"change the universe - with meat!"[0]
Nov. 7th, 2021 10:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fandomonymoushello! so!
CW FOR DISCUSSION OF HOMELESSNESS (not my own, but relevant to my career) UNDER THIS CUT / UNTIL NEXT CAPS.
I got to have the heartbreaking, powerful experience of actually visiting homeless shelters as part of my job. The world is so full of experiences, and so many of those experiences are tragedies beyond my comprehension; I have the privilege of even attempting to make these lives better, but also don't have the tools to overwhelmingly make these lives better in the best way we know how.
It's also, well, I'm currently in the office full time, which makes no fucking sense. I really really don't think I can do the rest of what I want to do (see after the CW) and this current job, if political forces keep making me have a commute and forcing me to tackle how to dress for my gender and body, and yet. Abandoning this job will feel like a deep political/activist failure, contributing to the brain drain and insular rot that makes civil service so much worse than it could be. And abandoning those people I saw, not making their lives better with my work, that feels as hard as it did when I got laid off at Elmhurst[1], if not worse. I also simply feel that I don't have the time/energy to do a job search on top of everything else going on, and well, this *is* stable. But I need to protect myself too, my other career, my partnership, my mental health. It's so hard, y'all.
END CW FOR HOMELESSNESS. Let's talk about the rest of my life, which is going in very different directions.
...was Celebration really less than a month ago??? oh god. The week before was dominated by uh, too-crunchy behavior on my part[2], but we made something really wonderful. It is also very hard to make a trip to Calgary from NYC "quick" and "easy", particularly with things like COVID test requirements and a broken phone along the way[3], but Harriet and I made it work, did really great work during the conference, and managed to have a really relaxing low-spoon con-drop day before I flew out, so fuck yeah to that.
It does suck that I will not see her in person again before the New Year. It would have been nice to fly up there again before then, but uh, my job won't let me work remote (see above, within the CW) and I'm burning a bunch of PTO for Florida anyway (see below). Sigh.
So, that "part time consulting gig" I'm doing on the side? That's real, that's happening, that's fucking project management for one of the best indie game devs out there. I'm supposed to only be doing this ten hours a week, my weekday evenings, with my weekends still free (including Friday nights for therapy). I wish I could do it all the time, but a) Xalavier literally can't afford that and b) that's a one way ticket to Burnout City, City of Burnout. But still. I'm so damn excited to be like...picking at these brains, helping them do good things, part of projects I believe in. The pay ain't fantastic, but it's not exploitative...as long as I stick to ten hours a week. hahahahauuugh.
Still hanging with my local polycule sometimes, most notably for a chill weekend watching neat Halloween circus acts. I've got Friendsgiving plans too, which is nice. I do feel a *little* lonely - it's hard not to want to fill all my time with Scaffold work when I don't have weekend plans, and I really miss having a regular meetup where I was guaranteed to talk to someone completely new without the pressures of Dating Or Whatever. But also goddamn I am so busy now, and my old meetups didn't really survive the plague. A conundrum.
My comet is not visiting after all, because he *also* started a new job recently, which valid and also contributes to the loneliness I discussed. Sigh.
Solidified plans to go to Florida, December 16 - 25. (Flying out on Christmas Day, like I flew out on Thanksgiving Day 2 years ago.) Still planning to partially come out to my parents - certainly about Harriet, and the Scaffold gig, and specifically some name things about the Scaffold gig[4]. It will also be good to see many of my college friends again, and in one case their kids will be old enough to like, maybe remember I'm a person that exists. It does complicate my usually personally elaborate Advent/Christmas plans - I probably can't have a real tree this year if I'll be away from the apartment for a week, and I'll be hauling a bunch of cards to Florida to write and send out while I have the time off, I guess?? But hopefully I can manage getting to the holiday markets in NYC before I fly out!
Blaseball is back! I am...less invested than I used to be! It actually has a lot of the feeling of trying again to get into Euro-football - the players aren't the ones I connected with, my life and priorities looks very different from the time that I really cared, but also I do enjoy just sitting down with fans who do care and listening to them enthuse. There's also the fact that due to the way the current season is going, things are less...analytically interesting to me, in a way that makes my contributions to the fandom less engaged. I think that'll change over time, but yeah.
Animal Crossing is *also* back, and I *am* dropping lots of hours into that, mostly over my commute and other forced downtimes. It's an interesting balance between joy and tedium, as that game often is. I'm psyched to learn more recipes and finally make some big house changes! It's also been a nice 'setting' for dates for me and Harriet, which is just lovely. <3
As it goes, friends!
footnotes that are as long as the actual post, sigh-
[0] I have the best job.
[1] September 2015 - June 2017, I was a deeply underpaid number cruncher at a local public hospital here in Queens. Despite the "okay it makes more sense for me to still live with my parents" paycheck and a too-hovering boss, a part of me still thinks this was my ideal non gamedev job - the tangible effects on a neighborhood I love dearly were really powerful to me, and the location can't be beat. ...Now that I write this I wonder if my old boss is close to retirement and I can just poach his job. Full remote is ideal, and there was plenty wrong that led to the big layoffs throughout that system in 2017, but this would mean walking distance from Kawa Arena...
[2] Instead of just "third party chat app plus a live stream", we run our own browser-based MUD-inspired chat software. While two absolute wizards attempted to mostly-roll-our-own video chat, I ended up taking on the task of implementing room descriptions and game-like features within the space itself. I'd hoped for more new features, but we had no time; we ended up planting riddles throughout the space and "/go [solution]" would take you to hidden rooms. Harriet did some technical work here and gave me a staging environment to play in. Another organzier did the actual riddle writing, entirely off the cuff, which was insane and wonderful and creative people scare and delight me. But this meant I was spending every waking moment plugging all of that into our very baroque code, and making sure it mostly worked, as well as some producer-ish work making sure everyone's time was used well, at the expense of myself. ...This is a theme.
[3] Yeah, guess which idiot dropped a phone into a toilet for the second time in 3 years....a few days before having to fly internationally. I swallowed my pride and bought what seemed like a decent phone with Amazon's fastest possible delivery. There's been....weird hiccups since; it took some time for AT&T to give me full service, I missed an important voicemail once, finding a case for this phone was a nightmore. But we sadly live in a world where not having the Pocket Computer is incredibly worse than having it, esp given stuff like "oh, the proof I've been vaccinated and thus can enter restaurants lives in the Pocket Computer" and "my anchor relationship is international long distance and thus the cheapest way to stay in touch is through the Pocket Computer".
[4] A week into my work at Scaffold, I got asked if I should be credited with my wallet name for Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator[0]. I'm choosing to pair Kawa with my legal surname. Which is admittedly how I've been thinking of myself for ages now, but this is the first time I would acknowledge this in a context that has also made me money, so that's wild. My Facebook (which I only use for Messenger and events, and is the only way I stay in contact with my parents) uses both my wallet name and Kawa, so it can't be that much of a suprise; nicknames are part of Pilipino culture anyway; and I don't plan to change my name legally until every legal document I could have either has no gender markers or an X option I'm capable of changing.
[4b] Harriet has worked in AAA or adjacent to it for years now, and sadly mostly has cancelled or long-delayed projects to show for it. The contrast to the above still makes me really emotional in a way that's hard to describe. Though a date coming up Very Soon will have gamedev signficance for both of us, which is wild and joyful.
CW FOR DISCUSSION OF HOMELESSNESS (not my own, but relevant to my career) UNDER THIS CUT / UNTIL NEXT CAPS.
I got to have the heartbreaking, powerful experience of actually visiting homeless shelters as part of my job. The world is so full of experiences, and so many of those experiences are tragedies beyond my comprehension; I have the privilege of even attempting to make these lives better, but also don't have the tools to overwhelmingly make these lives better in the best way we know how.
It's also, well, I'm currently in the office full time, which makes no fucking sense. I really really don't think I can do the rest of what I want to do (see after the CW) and this current job, if political forces keep making me have a commute and forcing me to tackle how to dress for my gender and body, and yet. Abandoning this job will feel like a deep political/activist failure, contributing to the brain drain and insular rot that makes civil service so much worse than it could be. And abandoning those people I saw, not making their lives better with my work, that feels as hard as it did when I got laid off at Elmhurst[1], if not worse. I also simply feel that I don't have the time/energy to do a job search on top of everything else going on, and well, this *is* stable. But I need to protect myself too, my other career, my partnership, my mental health. It's so hard, y'all.
END CW FOR HOMELESSNESS. Let's talk about the rest of my life, which is going in very different directions.
...was Celebration really less than a month ago??? oh god. The week before was dominated by uh, too-crunchy behavior on my part[2], but we made something really wonderful. It is also very hard to make a trip to Calgary from NYC "quick" and "easy", particularly with things like COVID test requirements and a broken phone along the way[3], but Harriet and I made it work, did really great work during the conference, and managed to have a really relaxing low-spoon con-drop day before I flew out, so fuck yeah to that.
It does suck that I will not see her in person again before the New Year. It would have been nice to fly up there again before then, but uh, my job won't let me work remote (see above, within the CW) and I'm burning a bunch of PTO for Florida anyway (see below). Sigh.
So, that "part time consulting gig" I'm doing on the side? That's real, that's happening, that's fucking project management for one of the best indie game devs out there. I'm supposed to only be doing this ten hours a week, my weekday evenings, with my weekends still free (including Friday nights for therapy). I wish I could do it all the time, but a) Xalavier literally can't afford that and b) that's a one way ticket to Burnout City, City of Burnout. But still. I'm so damn excited to be like...picking at these brains, helping them do good things, part of projects I believe in. The pay ain't fantastic, but it's not exploitative...as long as I stick to ten hours a week. hahahahauuugh.
Still hanging with my local polycule sometimes, most notably for a chill weekend watching neat Halloween circus acts. I've got Friendsgiving plans too, which is nice. I do feel a *little* lonely - it's hard not to want to fill all my time with Scaffold work when I don't have weekend plans, and I really miss having a regular meetup where I was guaranteed to talk to someone completely new without the pressures of Dating Or Whatever. But also goddamn I am so busy now, and my old meetups didn't really survive the plague. A conundrum.
My comet is not visiting after all, because he *also* started a new job recently, which valid and also contributes to the loneliness I discussed. Sigh.
Solidified plans to go to Florida, December 16 - 25. (Flying out on Christmas Day, like I flew out on Thanksgiving Day 2 years ago.) Still planning to partially come out to my parents - certainly about Harriet, and the Scaffold gig, and specifically some name things about the Scaffold gig[4]. It will also be good to see many of my college friends again, and in one case their kids will be old enough to like, maybe remember I'm a person that exists. It does complicate my usually personally elaborate Advent/Christmas plans - I probably can't have a real tree this year if I'll be away from the apartment for a week, and I'll be hauling a bunch of cards to Florida to write and send out while I have the time off, I guess?? But hopefully I can manage getting to the holiday markets in NYC before I fly out!
Blaseball is back! I am...less invested than I used to be! It actually has a lot of the feeling of trying again to get into Euro-football - the players aren't the ones I connected with, my life and priorities looks very different from the time that I really cared, but also I do enjoy just sitting down with fans who do care and listening to them enthuse. There's also the fact that due to the way the current season is going, things are less...analytically interesting to me, in a way that makes my contributions to the fandom less engaged. I think that'll change over time, but yeah.
Animal Crossing is *also* back, and I *am* dropping lots of hours into that, mostly over my commute and other forced downtimes. It's an interesting balance between joy and tedium, as that game often is. I'm psyched to learn more recipes and finally make some big house changes! It's also been a nice 'setting' for dates for me and Harriet, which is just lovely. <3
As it goes, friends!
footnotes that are as long as the actual post, sigh-
[0] I have the best job.
[1] September 2015 - June 2017, I was a deeply underpaid number cruncher at a local public hospital here in Queens. Despite the "okay it makes more sense for me to still live with my parents" paycheck and a too-hovering boss, a part of me still thinks this was my ideal non gamedev job - the tangible effects on a neighborhood I love dearly were really powerful to me, and the location can't be beat. ...Now that I write this I wonder if my old boss is close to retirement and I can just poach his job. Full remote is ideal, and there was plenty wrong that led to the big layoffs throughout that system in 2017, but this would mean walking distance from Kawa Arena...
[2] Instead of just "third party chat app plus a live stream", we run our own browser-based MUD-inspired chat software. While two absolute wizards attempted to mostly-roll-our-own video chat, I ended up taking on the task of implementing room descriptions and game-like features within the space itself. I'd hoped for more new features, but we had no time; we ended up planting riddles throughout the space and "/go [solution]" would take you to hidden rooms. Harriet did some technical work here and gave me a staging environment to play in. Another organzier did the actual riddle writing, entirely off the cuff, which was insane and wonderful and creative people scare and delight me. But this meant I was spending every waking moment plugging all of that into our very baroque code, and making sure it mostly worked, as well as some producer-ish work making sure everyone's time was used well, at the expense of myself. ...This is a theme.
[3] Yeah, guess which idiot dropped a phone into a toilet for the second time in 3 years....a few days before having to fly internationally. I swallowed my pride and bought what seemed like a decent phone with Amazon's fastest possible delivery. There's been....weird hiccups since; it took some time for AT&T to give me full service, I missed an important voicemail once, finding a case for this phone was a nightmore. But we sadly live in a world where not having the Pocket Computer is incredibly worse than having it, esp given stuff like "oh, the proof I've been vaccinated and thus can enter restaurants lives in the Pocket Computer" and "my anchor relationship is international long distance and thus the cheapest way to stay in touch is through the Pocket Computer".
[4] A week into my work at Scaffold, I got asked if I should be credited with my wallet name for Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator[0]. I'm choosing to pair Kawa with my legal surname. Which is admittedly how I've been thinking of myself for ages now, but this is the first time I would acknowledge this in a context that has also made me money, so that's wild. My Facebook (which I only use for Messenger and events, and is the only way I stay in contact with my parents) uses both my wallet name and Kawa, so it can't be that much of a suprise; nicknames are part of Pilipino culture anyway; and I don't plan to change my name legally until every legal document I could have either has no gender markers or an X option I'm capable of changing.
[4b] Harriet has worked in AAA or adjacent to it for years now, and sadly mostly has cancelled or long-delayed projects to show for it. The contrast to the above still makes me really emotional in a way that's hard to describe. Though a date coming up Very Soon will have gamedev signficance for both of us, which is wild and joyful.