainy and damp, which did not bode well for the recording that we had to do today. After breakfast and a period of playing some games and all, I undertook a period of intense writing. Overnight, my group members finally added their section... and it was 100% AI generated. Lovely. Just lovely. I didn't have time to edit everyone's section, so I just rewrote the entire closing, and managed to convince everyone to take that rewrite. Then, we all called together and had a whole 1 hour experience (checking over the script, then the slides, then scrambling to add images to the slides because things looked pretty barren), that turned into 2 hours (figuring out how to record meetings, then camera and mic stuff, then making sure we didn't overlap with the slides), that turned into 3 hours (recording the thing, needing multiple takes because we went over time on the first attempt). It was a bit of a frustrating experience for sure, and I knew that it was not work I was really proud of, but at this point I was so glad it was finally over. All that was left was to submit... oh but someone's face didn't appear in the first 30s, so we needed to re-record that part. Well, I can stitch together videos pretty easily, so after recording the intro one last time, we all signed off. I really do hate my group, so much. They saved everything for the last minute and used AI to write everything, making things seem artifically cohesive, and just filled with extraneous details and terms that AI loves to overuse. At least I will receive credit for the non-AI written parts... and for everything on the logistics side. As I edited, I noted that it seems my internet just sucks, since in my portions I kept having 1-2s gaps where my video and voice froze, but no one else had anything like that. It brought down the total watchtime of the video by 40s, which makes me wonder if our first run-through could have been overtime if I had edited it. Oh well! Once it was done and uploaded, I just felt so relieved. And still... stressed. Extremely so. I tried to take a nap, just for an hour, but after half-an-hour I got up, feeling like I should do something. Well, sure! Why not! Let's do something! I showered, I played more 'NUMAZU in the MIRAGE' (got even closer to beating every quest! made a lot of progress on them, but didn't quite clear them), gaslighted one of my friends online just to make sure I still had that edge, then finally, finally made a dinner. I used the last of my pesto for it, and the last of my brocolli too, but I did it. So if you were mad at me for skipping dinner three nights in a row, I did eventually eat, ok!? I thought about doing even a little bloghan work that night, but honestly, I had been drained from the work I had to do today, so I ended up just going to bed. And finally, Sunday. I woke up, and immediately got dressed and headed to the grocery store. Wanted to change up the morning routine, you know? It was raining, then sunny, then raining again as I walked into the store, then cloudy without rain as I walked out. There was very little in my bag, but it still felt like a whole lot. Once I got home and showered, only then did I make breakfast. It was almost noon, but man what does it matter? I feel so much better today, probably because there's not a video I have to worry about. The bulk of my day between then and the late evening was spent playing games and watching videos, as any good squanderer of time knows how to do. I'm actually so so so close to finishing 'NUMAZU in the MIRAGE.' The run I had this day was just astounding, and I got pretty lucky with which enemies I fought, meaning that all I have left is one quest! One! Granted, it's one that requires taking out 8 of a certain type of enemy, one that's pretty rare, but that feeling of only having one left is so nice! There's not much else noteworthy to talk about during that period except that it went from very sunny to raining to cloudy to windy pretty frequently, almopst every 30 minutes! I haven't seen weather like that since I left my home city to come here. I also tried air-frying pizza pops... yeah, not doing that again. The microwave has a better shell texture. Very late into the night, I realized just how behind I was on bloghan, so I rushed to do that, but made some extra time to talk to that same friend from my home city, talking to them extensively about queerbait, listening to Ween's 'Waving My Dick in the Wind,' talking about my revelations about who I am, then letting them know about my gaslighting campaign. Ah, that was great, and poetic. The last item sounds terrible... that's because it is! Finally, I did also cook dinner this night too, and rushed to complete this bloghan as quickly as possible. This week has been such an up and down and up and down type of week for me, mostly emotionally, but also in terms of workload, sort of. While I mentioned earlier that it was draining, I do think that this week was probably one of the ones where I laughed and giggled and smiled the most, exclusing that one giggling fit from counting. That being said, a lot of those laughs have come from my new response to sadness, which is to simply laugh. Man, I hope this upcoming week lets me recover...
Here's the results of last week's plans (with an additional few things being thrown in there because I forgot about them!):
This week, after a few mandatory reflections that I have to do for my course, I'll read 'Homestuck.' I'll also set up the suction cup plus document sleeve thing in my shower this week, and I'll plan out D&D too, levelling up characters and coming up with what willl happen next session. I think I'll try making another 'Jeopardy!' board too, and I might try to do something more fun this week than "going straight to the grocery store in the morning."
'Datte Datte Aa Mujou' (https://youtu.be/qIaYhwkrNdI) by μ's is the song of the week. This song's title basically says "Oh, Oh, How Heartless," referring to the world. And yeah, this week makes me think that this world is pretty heartless, through the pain and suffering it brings me. But... even so, having met all the people I know, and having experienced all the joyful things I have, at least I can still manage a smile... right?
Last week as a net sum of zero when it came to the good and the bad. This week had the same up and down stuff going on, but I can confidently say that the bad outweighed the good. This week has its own set of work to do, but hopefully things will come out to be more positive instead! See you later!
- bubbler