April 6, 2025 - bloghan 41
What a week! Everything was constantly changing outside, so you already know that means that everything's been constnatly chaning on the inside too! Also, I think that enjoyers of my illucid writings will be very happy with this bloghan! Let's see what I got down to this week:
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: felonies (excluding sex crimes). Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, unordered wthin tiers. This is sorted on how "cool" these crimes are. Not like "oh it would be cool if someone did them to me" but like cool for a story. I can't stand people who think that having horrible things happen in fiction is problematic and that liking to read things like means the reader agrees. Everything nowadays has become about finding things in bad faith as much as possible - surely, none of you would do that, right?
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
Monday almost continued the trend of being unable to get out of bed, but my sheer panic at being late to work managed to get me up and out quickly, as well as out the door faster too. The bus wasn't going to be AS late this time, so I actually had a reason to hurry. The first focus at work was the nine runs, as usual. I wasn't even able to run 8 of them, since I was stuck mostly running sub-versions fo the first one. One of the runs from last week was somehow still going, so I decided that it had had long enough. I killed it, then and there, then spent time refreshing all my filelists and all that to restart everything. SUrely this time it would work right? Well... it turns out that I had accidentally started two of them from the same place, causing them to conflict with and destroy each other, which was great, so I had to restart everything another time. Then I figured out that they were all using different versions of some tool, which I just knew would interfere with things a whole lot, so I had to figure out where the tool version info was kept, change that, then restart them all AGAIN. Ugh. Once it was done, everyone had already gone down to lunch, so I decided I may as well work on that "bring in" task from last week. My predecessor had been sitting in our little corner for the last little bit (don't know why, but he was), and aftert a bit of small talk I told him about this task. Turns out, he had done a lot of this specific task in the past, and he was able to really help me out with it. He guided me through the entire process, and actually helped parse through the different logs, and the meaning behind what my manager had told me. It turns out that I only had to make changes to one file, and that my concern with it not belonging to my team (thus not being ours to change) was actually completley unfounded and untrue. Once I had correctly done it all (or so I thought) I reran all the tests and ate lunch at my desk, where I had some conversation with my predecessor about 'Balatro' once again. As people came back from their lunch, my tests began to fail. It was a weird failure too, not one of the ones from last week, but once i got Steve on it he just told me to run it again. This time, it just worked! Until it gave me back yet ANOTHER failure that matched the one from last week. My predecessor was still here though, and as we were trying to figure out this one, I began getting emails about what I kicked off this morning also failing. Everything is going SO swimmingly, huh? By the time we figure out that in the file I need to change, I need to apply the changes twice (because of COURSE I do), we have to go to a meeting room. I've been asked to attend my work rival's team meetings by his manager, because of these runs I've been asked to do. How frustrating... In the meeting, I notice that I'm the only one who uses their laptop on their lap (why would I put it on the table when there's no monitor?), but at least I'm not the only one typing on my laptop as the meeting is ongoing. There's a new member on my work rival's team here too, and the meeting opens with her being introduced to us. My work rival then takes this opportunity to suggest that we go around and introduce ourselves to her, and he gestures to me to start, calling me out by name. That dinky little rat.... I'll get him one of these days. His team laughs a bit, then goes silent and looks at me. I can't believe it. My work rival then calls me out for being a little shy, then goes ahead and introduces himself. My predecessor goes next, and I'm expecting it to go in a circle around the table (making me the last in the turn order), but apparently everyone else gets to skip and I don't??? I accidentally leave out the detail of which subteam I'm on, and my work rival decides to fill in that information for me. Some day, it's going to be ON SIGHT, I tell you. With him, on sight. The meeting progressed pretty normally, and most of it was actually completely irrelevant to what I was working on. When the topic of what I was working on came up, I just told everyone that it was all failing and my work rival's manager told me we'll talk about it later, just between us. My mentor walked in and joined the meeting too, and my work rival's manager told us that he'd be joining their team. Didn't know she got jokes like that! The director also joined too, but he didn't really say all that much. The meeting felt long, but I'm sure if I had more to do with the topics being discussed, it would feel faster. I did manage to make my last few fixes to the "bring in" task though, and soon I had the tests running. After I left the meeting room, there's not all that much more to talk about. My work rival's manager eveneutlaly got back to me about where those failures were, and left me on read when I told her. Classic. All the tests I started in the meeting came back passing, so tomorrow I can move on to the next step... wellllll there is one test that didn't pass but once I figure out if it did that before I brought in these two projects, then I can proceed. Steve also took me to the break room to get me tto try the flavoured water machine, shocked that I couldn't actually pick up on any of the flavours that it says it dispenses, then showed me how he made orange soda by mixing plain sparkling water with orange juice. That's very interesting Steve, but I don't think I will be trying. I think the most impactful thing that happened in this period after the meeting (which was charactereized by me just kinda sititng around not doing much) was my work rival telling me that it was no joke that my mentor was moving over to his team. Wow.. I didn't think working with me and Absconder was that bad! My work rival left work early (after I teased him about how his manager was looking ath im when she gave the meeting a warning about the new return to office policies), and the last little bit of my workday was spent writing up bloghan and talking to my predecessor about my course, which I totally planned on doing once I got home. You wanna know what I really did when I got home? Well first, it was a shower. Then, a very quick failed red deck gold stake run because I have no self control. Then, 3 hours spent in the plasma deck, meticulously carving my deck and joker selection so that I could score in the trillions, unlocking a very powerful joker and voucher. I cooked dinner, wrote bloghan, and guess what? Instead of touching a very important, oh I don't know, assignment: I just ended up playing more 'Balatro' (more red deck gold stake attempts, and some attempts at the speedrunning jokers) because of COURSE I DID. I have to do some work today, any work! But I'm already so tired from how late it is. I'll do it tomorrow. It's not like my groupmates are going to do anything anyways.
Once again, I somehow woke up early on Wednesday, and with the bus being late, I was able to work in a shave. It was pretty tight though, since I had forgotten to defrost the chicken I was going to use in my sandwich, and I put it in the microwave on an oblong plate for a minute or so to defrost one layer just enough. I mention the oblong plate because I think it somehow decentered the rotating mechanism in the microwave, and the frozen berries I put in my oatmeal ended up being frozen even after the regular time. I did make it out on time to the bus though, and saw that it was one of the old bus drivers, from way back in December. Nice to see a familiar face! Work wasn't all too much today, since I got focus in on the "bring in" tasks, updating things and testing once more. I went to the break room with Steve pretty early on, but our Japanese coworker gave us a warning about the water being weird. Uhhhh ok? I try out the regular water dispenser and it looks just fine? I decide not to take the risk though, and dump it into the sink, then going to the sparkling water dispenser to get some regular hot water when I see it: this machine offers flavouring that can be mixed into your water, but today the flavours are really weird: soggy pineapple pretzel, egg, banana blue cheese, truffle, gold (24 karat), and so on. Yeah, no, I'm not trying any of those flavours, just give me the water... From then on, I sat at my desk, listening to a lot of 'Parappa the Rapper' music (and the video 'chinese' a couple times too) as I made sure my tests were all going smoothly. I needed someone to give me the results of those tests without the stuff I brought in, so I got my work rival to do them. Soon enough, people were coming in to bring us down for lunch, and I could finally do my APril Fools prank. I pretended that I had developed a splitting headache, then pulled out my bottle of over-the-counter painkillers, poured out around 8-9 of them, and drank them down. My predecessor was the only one who saw, and he pulled his head back, then said "you're actually insane." He realized right away though what I had done: the bottle had been filled with those cinnamon candies that I bought recently. However, no one else saw me do it... so I waited for people to turn to me, and downed the last 5. And only the compatriot saw. He was shocked, but wow. I really wasted that whole gimmick, huh? And a small little doubt started to worm its way into my mind... what if I forgot to swap out the drugs for the candy? But no, I couldn't have, because I washed the container on Saturday and dried it out on Sunday. But what if someone put some in there- wait, but who would've? It definitely was cinnamon... I tasted a bit of it, and each candy had those yellow flecks that the normal drug did not... but what if? I went down for lunch with eveyrone and all the worry was bubbling forth to the front of my mind. As I ate my sandwich I began to feel dizzy, especially as my equivalent started to describe to me what liver failure was. Did I really just do that? Did I take a whole bunch of painkillers by mistake? What if I just imagined doing the swap? I tried to play it cool and talked to my Japanese coworker and my equivalent about what I did, and they believed that I took 13 of those pills, but they weren't worried enough to the extent of calling an emergency number because I had to be joking about something. They knew, but did I? I was starting to feel real nauseous too, and I think the strongest indicator that something was wrong was that I actually enjoyed watching the group play 'President' today. I went up pretty quickly, at the same time as my Japanese coworker (but no one else), and revealed what I had done to him on the stairs. But I let him know about my worries: what if the box of candies I bought was accidentally a box of painkillers and I didn't check it enough? And then: the headache part actually came true. It wasn't a splitting headache like I lied about earlier, but what if I- what if I- what if I
I need to go back. I need to check the box. Also, I can't focus on anything right now. A lump forms in my throat. What have I done? I tell my Japanese coworker that I'm thinking of heading home early, but to keep up appearance I tell him it's to extend the joke of hte original prank- in reality, I'm panicking a lot right now on the inside. I write up an email to send the whole team, look when the next bus is, talk to some of the people who have come to see if I want to go with them for bubble tea (no, I haven't before, why would I now??), and head out. I make the first bus but miss the second bus, so like I've been doing recently, I walk the rest of the way. It's actually really nice out, and I'm kinda glad that I did this, but man. I cannot stop rationalizing to myself about having cinnamon candy in that bottle. Once I get back, I rush to the box and see: yes, they indeed are cinnamon candies. I didn't accidentally overdose on painkillers, just imagined that I was about to. Don't I feel silly? Or seem it? I make myself a nice cup of boiling water and get back to work, where I see that someone has asked how my "bring in" task is going. Luckily, all my tests that I kicked off in the morning finished on my walk back, so I get to report that everything is fully working! Now all that's left to do is to submit that to the rest of my team, but there's apparently a special process to do this? I have to actually change the stuff in that submitted area, then submit from my computer to that... which is just as much of a messy process to do as I can describe. Next is to actually do it, which I get all set up, but hesitate at when it comes to the part where I make changes in the submitted area. If I break something here, it breaks everything. When we submit our project to other teams for use, we reference our submitted area. When someone wants to update their files, they get them from here. If I mess this up real bad, things will be real bad for me. I think over what to do, and settle on asking my predecessor for a call, so that he can walk me through it. He had been sending me a lot of messages about it right before this, but I needed some guidance just to assure myself. My nerves were still extremely shot from what I did right before lunch. Thankfully he agreed, and over the next 40 minutes we get it all done, with him exchanging some stories about times he had done this type of task before, me talking about the symptoms I was still feeling, and about the various glitches we were seeing. At the end though, it all went through (later on in the day I would check, and it passed all the automatic checks - that means no angry messages tomorrow morning!), and now I know how to do it for that other project I have to bring in. We stayed on the line for a bit after, as I picked his brain on some more related stuff, and we also made a promise to go to that one Asian supermarket that might have that Sri Lankan soda I really like. After this, I really didn't have much left to do, so I ended the workday and... well, I'm sure you can guess what I did (got some more unlocks, at least). Once it was done though, I put my efforts into finishing bloghan earlier than yesterday, then another 'Balatro' unlocking spree (amazing plasma deck white stake run got me a couple more unlocks and some achievements too!) then dinner, then finally, after what felt like so long not working on it (it's been one day), my assignment. I don't really get much done with it though. It's gotten pretty late and I'm pretty tired. It's become hard for me to articulate my points, and make my writing cohesive and all that. After about 1 paragraph I give up. I'm not going to write much of anything this late at night, I'll be better off doing some tomorrow at work or whatever.
It's a cloudy morning which greets me on Wednesday, and it's quite rough getting out of bed. The cloudiness doesn't make me feel bad per se, but it doesn't make me feel really good either. I just kinda feel normalish. I seat myself down once I get to work, but pretty quickly get up and take 15 minutes to talk with the gregarious and the compatriot about the 'Deltarune' trailer and what happened yesterday with the prank. At my desk, I take some time to do the "bring in" task that my manager asked me to do last week. Unlike the "bring in" task which I successfully completed yesterday, this one only involves one project that I have to "bring in" to ours. Also unlike yesterday's task, this one did introduce new errors in our project once I "brought" it "in," so before I could proceed, I would have to fix it. The thing is though, since the errors I found were from that project, not our own, I can't actually go in and fix it. My only course of action is to record where the errors are, then share it with someone more experienced and go from there. My predecessor catches up with me near the tail end of this, and we talk a little bit about whatever comes to mind (yesterday's task, stuff going on back in our home city, about my work rival being absent from work once again, our tasks, that kind of thing), before I leave to go for lunch. At lunch I talk a whole lot with that other guy form my home city about upcoming courses and such, also learning from others who live in different cities about how it works where they're from. We end up playing 2 rounds of foosball rotating around the table a couple times. I've become a lot better since those days when I simply just watched as people older and stronger than me slam the ball into the goal from the other side of the table. My offense is way better than my defense though, because I'm used to scoring goals without using the spin, which unintentionally taught me a lot more about ball control and aiming. I have to thank one of my friends from my home city for that (I'll call him Riko on bloghan, for reasons undisclosed but obvious), because he played against me (and won every time but once) for months before I left to come here. I'm really excited to see Riko again, even if he's just going to trounce me over and over again in foosball on the first day I see him. Now, we would've gone for a third game, but someone from another meeting room heard our excited cheers and the ball hitting corners hard, and told us they could hear the ball more than the speakers at the meeting, prompting us to call it and head back upstairs. I spent some time catching up bloghan, then updated my manager on the errors I saw in my "bring in" task of the day. The clouds of the morning had turned into veyr light snowfall during lunch, but now it was a full on blizzard outside, and it suddenly made sense why my work rival had not shown up this morning. After a while of me typing up bloghan and my assignemtn on my phone, the blzzard slowly subsided innto a regular snowstorm, turned to rain. My predecessor visited me at one point and we ende up talking about how my ID badge's plastic tag was basically a single thread, but he showed me where to get a replacement. It was close by the crossword cubicle and I caught up with them for a bit (my co-DM gave me all the character sheet stuff because she might have a meeting that will overlap the start of our D&D time) before returning to my desk. My manager had gotten back to me about the errors I was seeing, but I was sort of stalling it out to work further on other things. The cable guy also came by to ask if I still wanted feedback from last week's D&D session (oh yeah I forgot about that huh?), and I collected that feedback from everyone present. My manager finally asked me to do something about the errors, so I began to do it, but I took so long he just did it himself, before telling me to just reach out to the people managing that other project, to figure out if those errors were ok or not. Once my equivalent fnially showed up to the office, we could finally go down for D&D. The session was a really fun one, with a more challenging fight that actually made them struggle (and also not just rely on AC to dodge hits). I also got to set up a bunch more ties back and forth in the story (making them see the consequences of their actions but not face them... yet), which comes even more naturally to me now. There was a strange moment when I saw my co-DM passing by the meeting room we were using, but she just left without a word. She never said anything about leaving early, when she told me she had that meeting, I assumed that meant she would just be arriving late. I realy hope she's not thinking I've taken over the DM role, but maybe I accidentally have? I'll talk to her about it on Sunday. When the session ended, we all left pretty quickly, but everyone seemed to like the session. It had a pretty even balance of social, combat, and exploration encounters, probably the most balanced session I've run yet. I got to my first bus right on time, and this time, I didn't miss the second bus! This meant that I didn't have to walk as much in the freezing rain which had overtaken the regular rain, which I really don't mind. At home, I started working on the assignment, then got in call with my group members. I am not very inspired by their work ethic, but at least I was assigned most of the sections with the analytical thinking. We'll see how much they actually do though. If I had started earlier, I could've cut them out so that they get some sort of punsihment, but it's too late now. The rest of the call just consists of them talking about their workplaces and where they would want to work in the future, and I stay mostly silent during the interaction. I'm not feeling great about the assignment, but I'm feeling a little bit better about it at least. I make my dinner and get really tired of working on the assignment, but I get some good progress in. When I start to feel tired though, I hear a giant BOOM from outside. I don't know when it started, but there's a thunderstorm extremely close by! My blinds are drawn, but the blackness of the night gives way to purple light occasionally, with thunder rumbling for 10 seconds at a time pretty soon after each flash. I spend about ten minutes leaning out of my doorframe, watching the sky, often seeing the entirety of the sky illuminate brighter than the daytime, and the thunder feeling like there's been an explosion only a street down. I even got to see a couple of lightning bolts arc and race between the clouds and down to earth. I know I probably should not have peeked outside due to the risk of lightning, but this was genuinely the closest I've ever been to a thunderstorm. It was so delightful to see, but I don't think my neighbours appreciated the cackling and cruel laughter I was also adding to the noise, especially at a time like 2 hours past midnight. Once the storm system moved on, and I was satisfied with the amount of work I had done, I went to bed.
Thursday was a return to the cloudy and rainy combination of Monday, but this time it was difficult to get out of bed. I guess I've been stacking up too many late nights? I was expecting it to be quite cold when I walked outside, but it was actually quite warm, despite the grey sky above me. It was reminiscent of the humid climates I've experienced in more tropical countries, weather conditions I really dislike, but I'll live with it just for today. This week's "turning on a dime" weather reminds me so much of my home city. The first mission of the day at work was to prepare sending an email to the person in charge of that project I needed to bring in, and to do that I needed to figure out who the person of contact was. This took me a while, and I was not helped by the constant distractions of my work rival and others. My mentor visited me during this time to ask when I was planning on submitting my Absconder work that checked if parts of the project were being properly interconnected, and I told him I'd have to do it next week. He proceeded to log it in our regular task checker, where my manager and the director could see it, so that's going to be fun. Once the person was identified, there was some more information I needed to find before I could write the email, and that information involved figuring out what had changed between now and the last time this project was "brought in" to ours. My mentor and my predecessor helped me out with that, but it took a while for it all to run, so I started catching up with bloghan as I waited. It took about half-an-hour, but surely there can't be that much that changed right..? I open the result up and oh... looks like it's quite a lot. It takes me a bit of time to figure it out, but it wasn't so bad to sort through and find the 2 things in it out of 60000. Before I could actually start prepping the email, people from the crossword cubicle came to visit and ask if I wanted to go out with them for lunch. It would be everyone going: work rival, Steve, my Japanese coworker, the fanatic, the cable guy, my equivalent, the compatriot, the gregarious, and my co-DM. While I did have my sandwich for lunch, I decided to say yes. I'll eat it when I get home. We quickly shipped out, though everyone warned me I shouldn't take my winter coat. It had warmed up significantly, and the sun was out in full force. However, I saw that it was extremely windy in the area, so I'd just like to say that I think I was fully justified in bringing it. We walked out and the wind nearly bowled me over almost immediately, but pretty soon that wasn't the most annoying thing of this walk. No, that goes to the wind blowing tiny particles of dead leaves right into my eyes, but a discussion about my home region with the compatriot made it bearable. The restaurant is supposed to be inspired by Hong Kong cuisine, but I don't really sense much of a theme from the menu. There's some menu items I might see on a Chinese restaurant's menu, but also a bunch of other stuff from Portugal and Spain and such. Is that Hong Kong cuisine? I don't really know. I have the Portugese baked chicken with cheese, as does my work rival, and I try to stay out of the ensuing conversation as much as possible. I'm kind of regretting coming with everyone here, wishing that I had stayed behind and eaten my sandwich, but the conversation is interesting at least. My work rival's food comes first, and he starts eating it in utter bliss, unaware that as we all receive our plates we wait to eat until everyone has something. Once it does all arrive, I dig in and the food is fine, I guess. The sauce is creamy but doesn't taste like cheese at all, more like lentil bean curry. The chicken is really tasty as is the chicken, but I don't know if rice was the best option for a carb underneath it all. I still eat most of it though, but it's a very large serving, and after a while we all are kinda staring at the leftover food. My work rival then starts criticizing me for the way I ate (from the top down, instead of from the side on), but I just straightened my posture, stared at him right in the eyes, and said nothing but "go ahead, have a bite" and nothing else until he apologized. The price was good for getting two lunches out of the meal I guess, but I don't know, maybe I would've liked a different menu item. The group left in two big groups, one right away and one much later, but I ended up walking back to the office in between both groups, all on my own. I do think my coworkers are good people, but like I've said before, I do wish I hadn't been as social with them as I have been. I manage to catch up with the group who left the restaurant first, but I walk past them on an alternate path and enter the building first, and I'm back sitting at my desk working on an email to send out, which I eventually complete. There's not much left to the rest of this workday. My work rival starts up another conversation about what superpowers would be the best to have in real life and would be discrete enough to not get you captured by the US Army (I don't know, probably telekinesis or a 'JoJo's Bizarre Adventure' type of ability?), then a whole lot of catch up on bloghan and my assignment. There's not really anything interesting that happens after this point, so once it's time to leave and I get back to my place with no issue, do a little more work on both of those things before hopping onto the normal Thursday call with my friends from home. Except tonight, one of them has an exam and can't join us, so it's just me and the other chronic 'Balatro' addict. I'm sure you can guess what we did that night. Near the end of the call, I managed to unlock every joker and almost all the vouchers, and he showed me the cool stuff from the most recent Nintendo Direct (I'm not getting a Swtich 2 because the games I'm interested in can be run on my laptop or on a Raspberry Pi 4). It was quite a fun call, and it satisfied my 'Balatro' cravings for that day, but even though they were satisfied I had a hard time finishing my portion of the assignment. It's unfortunate, but tomorrow's a work from home day. Surely that means I'll get it all done then, right?
Guess who gets to say (for like the third time in a row) that their Friday and Saturday were very similar days, differing only in working from home and working on assignment and weather?? This guy!! I won't bother you too much with this. Just think back to the last few weeks: Friday was sunny, and I did some breakfast, some work on the same things I've been doing all week, barely any assignment work, and some distractions with 'Balatro.' Saturday was rainy, but also had breakfast, a lot more assignment work (a whole ton of editing and revising of my group members AI written work - maybe they should stop suggesting it if it was giving them lackluster results?), and once I was actually proud of what we were submitting, I submitted it and got lost in the 'Balatro' sauce once again, slamming my head into the wall to get gold stake done for red deck. Sunday was a chill day, though I should probably have not let it be. But maybe I deserve it, after all that my group members put me through. I have to finish this week's bloghan, do one more solo assignmnet for my course, and two more quiz reflections, and I'm finally free from it. In the morning though, I sleep in by an hour, then stay in bed watching videos on my phone for another hour, then make and eat breakfast for a whole other hour on top of that. I'm also loading up my grocery delivery order too, because I realized something yesterday. You can reduce the delivery fee down to zero if you schedule the order a day in advance. However, I usually don't know what I need until the day of. I realized that you can add items afterwards though, so if I know one item I want, I can submit the order with one item, then add more items to the order on the day of! It's a genius plan... if I didn't take so much time before the delivery time sleeping, rotting, and eating that is. I managed to get it all in, and while I waited for the groceries to come in I did a bit of bloghan and a lot more of 'Balatro.' At one point though, the shopper said that the big bulk box of orange pekoe tea bags (which I need to survive the horrors of daily life) were... out of stock? What???? No, that's impossible! That can't be right... because if it is, well. Let's just say that this would probably be the last bloghan you'd ever read. After a bit of time, I went out to grab the groceries from the shopper (why'd he put a sticky note saying "have a sunny day" ??? it's more windy than sunny...), and once they were all put away, I set out for the grocery store on my own. I thought of also grabbing an ice cream sandwich on the way, but the wind was actually making it still a bit chilly, so I decided it wasn't worth it. When I got to the grocery store I beelined for the tea section, and for a good 7-8 minutes, I looked and looked. It's... not there? What? That's impossible... I know this bulk box was on sale, but people don't just buy 200 teabgs just like that. I'm only buying because my box of 200 finally ran out! I decide to roam around the store more, jsut in case I missed it, and in the very next aisle over, they've been piled up in a bin marking sales. Ah. That's why. I was a bit mad at the shopper at first, but I realized that I almost left and gave up myself, so it's not really his fault. I mean it is, but not really. After paying, I walk home and make myself a cup right away. I decide "one game" of 'Balatro' would be good to do before I started any work, but a couple hours and restarts and "just one more try"s later, I was at the end of my rope. I just couldn't do it. The gold stake had eluded me for so much longer than the other stakes. Maybe I should just give up. I'm great at giving up. Giving up makes everything easier to live through. And I'm not the kind of person with the strength of will and character to always perservere in the face of hard things. Actually, I think I'm pretty easy to break down, compared to a lot of others. Maybe in terms of some things I'm not, like passion about the things I really love, or my own attainment of any personal freedom I can get my hands on, but otherwise? I'm pretty easy to demoralize. But even after grabbing another cup of hot water, and typing away even more at bloghan, 'Balatro' calls to me. FINE. One more run. Then, I work. And while it's not the luckiest run of my life, it does center around lucky cards and rolling them as much as possible to proc them as much as possible - and I win! I did it! Oh, I feel so free, and I feel so hooked too... I ask myself what I should do to celebrate this, and I decide that every joker I succesfully gold stake with, I will also change the name of in the files, just as a little "tee-hee I did it with you!" kinda thing. I'd say "you know how it is" but I think for the first time in bloghan history, no, you probably don't know how it is. That's ok, neither do I! After a visit from my landlord giving me some very very cheap hot dog sausages she randomly found at the grocery store (thanks, but my fridge and freezer are filled with so much meat right now... it's a little much), I decide to go ahead and play a little more. I even end up on a call with a friend from my home city (same guy as Thursday) as I'm trying to write, and I show him my joker nicknames (he hates them! perfect) and watch him play around with changing his jokers' names, then do a couple 'Balatro' runs of his own, which capture my attention. The rest of the night is spent on catching up bloghan as much as possible, though I fear I let the distractions take me WAY to far this time. Yeah, this bloghan is getting delayed, and this time, I really don't think it was a reasonable delay. Even though eveyrthing this week was all topsy-turvy, making me see double. Rain to sun to snow to rain to sun and rain and rain and sun, can you imagine how my emotions and work ethic were fluctuating all week? Still though, it ended it success, and it ended with sunshine, so I could've gotten this out on time. Ah, it's too bad! I'm back to enjoying life, until tomorrow when it rains or snows again! If it does... I don't know, I never check. Isn't it more fun that way?
Future plans
Here's the results of last week's plans (turns out if you set the expectations low, you get way more of the stuff on the list done! whaddaya know?):
- Team assignment: done, all my group members' sections overwritten where necessary. neve rhave to work with them again!
- Red deck gold stake: got it! only used Lucky Cat, Vagabond, Hanging Chad, Square Joker, and picked up Hiker at the end too
- Door: no progress
This week, I'm setting the expectations low, but not as low as last week. I've got one assignment I need to do, and some reflection quizzes with about 6 short reflections to do in total. Once those are done... well, I'll have a lot of time on my hands until May, won't I? I'll probably also need to level up the D&D characters for our campaign, but other than that, I'm free to choose other things! Maybe I'll finalyl get back to 'Homestuck,' and if it's nice out on the weekend, I just might go get that ice cream sandwich as a reward. This'll be a hard but good week, I think (and hope).
Song of the week
'Both Sides Now' (https://youtu.be/7m_t3_1vbX8) by Joni Mitchell is the song of the week. I don't want to say that I've seen everything from life and love (and clouds I guess), but I'd like to think I've seen quite a lot of it. The way this song is written makes me believe that the speaker of the song has experienced all those things from all sorts of sides, in and out, up and down, give and take, but I'd like to suggest another interpretation: what if you just spend your time observing from outside? Never actually going in to experience those things, but just looking at them in other people (and other skies I guess), seeing the good and bad without actually feeling the good and bad yourself? This week has rocked me up and down becuase of those clouds in the sky, and either weather has made me stare off into the distance thinking about those higher things, love and life... I can't say that I've experienced them in their entirety, but from what I've seen, I think I'm apt to reach some conclusions that readily apply to my life. I've observed them, and concluded things that probably would make some of you upset to hear. Maybe though, just maybe, I don't know enough about either, even though I've been examining them for what seems like ages. If there is more to it, will I even know what to do with that info? Maybe I really should give up. As Joni sings, they all seem to have some illusory component, but mayube that's why I don't understand them yet? Ah, but what do I do then? Just watch some more, I guess. Listen to more songs for the living even though I am functionally dead. Read more stories about romance although I'm geared more to be alone. Watch more of the sky and more often for more clouds, even though it already troubles me or energizes me greatly. Man... did not know I could get so waxy and soliloquic with this section.
Until next time
Ok I guess it didn't really get all illucid until the end there. I was a bit more grounded this week than last week (or was it the opposite? who knows? who cares?), but it still felt like an accomplished week, sort of. See you next week where I totally won't ruin that momentum at all!
- bubbler