November 17, 2024 - bloghan 21

I guess this one was more of a normal week, with easy meals (mostly chili over carbs), work being pretty normal, and my home life being as usual. I've become settled in this little life I have here, and while I know things aren't going to be like this forever, I think that it works well for me right now.

Tier list of the week

This week's tier list: songs from 'ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits,' an album I've been listening to a lot this week. For some of these songs, this week was the first one in which I ever heard them, and some of those rose to the top of my favourite ABBA songs list, and some really didn't move me all that much. Here's the tier list:

Ordered tiers, ordered tiers. I had never heard the songs 'Thank You for the Music' and 'One of Us' prior to this week, but I really love them. 'Fernando' is up there, but not quite to that level, but I think it's just because I don't really know much about the story of 'Fernando.' I find that 'Money, Money, Money' and 'Does Your Mother Know' annoy me when they come up during my album listen, while I feel mixed about some of the classic ABBA songs like 'Mamma Mia' and 'Take a Chance on Me.'

Personal updates (achievements, reflections, and antics)

Monday was quite normal. I don't really remember if anything important really happened this day, it was mostly a normal day. I put a crossword up on the board and people liked it, I worked more on tightening up that Absconder stuff for the not-manager and for my work rival's team, asked my manager for a meeting this week since I had an evaluation coming up, things like that. Lunch was just as normal as far as I can remember, and when I got back to my place, I didn't really do anything in particular. I think it was mostly more crosswords stuff? Some cooking? Some being on my phone for nothing? Tuesday was way more interesting. I didn't prepare a lunch this day because there was going to be a lunch and learn on Absconder, hosted by a guy who is actively developing it for people in the company to use. Naturally, I wanted to attend, so that I could learn more ways I could use Absconder, hoping mostly to learn ways of making my uses of it faster and more able to do things. Some of my coworkers who had never heard of Absconder were going just for free food, and they sat in the very back of the meeting room. My work rival signed up for this lunch and learn as soon as the invite went out, but he chose not to show up today, forgoing free food. Unusual, but he's always finding some reason to be absent on Tuesdays. Before the event starts, I slowly see almost all of my team filter in, which did surprise me. I was under the impression that if they wanted an Absconder task done, they would just ask someone who had Absconder experience, but if they wanted to learn it for themselves, power to them, I suppose. One person I worked with before (back in August's merge saga) and a manager (not my manager, but still on my team) sat on my left and right (respectively), and I think other people on my team looked at me oddly with my notebook and pencil out, taking notes. Honestly, most of the stuff in the presentation was stuff I already knew, but there were some tidbits that I found interesting, things that I might incorporate into future Absconder stuff. Afterwards, in the question period, a lot of those people on my team started asking questions about how Absconder could make their specific duties easier: I started to get a feeling that I might start getting asked to actually realize some of those ideas on behalf of those coworkers. It was also nice that teh guy presenting said we could talk with him anytime if there was some specific application we wanted to use Absocnder for, or if there was a feature that we specifically wanted to add Absconder. Honestly, it was pretty great! The guy on my right asked about runtime, and after the presentation ended, I told him what my most recent runtime was, and he asked me to show him some applications of Absconder later. The one on my right asked me how one of my Absconder tasks was going (the one for our our team), but I told him that the director told me to prioritize the Absconder stuff for my work rival's team, and he understood. After this event, I headed back to my desk, satisfied with that event. After I went to help the guy on my right use Absconder for his current task, I worked for a bit on my own Absconder stuff, put up a new crossword, worked some more, and then heard a strange sound, that sounded like a bunch of things turning off. My monitors went dead, and the ceiling lights behind me all started flickering. The office got real quiet, and I realized it was the ventiliation system powering down completely. I was in the middle of making fixes to my Absconder task that was bugging my work rival's team, such as new logs overwriting old logs, but I heard people in the office getting up and walking around. I ended up doing that, and getting awkwardly wrapped in up in a conversation with the not-manager, someone I didn't know, and someone who is basically my workplace mentor about where they lived, how long their commute is, and where they went to high school. Eventually, someone else came out of their cubicle, told us "your laptops still work so you can too," and they all laughed and headed back to their cubicles. I went to my desk, and continued working just on one screen, but a coworker who typically eats lunch with me came by, complaining that he couldn't work without all his monitors. I gave a bit of a noncommital answer and continued to work, but learned that I had it somewhat easy. Over my desk, there weren't many celiing lights, since I'm right next to a big window, but a lot of the people I eat lunch with had desks right under rapidly flickering lights which hurt their eyes. Eventually, the internet went out, and I got an automated text message from the company, which told all of us to evacuate the building and wowrk from home. I got a ride from another coworker, and worked from home. It was a really strange turn of events, since only about half of the building was experiencing this issue. After I logged off for the day, I ended up on a voice call with a friend from Calgary, since I wanted to test if I could do screen sharing with audio. It didn't work on Firefox or Chrome, but it did when I used the Windows application. I really didn't want to use the Windows application, but I finally caved in and installed it. After that, we mostly just kinda talked about things she was getting into, and about how some songs from one franchise can often sound like songs from another franchise (that was like 2 hours how did we do that). We also made plans for us to get in call on Thursday to watch me play 'Danganronpa' for the first time, and I taught her how to solve some of the clues in my first few mini cryptics, before she panicked, realizing she had something due in an hour, to which she had to end things there. Some things never change. Before I headed to bed, I got another text message from the company before I went to sleep: the power issue wasn't going to be resolved by tomorrow, so it was recommended to work from home tomorrow too. However, I did not anticipate this and let my work laptop's battery drain quite a bit, assuming that I would go back in tomorrow. I didn't have the charger for it, so if I did work from home, I would be unable to work the full day. I ran through the options in my mind, and settled on trying to get my work rival to let me visit his place and work from home there, alternating uses of his power cable. I sent a message asking if he would try to go to the office tomorrow or not, then went to sleep.

I woke up on Wednesday and saw that I had gotten no response from my work rival. I had done everything in my routine and was about to leave: still no response. So I made the decision to just go to the office, and hope that there would be Wi-Fi today, not to mention power. When I was waiting for my second bus, he finally responded, so I let him know about the new plan. I get into the office and it's even emptier than a usual Friday. Only two people I regularaly eat lunch with were there, and one was there because he didn't read the text or emails telling us to work from home today. I managed to get quite a lot of stuff done regarding the Absconder stuff I'm doing for my work rival's team, and I had a couple of online meetings about it too, just discussing feature requests: automatic emails, automatic nightly activation, bug fixes, additional coverage, things like that. Those calls were from one guy who really loved my work so far, because it has saved him quite a lot of frustration and manual effort. He did try to get me to add some additional feature that would be way beyond what my work already covered, but as he was explaining this addition to me, he realized it was indeed, very out of scope, and maybe it could be a separate thing I produce at a later time. I didn't sit at my regular desk this day, sititng next to one of the other guys I normally ate lunch with instead, since the guys in his group cube chose to work from home. Some people made comments on me not being in my usual spot, such as the floor administrator asking if I was bored since no one was here (I was fine, I guess?), and a manager of another subteam asking how some former coworkers from my home city were doing. I didn't really keep up with those guys, but my work rival did, so I just repeated what I had heard from him. After that pretty productive day, I got back to my place and started playing the final case in 'Justice for All.' This case seems to be more satisfying than the last one, just from having actual tolerable characters and the return of old favourites like Edgeworth and Powers, and the actual narrative of this case is more compelling with Franziska getting shot and Maya getting kidnapped. However, I still feel like I'm frustrated with this game specifically becuase I was not doing well in the trial. The investigation phase and the psyche-locks were fine, I did well in those, and ended them in full health, but man, I got so annoyed with the specificity of things to present in court. I lost all my health in just one evidence presentation because I assumed that since something was in a picture already presented to the court, that it wouldn't count as something that the court hadn't seen before. I retried, and later on, something similar happened that just made me put the game down. Maybe when I wasn't feeling as tired, I would do better, and I would enjoy the game more.

I walked into work Thursday morning to a direct message from my manager, setting up our meeting for later today. At the time, I didn't realize that him not booking a meeting room put the onus on me to do so, so I just said "sounds great!" It was a regular work day, still solving some bugs with the things I was working, just the regular. I got a message from one of the other coworkers I ate lunch with, since she unexpectedly found my name on something she was working on. It must have been something from all that merge stuff I did in the summer, and that what she found was probably safe to ignore. She shared that she would just be deleting it, and my first thought was "I can't believe this," and I decided to share this with her by replying "Ludicrous inevitable ethics forms a statement of surprise (1, 4, 7, 4)," stumping her for the rest of the day. My normalcy in direct messages is immaculate. Lunch was pretty uneventful this time around, the only highlight being a conversation about 'Ace Attorney.' The guy I was talking to about it is like my equivalent on another team, and I do respect him and his thoughts and opinions quite a lot, since we share similar interests. It started off with him asking me if I had read anything new recently, which I hadn't, only that I was still playing through 'Justice for All.' He went on a whole tirade on the series, saying that the first and third games are a lot better than this one, the second, and that the second was still worth playing because of the character work, which I agreed with wholeheartedly. He proceeded to rant about some of the other games, recommending some and telling me I should avoid others. To be honest, I wasn't really interested in exploring titles outside the trilogy, but I migth just do what he suggested. After lunch, I put up another puzzle on the board, in addition to the "inevitable ethics" clue. The group was getting way faster at solving all my crosswords, and I think I'm getting better at making them, and also getting better at making them more difficult. Then, came my meeting with my manager, which had to get delayed by an hour since my manager got wrapped up in another meeting, and the next available room booking would be later still. Once it started though, it was pretty good. He told me that I was contributing well, and he was happy to hear that I've become pretty proficient in using Absconder, as well as giving me some advice for a particular bug I was encountering when working with Absconder for my work rival's team. I went over all the things I was currently working on, and about the lunch and learn, and how the director was interacting with me, and just overall how I was feeling about the position. He told me that pretty soon I would be given some new stuff to do, not just Absconder stuff. I started to ask about a bunch of questions about how things worked with this company and our team, and he would give his answer, and we went on like this for 20 minutes past our meeting end time. After discussing the evaluation form that he had to fill out, and him asking about how I'm doing with moving out to this city overall, we finally left the room, to see a whole team of people waiting outside the meeting room. I was a bit ashamed of holding them up, but my manager said with the smuggest smirk, "waiting for me?" On the elevator up, I told him about some use of Absconder that another subteam used, and he told me I should look into it, since it sounded useful to us, before thanking me for what I've done so far. Honestly, great meeting! Pretty soon, it was getting dark, and some other coworkers from other cubicles were taking a break by the desks of myself and my work rival. My work rival pointed a statement at my co-DM, talking about she was technically wrong about how the United States political system worked, and that there would be no point to have a House of Representatives if there was a majority of two-thirds in one party. Then, all of the people there started... "debating," with people showing their political linings. My co-Dm was getting increasingly frustrated with a lot of the things my work rival was saying, especially about women. I already didn't really respect him all that much, but honestly, it went way down after this. They got on the topic of transgender people, and before my work rival opened his mouth, I told him he should probably not say it, so as to not negatively effect any workplace relations, and he agreed. Then he told us his thoughts on transgender adults and minors, and wow! I didn't know I could lose that much more respect for someone. I really don't think I want to talk to him further about this topic, but I can't really just ignore him, since I'm sitting next to him for the next nine months or so. I kinda zoned out of the conversation after that all, and I think my signalling that I was no longer wanting to talk about this was receivied, and the other two managed to annoy my co-DM into leaving early. They asked if I wanted to come with them to talk about politics with a different coworker, and I turned them down, since I didn't want to be seen as taking part in annoying a woman with some very interesting political discussion points. When they were done, it was about 15 minutes until my shift ended, but my work rival was "so bored," and wanted me to put up another cryptic on the board. I did so, and decided to stay and watch them puzzle through it, with my work rival being really surprised that he was able to get a lot of them at first. Good for him, I suppose. I got a ride home from someone, since I stayed logner to put up the puzzle, and when I got home, I hopped into a voice chat, waiting for my friend from home to hop on too. Usually, we'd have D&D at this time, but the player of "Izuku" didn't bother telling us he was going to Europe for a week until Monday, which is why on Tuesday, the player of "Harold" and I agreed to watch me play 'Danganronpa.' Well, I waited, and I waited, and I waited, but she never showed. Well, I guess that's just how it is. I was a bit disappointed, but I didn't really feel like my time was wasted, since I took some of that time to make a new cryptic and to cook. I did go to bed a little more disappointed, just wrapped up in some thoughts that probably don't matter to others, and fell asleep.

I decided to go into the office on Friday, mostly to focus on ironing out the last of the bugs. Throughout the day, I was messaging the person who pointed out the bugs about all the bugs being fixed, which I think probably annoyed them, causing them to tell me that we should just meet on Monday to discuss. Me and the lunch group also had some fun with more puzzles, and even my co-DM was getting into making cryptic clues, giving me a pretty good one for "PIECE" and an alright one that I couldn't solve for "GRANT." Actually, one of the more permanent staff caught my co-DM doing a crossword instead of work, but it ended up mostly alright since the thing he as asking her for was something she had yet to do, so he decided to just do it himself, as it was time-sensitive. She and I got to working, while the rest focused on solving. It was ind of a boring day in the office, but honestly, after the power outage day, they all kinda were. Also throughout the day, I was talking to the player of "Harold," who realized she forgot yesterday's plans, and was a bit apologetic about it, but we just decided we would do it this night instead. Flash forward to that night, and we actually go ahead and start. I knew a little bit about the basic premise of the game, but not all the detials, like character names and such. "Harold" voiced the girls, I, the boys, and I really wasn't expecting as much prologue as there was, so I do regret choosing such taxing voices for each character. We played up to the start of the first chapter, and I already noticed some things that were off, like the main protagonist having a lockable washroom in his dorm (exclusive to female characters, even though the main character is male?), and that there was an even amount of chairs at the opening ceremony. We called it a night, and while I didn't really get to much gameplay, I felt like I was going to enjoy this series. Before we ended, we did a whole prediction matrix thing too, with me predicting teh victims and murderers in each chapter, but I had been spoiled for some things, so I already don't think my predictions are all bad, but still not complete. Finally, this more boring week was finished off by Saturday and Sunday. Saturday was a day of chores, doing a bunch of sweeping all around my place for a really surprising amount of dust, laundry for big items like sweaters and jeans (there was no rain so I could hang it outside!), and grocery shopping, including the purchase of some pesto, bringing me back to the days in Switzerland where pesto chicken pasta was my dinner for about 25% of that trip. My landlord also visited me on Sunday night, letting me know that since it was getting colder, she would let me know when she was going to the Asian supermarket so that she could pick up some groceries for me, which I really do appreciate. She also offered to transfer Jimothy to a new pot, saying that the leaves had gotten so big. I try to water it, but I have recently turned to forgetfulness, so Jimothy has only been getting watered once a week. All his blooms had shriveled up, even if all his leaves grew, so I don't really know how my landlord will feel when she sees what's left of the blooms for the first time in months. The rest of this weekend was unironically spent on typing out this bloghan, and also worrying about my future career (to get into the industry I want, I'm going to have to put in a lot of time building up skills over the next year or so), and about all the things I wanted to write (so much fiction, so little time), including my untouched assignments (I don't wanna do a slideshow). At least this time, my manager was able to submit the evaluation form on time... one less thing to worry about going into next week.

Future plans

This week wasn't one of being unmotivated, but not one of being particularly motivated either: just a week of being me, doing things I like and all that. Here's what I did end up doing:

Well, I did say I would do more reading or writing and I ended up doing more gaming and more work instead. I don't really mind it all that much, it just feels like I'm doing the same stuff over and over again. That being said, this upcoming week, I hope to finish 'A Court of Thorns and Roses,' 'Ace Attorney: Justice for All,' a mini cryptic crossword featuring a Schrödinger word, and maybe a couple of cryptics with larger words (6x6, 7x7, 8x8 even?). We'll see if I get to play through more 'Danganronpa' this week. I really hope to start working on that new D&D campaign with my co-DM, and also to finish off the mystery in the game with my home friends. Finally, I learned this week that certain public libraries allow you to borrow instruments, and I want to go try borrowing a violin, since I haven't had a chance to play mine in years. I will first have to get a library card though, which may be tough considering that I'm only a temporary resident here.

Song of the week

'The Winner Takes it All' (https://youtu.be/WbnG3eAGb6Y), by ABBA is the song of the week. Again, this one made song of the week not because of some insane rebound I had after an ex while the ex's rebound didn't work out very well (I've never had an ex to rebound from), but because I've been listening to it quite a lot this week. I just downloaded it onto my phone this past Sunday, and I've been listening to it throughout the week a couple of times, usually playing it twice whenever it came up. I have a close friend who "locks in" to ABBA songs, and while he wasn't the one who introduced me to them (that was father), it was a memory of him telling me that was what he listened to while studying that prompted me to go ahead and listen to ABBA for the first time in a while, and carry it around with me too. While the main idea of the song can be a bit confusing for me, since I just don't have the necessary experience, I really like the ideas it presents beside that main idea, but I'm afraid I probably don't understand those fully either. It's not so bad though, I have my place, and they have theirs.

Until next time

Surely this time I don't forget to actually make the bloghan live on Sunday. Surely. I think it's because I've gotten used to preparing posts on the random thoughts, but not publishing them right away, waiting for the end of the week, which won't really work for bloghans... Well, I hope me publishing this on Sunday starts a good trend continuing in bloghan 22, or starting in bloghan 22 if it doesn't start for bloghan 21.

- bubbler

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