Holiday Humbuggery

Here is the public version of the homework I assigned all of you — relief from societal expectations of familial interactions, in forms from commiseration and acknowledgment to scheming and puppy GIFs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/9lneeb/
It’s the sort of thing I think makes RBN so valuable, and I’m glad that you participated in a similar thing.

I don’t do most holidays, or at least haven’t ever participated outside of a family context I hated¹It’s not Christmas until somebody cries. This is both the tagline to my Christmas action movie and historically true in my experience.. These days that doesn’t feel like such a burden, but it did sometimes in the past. Particularly when there was something enforcing my participation like the dorms closing for a month in the middle of winter, or everyplace in the world being closed on Christmas. And so I want to make a standing offer to do lots of holiday-time things that might make your life better — I can provide a place that isn’t with your family, or to meet only the people you want to see, or someplace to be while the world says you must be “home”. I can provide a safe place for whatever sort of ritual you prefer, a day of distraction, some time with a dog, or drunken ba-humbuggery about the hypocrisy and harm of mandatory calendar-based “celebrations”²Next year I might rent a big house in the Chicago suburbs or somewhere convenient for travel and cold enough to have outdoor winter activities, and host people I want to see — and the people they want to see — for some clearly-not-holiday-related winter vacation.. So please reach out if any of that ever sounds like a good idea.

Got a dog food dispenser mounted, approved the filing for my debt lawsuit, came up with a new plan to extract a little money from the federal government, advanced the plot on my pub-sub system, worked on a grow light project for Ben, provided charts and explanations of PWM motor control for the robot team, and got through a good PoC for a new access control system. And that’s all before 1 PM, so now I’m gonna Rimworld until Shanda gets home and makes me stop, pausing only to deal with Dog. In fact I’m gonna to take him (and me) for a walk before I start so he doesn’t get too antsy sitting around all afternoon. A 1 PM walk today is easy because the weather loves me — dark and windy even as the daystar as at its most deadly.

Rimworld’d until 6:30 PM and am finally back in the swing of things. My last game was 2017-11-26, so it’s been 11 months. It’s hard to keep everyone alive and manage their mood; in the early game you have to just ignore moods and hope for the best, but later on managing mood and social interactions is the only way to keep the colony from collapsing. I added plumbing to this run, which I’m really liking so far — access to water is high on my worry list and this mod adds a lot of water-specific ways and infrastructure to plan and build and worry about.

Folks at robots are starting to freak out about Saturday’s competition. As if that will make anything happen better or sooner. I’m not sure what auto will look like but traditionally we go to the first competition just hardly having the opening move working, and that seems very plausible given our current state. Hopefully in addition to panic and extra meetings (which I’m not going to) this will motivate people to choose getting something functional over not finishing something theoretically cooler.

I told my boss that he should remind me to get to our daily meeting when he thinks I’ve missed too many. The meeting itself isn’t so bad, but the daily reporting regardless of urgency is hard on my soul. So I skip a bunch of them — and missing 50% or so is generally fine — but it’s hard for me to skip the right amount because I tend to avoid the whole topic. So we’ll see if my boss wants to be in charge of technically supervising me. Historically most people don’ — I can’t blame them because I’m a fucking handful as a corporate employee. I expect to have to manage my boss’s feelings about this request; he’ll be nervous because I asked for help outside the context of hierarchical interactions or individual expertise work assignments.

Here’s hoping a I can manage a week with normal bedtimes and not so much robots that I hate it before Saturday and no drugs and 4 hours for CritRole.

ZiB

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