I started writing this overly wordy post about how burned out I’ve been feeling lately. This is not news to anyone since I’d wager most people who didn’t have their work lives wildly disrupted during the pandemic are equally fried and as ready for the scrap heap as I am.
I had a few free hours this weekend and tried to just concentrate on writing that smaller thing that seemed less intense than the much, much longer thing I’m also puttering away on. I was completely wrong about that. The end result was an intense wave of brain fog and fatigue that knocked me entirely out of commission at 10 PM on a Friday night. This is not at all normal for me.
After I concluded that absolutely nothing worth sharing with any one was going to be accomplished that night, I just poked around on the interwebz for a length of time likely equalivalent to what I’d spend writing something that wasn’t a link dump with a lengthy explanation.
As a side note, I’m giving Ulysses a trial run as an editor for things longer than 1000 words. I have not yet decided whether it is for me yet but it does give me some separation from a web browser which is a nice break if nothing else. I recently acquired one of the M1 Pro Max (it just flows off the tongue like a song) MacBook Pro’s and decided that I should stop doing everything in the damned browser if I was going have a machine that substantial. I still have very mixed feelings about Apple but this generation of machines is pretty damned good at least until the new version of the OS comes out and makes me regret my earlier words. The weird part is that I actually enjoy this keyboard which is significant because I often go to ridiculous lengths to avoid ever typing on the keyboards built into laptops. So, yeah, real tools like a goddamned grown up. Totally weird, right?
Unfortunately, this wasn’t prompted entirely by a fervent need to complicate my workflow. Draft is performing strangely for me over the past few weeks and the ‘Oh boy’ moment was watching my cursor, unmanned by me, mow backwards over something I’d just finished up and losing 650 words or so. Nope, haven’t reported as a bug or anything yet but until I have some free time that actually feels free I’m going to stick to editors that save text locally. There are too many unstable layers to that stack although I’m guessing Chrome is the guilty party. I’ll come back to that extraordinarily handy tool when I’m less terrified of it potentially eating a bunch of words while I watch in horror.
Things I saw recently:
This hardware-centric examination of a 1996 photo of animators working on Final Fantasy 7 is one of the those things that I started reading out of general interest in all things FFVII but ended up being far most interesting. The idea that an SGI machine had the capacity for 8 GB of RAM in the 1990s when hard drives were generally measured in megabytes is mind blowing. SGI and IRIX were always fascinating to me but, mostly because I work with excruciatingly boring commodity hardware even on the server side of the house, I’ve never had to opportunity to do much with that family of machines other than stare slack jawed at it. I made the mistake of looking at ‘vintage’ SGI hardware (specifically the Onyx line mentioned in the article) and I am now reassured with complete certainty that I will never own any piece of hardware from Silicon Graphics.
Holy shit! A Next Level Burger opened in Denver! I will soon venture out on another leg of my ultimate quest to become the most overweight and unhealthy vegan ever. I’m not happy about the potential impact this will have on our local heroes Meta Burger but I suppose this was somewhat inevitable.
I would have never guessed that DMCA takedowns were an escalating issue on Reddit. Maybe it’s because my use is largely limited to geeky/work/funny areas. If you follow the link, the actual number is startling.
Unsurprisingly, dictionaries are too risky for Florida schools now. I wish I had adequate words to describe the sounds that came out of my mouth when I originally read this. It’s also saddening that I now have a Google Alert set up for book banning in the United States. That’s really where we are folks. Maybe the uncertified veterans being welcomed into classrooms as teachers will just start shooting books deemed offensive?