Trysdyn Black

I've been busy I suppose. I last rambled here in mid-March, when I finished my playthrough of the Deep Dungeon series. I thought then I was done with RPGs on my stream, but then I got bitten by both the Pokemon and the Etrian Odyssey bug, as well as tangoing with a little game called The Dark Spire.

I may do a write-up on those at some point but not tonight. Maybe tonight I just wanted to braindump, to catch up with the 0 people who I suspect read this. To put my thoughts in order.

Shortly after my last post, my job went rather unstable. I'd been given a temporary contract pursuant to my company being purchased by a larger entity and was rather unhappy with the culture in the new organization, so I put feelers out for other employment. I took a job closer to home, doing more engineering-related work than my old operations gig.

The job change has been a trade-off. I gave up a rather easy, boring job in a corporate culture I liked for a far more difficult, far more engaging position but within a corporate culture I dislike. It's not often I go a workday without missing the old place and my old team, but the problems I'm solving here are interesting and challenging. I can't say for sure I'm happier or not; I at least feel like I'm getting more done?

Unfortunately the new job comes with the rather steep price of my free time. At the old job I was essentially working from home almost every day, on my own schedule. That's not quite acceptable now, and I've had some difficulty transitioning back to the 9-5 world. I used to be the person available to do events, marathons, etc at any hour of the day but now I'm experiencing a time crunch trying to fit in all I used to do in fewer hours, and more constrained ones at that.

With what time I have, I've signed up to run in the Handheld Heroes marathon this coming weekend; Hachiemon is finally getting its debut in a marathon. After that, I've done the unwise thing of submitting five runs to Big Bad Game-a-thon 2018. I wrote, at length, about how awesome BBG was last year; I'm hoping it's just as great this year. Unfortunately I'm unsure if I'll be able to be present 24/7 for it this year like I was last. It's over the weekend, so maybe.

Finally, after SGDQ, I'm rather confident I want to go to AGDQ 2019. I'm so confident in this I've already started making plans-- but we'll see if I chicken out AGAIN before signup time.

Between Handheld Heroes and BBG, I want to find another obscure gem to delve into casually. I miss the experience of Deep Dungeon. Even though it was arguably quite bad, it was new and fresh to me, and was a joy to explore. Dark Spire was a joy too, and I deeply regret I can't go back and play it again from the beginning.

[Whole lot of CWs here. Slurs, trans hate, queer hate, furry hate...]

If you hang around on Twitter long enough it'll probably happen eventually: you say a thing that takes wings and the next thing you know you have to silence your phone because it's beeping every 3 seconds with RTs and replies. I guess in my case I can't be too disappointed in what did it for me. Out of all the random bad puns and random banter, what blew up for me was a rather charged tweet I made about gender identity and gamers:

Just saying: If you can memorize

- The moves of 200+ pokemon
- The moveset of every fighter in DBFZ
- The routes for speedruns
- The roles of 100+ heroes in a MOBA
- The spray patterns of guns in CS:GO
- The names and records of eSports teams

You can remember people's pronouns.

Shamefully this came from a place of anger. I've gone thus far without calling out the person in question because I believe, if they saw how big this blew up, maybe they'll give some thought to it. Suffice to say though, I was just a wee bit grumpy at a speedrunner misgendering a trans individual. This runner prides them self on being varied in the pool of games the run and routes they remember, but they claim remembering the probably ~10 people in their normal stream circles that aren't he/him is too much work.

The tweet itself was crafted to try to be more generic, hitting on something almost anyone that would self-identify as a gamer would at least understand, if not be immediately party to. My original intent was to empower people who deal with this with talking points rather than directly call anyone out. I guess you could say I was yelling into the echo chamber; something I am sometimes guilty of. What happened next though ended up educating me.

The tweet blew up. It started with a few friends Like/RTing it, then my phone was assaulted with a salvo of happy chimes indicating someone had interacted with my tweet. Within minutes I had to mute my device as friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friends were RTing multiple times a second. It was around then I knew I probably screwed up.

The most interesting thing about this is the propagation of the tweet followed very specific phases...

Phase 1 - Echo Chamber RTing: This is pretty much what I expected if things went anywhere. Friends RTing the tweet, and friends of them RTing it. The last few times I had something go "viral", it bounced around within a rather closed social group of people who shared my opinions and thoughts, so at worst I got a few people voicing their agreement or questioning some of my verbage choice. I always enjoyed when this happened because the pool of people engaging was small enough to peek at profiles and possibly find new people to follow.

Phase 2 - General Break-Out: I muted my phone and went to bed. At some point in the morning, I'm not sure when or even if there is a specific "when", the tweet reached out beyond the bubble of like-minded people I expected. Now instead of getting quiet RTs of agreement, I was seeing Quote RTs where people were inserting their own commentary, and then soon after that replies. For the most part this fell into three groups: general statements such as "I don't remember any of these things, haha", polite disagreements about the nature of gender identity, and statements that I "care too much" or whatever.

Folded into what I would consider polite discussion were a few more charged challenges. An interesting thing about the challenges in this phase of things though was most of them jumped straight to neo-pronouns, ignoring both cis women being misgendered in communities, and trans people. I assume most of these were in bad faith, regurgitating hatred and trolling. In this phase, challenges fell into one of a few groups:

1. Okay my pronouns are (random noun) and (other random noun), remember it or you're a nazi
2. Haha who cares about pronouns on the internet you loser
3. Trans and gender non-confirming people are mentally ill and I won't engage their delusion
4. Yeah but I care about pokemon/DBFZ/etc, and I don't care about identities

I think the thing of most interest here is, despite receiving about 100 of such replies, they all sorted neatly into one of these groups, while a lot of the people speaking them thought they were unique and clever, or had some insight I and others had never seen before. Most of these I ignored; a rare one or two I replied to when I saw a particular opening for a hilarious "sick burn" or whatever the kids say now and days.

Also present were the usual tired arguments of "Science says!" and whatnot. These caused arguments within the thread and linking of biased scientific journals. The usual.

One thing I could not help but notice is the more "spicy" takes seemed to come largely from individuals with anime styled avatars. Maybe that's because there's a larger ratio of them on Twitter in general, or maybe there's a correlation? I called this out to one person and they found it ironic this was coming from a furry with a furry avatar. Meh, most of the furs were on my "side" though? Such as there were sides anyway.

Mixed into this is one more thing worthy of note: individuals who felt some degree of guilt over the entire thing. This manifested in about two dozen people replying that they're trying to remember but it's actually hard sometimes. My one regret in all of this is Twitter's message length constrained exactly what I wanted to say and I didn't get a chance to express that trying is far more than most people do and mistakes can happen, so guilt shouldn't be felt from people being sincere. Oh well.

I think the highlights were the person who got so mad at my tweet that they forgot pronouns existed at all and my reply to them later. Also an individual I won't link who came at me pretty hard, but later apologized and explained to me that they, like a bunch of others, took exception to the implication that I also supported full gender non-conformity/non-binary and they felt this took a platform away from trans people. I don't agree, but I can respect the viewpoint.

Phase 3 - The Shitstorm: This persisted for about 24 hours. Then at some point the nasty stuff started. I can only presume someone with some sway or a large reader base somehow found my tweet and talked about it, because this seemed to be a very sudden and specific event in which even these somewhat thought out troll responses just turned into vitriol. I woke up the next day with about two dozen DMs from various people saying everything from "There are two genders and you are a deluded (slur)" to "I'm going to find and kill you if you don't delete your tweet". I reported the more egregious ones, of course.

Again it's worthy of note here that the people most upset about my tweet seem to have dog-whistled on the inference that I was talking about neo-pronouns (xe, ze, peh, etc, and to some degree them/they). While I certainly include that under the umbrella of "If you want to respect someone you should support their identity". this whole thing started with a woman being misgendered as a man. So a lot of the angry replies were attacking a straw man I didn't bring to the table.

In this phase, the activities from phases 1 and 2 were still present but were now taking a back seat to people bandwagoning on just insulting people in the thread. Several fights broke out between people posting low-effort insults against my furry/kin identity, against my validity as a person due to what I care about, against trans people, against GNC people, against women... and the people who wanted to defend any of the above. I mostly went silent at this point, half out of scientific curiosity for how this would play out and half due to the fact that life took my attention away from Twitter for a day or three.

Noteworthy "challenges" here...

1. lul sjw fur-fag
2. something something autism
3. You're such a loser if you care about people using pronouns in games
4. (Animated GIF of a 3D model of the number 2, presumably to argue the 'two genders' thing, but I actually don't know for sure)
5. Who can't keep he and she straight?? LUL
6. You must have no life if this is what you waste your time on (that one coming from a Twitch streamer "trying to go full time" for over a year with 4 average viewers so I'm sure they're a lovely person with many redeeming characteristics)

Highlight here? The twitter account that exists only to try to RT-and-win Funko Pops chiming into the discussion with "There are only two genders, fur-fag". I feel like I won some kind of Twitter achievement for getting called out by someone who uses their entire account trying to win 99 cent pieces of plastic, and for bonus points I'm not sure they actually read my tweet. Needless to say, upon careful consideration of their platform I found it wanting.

I made the mistake of reading those DMs yesterday as the first thing I did upon rolling out of bed. That had a momentary impact on my mood. On the plus side, I have some pretty awesome friends that reminded me how sad it is to go looking for people to insult on Twitter.

Ultimately I consider most of the "counterpoints" presented in this phase to not just be trolling, but brigading from some source. Most were not worthy of any consideration and I got to work out my pointer finger clicking "Report" quite often.

Phase 4 - Much the same as phase 1: That ended late last night. Since then I've actually been able to turn notifications back on on Twitter. The tweet, despite being almost a week old now, is getting RTs every now and then but no one's actually engaging in discussion (can you even call most of it discussion?).

Just as quickly as it arrived, my 5 or 6 days of fame/infamy vanished. The final "Score" as it were is about a quarter of a million people saw my tweet. Definitely not a massive viral explosion but hundreds of times more than I expected. Plus, it's always shocking me to how nasty some people are willing to be to absolute strangers online. However I know for a fact I changed one person's view on the gender binary, at least somewhat, so maybe that was worth it all.

I also re-learned that if you care about anything, a non-insignificant chunk of Twitter will accuse you of having autism.

I'd like to go awhile before having something blow up like that again 8)

Most people who would read this follow me on Twitter so they probably know how things went with the job. I haven't really had the time or inclination to write anything; it's been a stressful month. Let's see...

On the the job front, I was shockingly retained. I'm on a temporary contract to migrate our environment to the buying company's servers, then it's "expected" I find a role within the company to migrate into. I haven't decided how seriously I'll pursue that; first thing's first anyway. The last business day I'm an employee of the old company is probably Monday. We lost our tier 1 guys and our manager. So now there's no one insulating the system engineers from users and veeps, we're having trouble prioritizing or sticking to one task because no one's triaging for us or setting priorities. It's going to be fun when migration work begins.

On the home front, the partner-thing had a major medical issue mid-August and was put on a medication that made him ill for three months. So about once a week for three months we were going to the walk-in clinic or, in some cases, the ER. That seems to be settling now but I'm still in this hyper vigilant state where I feel like I can't fully relax because he may have another issue resulting in an urgent trip to a doctor. I'm sure I'll unwind in time but for now it's a rather intrusive thought constantly on my mind. He's off the meds now and improved almost immediately so... yeah hopefully it's over. Achievement unlocked: hit your yearly out of pocket maximum on your insurance? Blorf.

Furthermore our other roommate, who moved out in March to live with her wife, experienced a run of bad luck and the two of them may or may not be moving back in in trade for maid work. Don't know yet. Not looking forward to four people in this small house but it would be nice to have another presence here again. The house is oddly quiet with only the two of us here. I'm thankful to be in a position where I can actually help people in such a way. It wouldn't have been the case if the two of us had lost our jobs suddenly with all the medical issues hovering around.

Then I found out yesterday one of the big names in the retro speedrunning scene may have some kind of major health issue leading them to believe they'll be passing on soon. Details are sketchy but there's enough there to piece together a story that he's not expecting to survive out the year. That was a punch in the gut seeing as how much I like the guy. Death and I don't get along... Understatement of the century, yeah?

SPEAKING OF... it's my birthday in less than a week. I've largely not been a fan of celebrating it because it's also the anniversary of the death of one of my SOs. It's been 8 years now but it still twinges the back of my mind when the day rolls around. Especially when so much illness is surrounding me like this year. Still, I'd like to do something. For the past 8 years it's just been "just another day". Sadly on my birthday itself I'll be in meetings planning the migration of work's systems to the new overlords. I don't even get to take the day off as I've traditionally done every year.

Then you have all the political stuff going on, and whatnot. Yeah... it's been a really rough late half of 2017 for me.

I dunno, I just wanted to hash all this out for people asking what's been eating at me lately. The answer is a whole hell of a lot.

Yesterday I was stirred awake at 4:30am by a noise or something. While I was settling back into bed I decided to peek at my phone. I had a message from my CEO explaining in very curt and sterile form letter terms that my company has been bought out and there was a mandatory attendance all hands meeting at start of business. Not the best way to wake up after ~4 hours of sleep.

My partner and I were both awake so we drove into the office and just had "our day" early, then sat down for this meeting. Here's where the details have to be hazy but the net of it is yes, my company is being acquired by a larger firm. They were very careful to give absolutely no useful information at this point, as one can expect. What I gleaned from it, though, is that in about 30 days I will probably be layed off.

Everyone involved is playing their cards close to their chest. Why let people know they'll be let go in a month? They'll lame duck it. However given that I tend to be the generalist on the team with not as much under my wing that's mission critical, I expect I'm one of the least important people in my group. So yeah, I'm working on the assumption that either mid-November, or end of year, I'll be axed.

One bright side to this: due to a combination of factors, I'll be "okay" financially if it happens. The down side? I like this job. I'm actually completely 100% out about who I am there, which is something I can't say for sure I'll ever be able to do again. It's kind of a scary thing that after years of not having to live a double life, I'll probably have to go back to that to get in somewhere else. I've been extremely lucky.

To double that "I like this job" thing, most people in speedrunning scenes know me as the person who has an amazingly flexible schedule and can be involved in events whenever. I do night shifts for marathons, can fill in runs at events in the middle of the night or dawn, I'm always around. This is entirely because of the flexibility of my job and I'm not certain I can go back to a standard 9-5 now; especially with my sleep disorder in play.

I mean yeah, that's all whining. Having to go back to "A normal job" is a pretty good problem to have. It's hitting me kind of hard right now though. Who knows though, maybe they'll keep the whole team. I don't have a ton of hope for this being a permanent arrangement as it's been for the past years though.

It's 3:15. I'm trying to get my brain to wind down enough to sleep so my schedule doesn't drift too far out of control by having my LEDs on their lowest red setting. These things cast a dim enough glow to just barely see by; I suppose it looks like an old photography lab in here like this.

On my mind is the coming Nanowrimo. I've had a novel ... mostly... outlined in my head for years now. Probably more like a trilogy, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Will I do it this year? Who knows. I actually want to start sooner than November, and eschew the Nano concept entirely. I don't think I could hammer this whole thing out in one month anyway.

As far as the novel goes, it's actually a story world that's a fusion of five short stories I wrote since middle school. Some of them were pretty bad, and will need a total rehash, but I've developed as a wordsmith since those days, so I think the challenge is more fitting them together cleanly. Initially, those five stories weren't intended to be within the same universe; it was only many years later did I realize how well they could coexist.

The general plan is to get about a quarter of the story done, then begin publishing it chapter by chapter as a web serial. I already have the platform for that developed (both a journal here on Dreamwidth and a custom script I wrote to publish to my own website too). I have at least the first quarter of the story outlined in explicit detail. I guess I just need to start.

But hasn't that always been the barrier?

August was a bad month. Getting into the complete picture of why is far beyond the scope of one post, so I'm going to focus on the issue most visible to people following me in the internet spaces: my issues with Comcast and my internet service. This is long so I've chunked it into chapters to not flood timelines.

( 10 Aug: The Beginning )

( 14 Aug: The Initial Support Request )

( 18 Aug: Tier 1 Hell )

( 21 Aug: Tech Visit #2 )

( 22 Aug: A Glimmer of Hope? )

( 27 Aug: Ghosted by Comcast Support )

( 2 Sep: Escalation #4 )

( 5 Sep: Improvement! )

( 10 Sep: Resolution )

( 23 Sep: Recurrence )

( 29 Sep: First Major Issues )

( 3 Oct: Service Unusable )

I took a second go at setting up GNU Social tonight, after Twitter's round avatar-gate set a bunch of people into clamoring for an alternative. It was a much easier experience this time around-- likely because I didn't break my federation with major servers while fumbling around in setup this time. I think I'll keep it around. If it's still working in a few days I'll declare my Mastodon account deprecated. I've already updated my contact page.

I also set this up as my official blog from my website. Nanoblogger is neat and all, but I think it's better to use this. I may port over the old posts to backdated entries here; unsure as of yet.

I probably won't drop Twitter because as of right now I have 6 mutual follows on GNU Social and about 170 on Twitter. Just social space issues... Blah.

Work-side I've had the most productive week I've had in awhile, even if it was a week of setting up alpha-quality software to talk to an alpha-quality storage backend I know nothing about, with no documentation on either available to me. I got it done... somehow. Just the life of a sysadmin grunt I guess. Now I get to transfer a metric boatload of data into the new system and hope it doesn't keel over. The transfer will run over the weekend without any management from me, so I expect to just relax this weekend.

Four Job Fiesta starts tomorrow. I'm excited, though I expect I'll only do one run this year instead of the 2.5 I did last year. We'll see I guess. Everyone should join in though!

This is more a rant than anything. I started to spew it on Twitter but when I realized it'd span a ton of tweets, well...

In recent years I've begrudgingly accepted the online-only nature of Blizzard titles but something I'll never get past is their social network. For those who haven't touched a Blizzard title since about 2008: being logged into any Blizzard title they don't call a "Classic" involves being logged into the battle.net social network. You appear online to your friends, you can be messaged or invited to parties. That's pretty cool. What's not cool is your status options: you can be available, or flagged busy. There is no offline, there is no invisible. For varying definitions depending on the title, if you're in a game, you're visible to your friends list. Period.

Some days I just want to sink into a game for an hour or two and keep my social stuff off in another window. That's how I enjoy gaming, and I'm by far not an unusual case. So it's frustrating to be forced to announce to my friends list that I'm playing a specific game. More often that not that is immediately followed by someone else (or many someones) logging in and sending party requests. Requests I feel obligated to accept or I'll be forced into a long awkward conversation instead of gaming anyway. Sometimes the people asking to join don't want to do what I want to do; more awkward conversations.

So solutions? Don't add anyone to my friends list? No can do, or I can't party with them when I DO want to. You have to add before you can send invites. Set myself busy? That just moves the long awkward conversation to another medium like Discord or IM. Tell every person sending me an invite I'm not interested? Why should I have to do that? Tell people that busy = don't contact me? Why should I place the burden of remembering that, or playing guessing games about my status, on them when this could be fixed with a simple toggle?

I know the answer to why this is: Blizzard wants to use the friend list system as advertisement. "Oh four of my friends are playing WoW, maybe I should dust off my sub"... They lose some of that if people can go invisible. Still, on the other side of the sword, I've literally wanted to play a game and held off because I didn't have the spoons to deal with the social aspects that would be forced on me by the lack of invis option. It's frustrating.

I guess all in all it feels like my comfort in using their products doesn't matter. I know it doesn't but usually companies don't go out of their way to make me FEEL that way, you know?

It's 01:30. I had intended to go to bed half an hour ago as my sleep schedule is still on the mend from being particularly irresponsible over the past few weeks, but I also have the desire to just write something. I should be working on the story stuff, but I almost feel like over-planning is a thing that'd hurt the creative process just as much as under-planning, and I have a very solid and extensive outline of the serial and how I want it to go down. Furthermore, I don't want to do any real work at the moment, so there! :P

Just working with a social journaling system again has brought up some rather interesting memories centered around when and how I used LiveJournal. One particular such memory involves my last days at UCF and sitting up at 6am reading back over old posts and writing one about not knowing the path my life was on and feeling extremely out of control and directionless. For anyone who doesn't know (not that anyone reads this drek yet), I lasted 3 terms at UCF and then was placed on academic dismissal for low grades. This didn't happen because I lacked aptitude, but because I found "Finding myself" to be a far better use of my time after 17 years of hyper-religious upbringing from my parents and private school-- a story for another time to be sure.

At the time I was unsure I'd made the right decisions. Failing was, obviously, no help but at the same time I had filled the time I would have been in class and studying with an immense amount of social, emotional, spiritual and *ahem* sexual growth that I would have missed out on if I had been studious. A better balance could have been struck, but in retrospect I think those events lined up to make a me that is a far better me than the one that would have stuck to the books.

My navel-gazing at the time didn't last long though. Another memory of those times: the night before the semester closed, I was messaged by a friend I had made at a local anime event. He had quietly carried the torch for a lady in the same group, and had confided in me this a few times over our time together. He wanted to tell her during her birthday party that night, but events conspired to not let him go, so he asked me to give him a ride. Now, I know... if not then, he would have had ample other opportunities to break the news to her, so it's not like some movie fairy tale where I swooped in and saved true love when all hope was lost-- still, it was quite exciting to haul ass down the highway, with half my stuff already packed in the back of the van, to get him there on time.

I wonder if they hit it off and how they're doing now. I like to think I got them to connect and they forged a relationship and sometimes think of me now. I lost contact with them shortly after I moved away.

Diversion aside, soon after that I decided Computer Science and a life as a coder wasn't for me. I liked being a maverick too much; couldn't regiment myself properly to work in a team, under a project manager, on a project. This is a conclusion I would have reached one way or another, but let's just say failing out of UCF was no harm done and the separation from my roots did a lot for my growth. This was a pretty expensive way to "Branch out" with nothing concrete to show for it, but I'm grateful for the experience.

To cap off the story: part of my explorations at UCF eventually led me to meeting the local furry fandom, which led to meeting furry types nationally, which led to forming some relationships that gave me the ability to move and try a life in California. This was literally a demo basis: my home-life in Florida was in shambles and they worked to find me a job and a place to stay to see if I did better in a different locale. Needless to say, I never left California, so I suppose that worked out for the best. Again, that wouldn't have happened if I'd stuck to the books at UCF.

These retrospectives though... Of course I'm going to say "I turned out okay", because I don't know for certain what the other side of the fence really looks like. Maybe if I'd finished the CS program I would have found a great job and been happy; who knows. All I know is how I ended up so far ain't that bad and I can't really imagine any major point being different, and I only carry one or two major life regrets-- and they're not related to my education.

What's the point of all of this rambling? Not much. I felt like waxing reminiscent I guess. I do that quite frequently on late, quiet nights. Is there a moral? College ain't everything? I guess that's it; but most people are realizing that without my long-winded retrospectives. :)