My close friend died last week, by suicide. She was an epic motherfucker, parachute jumper fire artist BRC ranger entrepreneur photographer DJ traveler. She was gonna turn 31 this spring. Had dreams of buying a house and starting a family. Loved by so many, our community is devastated. There's a celebration of life next week and I will not be surprised if hundreds of people show up. Her work was intense, she was touring the world with a big artist for many years as part of the AV team making a really good salary. She was not political, we never even talked about it but she was trans and I can't imagine the current state of the world did not play a part in the dark moment that pushed her to make the decision that ended her life. I imagine we'll never know why. She had plans for the weekend, vacation in the south booked for this week and no note or prep that we know of. I will miss my friend more than I can express.
Gotta love when no one in your department is able to attend meetings on time so you're the dependable one who has to let the chief of health into the office in the morning. Head of my team routinely is late it misses meetings. It's honestly embarrassing for me because I spend time organizing then they just don't show up. On the bright side, I've got a fancy shiny new updated resume with help from career services and have started the great cold emailing game. No bites yet since the job market is hot garbage but I'm going for it! Union negotiated a long weekend for Cesar Chavez day so I'm excited and beyond ready for a three day weekend. Going off the grid to my partner's family's cabin. It's quiet and peaceful and such a great place for relaxation. Going to be rainy there probably which means we get to just hang out and cook and read and play games instead of hike or swim or explore. It's fabulous I'm so ready.
This just sounds like bad or missing management. Do what you can, and keep looking for a better work environment for yourself. The cabin sounds great! Cabin's even on a rainy day are hard to beat. We have a slight, I think 2% to 4% last I looked, chance of tornado later today here which is...not normal.
I'm not new to the game, but recently began to find deeper levels of appreciation of the character creation system in Traveller. It's not like D&D or any other RPG (that I know of/didn't steal it wholesale), where you decide "I want to be X" and then play as X with whatever class/gear/stats/skills/feats of your choice. No. Here you start wanting to become something, assign attributes and skills learned from your homeworld... and then life happens. You start wanting to become a space frontier doctor like Julian Bashir, life happens, and you're playing an '80s vision of a netrunner - with chip sockets behind high-collared hobojacket and cyberdecks and communicating with excerpts from Gibson - that's been in and out of prison for the last 40 years. You start without much of an idea for life, enlist in the navy, life happens, you earn a field commission and live your life as some larger-than-life overdecorated mix of James Bond and Horatio Hornblower, hitting Admiral before turning 40. You are born into wealth and nobility, spend 20 years of your adult life as a blasé socialite with one of those administration 'jobs' the rich save for their spare heirs, life puts on its asskicking boots, and without other options you become a middling novelist more famous than Coca-Cola with contacts rivalling the FBI. There's three more people with equally subverted ideas for their character's life, ones above need the least explanation ("what's a Bwap?"). It was awesome to sit and make those characters together, weaving a common story. More games should offer something like that, but I'm afraid it's too much work for most designers and too not-what-I-want-waaaah! for most players. Still, it'd be bitchin' to have it in Call of Cthulhu as a better background generator than GM's default "so you all know this professor/are related to that so-and-so to inherit X."
Update on the apartment. We go to auction on Saturday morning (barring a last minute generous offer). It's been an experience. Juggling visits by potential buyers, building inspections and meetings with real estate agents, at the same time as wrangling a home loan and a very busy work schedule, is not something I would care to do regularly.
there’s definitely no, NO, possible way that tariffs announced on vehicles produced outside the United States is a way to obscure the Atlantic posting the entirety, unredacted, of the war plans they were texted. no way. how does this shit end for trump and the rest of these assholes
It's interesting, isn't it? I mean obviously it sucks balls. Lives are being destroyed. Livelihoods are in the shitter. Global geopolitics is being rocked to its core and wealth is being destroyed at a rate not seen since 2008. But once you get over the "front seat at the apocalypse" nature of it all, it remains... interesting. I think the Democrats had a duty to warn about all the heinous bullshit the Trump administration would try to pull. it didn't work? But "no, you don't understand, all this stuff is holy-shit bad" was an electoral strategy that should have worked. They could have taken the tack of "do you realize how incompetent they were last time" as well as "and all the clever people who signed on last time are farts in the wind" but not after getting caught pretending Biden was more competent than he was. I also think the Democrats are leaning too heavily into Napoleon's maxim "Never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake." But I can see the thinking - if "these guys would burn the Reichstag" doesn't work, and you have a good guess they will fucking suck at everything they do, standing back and letting the populism dissolve in the face of pure criminal incompetence is a strategy. It's certainly the lowest effort. I'm halfway convinced the Dems are hammering everyone's emails and phones so they can see just how small their base truly is; I know I'm in no mood to give them any money and i broached some "oh you're a REAL sucker" giving level last year. They're historically unpopular and that's saying something, considering the environment. One of my favorite morning rituals is opening up Yahoo! Finance and comparing the articles written three hours before the market opens with the tickers after the market opens. They rarely align anymore. Futures kinda went "lol tariffs" and then retail went "oh noes tariffs" and every talking head and substack analyst shows their ass about the fact that all their models and prognostications date to a world that makes sense. Broadly? The markets have stopped taking Trump seriously. And has been pointed out about that whole Signal shitshow, the only evidence that Trump had any involvement whatsoever was Stephen Miller going "daddy Trump told me" at which point it isn't even the populists in charge. '87-'88 were rough for Reagan, even after this: Because Iran-Contra made it really clear that homeboy was not in charge. Bush won in '88 anyway? But a lot of that was Dukakis had the charisma of a wet paper towel and a lot of that was ample evidence that Bush was a competent bureaucrat (new taxes notwithstanding). I think it ends in ignominy. I think it's gonna suck to get there but I think the fever dies back. I mean, the Trump administration hasn't even been able to do shit about egg prices, despite this: What have they done recently for the people who voted for them? Because what minuscule fraction of the electorate gives a shit about stuff like this?
The big question for the Dems seems to be whether they can produce a new candidate that won't be another Dukakis. Really, what I don't understand is how low the Dems have to be in the polls and how bad their demographic outlook has to become for them for them to wake up and change course.