Mini-Update: April 2023

Gonna keep try to keep this update short(ish), starting with the notably bad news first:

My 9-to-5 job is going through layoffs right now, and although I'm likely safe for the time being, it's still awful to see hardworking coworkers in critical positions get axed for reasons entirely outside of their control. It also seems doubtful that this will be the only round of layoffs, so I think a lot of folks in support roles like myself are waiting for the other shoe to drop, either later this year or sometime in 2024.

Stress has been high for months now, and morale is – at least from where I'm sitting – pretty damn low. I've been laid off once before at an IT service job back in Illinois, and while that definitely sucked, my circumstances at the time were atypical: one of my coworkers there wound up moving out of state shortly after the layoffs happened, which opened up a spot on my former team and led to my being recalled after just a few months. I also had extensive family support in that area, so I could have always moved back in with either of my parents if my employment situation hadn't stabilized.

In contrast, I'm starting to understand the "survivor's guilt" that gets used to describe how remaining employees feel after a layoff or similarly destructive reorganization happens. I definitely don't mean to draw any direct 1:1 equivalencies here, since actually being laid off or effectively forced into early retirement is orders of magnitude worse than just feeling bad about it happening to someone else, but this is honestly making me reconsider my own career choices more seriously. Pay in the public sector isn't great, but it was at least supposed to be safe. 

My original hope was to move back into local IT support work – think Help Desk and Computer/User support-type stuff – since I genuinely enjoy helping people with their tech troubles, and I felt like that would have been the perfect foundation for me in the long-term: do fun nerd-support stuff during the day, write at night, continue chipping away at my self-publishing projects, and maybe one day be able to do the writing thing full-time. However, after a few years of failing to break back into the professional IT space with my current employer, it's clearly not going to happen. We're in a very rural area, too, so technical job prospects in the larger community are mostly nonexistent. 

This obviously isn't how I hoped things would turn out, but definitive bad news at least forces me to move on from the fuzzy maybes and professional half-measures that have thus far dominated my career (such as it is) and commit more seriously to the labor of my writing and everything that entails. I don't think that will make the road any easier to travel, but it at least means I can stop spending my professional development time on skills that aren't central to writing or otherwise managing my tiny corner of the self-publishing space. So I've pivoted away from IT work entirely and am refocusing exclusively on my fiction. If I want to have any serious hope of pulling off this whole self-pub author thing, then I need to be a lot smarter about how I spend my free time. Full stop. The mental bandwidth needed to do any serious writing or editing work after-hours is already in short supply for me, so I need to stop wasting those precious minutes on peripheral shit and other distractions.

I don't want to take my day job for granted, but I also don't want to pretend that assorted purchasing, contract-writing, and administrative support work is especially meaningful or gratifying to me personally. It's not. That's all stuff I *can* do, but not what I *want* to do. This dissonance is easier to ignore when I'm doing things that are at least adjacent to things I love – writing, first and foremost, but also developing documentation and training resources, organizing things, or technical support more clearly and directly related to furthering our larger mission – but that also feels like an increasingly threadbare justification. I owe it to myself and PROTH to find a way to do work that is both personally meaningful and lets me keep contributing to the household at the same time. 

This is hardly deep or mind-blowing stuff, but it's a lesson I'm working much harder to internalize. It has been very easy for me to slip into the role of the unremarkable, reactive, and frustratingly passive protagonist these past few years, so I've been trying to un-fuck the habits and rituals that comprise my daily life and turn them into guard rails, inducements, and other feedback loops that actively support my writing. And critically, it's been working. SH#1 is undergoing its final reread and edits, I've resumed more serious development work for RW, and I increasingly find myself *wanting* to write before I game, read, or otherwise blow off steam at the end of the day. I doubt the battle against authorial entropy will ever be truly won, but for now it feels good to be productive again and have supports in place to ensure that continues.

My newest strategy on that front has been the app and service called Clockify. I've only used their free version so far, but it's enabled me to divide up various writing projects into proper categories and easily track my time spent on each of them (RW vs. SH, research vs. drafting vs. editing, etc.). It even generates an email report to me each week, showing what projects I've worked on, when, and for how long. This helps me track progress over time and gives me a clear indication of whether or not I'm meeting my general writing or project-specific goals, all without needing to reinvent the tracking wheel myself. Seeing those writing numbers stay up (or go higher!) is very motivating, but even if I have a slower week, it helps me keep things in perspective and avoid regressing into negative self-talk loops. Clockify has also fully displaced my use of Habitica, which had (ironically) become too distracting to use on a daily basis with its character building and level progression systems. My gamer tendencies meant that I started engaging more with its hokey mini-games than the actual tasks it was meant to help me stay on top of.

In other better news, I'm stoked for the coming release of the twelfth and final book in the Cradle series, Waybound, by Will Wight. I love that series with the power of ten thousand suns. Plus, he is kind of my self-publishing hero at this point, so seeing such an impactful and consistently compelling story conclude after *twelve freaking volumes* is a level of skill and artistry and diligence that gives me something to aim for. 

I'm also super excited for the return of the TV series Warrior, which had two incredible first seasons, and the new SILO TV series. Hugh Howey's SILO books were incredibly formative for me, so I'm hoping that they're done justice on Apple TV+ or whatever the platform is called (streaming acronyms and brand names are getting harder to track).

I'll try to share updates on my personal RW wiki one of these days; ditto some version of that "Modern Mythology" post I keep half-finishing, shelving, and then forgetting about until I invariably consume superhero media again, but I'm gonna call it for now and leave you with this snappy distillation that I saw on Reddit yesterday:

'Doing Nothing at All' vs. 'Making Small Consistent Efforts':

(1.00)³⁶⁵ = 1.00
(1.01)³⁶⁵ = 37.70

Gaming PC Upgrades: 2022-2023

Another quick(ish) IT aside, but I've been chasing deals on components for the past couple months to do in-place upgrades for our primary workstations/gaming rigs. I used this long holiday weekend to finish assembling everything and get both PROTH and I back up and running OS/software-wise. Residual customization and related detail work will probably continue for another couple weeks as we both settle in, but it feels great to have a fresh installation humming along on improved hardware. 

The research, deal-hunting, and eventual assembly are always fun for me, but things were complicated this time around due to especially awful price hikes from Nvidia; sticker shock from the pricey AM5 motherboards and DDR5 needed for AMD's new Zen 4 line of CPUs; crypto shenanigans in the tech sphere that, while less bad now, especially with Ethereum moving to proof of stake, continue to distort the price and availability of discrete GPUs; and all-around awful rates of inflation. I'd normally look to the upper mid-range CPUs from AMD latest generation – likely the impressive 7600X, which is the current successor to our old 2600X – but sticking with souped-up AM4 machines for a couple more years is easy math in our current environment. Plus, I was able to snag an amazing 25% off deal on the gaming powerhouse 5800X3D, and sticking with "older tech" has rarely felt this good in practice (here's a primer on CPU/GPU bottlenecking for reference).

Plus, I'm holding off on possible GPU upgrades for us until next year, when Diablo 4 (me) and Dragon Age 4 (PROTH) should finally grace us with their presence. Our RTX 2070s are still performing admirably at 2K, even if they're starting to show their age in next-gen games, and Nvidia's awful price-gouging for their 4xxx series GPUs doesn't leave me hopeful there will be affordable RTX 4060s of 4070s in our future, so a full shift to Team Red seems imminent. The fact that EVGA and its best-in-class RMA support team has also gotten out of the GPU game entirely makes that decision even easier. AMD's new RDNA 3 GPU architecture looks incredibly promising, and the *comparatively* cheaper and more scalable nature of its chiplet design makes an affordable RDNA3 GPU in the RX 7600-7800XT range seem likely sometime in 2023. And even if a reasonable 7xxx series contender doesn't materialize by then, the RX 6800 XT is still the logical choice. 

Otherwise, my 9-to-5 job has been incredibly busy of late, so I'm behind on my after-hours writing projects. I'm fortunately still on track to get one of those side hustles (SH#1, for brevity) wrapped-up in December, even though it will be a few months before I know if it merits any further installments. Either way, having SH#1 done and out the (e)door will at least free me up to refocus on the RW Project again. 

So until next time, I hope everyone has a safe, warm, and tasty holiday season. :)

Orbital HQ, out.

Font Accessibility: OpenDyslexic, Dyslexie, et al.

Just a short one for today, but I wanted to draw attention to the existence of the OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie fonts/typefaces. They are designed to help folks with dyslexia read more easily, with a growing body of research explaining how and why they work. But since I'm not qualified to interpret those findings or their professional application in graphical or website design, I'll simply speak to my personal experience using them over the last several months and point out a few helpful resources. 

Important note/caveat: I am not (to my knowledge) dyslexic, although I sometimes wonder if I have a less-intense, acquired form because of my traumatic brain injury, left-eye blindness, and a fairly extreme astigmatism. All I can say for certain is that the use of these two fonts has made it vastly easier for me to read and reduced the frequency of "mental misfires" where I unintentionally read letters out of order or skip words and have to go back and re-read for comprehension. Considering the amount of recreational reading and writing I do, these fonts have literally made my life easier. 

I currently prefer OpenDyslexic, both because it's fully free and does a better job of "catching" my eye with the shape and spacing of its letters, although YMMV. OpenDyslexic also comes pre-installed on the Kindle reading app, which I use all the time, so I'm embarrassed that it took me so long to try it out. Still, there's no reason not to experiment with both, and especially if you're comfortable installing fonts on your computer and/or have a mobile device that lets you manage those settings more directly. 

Here are potentially helpful download links, resources, and how-to guides:

1. OpenDyslexic Homepage: https://opendyslexic.org
• Chrome Extension:
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/opendyslexic-for-chrome/cdnapgfjopgaggbmfgbiinmmbdcglnam
2. Dyslexie Homepage: https://www.dyslexiefont.com
• Chrome Extension: 
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dyslexie-font-dyslexia-ac/jphdkcjkapjfojcjajeeomimmihnghjp
3. How to install fonts: 
• Windows 10: 
  https://www.howtogeek.com/787939/how-to-install-fonts-on-windows-10/
• macOS: 
  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201749
4. How to change your system font in Windows 10: 
   https://www.howtogeek.com/716407/how-to-change-the-default-system-font-on-windows-10/ (Sadly, I'm unsure how to do this one on Mac)
5. For the more adventurous, this custom font extension for Chrome will give you even more granular control over font selection, although it can require a lot of custom tweaking to avoid rendering issues: 
   https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/force-custom-fonts/hckjchjpkmbihoocajjpjajkggbccgee

It's also worth stressing that you shouldn't be messing with your Windows registry (#4) unless you're comfortable troubleshooting things. Changing your system font like that isn't officially supported, so it carries a slight risk. You may also want to further customize the registry edit by using another, more conventional font for areas that OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie have incomplete support for. For example, I changed my own Segoe UI Symbol (TrueType)"="" line to "Segoe UI Symbol (TrueType)"="seguisym.ttf", because OpenDyslexic symbols in the system tray don't render correctly. 

These were the only two accessibility fonts I could find that focused on dyslexia or similar neurodivergence and which still seemed actively supported, although I'm a little unclear on the branches attached to OpenDyslexic right now. Regardless, I hope something in there helps.

Orbital HQ, out. 

Back from a Long Hiatus and Other Musings

Preamble: So I've actually had several half-written posts sitting in my drafts queue for well over a year now. Some touched on writing-related insights, others were just borderline random nerd-outs, but there was at least a tentative plan to get them polished up and posted on a quarterly basis starting in 2020. Little things like that help keep the creative juices flowing when my regular 9-to-5 drudgery makes it tough to stay motivated. Plus, it's at least a kind of accountability, even if that's the equivalent of online journaling or whatever we call blogging these days. I suppose it's a greater, more impactful level of accountability to myself since writing things out like this feels vastly more permanent and tangible. Kind of like etching my to-do list and other musings in (digital) stone for future reference. As a TBI guy, I'm always worried about forgetting stuff, and this helps me look back, remember, and refocus when I need to. And then the pandemic hit. 

I've thankfully been able to get vaccinated and boosted without issue, and I was able to work remotely for most of 2020 and nearly two-thirds of the way through 2021, which was enormously protective in practical terms and good for (my) morale. But I'm back in the office now and finding that the chronic stress and uncertainty of those "lost years" has worn me down in unexpected ways. All that lingering, amorphous fear and anxiety have hardened into something much more insidious and difficult to shake. It feels like an awful chimera of PTSD and the siege mentality born from a collective trauma that only half the country fully acknowledges. Or at least that's how I conceptualize it; mental health theory is admittedly well outside my lane. My actual academic background in political science has often inured me to how often people vote and otherwise act against their own self-interests, but the enduring and deeply nihilistic wave of anti-vaxxing and anti-masking sentiment in the US has still been difficult to accept on any rational level. Seeing that pattern endlessly repeat itself as cases spike again (and again) is sobering and disheartening in the extreme, even for my world-weary and cynical pragmatism.

Fortunately, both my state government and local employer were very proactive with their mitigation efforts. The kind of administrative work I do can mostly be accomplished remotely, and it was far easier to tackle contract writing and other focus-intensive tasks while at home (being a max-level introvert and tech-savvy nerd surely helps here, too). That near-total lack of interruptions was the kind of blissful flow state that even a proper office and good noise suppression headphones can't match, and it's at least part of the reason I often spend my nights typing away at a draft or my worldbuilding compendium while humming along to my favorite tunes. But many other folks weren't even half so fortunate, and I want to acknowledge my privilege explicitly here. More people should be able to WFH, and as a society, we should push for more flexible work schedules, a truly livable wage, and better work-life balance all around. 

But with all that said, I've been extremely lucky so far. Although it's disappointing how few folks in our community seem to be masking these days, I haven't gotten sick or, by extension, knowingly risked getting anyone else sick this entire time (although I wish more people prioritized that second part at least as much as the first). The specter of asymptomatic infections is hard to dismiss entirely, but that's much less of a concern when I'm rarely around anyone but PROTH and still mask regularly in public. My fairly extreme introversion and lack of any kids (minus our fur babies) have made this period of relative isolation much easier to deal with. Frankly, it also confirmed something I've always assumed about myself: working on writing projects from home is the ideal end game. I fucking love it. Full stop. Similarly, until I can make homegrown self-publishing happen, tackling my regular 9-to-5 duties as remotely as possible is the next best thing, so I'm on the lookout for any hybrid or fully remote roles with my current employer. 

Unsurprisingly, progress on the RW project stalled out during COVID. My motivation to write had, at least until very recently, fallen into the same black hole that gobbled up aspirational content for the Orbital HQ. I kept a completely unrelated side project kinda-sorta in motion during this period, but even that slowed to a glacial pace compared to where I was at with it in 2019. But because that work has progressed at least somewhat over the last 18 months, I'm focused on its completion now so that I can return to RW drafting more fully by the end of the year. This authorial side hustle is being done under a pen name and is mostly a trial balloon for an experimental story. It's also an opportunity to get more comfortable with using Scrivener to compile a manuscript and the actual self-publishing process on Amazon, which I think will benefit from a low-stakes "trial run" before anything related to the RW sees the light of day. I don't plan on discussing the side hustle's particulars here, although I'm looking forward to the experience and seeing whether or not it's worth continuing in any capacity. As Mr. McCall would say: "Progress, not perfection." 

So what have I done beyond not-writing and stressing about the pandemic? A veritable shitload of gaming. 

I normally number my weekly game time in the tens of hours anyway, but those tallies exploded during COVID. My Steam, GOG, Epic, and Ubisoft profiles tell a clear but sobering tale of how I prefer to cope with health and job-related anxiety. Now don't get me wrong here: gaming is a fun, imaginative distraction that helps to tune out shitty real-life stuff pretty much on-demand. Full marks for that. Movies, TV shows, and books do that for me to a lesser extent, but gaming has always topped the list. The bit about distraction cuts both ways, though, and I find it's gotten a little too easy to stay distracted.

Notable examples include Skinner Box-style looter shooters and ARPGs like Outriders, Path of Exile, and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands; charming puzzlers like Dorfromantik; chill building sims in the vein of Kingdoms and Castles; the endlessly delightful Viking survival simulator Valheim; and more recent gems like Age of Darkness: Final Stand, The Riftbreaker, Diplomacy is Not an Option, and the absurdly good and nostalgic Songs of Conquest (and, I should add, the spiritual successor to my beloved HOMM franchise). It's a great time to be a gamer, folks. 

I could go on, but this surely paints an instructive enough picture: these are only some of the games I've chewed through of late, and that doesn't leave much time for passion projects. So I've been trying to find a better balance between work and play during my off-hours. That has meant a more explicit writing schedule, setting reminders, and directly linking the "reward" of game time with the completion of drafting work, Orbital HQ content, or other support tasks that I already enjoy doing but have too often neglected. I'm a lot more intentional about this stuff now, largely because building up positive, self-reinforcing loops that help me feel and actually be more efficacious seems like the better longer-term strategy. My hope – and dare I say, plan – is to counteract the unproductive inertia I've built up since 2020 by displacing it with better, more sustainable work habits going forward. I'm not an especially motivated person by nature, so I don't have much raw ambition to fall back on. I do, however, fall into habits easily, so I may as well make those tendencies and compulsive tics more productive than not.

Of course, there's nothing special or revelatory about this; it's really just figuring out what healthier habits look like in practice for me and how best to implement them. Some of these insights have even helped me at my day job, where smarter triage is critical for dealing with staffing shortages, increased workloads, and simple self-care. I even used a habit-building app for a few months – no, really: it's a cute pixel art service called Habitica – to help corral writing tasks and consolidate my typical mess of to-do lists into a single spot. I've since moved on to a leaner, less distracting utility called Dynalist and limited use of Google's "Tasks" and "Keep" services, but the specifics don't even matter here. This "slow but steady" approach isn't particularly sexy or showy, but so far it's keeping me fresher on the material, more motivated, and seems to synergize well with my tendency to want things planned out in advance. I wouldn't call it a perfect approach, and there is clearly a balance that needs to be struck between finding the right tools to support my work and not unproductively fixating on the tools themselves, but this particular kind of structure already feels better and is forcing me to break my writing objectives into smaller and more measurable chunks in the service of larger project-related goals. I'm hesitant to call any of this SMART, if only because that sounds so pretentious and I've generally been terrible about self-imposed deadlines, but that's at least the gist of what I'm moving toward.

The initial draft of this post covered my thoughts on a "modern mythology" of superheroes and dystopias. It drew parallels between our media and real-life instances of heroism and villainy, and the ways in which that kind of media can be enormously gratifying but also dangerously limiting in how it influences our ability to understand and tackle real-life structural problems. I'd like to return to that subject in another post after I've had the chance for more substantive rewrites, but I think this is plenty for today. 

I wish you folks luck in dealing with whatever roadblocks life throws your way. Whether COVID-related or otherwise, I hope you find a way past it. Oh, and maybe flip it the bird in your rearview mirror as you drive by. Just a thought.

Orbital HQ, out.

Lord of the Rings-a-thon: A Holiday Tale

As a quick aside, PROTH and I have nearly finished our annual viewing of the Lord of the Rings extended editions – a holiday tradition that has become a warm, 11ish hour-long blanket of nostalgic bliss over the years, and a never-ending source of all the feels (spoilers) – but we still have a lot of fun critiquing certain parts as we watch, and especially the large scale battles and sieges. 

So I was understandably excited when I found out about A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, which is an absolute gem of a website that breaks down pop culture representations of premodern combat and societies to fascinating effect – including a six-part series deconstructing the Siege of Gondor and a larger worldbuilding page. Kudos to the site's operator and military historian extraordinaire, Bret Devereaux, for putting such a phenomenal, insightful, and entertaining resource together.

Orbital – or maybe this time terrestrial? – HQ, out.