April 27, 2025 - bloghan 44
Hmmmm... Even when free of school I still put myself through a lot of work it seems, distracting me from the more fun work. I guess that's how it goes, isn't it? Here's how this week treated me:
Tier list of the week
This week's tier list: Google apps. Here's the tier list:
Ordered tiers, unordered wthin tiers. I've never heard of a bunch of these things, but I feel as though a lot of these things have slowly degraded over time. Maybe years and reas ago I would've put Google search and Gmail way higher, but with the way those have evolved in our current digital climate with things like AI and needless simplification and removal of features, a lot of it all feels worse. I will say though, Google Forms and Slides still feel extremely good to me. Docs, not so much, since LaTeX has ruined that and Microsoft Word for me, but as much as I like LaTeX presentations, Google Slides still feels great for style reasons. Forms also has all the options I can really ever think of needing, and its integratability with the really good Google Sheets is just icing on the cake. All the rest just feel clunky compared to other alternatives, have had AI affecting them so much that it can sometimes be hard to use, or just have really limited and nche utility that still doesn't seem all that great.
Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)
A cloudy sky that implied rain (but didn't shed any) greeted me this morning. Today had me feeling absolutely terrible, probably because of how late I stayed up writing last night. Still though, I would say "worth." At work, I was finally done with those runs I was supposed to be doing since they all passed (I think? I'll just wait until someone asks me to do more). This let me finally focus more attention on the latest "bring in" task for the new project. I could just go ahead and bring it in, but first I need to fniish making temporary waivers for errors that I know are going to show up. My manager told me I technically should be asking other teams about it first, but since we're pressed for time right now, I can do first and ask questions later. The morning was filled with struggle in trying to get these waivers to even work. Everytime, I would get a new error saying I wrote them wrong. I was trying to use the short method to write them but eventually I gave up and just used the long method, using a little Python to automate the process for me when it came to really long errors. I decided to skip going down for lunch, eating it at my desk instead. I just feel like talking to my coworkers less and less very recently. I mean, I guess my biggest regret was getting to know this many people while over here, so it checks out. Once I was confident my waivers would work, I started up one last test before getting back to one of the important things in life: the cryptic crossword. I do it for a good while, but as time goes on I get more and more sleepy. I'm awakened a couple times by my predecessor sharing one of the things he's been working on (a large warning written entirely in ASCII art that he won't be sharing), but I do start to cover my eyes with my hood to try and get some sleep in now so that I'm awake if people try to bother me later. I'm not sure how long I'm in that state for, but I do now that before I leave work, I tried to pass off some of those freezies to Steve (didn't work), read the 'Levely' arc of 'One Piece' (intruiging, but I wish we got more... also, how can this many mysteries be packed into one little arc??), admitted to my coworkers that I was NOT getting my crossword done for today, and realized that I still had my waivers all messed up. I ended up leaving a little early so I could catch different buses, which would drop me off at a point where I could easily grab some milk and deodorant on the way back to my place. However... I messed up the first bus I was supposed to take. I took the base route, when I was supposed to take the B variant which showed up a minute earlier. This doesn't seem like a big difference, but it did actually cause me to miss the connection bus, so I ended up walking a bit more than 2km walking to the grocery store, tehn to my place. It had become fully sunny by this point in the day though, so it was more than ok. It was actually quite nice, though I did almost get hit by a kid on his bike, feeling severely dissapointed when the kid didn't careen into a (nonmoving) minivan. One of these days... I got each item on my shopping list from two different stores and received some strange looks from fellow customers and the employees for only buying one thing, but that's all I really need, so it's alright, right? I got back and greeted my landlord in the garden, and... it pains me to admit it, but I did indeed squander almost all my time at home, just playign gmaes, barely writing bloghan until the last minute, reading 'One Piece' and other stuff, watching videos, learning the lore of franchises I don't care about, all that. I know I meant to do so many other things... I know! I'll just go to bed earlier than I did yesterday. That'll solve it!
I really should try this "sleeping early" thing more often. It does actually work wonders for how good you feel in the morning. Strange how that works... I left on time, greeted my landlord as I walked out, and enjoyed the sunshine greatly. There wasn't much to my work morning, just more work on figuring out the waivers for the "bring in" task and getting annoyed by my work rival. In between running things and writing things, I worked on my cryptic crossword, getting a lot of progress and even finding time to redo some old clues I wrote that were very obviously written at 3am. With the help of my predecessor, I learned that someone had gone ahead and done the "bring in" task for me. Yeah, I guess I was taking a really really long time. That's too bad... if things go well though, I won't need to come back here later. Lunch was boring as always, but I guess today's game of 'President' was somewhat entertaining to watch. I mostly focused on my crossword, though I did try and rig the burned cards to have a bunch of jokers to psych people out. Near the end of lunch, my work rival asked about the desk situation in our corner by the admin that showed up for her lunch. She confirmed we would be having 6 people in there, and apparently they are putting film over the windows. Ah, great. Because of my work rival's heat complaint, now all my sunshine is going to go away. I think I'm going to ask about what they're going to do about the low light situation in the corner to get them to reconsider. When I got back up to my desk, it was more of the same. My predecessor and my work rival went out for a bit to pick up trash (apparently there was sdome sort of Earth Day event today?) while I had a call with my go-to about the waivers. I had fully given up on doing it on my own, and once she explained it to me... well, I'll be blunt. I was really regretting not doing that earlier. I would've been able to be the one to do the "bring in" task without someone else being asked to do it for me, and everything would've been a lot faster. At least I know how to do it now, but I have a feeling my manager won't be asking me to do such a thing again. The rest of my work ended up being a repeating loop of "run the tests" and "make the waivers," so the rest of my "not-work" was spent in conversation, cryptic clue writing, and staring at screens just in general. There was a conversation with the fanatic and the gregarious about something Absconder-related that I wrote that the gregarious was looking for reference on, and then my work rival hijacked the conversation by asking about how much the guys present would pay for engagement rings (and he asked the gregarious how much she expects her future fiance to pay). Fanatic said $15000 and everytime my work rival protested he doubled it, gregarious kind of just agreed with the initial $15000, my Japanese coworker said "whatever the price of the ring is going to be" really confused-like, and I said that I find it extremely doubtful that someone would ever want to marry me but that I would prefer to be the one being proposed to. For some reason, my work rival did not like those last two answers, but he also thought that $15000 was a lot, and he stated "I would spend like $5000 maximum but it's coming out of her dowry" (or something like that). Also, apparently we're doing 'Jeopardy!' on Friday? Ok, cool. For the next hour or so I would just hear my work rival travelling around the office asking the others the same engagement ring question and getting people to try and come to 'Jeopardy!' He left eventually, and later on the compatriot, the fanatic, and my co-DM came to visit the corner, just for some random chatter about whatever: voting, engagement rings (my co-DM actually got me to start thinking about how much I would expect for my partner to pay for an engagement ring: I don't know? Like $2000? $3000? This question doesn't even matter for my life specifically...), Steve skipping out work today becuase he's "sick," and how my test window just froze. I also visited my mentor to help him out with a small Absconder thing, but when he wasn't all that satisfied with the answer, I ended up delving into the issue a little more to solve it fully. It felt really good to be able to do something about an issue right away, instead of needing to wait for something for 2 hours to make sure it's all working. All this did keep me at work 2 minutes after my regular leaving time, so I had to rush out to make my bus, but I made it home a little earlier than usual. An ice cream sandwich and two showers later (I forgot the first one when I went for the second one), I'm back on that grind to write bloghan, "cook" food, write crossword clues, and a 5 minute 'Balatro' adventure that turned into 40. Then I go to sleep, and one of those things is going to take the blame for why I went to bed later than I wanted to. Not saying which.
Once at work on Wednesday, I set myself on doing more of this waiver stuff, but to be honest? A lot more of other stuff was done. All my grades came back for that course I did - an A+, which was very pleasant to receive when expecting just an A. I also spent a good amount of time on my crossword, getting it way past 50% completion, but not quite fully finished yet. My mentor came to ask me as well about when I would be submitting my Absconder work, but the not-manager left me on read when I asked about his submission, which was gating mine. Steve said it was a good thing when the not-manager wasn't talking to you becuase that meant he wasn't actively giving you a task, but I really just want to get this all over with. Steve has actually turned out to be quite the surprising source of wisdom. Today he taught me the 2-minute rule: spend 2-minutes working on a problem, and if you still haven't got a working idea of how to approach it, ask for help. Wow... I really could have used that advice this whole past week while I was trying to figure out all these waivers. I also managed to figure out why these errors that I had yet to waive were not showing up in the nightly runs. It's because of that whole mess with having two diffrent versions of our files, and the current nightly run was only focused on the most recent version of the project. This most recent version doesn't automatically get updated when a "bring in" is performed (because I guess it would be TOO EASY if it did, huh?), so after talking with my manager a little bit I set out to update that. My predecessor caught me before I did that though, warning me that we were trying to have things as error-free as possible for Friday. Well... I think I'm fine with that, because that will force other people to reach out to the other teams that need to be reached out to, and if not - well, they can come to me and tell me who to email. Perfect! I went down for lunch with the others, but the 'President' game was rather boring, and I went back up nearly right away. The post-lunch period consisted of some more conversation about engagement rings with my work rival, then some time where I could focus on everything I was able to work on. That didn't last long though, as my work rival really needed help with using Absconder for a new task he got from his manager. It was for an application of Absconder that I wasn't familiar with but had played around with before, and it was actually more enlightening for me than it was for him. It drove me to discover how to use the new version of Absconder that I've never been able to get working, and it also taught me some new things about that other functioning mode of Absconder. Meanwhile, my work rival was moaning and groaning about how Absconder wasn't giving him the information he needed right up front with just one Absconder tool. Honestly, I can't stand this guy. Of course the people who make Absconder aren't going to have a single tool which just does what you asked - you have to put in effort to use the tools you've been given by both Absconder team and tools from other places to get it working in the way that you want. The way of life of some people is just... I don't really know anymore. My predecessor came by to visit as well and told us of something we migth be missing because he was also playing around with this specific Absconder application, and the results were way closer to what my work rival wanted because of it. Until he left a half-hour later, he constantly flip-flopped by saying this whole task was impossible and then in the next minute he would be so confident that he could finish this whole thing tomorrow morning. There's not much else to talk about what I did at work after he left, except for D&D. Today, it would just be me, the compatriot, and the cable guy. My equivalent had some club activity to do todya so he didn't show up to work at all, and my co-DM and Japanese coworker were extremely busy due to a big thing happening at work that is only really relevant to their teams. This session was a mini-adventure, a side quest that was more than just "go around the town and help these people with their day-to-day lives." With this mini-adventure, which was completely improvised from one unoriginal idea, it was more about developing one NPC a little bit as wel as the setting, but also reincorporating some of the combat and action that the players were missing. It was a really fun session for me, and it's been a while since I completely improvised an action-focused session, so it was really fun. Also, having only two people made things a lot more reasonable, and made it way easier to just run the game: balancing enemies, balancing buffs and debuffs, reducing combat time (allowing for more interesting things to happen during a fight and some interesting NPCs to join in too). The players really enjoyed this session too, and we even ended it early. That's something I haven't been able to say for WEEKS. We all split up, and my journey home managed to make use of two buses, so I could skip the 15 minute walk. I would've been fine with walking, but this works too. Once home, I mostly just did the same types of activities as I did yesterday, but I did crack open my work laptop to check one little tiny thing. You see, I wanted to see if my newest batch of waivers were working, so that I could submit that right before the nightly run started up. If I did, I could avoid the messages I would be getting from lots of people tomorrow, since no one would be aware of the newly found errors. However, none of my waivers worked at all, so I couldn't do my submission. Guess tomorrow's just going to suck...
That is, if I didn't work from home that day! My throat was feeling a bit sore, and so I got to wake up later and work from bed for 3 hours afterr waking up. There were two separate managers after me for those waivers, but I think I was finally in a position where I could get it done. All it took was not going to the office and actually bothering to only do work today. Funny how that happens. There were a couple of errors that were popping up again and again, but I knew that I cuold waive them since they were suffering from the same problem of having an outdated path. My first attempt didn't go very well though, because there was something slightly wrong about the formatting of a file we were given, but my manager told me that we could fix that later, and that I should just add them directly to files we control. Sounds good to me boss, because I was about to just do that without telling you. Once the first set of errors was dealt with and working and submitted, I moved on to the next set, which was much harder to get the waivers working for. By this point it was the afternoon, and I had eaten my breakfast and gotten dressed any everything. There was a meeting I joined virtually, where I wasn't really paying attention since I was so focused on doing this task. I did tune back in when one of the senior employees started mouthing off to the senior who called me a good boy, the director, and the director of the director - a hilarious thing to see - but it was once again a lot of stuff that wasn't really all that relevant to me. The evening came and passed, and I just couldn't get things working we this last set of waivers. They had given me so much grief this past week, and wasted so much of my time. Even when I asked people on how to get some tool to make the waivers for me, it just didn't work. So, I gave in. I gave up. I wrote them by hand. All 50 or so. Well, ok, not really by hand, I did a little bit of Python to help me out but still. It took quite a lot of effort to do so. Once it was done though, I could do one last round of testing, just to make sure it had worked this time. I left my work laptop on when I joined that call with my friends from home, just to keep an eye on it. There was only one other person who joined today, the one who had his birthday last week (let's give those guys nicknames from now on... this guy who had a birthday played as "Izuku" in that one D&D campaign, but I think I'll call him "Umi," while the girl who played "Harold" will be called "Kotori." These names were chosen for no reason in particular). Umi and I talked about how equally terrible our days had been (me with the waivers and him with the Switch 2 per-order fiasco), and once we had finished that we moved on to having our own engagement ring discourse as well as more discourse on all the stuff that could be associated with it. There were some awkward gaps in between our conversations where we had no idea what we would actually do together tonight, but we eventually settled on Umi playing the first 'Ace Attorney' game while I watched. Honestly, it was a blast seeing someone else play the game, just as much fun as playing it yourself. I have no idea how that works, or why, but maybe that's just a trait of good games in general? Or good visual novel-esque games. It was super fun seeing him reason through things, especially seeing how we differ in our thinking processes. For example, with one of the witness's testimonies, there was a contradiction that the witness made that I immediately caught, but he didn't because he made the connection that he was technically telling the truth before that technicality was actually revealed. You're meant to state this as a contradiction in the game, but he struggled to do so because of already making that connection. We played through the first case and had a blast voicing the characters. I was so glad to see that he actually started getting invested in the story hooks at the end. This will be a good deal of fun for sure... We ended the call after that case was done, and after some late nigth shaving and dish washing (and mayb ejust a little too much 'Balatro') I just went to bed. Yes I didn't have dinner, but I think the massive cup of granola I had during that call should count.
Friday honestly felt like a Thursday to me. I woke up late by 5 minutes but still caught all my buses and all that jazz. I was in a rush, and that rush caused me to spill a little oatmeal on my black cargo jeans. I came into the office to see that my manager had sent me a message and then deleted it. I think it was because the nightly tests were still reporting errors, but he didn't realize they wouldn't have caught my changes because of how late I stayed up to submit them. I wanted to make sure they were all OK though, so I took a little more time to repeat all of last night's tests. Only half of my changes made it to last night's nightly run, but that half fixed its half of the issues, so I was pretty confident. As I waited, I prioritzed bloghan, but I did let myself talk a bit to some of the others. It seemed like two people have decided to drop out of the 'Jeopardy!' game today. Unfortunate. I really do like this board I've made for today, and less people being available to enjoy it sucks, but whatever. As I worked on bloghan and actual work, my work rival got on call with his manager and complained to her about the task she gave him, then when it was done, went up to complain about his manager and task very loudly, for the entire office to hear. Today, more than any other day, showed me my greatest regret when it came to this job: making friends with all the people who started at the same day as me. Some of them are cool, yes, but for the most part I still regret it> I wish I had gotten to know the full-time employees on my team better to be honest. Would've made this whole working expereince so much better, and I would've gotten way more out of it too. His loud bad mouthing was enough to break me out of any semblance of focus I had, but when they all went down for this month's pizza lunch, I got a couple minutes to myself. I wan't sure why some things were not working for me personally when they were in the overnight runs, but I played around with a few things before heading down. There weren't as many people in attendance today because it was Friday, but the people who were here and on time started up a game of 'President' with 4 decks. Blargh. I'd rather just watch. It was an entertaining game, and I was privy to the cable guy's hand. He had a real good chance of winning and he made what I would consider a game-winning play at the perfect time... if my co-DM didn't have a way to stop him trumping over everyone with triple 2s. Honestly though, I was kinda just wishing I was at my desk doing stuff rather than interacting with these other temps. I headed up after finishing my pizza worldlessly, as they continued to play, doing a TON more bloghan and such in their absence. I walked around the office floor for a bit too: I enjoy it much better when those guys weren't here. I feel like I could do so much more. I'm sure it's not their fault, purely mine, but there's not really any use to this sort of complaint, is there? They're all here, so I'm just going to have to cope with my decisions. Until 'Jeopardy!' later that evening, there were only really a couple things that happened. After I wrote a little documentation for our team (mostly for my inevitable successor) and shared it with my manager, he asked to call me. Oh ok, sure. He calls, but when I plug in my laptop everything freezes and goes black for a second. When I finally regain control, the call ends. OH SHOOT. I immediately call him back, but he gives no answer. I'm lightly panicking right now, but my work rival says that managers do this all the time - I sure hope so, because I don't think things could look worse for me right now. The call is as awkward as ever, but he brings up no mention ofany frustrations with me. I guess that's good? We mostly just talk about the waivers, and how there's some oddities with a couple of the ways we write ours and use the ones written by others. There's hidden errors we can't see related to something going wrong in one of those processes. For once, I actually know exactly what he's talking about, because it's a problem I ran into yesterday. After some more discussion, and his surprise that I tried solving it on my own yesterday, we agreed that I would try some more test runs just to make sure. Until 'Jeopardy!' later that evening, I didn't do all that much. It was a lot of writing and a lot of waiting and a whole lot of thinking too. I talked a bit with one of the full-times and she told me about how one of the programs for younger members got completely cut to to anti-DEI measures in the States. Our company is based there, so I guess it was only a matter of time, but I'm surprised that the program for young people counted as that. Like, does being young really count as a diversity hire to those people who think DEI is excluding those with merit? I don't really have the knowledge to answer that, but I don't really think it makes sense. Who knows though, I'm not in charge of that sort of thing. Eventually, everyone was ready for 'Jeopardy!' and even my predecessor and his wife joined us. It was a pretty fun game, but my work rival was playing very unsportsmanlike throughout, touching other people's phones to buzz in for then and trying to distract people when they were answering. I really am glad that in a few months I won't have to see him because that type of behaviour really annoyed me. Have a little respect for the game that you demanded be held today, that I took a good bit of time to put together. My work rival wasn't the only thing that was annoying about this game though. There was fire alarm testing that went on throughout the entire first half of the match, so we all had to yell over it until that pesky voice asking for our cooperation in evacuating finally stopped. After it did though, we got to the end with only one more interruption: the not-manafter messaging me about something. I've been waiting for his response all week... and he sends it to me now???? In a panic, I set my status to "offline" and the issue is solved! In the end, my predecessor stomped the competition, and I think that this board wasn't my best work. It did succeed in having very broad topics, but in doing so I accidentally let things get too hyperfocused on very specific niches of knowledge, and a lot of questions went unanswered. It's unfortunate, but at least it will guide me well for the next board. One of the admins also gave us some chips to enjoy as we played, but once the event was over we realized we couldn't just leave the leftovers in this meeting room, so I had to lay them out on the snack rack in the break room. My predecessor offered me a ride home, and as we listened to 'Free Bird' on the way, his wife was psychoanalyzing the reasons why I started hosting 'Jeopardy!' Uh... I like being in control of the competitions? I like leading but in low stakes situations? I think I have a good announcer's vibe and voice because of my limited theatre experience? I hid all these reasons from her because I only thought of them now, but I these are probably why I do this and the cryptic crossword thing. Being a puzzle-maker can be so rewarding, but it's sometimes tough to figure out what your audience knows that you don't and what you know that the audience doesn't, so that you can fill the puzzle with stuff that is satisfying for as many people as possible. Once I got home I walk into the garage, just to get to my front door like always. What I see is a whole bunch of stuff scattered all over the floor. A lot of this I recognize from all the other times I had passed through this garage: a bunch of pots and pans, a little table lamp, a bunch of my landlord's bottles of soda, all toppled over on the floor. THere was a whole bunch of other stuff too: a spatula dangerously close to the garage door, paper towels that must've fallen from a very high shelf, some sort of tarp leaking some sort of liquid. It looked like a small wind storm had passed through the inside the garage. After standing in shock for a minute, I texted my landlord nad began to pick up the table lamp. She came rushing in and immediately thought it was a racoon. She pulled out a stepladder and got me to climb up with a broom stick to the high shelf, but after a lot of poking around and flashing with the table lamp, I figured there was nothing up there. We picked up most of the stuff, and we even saw that the compost bin (which was upright and closed when I walked in) had a bunch of shredded bags in it. The racoons must have gotten in to do that, but how and why did they not knock it over, but did so to everything else? And how did they close it too? After a while, my landlord thanked me for my help and sent me back to my place, telling to make sure I didn't leave my door open or something to let a racoon in my place. I mean... there's not all that much food there really. Reflecting on the morning, I knew that I closed all the garage's door on either end, so it couldn't have been me that let in a racoon. But I guess it's possible that maybe a racoon snuck in behind me as I was leaving? And ended up getting trapped when I closed the main garage door? But then, how did it get out? Must be something to do with my landlord's gardening habits then, since she leaves the garage exit door open when she does so. How then she did not see the mess when she was done gardening? Ah, whatever. Some mysteries are bound to go unsolved, I suppose. Once I got in (and confirmed there were no racoons in my place), I ended up wasting away on my laptop. I wrote only a little bit of bloghan and played a lot more of 'Balatro' (got yellow purple stake though!), staying up into the wee hours of the night. I had pierogies for dinner because I just didn't feel like doing all that much. One nice thing about this evening/night was talking to my sister quite a lot over the Steam friends chat of all things, and 'Balatro' is always a fine time. I don't really know why there was a dramatic shift in my work ethic when I got back, but it's alright. I had a busy day, kind of. Surely, I will lock in for Saturday, right?
I woke up one hour after noon on Saturday. It felt so warm, so comfy. This led to other thoughts: isn't this the better way to live? Or I guess, not live, but just be alive? The blinds are closed but I can still see the sunlight through the gaps. If I stay in bed all day, even if I stay inside all day, si tehre really anything I need to do outside? THe only thing I can think of is haircuts, but I can get groceries and tech and other things I buy delivered. I decide that I want to test how long I can stay in this bed without getting up. Could I make it to the night? I've already spent the entire morning in bed sleeping, so could I spend the afternoon and evening on my phone? Will my adult life look like this too? That might be a good thing for me specifically, given the type of person I am... maybe it's not so bad to remain in a state like this...
Anyways after 2 hours of lying in bed like that, I got bored. I think that for someone like me the hikikomori or other social withdrawal lifestyle is probably ideal, but I think I would get so bored of living like that that I wouldn't do it. So, at the detriment at my own joy for life, I probably won't do that. The day consisted of a lot more 'Balatro' (yellow deck orange stake got done!), looking over the documents for my next course (oh this is going to be very very difficult, isn't it? But at least I can start on some stuff earlier...), and barely any bloghan. I think doing all that lying around in bed actually affected me throughout the whole day, as I was yawning and nearly falling asleep constantly. Given what I now know about my next course (one mistake on an assignment caps you at a grade of 90% - rough for no good reason, I fear...), if I let things get like that it will spiral out of control for sure. That's why on Sunday I woke up early and finished bloghan stuff as soon as possible. I planned to dedicate myself to catching up all sorts of things: the crossword had to be done today. It took me a long while to do though, but I feel pretty good about it. I also feel as though I will never do a cryptic of this size ever again. It took me the whole day, but I allowed myself breaks for picking up my groceries, a lunch of pierogies, an ice cream sandwich break while basking in the sun (but not going outside because the hornets are back), an hour-long call with an old friend of mine just talking about 'One Piece' and how I was feeling about the story and where I am predicting it will go (I am SO excited for 'Wano'), and played a couple games once I was down to the last clue. After some menial chores, I set myself on reading a bit more of 'Homestuck' (END OF ACT 3!!! Goes undeniably hard, and things feel so connected and disconnected at the same time! I can't wait for the inevitable payoff for all the time travel shenanigans). I start to cook chili but realize that I didn't ask my landlord for a can opener, so as I wait for her to bring it down I play the first case of 'Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations' (see the section below this one to see what I thought of it). When I was finished with that amazingly written case, I finalized this bloghan and barely started work on future bloghans, but soon it was time to go to bed. My landlord was probably asleep by this point so I was not getting that can opener. I stowed the meat and peppers I had cooked in a contiainer and fridged it, ate a mandarin, then headed to bed. A pretty good Sunday if you ask me!
Future plans
So I guess I kinda got "invited" to one little thing, but I still think I managed to get most of this done, even if it was on a Sunday. Here's the results of last week's plans:
- 21x21 cryptic: finished! You can try it here: 21x21 Cryptic
- 'Homestuck': read up to the end of Act 3! I think I'll take a break soon though.
- Door: no progress
- Document sleeves: To combat the seemingly impossible nature of this task, I'm going to start looking at this section everytime I return home... yes, that means I didn't do this, once again.
- Photo editing thing: Yeah ok, you got me! Same here. That pesky cryptic...
- Next 'Phoenix Wright' game: finished case 1! I really loved the twist of this one, where it sets you up to expect Wright in one place but he's in another... I really loved how this series uses connected the current day to the past to form an intruiging mystery, so it's really cool that we get to actually play in the past!
This week, I've got a plan. Yes, I have a plan every week, I know, but this one is more sensical and strategic than "I WANT TO DO THAT ONE THING THIS WEEK." I've been blessed with a week of nothing really being "due." So, I'll definitely have time for that document sleeves in my shower thing, and that photo editing thing. I'll try to not play too many games too. Instead, I want to do as much of my upcoming course as possible this week. It's a course on communication, and I've got to write an email and make a presentation. Handily, there's a separate presentation I need to make too. So, I'll write that sample email, start the joke presentation, then see if I can start on the course presentation. Oh, and maybe a 'Jeopardy' board? Who knows?
Song of the week
'Lovers of the World' (https://youtu.be/N9JN4aqMduo) by Jerry Wallace is the song of the week. I've only recently noticed that the lyrics of this song are actually quite similar to my favourite song ('As Time Goes By'), even down to the central lines of "All the world / loves a lover" compared to "The world will always welcome lovers." It seems like a sentiment that might become less and less popular as time goes by, but I think that all the lovers of the world will continue to feel it regardless. ...OK sorry about that Ian Flynn-esque writing just then, but it fit well so I'm personally ok with it. Anyways, there's some instrumental parts of this song I really like becuase of the "Western" vibe it gives (sometimes I'll even rewind it like 6 seconds or whatever to hear them again!), but it does also really make me think about what it really means to "be a man." I mean, I am a guy, but I know I'm definitely not considered as "manly" compared to a lot of other guys. But I know that's fine, and I've recently become a lot more comfortable with that fact, and increasingly more comfortable with being more in touch and aware of more "feminine" aspects of myself. I mean, if according to this song, I'm no man for not ever having been in love before, I guess I'll just relinquish my he/him pronouns here and now. I don't really think I'll ever know what it really means to "be a man," but I think now I've realized that I don't really care? I don't know... I don't really think it matters at all. Maybe that doesn't make sense... but hey, at least this week, the "Song of the week" section is actually lucid! That's gotta count for something.
Until next time
My two biggest lessons from this week kinda just reinforce what I already knew. "I'm better off prepared," and "I'm better off alone." Things are going to get super busy super soon, so I think the sooner I fully embrace these principles, the better I will do with those super busy things. In the next few weeks, you'll hear two voices from me in these bloghans, some from this version of me on April 27th, and one from the days those bloghan posts get written. So I guess I should sign this one off with see you next week! And next next week! And next next next week! And next next next next week! And next next next next next week! And next next next next next next week! And next next next next next next next week! OK I think that's all of them!
- bubbler