I’ve been reading a ton of excellent and also very disheartening writing about experiences home schooling kids. For me, it’s completely exhausting even though my level of effort towards my twelve year old getting logged into a Google Classroom on the days when he’s with me is minimal. It’s the other stuff like figuring out how to feed everyone lunch while remembering that I need to eat lunch too that compounds the fatigue. I also don’t spend much time doing technical support for distance learning either. Maybe my kid has just absorbed some basic IT troubleshooting by osmosis? He did fashion a cover for his webcam out of masking tape and a bottle cap.
Working from home and schooling from home is a reality that everyone I know has been dealing with at varying levels of success for the better part of a year now and it does completely suck at least in terms of overall happiness. Apart from the utter lack of boundaries between work and real life which for me mostly stem from home life intruding into my workday, there are all kinds of pressures to seem more present when remote. I’ve heard more than a few horror stories about teachers demanding that webcams remain on while they’re teaching and empathize with that as I’ve heard the equivalent demands from my work while in an all hands meeting where over a hundred people were attending.
It seems like school and all of the parental requirements that come along with it that often require you to be somewhere that isn’t work at unreasonable times like 4 PM on a weekday is the way we’re manifesting our misery. Everything changed for most people because the moron in charge decided that he didn’t want to spook the stock market so here we are. Maybe it’s slightly better because we are talking less about the survivability of this year and perhaps spending less time recreating old timey Antarctic survival food out of sheer boredom and desperation.
Category: This Sucks
I enjoyed the Netflix series Altered Carbon more than I enjoyed the books written by Richard Morgan. They numbered among those guilty of my least favorite criminals in the science fiction genre: exciting worlds full of engaging ideas written poorly, presumably at top speed in order to pay the goddamned bills. It’s an unfortunate pattern I’ve been haunted by more than a few times and a hypothetical (following my own assumption that books were issued hastily) situation that I empathize with. I hope that the Netflix money provided the author some more time and resources to invest in his creations. The preceding makes me feel somewhat mean.
The reason for this personal attack on a writer (sorry!) is that I read an overdue explanation of the reasons that Netflix keeps cancelling shows after two seasons from Wired and it really points to how little algorithmic trickery and how much the simple cost of production and the oddball bonus incentive structure tied to attracting creative talent has to do with it. You’d think there were many more data points under consideration and for a longer period than 28 days but apparently it’s watched one and watched all spread over a slightly less than month long period weighed against costs that will rise per additional season after the second:
Netflix tries to make itself more appealing to TV show producers by giving them bonuses and pay bumps as a series carries on. Harrington says that shows on Netflix are more expensive after season two, and even more expensive after season three, with the premiums going up each season. “They have to give [a show] more money per series, and if they decide to recommission it, it becomes more expensive for them to make,” he says. “Because of that, so many more shows are canceled after two series because it costs them more.”
Financially, it makes more sense for Netflix to commission a new show than to renew an underperforming show that is only going to get more expensive the longer the series goes on. Tim Westcott, research and analysis director at Omdia, says that in terms of investment in content, Netflix is still in the growth stage. “In the US, subscriber growth has leveled off a bit, and they’ve now got a lot of competition in the US. But they’re adding many hundreds of thousands of subscribers every quarter around the world. They’re still in a phase where they’re still throwing fuel on the engine to keep that subscriber growth going,” he explains, adding that it’s ultimately looking to increase volume so that it can churn out new shows that it can promote to attract more subscribers.
This strikes me as absurdly since so many intriguing series that have excited me were doomed from the start by their release date or what was going on in the world when they were released (would Tiger King be nearly as successfully as it was had it been released before the Covid-19 quarantine? I have my doubts.) and that part of the algorithmic decision making breaks my fucking heart. I guess it’s marginally better to know than to be clueless but the ruthlessness of this decision making process makes me not want to get too emotionally involved in anything that Netflix produces.
I wrote this long and excruciating post last night about having a bad case of the Mondays and failed to post it because it felt more purgative than like something I should make available for a hypothetical (read:imagined) audience to read. What it did make me realize after venting a godawful amount of venom is that I’ve let the burnout progress too far and I now dread every work day because I can’t succeed. The most I can realistically hope for is to put out most of the fires by the end of the day and, if I’m super lucky, have time to eat lunch.
Obviously this isn’t a sustainable job for me any more and although there are still a few jobs that aren’t paying grossly below pre-pandemic market I still feel a bit stuck after accepting this position (for less money and less responsibility — only one of those two is still true now) and approaching chew my leg off to escape this trap levels of needing to get the fuck out. I’ve walked away from more rewarding (both financially and in terms of what I was working on and learning) positions in the past mostly due to feeling restless. I’m fixating on retroactive regret about that and it doesn’t feel like things are going to improve any time soon.
I don’t take job hunting very seriously and I never have. The process is so drawn out and awful that I barely like to think about it before an actual interview takes place. I think this particularly awful situation and the impending recession that is going to bump salaries down yet again has galvanized me a bit more to actually, you know, try a little bit harder. Typically I don’t have difficulty with the human interaction parts of interviewing. Despite being a pretty introverted person I’m also a social pragmatist that can usually make the best of undesirable social interactions. I feel like I need to put a little more effort in but I’m also having an inordinately rough time caring very much. I recognize the need or the expectation but I can’t summon enough genuine interest in the process to pass for someone invested. That’s sort of the golden litmus for burnout; utterly lacking the energy to fake enthusiasm or the will to tell the lies I know are required for positive outcomes. It isn’t making me happy with either my current situation or my own outlook on the world.
I’m currently waylaid in unplanned emergency project land so my time has, yet again, been short and my reading seemingly only happening in 45 second chunks. I had a moment of terrible deja vu during dinner last night when I learned that my entire company was unable to access any Office 365 applications. It turns out that our accounting department had failed to pay $7K in invoices due to the reseller. I guess that’s the new new normal. I’m feeling more than my usual amount of fried.
Some things I’ve found interesting enough to take note of over the past few days:
1. To the surprise of absolutely no one, folks are getting hit with malware/adtech (is there any real distinction between the two anymore?) when using Internet Explorer to access porn sites. Ugh. This bothers me for a couple of different reasons. The first is that IE has never, ever been the best browser for anything even when it dominated market share. Why would you ruin your viewing experience by using the very worst viewing platform available. You might as well just slink back to your childhood hideout and try to decipher scrambled porn on good old fashioned cable. Why, stupids, why?
2. You should also give this post by a deeply religious but politically liberal person that examines the conservative obsession with child trafficking a read because it’s very well composed and gives you a bit of insight into how an intelligent believer would interpret the current and persistent insistence that a shadowy legion of pedophiles is abducting children and mining adrenochrome for Satan (?). It’s a much more balanced examination that I’m capable of making because I’ve already blazed through a lifetime’s supply of patience with trying my best to respect religious beliefs that I entirely disagree with and would just drop the that-person-is-fucking-insane mic at top speed and move quickly away and onward with my life. I gained an immediate respect for the author. I may not have the faith that he does (or really any belief in the non-concrete) but I respect the amount of thought that went into this piece of writing. It comes from a place that is relatable above and beyond religious beliefs.
3. This is kind of old news at this point but the seizure of ‘counterfeit’ ear buds by Customs and Border Protection is weirdly emblematic of the world we’re living in right now. Did Microsoft
Apple file a legal complaint against OnePlus? Nope. Is CBP actively pursuing sellers of actual knock off Air Pods? Nope. Does this feel like petty and political bullshit? Yep.
4. This is a sensible explanation of the various forces at work behind Oracle’s sudden emergence as the buyer for TikTok. It’s a lot more complex situation than the typical Trumpian defiant corruption scenario that we’ve become so accustomed to wincing at. No surprises at the ickiness of Oracle’s leadership at all. We’ve all known that Larry was human garbage for ages. I wonder how much time in the courtroom these maneuvers are going to consume after this toxic administration is banished back to hell. I look forward to reading about those minus the white knuckled terror of being governed by that toxic cesspool of the most shameless Americans.
I’ve tried to write out my thoughts about this a few times but I always end up being overwhelmed by the ever widening scope of related things that end up being pulled in. What I’m hoping to do, and this may never be read by another human and/or web robot, is use my cane to tap around the perimeter of this vexing problem that I’ve faced at nearly every place I’ve worked: Active Fucking Directory.
At the moment I’m completely mired in the weird middle space between wanting to switch completely over to something that functions less like a needlessly complicated wrapper around LDAP and more like a secure-ish authentication method that performs a bunch of single sign on functions. It would also be nice if maintaining this shiny new solution didn’t become my full time job as well. The short answer, in my situation at least, is that an answer that simple and comforting doesn’t exist at all.
Here are the problems:
1. This needs to meet all of the requirements of the eleventy billion master service agreements that we’re supposed to hit. These are constantly changing and some of them we just sign off and ignore until one of our customers proposes an audit. Some of these requirements would be better left to a capable MDM solution but …
2. My budget for such a solutions is, well, um, if you could just cut checks to my company for using your solution that is about the only that would make it through our finance department. The finance folks are not looking to invest money in anything ever so that becomes a rabbit hole I’m not going to willingly crawl into.
3. To make things absolutely and utterly disaster-tastic we also just hired a CTO who seems like a cool enough guy but wants to have more input into the infrastructure we’re implementing. The real rub here is that he really just wants to implement a SaaS solution that is the namesake of the company he just jumped ship from and I have heard nothing but gnashing teeth and the sound of hope anally escaping the human body from other folks I know that still do infrastructure work. So, I’m in a holding pattern right now while I fervently hope that one of the interviews I’ve had recently bears fruit and I can hit the ejector seat button thus escaping with a few tatters of my sanity intact. Maybe I’ll get budget approval for something more expensive than anything I’m proposing and doesn’t work either? Splendid.
4. Another thing that happened in the midst of all of this was an office move, a company rebrand, a phone system replacement, and a few other ball crushing tasks that I might be defensively forgetting. Just a few minor things that need to happen all at once and posthaste. Our IT department, at least for anything that doesn’t live in AWS or Salesforce, is poor old me and I report up through 2 levels of managers. The usual song and dance occurred after the move was sprung on us/me; we’ll just have an MSP come in and do some of that work for us because that is always painless. I got a few things out of that: some new networking hardware (Meraki because the techs were either morons or thought we/me were morons) and a new server to host the software used to manage badging and security cameras. Like most security and monitoring software it requires me to install components from Windows Server 2000 to get it successfully running so I’m completely okay with isolated that garbage onto its own server and away from any infrastructure that actually matters. It did not get me any new server hardware that I could because there’s much money to be made reselling software licensing, of course. The MSP folks built us a sort of functioning Active Directory server in AWS but didn’t do most of the grunt work before their contract budget was consumed. Thanks guys! I was hoping to spend a couple weeks running hastily written Powershell scripts on a production machine. This also sounds amazing!
5. Here’s the punchline to all this: The server that really, really needs to be replaced is a 7-8 year old Dell PowerEdge that has been outside of a service contract for several years and spent most of its life in a switch closet/sauna basically the size of a closet with no real cooling. It is obviously a ticking time bomb despite having a backup domain controller even older that takes more than 15 minutes to reboot when I do something terrifying like rebooting it. Oh, yeah, and this is hosted on a Windows Server 2008 SBS box. Yeah, it really is that grim. The message from on high is that I need to somehow keep this incredibly robust and reliable machine running for a unspecified period of time until there is a decision and budget available for a cloud solution that will likely do measurably worse job of handling authentication and won’t serve any policy at all. Maybe that means I’ll finally get some budget for MDM? Probably not.
We are an Office 365 shop (this is what that service is called no matter what stupid renaming convention they try to employ) so everyone in the company that has absolutely no fucking idea what they’re talking about immediately tells me how we should just migrate on over to Azure Active Directory. This, of course, is more telling of how much coverage Microsoft pays for in trade magazines than anything else and has caused me to explain far too many times that (cue the theme music) Azure Active Directory is not fucking Active Directory in any meaningful sense.
At the end of this highly purgative post, I’m left with some questions that mostly should be posed at the huge corporations that create the software I’m supposed to keep things up and running with because cruel and unusual is industry standard. One very, very important question is: why the fuck isn’t Azure Active Directory analogous to Active Directory? That’s the most painful question. Look, I know it’s blindfolded brain surgery dangerous to expose an AD server to the internet, right? That’s been pounded into our heads since Active Directory was a relatively new thing. Don’t ever allow your AD server out into the world without galoshes and a rainsuit. That’s IT canon. BUUUUUT, the other Microsoft product that was absolutely, positively unsafe to expose to anything but a RADIUS-backed VPN was Exchange and now Exchange or at least a distant cousin of it is out there on the web eating apples full of razor blades and taking Tylenol from open packages all willy nilly. Obviously O365 isn’t the most secure platform in the world but it only seems to roll over dead a couple of times a week. Why can’t Microsoft spend a few cycles on that sort of work for AD? Oh, because all the data transmitted between a client and the AD server is full of delicious data that isn’t well protected. Extra fabulous!
The other non-option would be something like Direct Access which is already deprecated, requires the very most expensive edition of both the client and server pieces that it would run on, and only runs on Windows which is not real world useful unless you’ve landed a sweet gig at Contoso or Margie’s Travel. That leads me back, all the way back, to the always on/pre-logon VPN issue which means more expensive software seats and more moving parts that I can absolutely guarantee will break each and every time the wind picks up because I’ve foolishly made decisions like that in the past. In the end, I have no fucking answers and I’m feeling like one of those sad photo-op polar bears stranded on a melting mass of ice with nothing to do but wait until the sea eventually consumes me bringing on the sweet oblivion that erases all of this fuckery.
An old friend asked me a few days ago about all of the posts from this site that disappeared. He also jokingly said that, given the wordiness, I should have published them in a book. I disagree with that completely and utterly because the editing alone would be more work than I’d ever find time for. I wiped out the old WordPress version of this site because after a few years of pointlessly posting still alive, maybe junk I decided to just scrape the domain and start over. I’d guess that the majority of what was posted there would not age particularly well either since the majority of that stuff was cranky reaction to whatever was going on in the Linux community. You know, back when it felt like there was some community organized around FOSS and less like the only thing that people know about Linux is that it’s available in AMIs from AWS. I miss having invested people yelling at me when I’m completely wrong.
Apart from the raw logistics of why I deleted a gigantic MySQL instance full of bile and garbage, my areas of interest and capacity for interest in more than anything that can get me through the next 24-48 hours without the world falling in on itself have changed a bit since then. I still love Linux and would do 100% of my computing in it if time and energy allowed but the honest fact is that I don’t really live in the 90% Linux world that I did for most of 20s and 30s. I’ve got a ridiculous Dell Precision with an i9 processor and an ocean of RAM installed in it that mostly sits idle because I don’t have nearly as much time for playing with cool things as I used to. I also have an Arch work laptop of fairly mediocre specifications that I work on whenever I can avoid being VPN connected (this normally would be the part where I complain for six paragraphs and a thousand words about how shitty it is that the Linux version of Forticlient doesn’t support multi-factor authentication and therefore is worse than useless to me) but because I’m incessantly dropping in and out of VPN-only environments I end up doing the most work on another mediocre-ly spec’d Windows 10 laptop the majority of the time. It’s kind of sad to think of how many utterly crazy work environments I’ve toughed it through by using the weirdest tools in the worst possible and unintended way to stick with my Linux machine. I feel like I’ve run out of steam temporarily or something. The truly sad part about all of this is that Windows 10, especially when compared to the sleek and shiny shit sandwich that Apple is masquerading as a cutting edge OS these days, is pretty stable and usable. Maybe that is the erosion of attention span and patience that comes with age showing but I don’t feel much of anything about it since, in the quarantined world we live in and will probably continue to live in for far longer than the most pessimistic of public agency estimates, I feel like I have any time to advocate for anything better than the bare minimum functional requirements for anything. It makes it considerably harder to put effort into working around the actual damage much less creating overhead of your own. That’s my excuse anyway.
The old Team Murder content is gone and I didn’t even consider backing any of it up before dropping the database. I don’t feel like I lost anything consequential in the purge. It felt more like clearing out old junk from a forgotten corner of an attic and was oddly cathartic.
During this worldwide and deadly pandemic a fair amount of ink was spilled about how difficult it was to stop working when the normal hours of business operation were finished. I find this kind of hilarious because it’s nearly impossible for me to get anything at all accomplished that takes more than 10 minutes because I absolutely know I will be disturbed at least once during that increment. I spend more time talking people thorough problems they’re trying to solve in completely inane ways during the day than I do working on things that would potentially solve some of those problems ahead of them being dragged to my (virtual or otherwise) desk like the corpse of a murder victim.
That person is dead. You should really be thinking more about burying them before they start to stink than how we could potentially jolt them back to life with a sufficient charge of electricity.
I’m an operations guy at heart despite what my job title may say about being senior guy who cleans up terrible messes or whatever. I wouldn’t say that I run towards the sound of a car accident necessarily but I do chase ambulances just to see what broke and who might be responsible. It’s a terrible habit that I’ve never successfully broken myself of. The one aspect of those situations that I’ve handled better as the years progress is waiting until everyone clears out of the office or until the Slack DMs slow down to 3 per second or so. I’m not going to get anything accomplished while the people who are right up against a hard deadline (sorry!) or the gawkers who read trade magazines are peppering me with (dumb) questions and (well intentioned) ineffectual offers to help out if they can.
Anyway, obvious mockery of self improvement listicle sites aside, I think this guide, which ironically was published before Covid-19 was a virus we are all too familiar with, has a solid list of strategies to avoid feeling like you can never mentally leave work. It was what instigated all of the venting at the beginning of this post in large part because I wish I was better at incorporating straightforward measures towards making work a lesser part of my life. It’s a short and pointed list that avoids all of fellow pandemic kids tactics that more irksome sites lean on especially hard and we could all use a 1100 word break from that.
This bit about Google Cloud Platform’s habit of killing everything useful in it has been all over all of the places I look at during lunch and it, despite being hosted on the most noxious platform for putting words out onto the internet: Medium, is worth reading if you have any opinions at all about the methodology that Google uses to poop what they’re not interested in any more out of their software stack (that’s deprecation for those of you who capitalize the word ‘engineer’) and not just because it’s funny. It’s also worth reading if only because it’s written from the perspective of someone who has actually used the things he’s talking about in a production capacity. Typically everything that I read critical of GCP falls broadly under the umbrella of tried this once and I didn’t understand some part of it so it sucks think-piecing. I’d love to think that the idea of building things with an eye toward them being useful for more than 3 months might make a comeback in the not so distant future. People do love to say the word ‘deprecating’ during meetings though.
All of the above said, I’ve never once wanted to invest any effort into getting my head around Google Cloud Platform. As Steve Yegge said in his post, the documentation is godawful and mostly non-existent and I don’t enjoy needing to mess with things when I don’t have to. The decades of IT work have made risk adverse even when I’m just messing around with conceptually. The odds of me learning much about something I know will break and will break by design are next to zero. God forbid I built something useful to a handful of people and then have to keep revising it just to make sure the framework keeping all of that shit together doesn’t silently decide that I’m doing it the wrong way and subsequently requiring me to rewrite something I no longer care about. I have the option of taking that posture because 1) I don’t write any code that any one else should ever read much less use and 2) because I’m not selling people services that may or may not work tomorrow due to engineering whimsy or boredom with something that doesn’t disrupt the paradigm, bro. No thanks and next contestant. I get to be that petty and arbitrary because no one is paying me (well, except my work and I do nothing but manage tools that manage other tools there these days) for things that started out fun and then got tedious quickly. I completely get it. It is fun and rewarding in a punitive way to work on things that sort of work well enough and then move onto another more novel and interesting problem. That is great method of creating things for a hobbyist. No one expects to pay a hobbyist (against a running meter much less) for their sorta working and might not see much new work in the future projects. The evidence for that is everywhere. I think Source Forge is basically a monument these days to projects that started strong and sunk silently into obscurity and obsolescence. The operative difference with Source Forge is that if something there is something people find useful and necessary then after the original author has moved on to other things there is opportunity for other people to pick up where the first person left off. Google has an utterly hobbyist attitude towards the majority of their products and no tangible accountability other than lighting the occasional stick of incense on the altar of Our Lady of The Perpetual Beta to atone for their indifference to any user of their software that doesn’t also work for Google. I guess if you sell enough advertising then you buy the right to just mess around on every front.
Ironically, after all of the Google bashing, I realize that I’m typing all of this up on Pixelbook which is my favorite in an increasingly gigantic stack of powerful and portable machines. The reason I love it so much is because it’s absurdly overpowered for what it needs to do, still has great battery life, and stays the fuck out of my way for the most part. I even get to choose which branch of Chrome OS you want to run on it and even if you make the wrong choice (p.s. the correct choice is the Beta branch) you can just power wash the machine back to newness and start the mucking up all over again in a matter of minutes. I’m acutely aware that they’ll probably never build a machine as cool as this again but I’ll be using this machine until it either rattles apart or isn’t eligible for OS releases any more. I’m betting the latter will likely be the end instead of the former.
Speaking of companies who have have incomprehensible piles of money to burn and utter disdain towards all but the smallest fraction of their users and the vast majority of people writing software for their platform, I also enjoyed this post about the pain of installing software that didn’t surrender 30% of its purchase price for the right to inclusion in App Store. I cannot imagine how frustrating it must be to create anything intended to run on macOS. It makes me wonder if any of the developers that were around for the old days of being a tiny percentage of the marketplace and making cool things for the people who haloed themselves in an aura of rugged and tasteful individualism by buying from the scrappier millionaires are adapting well to the utter irony of those artisanal mass market computer manufacturers dominating the market and using that dominance to make everyone resent their presence in it. While they’re likely making a better living (minus that 30% obviously) these days it’s undoubtedly a much more expensive and bureaucracy-laden process to even get to the point where someone without a Developer license would even be able to install something they’ve written.
Over the years, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time coaching people through the maze of workarounds needed to accomplish seemingly basic maintenance tasks on their ‘just works’ computers so I feel this pain in a palpable way. My frustration towards the design decisions Apple has made over the past handful of years mirrors the way that I feel towards the way the Gnome project veered much to the dismay of folks who appreciated Gnome 2 for its measured simplicity. I’ll be the first to admit that the Apple demographic may be the worst group to try to explain things to since the idea of a mod-click of any kind seems alien to them, thus the Can’t you just right click title of the article I’m talking about.
While this whole plague that’s killing people while they ignore it thing is going on, I’ve been working completely from home since March so the functionality holes in user controlled security has been the most persistent pain point for me in administering my shrinking fleet of Apple hardware. Every user in my organization now has the local admin account password because I need to give to them so that I can walk them painfully through the process of enabling screen recording and accessibility functions in System Preferences. Super duper cool, Apple. The most frustrating part about all of this is that Apple has yet to create any tools for managing their machines in what should be a managed environment. I know Microsoft has rolled out some paid solutions equal in vexation to the 3rd party JAMF suite that is supposed to allow me to have some degree of control over these precious slabs of silicon individuality but there’s always a way to work around that damage on the Windows side of the house. Again, backwards fucking compatibility motherfuckers!
The list of things that Apple keeps me from being able to do easily and cheaply continually grows. Wanna reimage any machines that thankfully don’t have T2 chips and are running Catalina? Prepare to fuck around with DeployStudio forever just to route around that damage. Need to install or update anti-virus? Get ready to become bffs with csrutil because you’re going to be hanging out a lot. Super cool to decide that monolithic imaging is dead without providing any method for replacing it. Oh yeah, keep your finger on that csrutil button if you want to do something crazy like removing FaceTime or any of the other included software that isn’t necessary for most business cases. In short, it’s awful and again it’s a case of being forced to cater to the whims of their innate need to control all aspects of their machines. Locking down common functionality and intimidating users by popping up warnings about malware and potential harm to their computers is really, really user friendly as is non-standard deinstallation of most software: it’s super easy! You just drag the Application to the trash and later go and find all of the plists it left behind that are breaking other things! It just works (for us)!
Automattic ended up in a battle of wills with Apple wherein Apple wanted them to build in purchasing capability (for domain purchases and non-free hosted WordPress plans) so it could collect its 30%. Luckily, they yielded in the face of angry users and relented. Apple isn’t a company that I’d ever choose to work with but until they make enough decisions that piss off a huge majority of mobile phone buyers most companies are forced to donate a third of their application revenue to the scrappy little computer company worth more than a trillion dollars. My interpretation of their position is that your product should already be worth millions of dollars before you even attempt to besot their App Store with your feeble stab at relevance otherwise they’ll relegate you to working in the gift shop on a commission basis. I liked it much better when the reality distortion field was smaller and didn’t infect and destroy more interesting things. I liked it better when Apple wasn’t so fucking huge and equipped with an infinite supply of blank checks for belligerently hostile behavior under the guise of aesthetic purity. Crazily, I liked it better when pre-SP2 Windows XP was the most pressing issue that I had and that is saying a lot.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here (insert no one being surprised about anything here) and the world has completely and utterly fallen apart over the past six months. My kid and I were talking about how odd it was to think about just walking into a restaurant, without any planning or forethought, to pick up something to eat. It seems like years have passed over this handful of months and I can still remember the conversation I had with my manager at work a few days before Denver basically shut all the way down for a few months. Both of us were a bit skeptical about how severe the impact of Covid-19 would actually be and verbally walked through a few different possibilities that largely ended up with everyone rolling back into the office in a month’s time. Sometimes I’m really, really wrong. As I go from the realm of ironically referring to myself as an old man to teetering on the precipice of actually being that point of reference, I’m more comfortable with admissions of ineptitude than I’ve ever been. It’s hardly upsetting any more.
If you are one of the zero or less people who actually read the old Team Murder that was active between 2002-2010 then you might detect a slight change in my perspective. This is not just years at work but over the past 2-3 years I’ve moved through a towering pile of changes and things are vastly improved and more stable these days, plague times withstanding and all. Since the last time I wrote anything on this domain with any earnest a healthy number of things that I felt were foundationally defining in my life sprouted legs (or wrote themselves a blank check with ‘Midlife crisis’ on the memo line) and Riverdanced the fuck off the map on into the great hereafter. While the majority of the more jarring changes were happening, I tried to make myself feel better by doing stupid yet outwardly invisible things that mostly didn’t stay with me. I used to try to ingest some variety of hallucinogen every few years because it would give my increasingly fixed perspective a necessary slap upside its metaphorical head and jolt me into cognizance of the narrowing circles I was pacing around in. I haven’t felt that need recently perhaps because it’s legal(-ish) in this state now and doesn’t have the urban legends of potentially losing your mind or whatever. The appeal is missing now, I think, because I was unstable for a couple of years. Of course, my idea of instability is pretty pedestrian and points to how much of a privileged wuss I am: I had a semi-amiable divorce, I moved into a very nice if depressing apartment, I discovered that being a part time parent makes me a much better and more engaged parent, I got married again and now I’m a step parent, and I bought yet another overly large house in the suburbs without feeling the slightest twinge of ex-urban angst while I post this over a 1G/1G fiber internet connection that costs less a month that the PPPoE aDSL internet connection that I had when I first started posting things on this domain.
What’s new with you?
Outside of this site which I abandoned entirely for something like six years I’ve never been one to document all that much of my life and even less so with the intent of being consumed by a public audience, imagined or otherwise. The obsessive selfie takers have always annoyed me and before that the person in a group who wanted everyone in that group to pose in front of things to get group photos while the remainder of us were happy to just walk around and be there in the place we were visiting. My former family-in-law were very much like this and trips would be spent dutifully marching from one spot to pose in front of to another and I’m very glad that I’m not obligated to do this anymore despite being completely impatient with the practice and idea when I was participating in it.
As disinterested as I typically am in photography (the practice not the product) article about the destructive and egotistical practice of forcibly inserting your looking glass self into everything you do was well worth reading. The separation between whatever thing you do with your spare moments and your identity is one I think is healthy.