Irka @coyoteseattle@mastodon.mechanicalmischief.com

That was a weird feeling. I walked into a Grocery Outlet I've never been to, and suddenly felt like it was twenty years ago, and I was halfway across the country. If that place wasn't selling usb cables and advertising their Facebook page, I would have sworn it was the same store I shopped at growing up. The layout was the same, the aesthetic was the same, the off-brands were the same... Nostalgia is a very strange thing.

Welp, I am officially unemployed a few days earlier than planned. I woke up this morning after a long night on call to find all my work accounts disabled, and my badge not working when I got to the office. Apparently, my manager had HR cut me off before my notice date, because he expected me to not work from home, while working overnight on call.

How I know I'm really ready to leave my job: my employer just announced a new program to set people up with charity work, and now I'm angry, because I can't see it as anything but a cynical attempt to get free marketing by getting employees to volunteer under the company's brand name.

If I ever run an open source project, I'm going to require that all commits run through a linter which, along with the typical stuff, considers comments containing, "simply," "obviously," and other similar words to be errors.

A friendly reminder: if an optimistic nihilist asks you for grocery requests and you say, "the meaning of life," a jar of pickles is a perfectly valid fulfillment of that request.

I sure do love climbing into bed, closing my eyes to sleep, then immediately having my phone blare an alert because for the past five months, the cron job to clean up cruft on one of our servers has been broken, and no one's taken the time to investigate *why* the disk was filling up, instead of just treating it as routine and manually freeing disk space. >..<

Hmm, I wonder if anyone's making a porn parody named "Baba Is Lewd," yet.

So, I was watching Love, Death & Robots, because I've heard so much good stuff about it. I got up to Zima Blue, and an hour later, the crying has subsided enough for me to type this. That is quite possibly the hardest I've ever been emotionally struck by a piece of media, and it was done in a ten minute animated short. I'd say it's too bad that they can't all be like that, but then I realize that I would probably never be able to finish the series, if they were.

Well, I just finished playing Moss. The best reward I've ever gotten for completing a puzzle in a game is now a high five from a mouse.
If any of y'all have an Oculus/Vive/WMR/PSVR/compatible rig and haven't played Moss, you're missing out on what may be the best narrative-driven game on the platform.

So, I went and saw Captain Marvel. I really liked it, and recommend it to anyone who likes superhero movies.
The fact that they introduced Monica Rambeau as an eleven year old in 1995 also makes me really hopeful for the possibility of a Nextwave movie. It was *probably* just a throwaway reference, and in joke for people like me to get, but a faithful Nextwave movie would be the best thing in the MCU, and I will fight anyone who claims otherwise. And then they will explode.

Ah, the fun of visible user impact. Spend weeks doing behind the scenes stuff to significantly improve stability, and no one notices. Spend half an hour bodging together a thing to make it marginally easier to do one task in an immediately visible way, and everyone heaps praise on you.

So, I just gave Sansar a try with my VR rig. It's good to see that the Second Life tradition of building with absolutely no consideration for performance then blaming the Lindens when your shit performs poorly is alive and well.
On a related note, it's a little impressive that the only VR thing which has made me queasy so far was the single digit framerates I was getting in a couple of those Sansar experiences, and not, like, the various high motion action games I've tried.

I'm starting an Elder Scrolls themed band. We're called The Deviated Septims.

A friendly reminder: if you are playing a VR boxing game, make sure there's nothing which you're going to accidentally punch within arm's reach. I forgot I had my bedroom door open, and accidentally punched the edge of it. My hand is not happy. >_<

Ugh. My employer sent out an invite to post an anonymous review of working at the company on a third party site. I was going to post an honest review, which would have been highly critical, and probably career limiting if it was tied back to me. But in order to actually post the review, you have to provide your location and job title; this narrows it down to like seven people, but I was still going to post it. Until I hit submit, and it popped up, "Great, to post this, you'll have to sign up for an account," with my work email address filled in on the registration form. Somehow, I doubt this is nearly as anonymous as claimed.