Bright End of Nowhere

The recent Tumblr (and my subsequent technical assessments of pillowfort.io) nonsense reminded me that this exists.

Hello!

Since I last posted, I
1. successfully defended a Master's thesis
2. graduated with a Masters.
3. dealt with family nonsense.
4. got hired by a company
5. started running a tabletop
6. got laid off by a company
7. started tinkering with Maker-like projects (desktop 3D printing and CNC and electronics)
8. started learning Javascript
9. accepted a new job (as of...15 minutes ago)

When I lay it all out like that, I can't tell if I've been really busy or not at all.

I keep putting off posting because I don't think I have anything substansial to let people know I'm still alive.

Anyway. My life has once again gone crazy and I'm just trying to keep up.

1.) Two PC game recs:

1a.) Transistor is really, really pretty. And it's fun and fairly clever. Reviews on the internet complain that the story is a little opaque, but really, it's because they did some interesting narrative tricks instead of laying it all out for you in a linear fashion. You figure it out by putting together what ephemera you find along with the (unreliable, biased) narrator is saying. It's made by Supergiant Games, the same people who made Bastion. And they got Darren Korb to do music again, so the soundtrack is excellent.

1b.) I accidentally 9 hours on Sunday playing Endless Space, which I guess is best described as Master of Orion-meets-Civ. 4X space game that's actually playable and doesn't feel overwhelming with micromanagement in real-time (it's turn-based). I hear the DLC expansion kind of sucks, though.

2.) I somehow got myself roped into staffing and being a plotwriter for a woods-LARP. As a corollary to that, I've found myself with the task of writing an entire critical mechanic system over the summer. Why I do this to myself, I'll never know.

3.) Trying to get my contract extended at work. This may or may not happen, depending on a grant. The probability of getting said grant might increase if I can manage to get a paper submitted. Which is where most of my energy is going. What's not going to that is going to the back-up plan, which is "find a new job". This plan is annoying. (On that note, anyone looking to hire a mechanical engineer with too much EE for her own good, who actually likes fluid dynamics, and has spent more time than one would think doing signal processing for biological systems?)

In case you were wondering, the US job market really fucking sucks for non-CS STEM right now. Especially non-CS STEM who are neither new graduates nor have 5+ years experience.

( My mom said looking for a job was like having a second job. She's totally right. )

I've found myself mostly dumping any free time into Skyrim these days. At this point it's sort of mindless, or doesn't require as much brain as actually using the Planetary Annihilation alpha access I bought from Kickstarter would require. Which is unfortunate, but seriously. Not enough brain to alpha test. Totally enough brain to shoot bandits with arrows.

(My Dragonborn seems to have developed a personality in my head and will not leave me alone. I thought the Lone Wanderer was bad. I should have known what I was in for as soon as I started calling it "Fallout: the Elder Scrolls".)

I had an exercise in...frustration today that at one point left me wanting to murder EA, burn down their HQ, and salt the earth on which it stood.

( It started innocently enough. )

Look, I am not a Steam apologist. I like the platform. I like it because it works and is the best currently out there that I've used. I would like it just as much if Steam had an actual competitor. (Things were great when AMD and Intel were hugely competitive.) But they don't, not really. And Origin is almost 10 years late to the party, does it worse than Steam, and acts like it's going to win this fight. I'm just not impressed by it. I wouldn't use it if I had a choice.

At least I have the game now.

Just so we're clear, internet denizens, I'm going to take this moment and just say that I'm probably going to go flat-out batshit insane for the next few weeks. See, I somehow thought it'd be a great idea to apply to grad school when I'm in the middle of writing a tenday. (I can't even blame the drugs for that brilliant decision, as I'm sick now and not 1.5 months ago. And for the record? Only I could get con-crud from a scientific conference. Why I thought grad students were healthier than gamers or sci-fi/fantasy fans I'll never know.)

And the first one is due in ten days, the next two 15 after that, and the last one 16 after that.

And then 20 days until the aformentioned tenday.

Oh my god, I am going to die.

(Washington D.C. was lovely, by the way. If only I hadn't had sucky internet so I could have actually done work instead of, uh, conferencing and goofing off. And sleeping.)

Last weekend was the big moving weekend for us, so all that's left really is to clean the old apartment. And not a moment too soon as while we're almost set up at the new place, so we won't be having to haul furniture in a hurricane. We're supposed to get hit by Irene on Sunday. Note that this is following the earthquake on Tuesday. Yes, I live in Boston.

I'm really, really sorry about all those natural disasters I played with in SimCity and SimEarth as a kid. Is this the Sims getting revenge?

I think my plan is to go grab a few non-perishables from the grocery store tonight and see if I can't rescue my bike from the old apartment tomorrow. (It's handy living with someone from Florida right now! He tells me how to not be dumb.)

I noticed that Bahamut was behaving oddly sluggish when using Firefox yesterday morning. I didn't deal with it then, figuring virus scan was running in the background, so left for work. When I came home, I noticed that it was still laggy, and then checked the RAM usage, which was logged in at just under "slightly ridiculous". Which, okay, it's Firefox 3.6.xx, which we all know leaks RAM like the Titanic. So I restart the program and Chrome, and that makes it somewhat better.

Then I start trying to play League of Legends, and holy hell, thank god that was a bot game because I was getting maybe 10 seconds of play every 30. It was choking on the game that much. (It says something about the quality of the bots that despite this, I was STILL winning against it, with my only deaths being accidental tower-dives. Or, you know, that it's because I was playing Teemo, and Teemo is awesome. This led to some amusing moments of "ultranos has killed an enemy!" "I did? When?! HOW?!") I closed just about every other program in the hopes that it was a memory leak somewhere, but no such luck. So, reboot time.

Apparently, that was my first mistake. (My zeroth mistake was mentioning my computer was acting strangely over Teamspeak with DMark, which means he thought about it, which means problems were going to start occurring.)

Long story short, my computer is over, the 1TB HD with the OS has a bad sector and needs to be RMAed because it's still in warranty (thanks, Seagate!), and all my data has to be transferred off of it before I send it in. Most of my critical data is stored in multiple places, so the only thing I'm grumpy about with regards to that is trying to figure out how to rescue my saved games (like the 90-hour unfinished game of DA:O...). I might also take the time to grab an SSD off Newegg and install the OS on that. Mostly, though, this is just a pain in the ass that I don't really want to deal with, but have to, because I do love Bahamut, even when it is a problem child.

It could also be that the universe is telling me to spend the weekend finishing A Dance with Dragons, as I'm 40% of the way through it, and it is currently breaking my heart. SO GOOD. Even if the book ended where I'm at right now, I'd be happy. Well, joining the fandom in crying for more, but happy. (Damn, with Bahamut down, it'll be harder to make the ASoIaF icon set I was planning. Oh well.)

So, because apparently the trees trying to kill me (it's their annual assassination attempt) wasn't enough, I woke up this morning with my left kneecap apparently misaligned. You know, that wonderful grinding, crunchy noise of bone against bone when I attempted to move it. And tiny shots of stabbing pain every time I tried to walk on it. I seriously feared it'd give out on me after I made it down the stairs and to the down the street for a new brace (because apparently gremlins hid my old ones in my room somewhere).

I dislocated my knee twice, once at 18 and the other at 21, and it's never quite recovered. I can't run on it, and I visibly limp even when I try to jog. I can't do a lot of lower-body weight training exercises because of the injury. I really fucking hate it because I used to play soccer, fence, and practice jiu-jitsu and then that got taken away from me. And to add insult to injury, I get people telling me I need to be more active [so I can lose weight, I guess, or just "be healthy"], but they neglect to remember that vast majority of things they do, I physically can't.

It's not that I want this old injury, but I'm running low on ways to fix it when I have ~no money for PT or a gym membership (thanks, student loans) for specialized equipment. Anyone have any ideas on something that can strengthen quads (apparently, my hamstrings are the only thing keeping me upright) that's low-impact and does not require much extra equipment?

Between this, the near-migranes I had to push through this week, and the allergies starting up again? I want my own secret lair and sweet robot legs.

1) I still need to finish Avatar: the Last Airbender, because, really, 6 months as a break is getting ridiculous. (Yes, abyssinia, I promise I will finish it soon.) That hasn't stopped me from either looking for fic or from writing it. And I realized I have a slight problem.

Maybe it's distance, or maybe I'm reading too far into it and misinterpreting, but I've studied a bit of Chinese and Japanese history (much more Japanese, I admit freely), and I, you know, very much see things in A:tLA where I go "hey! That's [foo] Dynasty!" Or "That's [bar] Period!" And maybe it's wrong of me to and think that if I want to figure out the socio-economic intricacies of the various nations, I go and read up on the relevant periods of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean history. Because that's what I'm doing.

And so I've discovered that it drives me absolutely up the wall when I keep seeing Western interpretations of social hierarchies and historical/cultural artifacts and practices that have no logical reason to exist in the Avatar-verse. I'm starting to wonder if something's wrong with me.

(The things currently making me howl are the number of fics containing foot-binding, which makes no bloody sense for numerous reasons, and the portrayal of the Bei Fong family as nobility or "high-born", despite being merchants. As far as I know, merchants were kind of at the bottom of the polite social society until the 1600s at least in both China and Japan.

This knowledge is making me slowly want to gnaw my own arms off as I keep reading fics that run contrary to history. Somebody save me.)

2) My collection of books by Japanese authors keeps growing. I'm currently reading Housuke Noriji's Usurper of the Sun, which is full of science and a neat, brilliant female scientist protagonist. In a hard-SF book! With the fate of the world in the balance! Oh, and ALIENS. But not yet.

It's making be grin a lot.

3) I need to remember how to play Dominion and Settlers of Catan really well, because my current mad plan involves taking both home with me and attempting to get my family hopelessly addicted. My mom seems receptive to the idea.

4) Maybe someday, I will be able to go a week without calling my mother 4 times a week. :/ Then again, yesterday, she told me "thank you", because she totally knows what I'm doing.

5) I hate migraines. Especially low-grade migraines that don't completely debilitate me so that I feel guilty if I try to take it easy and generally feel like I'm slacking. Why yes, I've had 4 of these in the last 2 weeks. My current drug regime isn't really working, and only the "oh god, make it go away" pills seem to work.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this before, but I've seriously fallen back into old fandoms (I guess SMT counts a new fandom for me, but whatever). I've found myself rereading old favorite NGE and FF(IV, V, VI, VIII) and Xenogears fic. This may or may not be related to how I'm hunting down the last two volumes of the NGE manga, ripped my NGE CD for archiving purposes, and that a bunch of us are watching Rebuild of Evangelion tonight.

I have no idea why I'm doing this. Additionally, this is leading me to play with some of my original fic universes. Which is slightly frustrating, because I have this giant pile of 'gateverse WIPs that I can't even be bothered to poke at right now. Which then makes me feel guilty.

MY LIFE, SO HARD.

Speaking of my life being so very difficult, I just realized that my next 4 or 5 weekends are approximately completely devoured, because the show I'm Master Electrician for (Jesus Christ Superstar) runs the first 3 weekends in September. So that also means all my available free time after this week is going to fly away.

So, you know, my life will feel like it did 3 months ago.

(I kid. I actually do love JCS as a show, and I've got a bunch of friends in cast, and it's reminding me of some of the best times I had in high school.)