Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I started off the day, sadly carried over from yesterday, feeling a bit depressed. Manageable, but annoying unmotivated. I didn't give much thought to the person in my other parking spot at home, though that is something of a pet peeve of mine. And swerving as a deer walked into the road on the way to work wasn't too upsetting, as it's a deer. That's sort of what they do. By the time someone decided to pull his car out from the middle of three in a merging lane over out in front of me, forcing me to slam on my breaks to not plow into him... yeah, that's the point where my depression transformed into rage. And I've been pissy and frustrated since. Work presents no particular shortage of little stupid shit that I normally just try not to dwell on, but irritate me in moods like this: - I could go into the "change this... oh wait, change that back" stuff that comes up as a matter of routine. - Or the remote ad project that was theoretically cancele...

It's a little strange to me, but several money-related issues have come to my attention and been on my mind over the weekend. Potentially ranty... Commissioned Artists A post over on Furaffinity was pointed out that spoke about commissioned art and prices. Largely, it seemed to be making the points that 1) artists often don't charge enough for their time, and 2) commissioners should understand this and be willing to pay more. Those are some valid points, but the post was horrible narrow in its view. The assumption seemed to be that every piece of commissioned artwork ought to earn at least minimum wage, based on X hours available and so on. It sort of ignores that some percentage (I want to say a majority, but I guess I don't know that) of artists have an actual job as well. If art is one's hobby, then making any money at it is more profitable than how a lot of us spend out time outside work. It also ignores that art is very much a luxury item, the market ruled by...

I seem to be in the midst of a "down week," which is to say struggling some with my more depressive moods. Such bouts are usually sparked by something . Worry over a friend, worry over finances, a stressful and unproductive work day... something. I get annoyed, or frustrated, or angry, and get into the mindset of wondering why I put up with such in my life. This leads to a somewhat cyclical sequence of thinking about things and feeling bad about them. I commonly come back to how I don't feel I've really accomplished anything in my life, and I don't really have any goals. I may berate or just ask myself about what value my life has in the grand scheme and that goes nowhere good. The most recent spiral was probably from work. Now, overall, I'm relatively happy with work. I still have a job that appears to be stable for a while. I have a boss who praises us, and our recent company of a board member was positive. But until numbers get hashed out by administration...

Serious introspection is often depressing to me, at least mildly. But I've had some of these thoughts being rather loud in my head lately, so maybe it's time to write them down in some fashion. A Lack of Ambition That's one of the things that really punctuates my life when I think about it. I've not had any real purpose or goals to my life in...a long time. An argument could easily be made that I have failed to live up to my potential. I've long been better off than my peers. I never had the perception that my family was in any way rich, but we never really seemed to want. Now, I realize that after my parents divorced and while I was living with my mom in California, things were probably tighter than I was aware of back then. And when I moved in with my dad building up to high school, my lifestyle didn't get lavish or anything. But I had money sitting in a fund for college, mostly courtesy of his father. And when further schooling was clearly not in my fu...

Urgh. Major, wearying drama last night on Faire. All because Orion realized (OOCly even) that Jezra and Jericho have been sexually involved. Now his big hangup, so he says, was less that it happened and more that he felt lied to about it. The generational difference seems to be a minor squicking point with him, but he seemed to be focusing more on how he went out of his way to make his character assume otherwise when he shouldn't have. Urgh. As far as the in-character situation goes, I really don't see how it matters much. While you insist Orion would have done things differently earlier, it hardly seems worth the retcon. Yes, perhaps he would have expressed zero interest in Jezra before sending her to talk to Tash - a conversation which resulted in Jezra writing off any chance of bedding Orion anyway. So whatever "tension" remained between the characters, I /she didn't perceive any real possibility of sex between them since that night. Would it have chang...

I started off the day rather depressed. Now I'm getting into the realm of pissed/weary. I don't like restoring computers to factory defaults on the best of days. When it doesn't fucking work that's even "better." I was hoping I could get to a point where I could have all the required programs and take it home to deal with the length installs while able to do something else myself, but it's taking a whole hell of a lot longer getting to that point than I envisioned. Use the OS reinstall disk that came with the machine? Sure, but that doesn't have any drivers. Wait, what... the... fuck? Image Recovery option? Well, that'd be great if there was an image. Make an image off another of the same model - okay, I'll just burn that onto... upwards of 20 DVDs? Uhh... okay, there's a portable hard drive, maybe... it has to be converted to NTFS first? I simply cannot catch a break here. And that doesn't even get into the bizarre screen lighting...

Rrrgh. Where to start? Perhaps with "I shouldn't have stayed up so late last night finishing that book?" That makes sense. Though I really did need to distract myself with something. MUCKing wasn't working. MMOs weren't working. And while I wanted to just go to sleep early, that wasn't happening. I was given this nice, holiday weekend and I just haven't been able to enjoy it. Too many toxic thoughts killing my mood... A lot of it comes around to the usual "mid-life crisis" questioning of purpose stuff. That invariably comes up when I'm depressed. It's frustrating because I'm consciously content with my life. I'm mostly healthy. I'm more financially-stable than most people I know. I don't really have any desire for children (heck, I don't even like people a lot of the time). Yet part of me still clings to that subtle influence of upbringing that taught life is going to school, getting a job, getting married, and rai...

... of why I'm not actually a fan of the electronification of frickin' everything: Today I got ready to go to work, went out to my car, got in, turned the key... and nothing happened. Several more attempts and the alarm actually went off. The button on the "integrated key fob" turned the alarm back off, but that still didn't fix the issue of the car not starting. Thankfully, I could retrieve the spare key from my room and it did work, but now I have a problem - and one that would have been a lot worse if I'd lost the key or it was with someone else. These integrated key fobs have buttons for door locks, trunk, and the alarm - which all still work. Apparently they also contain some data that syncs with the car to say it's a proper key and allow ignition, and I can only assume that's specifically the part that isn't working. This sort of thing doesn't happen when keys are just mechanical. Grrr. I thought maybe it was a symptom of a low ba...

Politics has a way of screwing things up and making me annoyed at people on both sides of an issue. It can be positively infuriating, especially when it rears its head in my recreational space. What are the duties of a head wizard on a MUCK anyway? I suppose opinions may vary. In my book, the position entails: - Delegation of duties to other staff and oversight of such, including appointment and removal of other wizards - Final say in matters of policy or direction (because someone has to) - Responsibility for anything not assigned to someone else Now, I strongly feel a headwiz shouldn't be making major choices without any other input or against the grain of the staff or player base. Like any leadership position, maintaining the post requires a certain level of appeasement of the masses (you can't exactly play tyrant and roll out tanks to force people to keep playing there). So on one side we have a headwiz who is prone to making seemingly-abrupt decisions and standing...

I just... rawrg! I am piiissed tonight, and it's probably only partially justified. A new laptop we got this week was booted up the first time to a failure to see its hard drive. Tech support was remarkably helpful in shipping out a replacement drive that got here yesterday, and install DVDs that got here today. Only the model doesn't have a DVD drive. So after hunting down some viable instructions on using a USB thumb drive and ISO files to boot from, I've made the files and I'm relying on this unetbootin program to put them on the USB drive (my personal one as that's all I had) and make it bootable. Only the program's been sitting on one file showing 0%. After about half an hour I tried again. After another hour, I tried getting a different version of the program. Now it's been about two hours on the latest attempt and it's still showing the same thing. Is this doing anything?! Then there's the heavily malware-infected laptop from yesterday...

I don't like change. It's almost always painful, it's not always better. The news-side software change was a hassle, particularly with stress over internet connection speeds, but the actual change went reasonably well and people were mostly prepared. There are still things being worked out, and whether it's an improvement depends on who you ask. The remotely-hosted environment does have the advantage of being accessible from outside the office along with the disadvantage of being reliant on a connection to servers in another state. We lost 2-3 hours of work just this week due to an outage on the other end. But I think it's an overall improvement to have the work done in InCopy and InDesign rather than Word and QuarkXpress (4) and there's some functionality in the system that's nice, though it may not be used in the long term. The advertising system, however, is seriously tempting me to use the term "nightmare." People were not as well-prepar...

Why, oh why am I this combination of a person who wants to help others and see them succeed, while utterly despising a sense of responsibility for them. I try to lend some outside perspective, to "teach" some of what I've learned. In some ways, on some levels, I've acknowledged that friends of mine are filling the roles of family. Archtypes of irresponsible mate, or stubborn child... I could slot people in those roles at one time or another. It may be a screwed up analogy, but there it is. I try to help and teach, and it kills me when I see them making the same mistakes over and over that I've tried to break them of. I'm not always right by a long shot. My ways are not the best, though I hope rarely the worst. But... guh... time and again, I'm left asking myself why I bother, why I invest the time and emotional commitment. Or even money once in a while. Finances are an area that seems to come up a lot. I'm better off than a lot of my peers/frie...