Month: March 2020

Professional Cat Herding

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I don’t have a pithy image to go with this post, but yesterday we officially went on remote protocols. Like literally everyone out there I am dealing with life in pandemia, where social distancing… that thing the introverts and anxiety ridden among us have been practicing our entire life. I am officially sitting in my work place and yes I am wearing pants. Well that is a slight lie because I opted for shorts instead of my usual jeans, but I am properly dressed. I attempted to maintain as much of my morning routine as possible as I got up, showered, left the house, picked up breakfast and then instead of driving to the office I drove back home. What makes it doubly odd is that both my wife and I are now remote workers for the time being, though currently she is on spring break.

I had the sudden realization yesterday that managing a team of 16 remote employees is going to be an awful lot like leading a raid group. The challenge of leading a raid is that you effectively have a group of unpaid volunteers that you somehow are trying to get working towards the same goal with nothing but text and voice chat in order to wrangle them. When it comes to actual employees at least there are some financial hooks that you have that you can flex, but otherwise I think remote work is going to feel extremely similar. While we swapped Discord and Ventrilo for more professional tools like Microsoft Teams… the theory is very similar.

While sitting down to write this I am already connected in with my team and answering some initial tech support questions as we attempt to make sure everyone can get into their machines as intended. Kenzie is extremely confused because she knows that I should be leaving my office any minute now and continues to pace around as if to remind me that I have to run out the door. Hopefully at some point she will settle in on her box beside me and chill. The thing that concerns me the most is that it is only 7:10 and I already feel pretty isolated. I have a feeling that we are going to have to keep a chat going or something in the background that folks can drop in and out of just to have some human contact, which is bizarre for me to admit considering that I can go hours without saying a word on most days.

I pitched this concept as a grand new adventure to my employees. We come from a very “butts in seats” culture where if you are not in your seat at a specific time then you must not be actually working. One of the biggest complaints that I have heard over the years is that we don’t really have a good remote work option, and as a result this is now our chance to prove that things can in fact get done when we are all in different locations. So my hope is that we can embrace this opportunity and show that productivity comes in a bunch of different packages. This is either going to go amazingly well or backfire horribly, but I believe it is going to be the former rather than the later. Just the fact that I can work from cocoon like darkness of my office is a major upgrade to the harsh brightness of the fluorescent light sea of cubical.

Some parting thoughts however. I did some research going into this situation and one of the things that I found helpful is a pamphlet that community veteran Sanya Weathers created with some of her tips and tricks from a career of working remotely. She is currently selling it on Amazon Kindle for a little under $3 and then planning on donating the proceeds to her local food pantry. I ended up taking this version, converting it to PDF and then sending it out to my employees and putting in a donation through her coffee link for each of them and a few more just in case it spread within the company. I found the advice to be invaluable and the writing style was easily approachable and as such I am hoping it helps my crew in making the adjustment.

The thing is… at this point none of us know how long this is going to go on. It is wrecking the daily routine and as a result we are going to have to find a brand new one. I also fully expect that this blog is going to shift around a bit as a result given that my gaming patterns are being interrupted as well. Yesterday was so draining that I more or less melted into the sofa when I got home and did the whole dozing in and out of sleep thing until we finally decided to go to the bedroom around 9 pm. I maybe knocked out a few quests in Elder Scrolls Online, but my appetite for gaming was minimal just due to the sheer exhaustion of existing in pandemia. We are in the time of community spread and I hope we all make it out okay on the other end. I am going to continue to talk about the things that concern me but I am likely not going to be promoting posts like this one. This one is only for the folks who read me on a daily basis.

Tres Cazadora

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This weekend was the beginning of another Diablo 3 season and once again we are on our bullshit. I was super happy to see that Byx was around and wanting to do nonsense and since we are all sorta stressed to the highest degree we seemingly all chose the easy mode. Demon Hunter is pretty much the default state for me and a Diablo season because I know with a little push I can get in and get the content knocked out in relatively short order. I decided to rebirth an older Demon Hunter which lead to the above state of our party, where we are all desperately in need of clothing and kicking demon butt in high heels.

This was a fairly low gaming weekend, because we spent a lot of our time doing various cleaning activities both for the sake of covid19 and for the fact that it is spring break and we always seem to do big cleaning projects. We went out shopping for awhile on Saturday and managed to get a new pair of outdoor rugs for the backyard, so pending things ever warm up again we will get everything set up back there again. This is mostly for our own mental fortitude because if we are sequestered for very long in the near future we will want access to our peaceful oasis with birbs, squirrels and neighborhood cats. Huge thanks to my friend Kolrath for giving me a lift from 55ish to 70 on Saturday morning fairly early, and Grace and I finally managed to catch up with each other on Sunday night to hang for a bit again.

I am currently stalled out on the seasonal journey and my six piece gear set by a single thing. I cannot for the life of me get a weapon to roll a socket. I’ve completely bankrupted myself on five or six occasions trying to roll a socket on a yellow bow and it just isn’t happening. Ultimately my game time has been spent farming gold and then blowing all of it on a futile attempt to get through chapter four. The worst part is that I don’t even love the gear set that is for this season, but I have been rat-holing other set pieces I come across because I think ultimately for farming purposes I am going to want a Yang’s Multishot build, which is probably my favorite? I am not sure what sort of shenanigans I can get up to this season with the ability to have odd combinations of cube items but I figure bolas and grenades are on the menu for nonsense.

The other thing that I did this weekend was spend the podcast getting reacquainted with Elder Scrolls Online. Effectively patching up right now will replace your current client with a brand new one, and while this is in itself a cumbersome and lengthy process… the end result is amazing. Elder Scrolls Online has always had significant performance issues, namely when it comes to loading into the game initially and loading into new areas. This client seems to completely fix these issues for me at least and has greatly improved general performance across the board. As always I am several content releases behind and am now working my way through the Morrowind content drop. I have no clue where I picked up the bad-ass Khajiit mask but I am absolutely rocking this cat lord vibe right now.

AggroChat #291 – Life in Pandemia

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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra and Thalen

This evening we thought we would start the show with a discussion of what life has been like for each of us in the time of Covid19.  We’ve all sorta been juggling trying to maintain a relatively normal life while still remaining safe and sound. As part of this discussion we talk about the various things getting cancelled, like E3 and wondering if this is the end of that show as a whole.  Kodra and Ash talk about their adventures in Ori and the Will of the Wisps and how maybe it is on par with Hollow Knight. Bel talks a bit about his problem with Destiny Seasons and how expiring content keeps him from wanting to engage. Kodra discusses his recent journey into Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and Dicey Dungeons.  Finally Bel talks about how he has reached an end with his sojourn into Spiders games with Bound by Flame being the one that he just can’t bring himself to play.

Topics Discussed

  • Life in the time of Covid19
    • What day to day life is like so far
  • Goodbye to E3
  • Ori and the Will of the Wisps
  • The Destiny Seasonal Problem
  • Kodra and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon
  • Dicey Dungeons
  • Mars War Logs
  • Bound by Flame

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Interesting Times

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There is an ancient “curse” that reads “may you live in interesting times”. I feel like right now at this moment we are all living in interesting times regardless if we want to. This has been a bizarre week, and comes on the tail of several bizarre weeks. In a Pinball machine there is an anti-cheating mechanism designed to lock down the controls if you push it off axis just a little too much and cause a plumb bob to bang against its housing. This is referred to as tilting the machine, and I feel like at some point on Thursday I officially entered the tilt state as a human being and am more or less just operating on instinct. As a technologist I often times think of my own internal processes as though they were that of a machine, because in some way it makes me feel like I have more control over them than I actually do.

Video games are a large part of my coping mechanism for stress. I often want to dig into some other world or setting as a way of resetting my brain back to healthy parameters. However when too much stress builds up too quickly I find myself in this restless state where nothing seems to be soothing. I am officially in that state as I flit between activities desperately trying to find something to bring some semblance of solace to my mind. Last night I spent some time playing Doom 2016, because I never actually managed to beat that game before careening off like a bored toddler into some other thing that caught my attention. The jury is out if it actually helped because I woke up this morning feeling just as frazzled as I was before heading to bed and I know I was up several times during the night tossing and turning and struggling with temperature regulation.

Starting around the 26th of February I started fighting a case of Influenza A that was thankfully tested and classified as that. However I took the advice of shelter and self care and as a result I was too late for antivirals meaning that I got the full brunt. I had a Flu Shot but got the trivalent version that my workplace was offering, and my wife later got the quadrivalent version that Walgreens had. Apparently the strain I got was the one covered under the one she received because she never actually managed to catch it which is a blessing. However while I am in recovery mode still and taking a course of steroids to attempt to clear out my lungs, we have also been dealing with the ramping up of concern and reaction to Covid19.

I won’t lie I am concerned about this virus, largely because when the news talks about about the people this sort of thing effects the worst… I am in that category. I have severe respiratory problems and have had my entire life. When you combine that with the fact that I have a less than fully functioning immune system due to some IgG deficiencies you end up with a recipe for me having a really bad time if I catch this thing. I am trying desperately not to let this fear control me, but it is nonetheless a thing. I am one of those people that seems to catch everything that happens to be going around, and I feel like it is just a matter of time before I myself get infected. I feel like I keep wanting to tell everyone that I love them… just in case something goes south because I am riding that line between understandable concern and sheer panic way too much of the day.

On one level it seems strange to be coming home and pushing my brain into another world… especially one as violent as Doom. However for me I guess it is a way of not being me for awhile and going into a setting with clearly defined rules that I can manipulate and bend to my will. It is a way of me getting back some control when I am feeling like I have none. I am a very information based person and the lack of what it seems like good solid verified information is ultimately the thing that pushes me into a state of panic the most. The fact checkers of the world are in a state of overload and too much information is flowing out through less than reliable sources that make for a very challenging time to decide what you can actually trust. So instead I keep looking for shelter for the night in the form of a game, because the day will always mean a return to the logistics of the world and the weariness that it brings.