Keeping up...

You know, for a while there I was actually ahead on posting things here. This week, I suspect I'm just going to miss some entries, and I'm fine with that. We're getting Secondborn caught up (slowly), I'm trying to get my sleep schedule under control (which would be easier if I didn't keep needing to do work-related things off-hours), and I'm trying to pitch in more with just generally keeping the house clean so we're not all driven to distraction and having allergy attacks. So I'm not going to worry too much if I miss a day or two here and there. Call it triage. 

So, instead, you get a spot of David Allen Coe. 

Writing, 2025

I'm taking a break from writing -- as much as I ever do or can, anyway -- while mind and body recover from the horror that was the month of May. (No, I still don't know why May is trying to kill me, but the evidence is incontrovertible.) It probably won't affect the blog much, but my current Horny Superteens project is at a spot where, if I try to go back to it now I won't have the perspective to figure out how to wrap up the current scene -- and that's a surefire recipe for writer's block. Phooey to that, I say!

I'm currently taking a fun little writing class on developing secondary characters, which I'm using to fill in ideas for an upcoming project involving a tween were-squirrel who gets sent into the Haunted Forest to protect his village, but that's low-key and low-stress (and also, as I mentioned, fun -- I get to see what a bunch of other people are working on and what their characters look like). 

So the blog may be seeing a bit more in the way of music, short bits, and dad jokes than usual, or I may be posting more of these "State of Me" bits of navel-gazing, but I'll still be posting. I may even have some more vignettes from the Horny Superteens project, as I build up to diving back in. Dunno; very much just going to play it as it comes. 

Also, as an update to yesterday's post: I... may have been a little optimistic. I took it easy at work, actually got a surprising amount done -- following up on and closing out some tickets, looking at some other issues, and taking care of some last-minute requests -- but man, I slowed down during the afternoon, and after I got back home I crashed. Hard. For about three and a half hours. So apparently I'm at the stage of recuperation where my body is just like, "Okay, buddy, you're going to listen me, and when I say you're going to sleep you're going to sleep. You got that?"

Off-blog writing project

I've been fiddling with a writing project outside of the Blog o' Doom here, which -- in conjunction with some Big Life Changes that have thrown off the stuff I had going more regularly (Dark Armor, A Wolf In The Mundus) -- is why I don't actually have any significant content for this morning. So... music. 

Shall we go with some Metric? Sure, why not.

State of the Unio-- um, Me. Or the Blog.

Whuf. So we're a little off-schedule here. Dark Armor hasn't been updated in weeks, the Thursday D&D posting have been erratic because the games have had scheduling issues, our DM is moving to Boston in just a little bit, I'm two weeks into a new job, and Firstborn is heading off to college in less than a month. 

I am 25000% out of my head. 

The job change is good: better pay, nice people to work with, a much more focused scope, and a lot less bullshit. They actually promote internally. The only real downside is the commute, which isn't a big difference in time but does cost more in gas and tollway extortion. I'm digging into some things that are very familiar -- user roles, workflows, and like that -- and some things that really aren't -- utility billing, permits, and suchlike. 

So far, nobody from the former job has called me to ask for help about the stuff I handled previously, but then I was very careful about who I gave the new cell phone number to. 

Dark Armor will likely be back as soon as I can get the rest of my shit together and put myself back in that headspace. It'll keep its place on Fridays. 

D&D will likely continue, just online, and the high schoolers should hopefully have picked back up by the time this posts; they're due to interact with the orcs who oversee the dinosaur herds. Following the collapse of the campaign that I was playing in, one of the other players is running a series of sessions in Disgraceland: the island that was taken over by his sorcerer-turned-vampire in the last campaign. I'm not sure about posting the notes from that campaign here; I'm playing Olen Mosk, a half-fiend Bard with an emphasis on Bluff and Oratory, and the other players are the priest of a sex cult and a halfling druid who's a literal trash panda. I'm also considering DMing something for one particular Discord server that I'm on; I'm just not sure how much headspace I have for that. 

I'm very sad about our DM moving to Boston; that's going to seriously curtail my social life here in Texas. This is not to say that I disagree with the decision; I can absolutely understand why they'd want to.

Firstborn heading off to college... if we're being honest, I have absolutely no idea how I feel about this. I'm distracted, of course, but I think I'm also in denial; I'll probably figure out how I feel about it when I finally get around to reacting to it, which might be a while. I will, however, say without reservation that I am incredibly proud of the child (even if I shouldn't really be calling him a child anymore; he's old enough to get drafted). It's time to give him room to make his own mistakes. Maybe past time, given that he spent his Freshman year of high school on Covid lockdown. 

My navel-gazing posts are  usually kind of mixed news, but actually I'm feeling pretty positive about this one; it's just that there's a lot going on. I hope the rest of you are on a more positive trajectory as well.

Quiet weekend, busy week

Well, it was mostly a quiet weekend. We played D&D for the middle school group on Saturday morning -- we're breaking in a new player -- and then went by the local comic book shop for National Comic Book Day and Star Wars Day (May 4th - so, May the fourth be with you) and out to lunch. So that part was busier than I'd expected, but it all went really well and nobody was taken prisoner by the Inquisitorius. 

I'm still kind of broken -- I swear, the more I try to take care of myself the worse I feel -- but I'm starting to feel like I might someday have the energy for writing again, at least. Monday, meanwhile, has returned with its usual load of Having a Job and needing to Plan All The Things, and also needing to make sure that Secondborn is keeping up with his work so that he can actually finish the year. 

Meanwhile I have tea and food, so I'm going to dive in and see how much I can get done if I stick to a sensible, steady pace... which may or may not happen, since timesheets are due this morning and there's usually some last minute panic. Still, I hold to the hope.

Idea for a Novel

Just reiterating something here that I was... ranting about? ...on Twitter, in response to this tweet:

On the other hand, small scale personal/emotional can be more important than ever in the context of even a slow moving disaster. See Emma Donoghue's gorgeous novel set in a 1918 flu ward, The Pull of the Stars. https://t.co/J2Tfw31MnP

— Sarah Pinsker (@SarahPinsker) December 20, 2021

You can find my response on Twitter, but I'm reproducing it here because not everybody follows me on Twitter. 

I swear I'm going to write a pandemic novel where everybody just keeps going to work and shopping and eating in restaurants and there's just this occasional aside like, "Did you hear about John? Yeah. Last Tuesday. Funeral's next week." Because honestly, that's how this feels.

Our protagonist will be training a new co-worker but there won't be any discussion of what happened to the previous co-worker, just a vague allusion to the handout from the funeral that's still on the bulletin board by the coffee machine.

Somebody will start ranting about how people need to be more careful and everyone will just look at them and edge slowly away.

Periodically there will be emails from management or bulletins posted from the Department of Health explaining that extra precautions are advised but not required at this time, but there will be no mention of what the precautions would be *for*. 

But other than that it'll just be a perfectly mundane slice-of-life book, with no dramatic character arcs and nobody really learning anything. Character growth? Naw.

Until *maybe*, at the very end of the book, the protagonist undergoes a full emotional collapse under the weight of all the things that everyone has been carefully ignoring the whole time.

I'm so tired, y'all. And it's not just the ongoing global pandemic, it's the persistent failure of leadership and the outright gaslighting from our Republican political figures and their pet media outlets. Yes, the global pandemic was always going to be horrible, but still: it didn't have to be this way. 

Blog-wise... I'm probably going to put something up for tomorrow, and there may be a few more entries next week, but it's also possible that it's just going to be radio silence over here until January. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and be careful out there: it looks like the holidays are making everyone a little deranged right now. 

   

Small Break

So I am, for vague and highly personal reasons which aren't entirely clear even to myself, taking a small break. Like, today and tomorrow. I expect to be back on Wednesday for the blogging challenge, and follow up with the usual installments of Dark Armor and Into The Black on Thursday and Friday. But in the meantime, I'm not going to push myself to produce content, and I'm going to think about maybe DMing for the Tuesday Night Group, while our regular DM takes a well-deserved break.

Just keeps coming...

It's been a weird, busy week and Beautiful Wife and I are both pretty worn out with it already. I expect I'll have the regular blog entries for the rest of the week, but there's a definite possibility that I just collapse into bed and nothing gets written until later. So if nothing shows up, well... that's what happened.

2020

So the holidays finally caught up with me and I was out sick yesterday. (Hopefully I'm at work today, because I have Things To Do...)

Regular writings will resume next week, with both Dark Armor and Into The Black; for today, just stop and marvel at the fact that we are now living in the distant future of 2020...

...I think I still have a sourcebook or two from that edition somewhere.

I have topics, but no brain...

I have blog topics that I could probably knock off pretty quickly if I had any kind of brain for doing brain-things. Topics would include:

1. We took the kids to a ropes course last Saturday. I have pictures, and even video, and plenty of commentary. What I do not have is the ability to make the words go into the sentences.

2. Firstborn's project from last week's coding camp. This was fairly simple, but also pretty neat, and again I have video but no ability to focus.

3. Firstborn is spending this week in Teen Camp. (He's been twelve for like six weeks now, so he only just barely qualifies.) Apparently they took the Teens by the mall as one of their early activities. Firstborn has comments about touring a mall with a pair of teenage girls and a guy who doesn't care enough to argue against going into clothing stores.

4. We got the basketball net set up beside the driveway, which means I have achieved a personal goal, and it didn't even leave me dribbling. I'm not sure this one merits an actual blog post, but any opportunity for puns is a slam-dunk.

5. Oh! And Secondborn zinged his brother a good one on the way down to the ropes course.


...So I'm just going to leave these here, in the hopes that maybe I'll come back and flesh them out when I have a brain.

Yeah, so...

I don't seem to be writing much for the blog right now.

That's partially because I have plenty of other things on my mind. But it's also, and more importantly, because I'm actually making some progress on a writing project. And that takes time and attention, which means less time and attention to devote to my presence here. (Also: Twitter. But really mainly writing.)

There's probably a better (and better-organized) way to do this, but right now this is what I have and this is what I'm doing. So I'm pretty sure that posting on the Blog o' Doom here is going to be a lot more erratic, but I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

On a vaguely related topic: being over-committed sucks. Don't do it. Get the sleep you need.

Yes, I'm absolutely terrible at taking my own advice.

Why all the blogs?

A while back, I put up an "Ask Me Whatever" post. My iFriend Lydia responded with a variety of interesting questions, which I've been meaning to get back to for a week or two now. So, here's the first of them:

You have several old blogs that you haven't updated in ages. Do you think you'll ever return to any of them? How do you decide when it's time to move on to a new site?

The dynamic here is actually a bit different from what the question implies. With one exception, these aren't blogs where I used to post before I decided to move on; they're blogs created to handle alternate writing projects, most of which I hope to get back to "one of these days".

The lone exception is the BorderTown blog, which was originally created in an attempt to find a replacement for a message board devoted to the Bordertown books. I'd forgotten it even existed until Blogger contacted me a couple of years back and asked me to claim it. So that one really is a sort of historical artifact.

The Shining Walls was a writing project - an attempt to see if I could finish a fantasy novel if I wrote it in blog-post-sized bites. It's one I'd like to come back to, but there are some issues with the plot and setting that I need to work out first. It's about a vampire who gets reawakened to help defend the last human citadels against the hordes of darkness that have overrun everything else. Scripture's Shadow is similar; it was going to be a retelling of the Bible, probably from the perspective of Cain, but instead the stories that are there are a lot more scattershot. Monstrosities was another such projects, which would have been (and maybe someday will be) a modern dark fantasy/horror story, or possibly short story collection. (I had another one for my All The Apocalypses story, but it seems to have gone away - probably from disuse.)

Right Behind isn't really mine; it's a group blog that I'm part of. It grew out of the commentariat over at Slacktivist, and our attempts to write alternate, better versions of the Left Behind books. It's been a long time since I've posted anything there, though.

Surreal Situations is my webcomic, and the only blog besides this one that gets updated regularly. It's an alternate-worlds-spanning pulp adventure, created largely from my children's toys.

So that's pretty much the whys and wherefores of my Vast Collection Of Blogs.

Post-Sick

So, I'm at the stage where the horrible head cold has mostly gone away, but I'm still low on energy and have a bit of a lingering cough which is making it difficult to get a full night's sleep. I'm not sick, but I'm definitely not well yet, either. Surreal Situations should update sometime tomorrow and again on Friday. Meanwhile, I have to focus on some things here at work, and if I do get some energy back I'm going to work on the zero-draft of the Unpublished Dark Fantasy Novel. (Well, energy and time. It's the scheduling that breaks me, I swear.)

All that to say, basically, that the Blog O' Doom here may be a bit more quiet than usual.

About to be out of town again...

I'm out all next week, and this week is pretty crazy (between being only four days long, and trying to be ready for the conference. So I have no idea what will be going on here on the Blog o' Doom, but I suspect the summary is "not much". With any luck, I'll make it back without being eaten by zombies. Or velociraptors. Or zombie velociraptors.

Tired... Too tired...

Work is trying to kill me. The boys' schools are both frustrating me. I don't seem to be able to make time to really settle in and write, and when I try to force it, well... it jumps off the rails, as this little Halloween short just did. We're headed into the holidays, which are fraught in their own special ways as well. (Interesting word, fraught. It's the archaic past participle of freight. So when you say something is "fraught", the image is of something fully loaded, carrying cargo.) Beautiful Wife has hit the point in the semester where her students are freaking out and falling apart (she had something like four of them burst into tears in her office the other day), and she's got Sisyphus' own load of grading to get finished. Allergies are leaving both of us tired and headache-y. (Headacheous? Headacheicitous? Whatever.) Both the boys need to be getting more exercise, but I honestly don't see when that could possibly happen.

I am fucking worn out. We both are. Hell, probably all four of us are. I have no idea how we make it through the holidays, let alone the rest of the school year.

So... I think what I'm going to do is go and make myself a drink, fire up the Playstation, and engage in outrageous acts of imaginary violence until my shoulders don't feel so much like they're trying to crawl up my back. And then I'm going to go to sleep. And hopefully, in the morning, I'll feel better -- you know, rested and alert and more able to cope.

Odds are, though, there won't be anything on the blog for at least a day or two.

The Parenting Equation

Here's my Unified Field Theory of Parental Sanity:

S=(T/E) + M - W

Where:
S = Sanity
T = Time
E = Energy
M = Money
W = Work

Low results correspond to cluttered houses, hastily-prepared meals, and dark circles under parents' eyes, and various other signs of emotional breakdown. High-value results correspond to neat houses, home-cooked gourmet meals, well-organized and biddable children, and parents who are fit, happy, and energetic (who are completely horrible people, I'm just sure of it).

'Tis the season (for illness)

Got hugely, horribly sick on Tuesday. Like, "I don't trust myself to drive a car, and I probably shouldn't get out of bed." That kind of sick. I have antibiotics now, but I've dropped pretty much everything -- including updating the Blog o' Doom, here -- in favor of getting as much rest as humanly possible. I'll be back when I'm sure my brain is working again.

April 2014 State of the Blogger

Real life has gotten a little... interesting for me. I've taken on some new responsibilities at work, which is good for my job security and my prospects of maybe someday getting a promotion. It has also dramatically increased my workload all by itself... plus, we're looking at upgrading to the latest version of the software in early June. That means that we need to upgrade the test servers in time for some of our more experienced end users to test them, and that means...

Tuesday. We're making that upgrade on Tuesday.

It wouldn't be that big a deal by itself. I mean, yes, it's a big project and if anything goes wrong it could eat up hours or even days of my life, but once it's done it's done.

Unfortunately, this is the last week in April, and May is (as always) The Month Of The Festivals, when every city in North Texas tries to squeeze their events into that brief moment of nice weather before summer comes and tries to immolate us all. For me, this means last-minute updates to event websites; it means photography at the events, so that we have images we can use to build future websites; it means a heady combination of stress, exhaustion, and overtime which leaves me deeply ambivalent about the whole thing.

...And when we come out of that? Why, yes: it's early June. Time to update those live servers, and very probably everybody's clients as well. No matter how closely we examine the results of the upgrade on the test servers, doing it on the live system is still likely to go horribly, soul-devouringly wrong.

Still, once that's done, I can get some rest... No, wait. Once that's done, we have the other major software upgrade - the one that, if past experience is any predictor, has been subjected to a minimal and insufficient amount of testing and quality assurance; the one whose documentation is written by semi-literate monkeys who have a habit of copying and pasting quasi-relevant bits of older documentation, and who have never even heard of the concept of proof-reading.

...Not that I'm bitter, or anything.

Anyway, that one's scheduled for... late June? Early July, maybe? ...and it's guaranteed to be a horrible ordeal.

Somewhere in there, we have at least one other website that we're trying to migrate over to a Content Management System, so that department can actually keep their own information up to date. That means we have to finish building out their new site, which for some reason requires me to assemble all the links for the needlessly-antiquated scheduling system they insist on using. There's also another set of departmental web-pages which we've almost finished re-designing and re-organizing, and which are almost ready to replace the existing pages. That's probably no more than a couple of hours of work, if we can just find a couple of hours in here somewhere.

TL;DR: At any given point between now and the beginning of August, I'm very likely to be completely out of my mind with stress, exhaustion, and/or workload. I have no idea what effect that will have on the Blog o' Doom, here. But if I suddenly drop off the face of the Internet, it's almost certainly because my job is trying to kill me. Feel free to send help. Or cookies. Or rum. Rum would be good.

Slight Delay...

So, yeah, I didn't actually come up with anything to post today. I'm hoping to throw something up at lunch - I have a couple of ideas primed, I just haven't been able to sit down and pull them together. If that doesn't work, well... I'll have something for tomorrow.


Meanwhile, a question: What's the weirdest dream you've had lately? What's the weirdest dream you ever had?

Crawling back out of the pit

So, with the help of antibiotics and various other medications, I'm slowly recovering from the whatever-this-was that has had me floored for the last week or so. Sleep is pretty critical at this point; I got a solid night last night, and I feel like I need about three more. I don't know how active the blog will be; I'm trying to catch up on some outside writing (and reading, and a half-dozen or so movies)so it's very likely that there will be some interruptions around here.

Meanwhile, I picked up the latest album from Within Temptation. It's not my favorite piece of their work, but it's well done and plenty enjoyable. Here's a sample to amuse yourselves with:


In books, I've been reading Xu Lei's Dark Prospects books, which are basically a story of adventure and exploration set in China (and Mongolia) around the time of the cultural revolution. They seem to fall into the basic category of "weird tales", and excitement, fear, and discoveries abound. If you like that sort of thing, check them out. (I haven't quite finished the second book, but I feel safe both in recommending the pair of them, and in classifying them as weird tales.)