CWs: mental health, holidays

It’s always interesting to make it through another year, another revolution around the sun. It doesn’t mean a whole lot more than that unless we give it meaning. 2025 has not been a great year for the world at large. It was pretty OK for us, but not much changed. We got a new car at the tail end of last year (2024), so we’ve had that for about a year. Still love it. My sister visited us, although I hope the next trip is better (she was sick for a large chunk of the trip and that was a bummer for her!). My parents visited, that was also very nice. We spent good times with friends. Took trips within Colorado and saw more of this beautiful state.

Now some of you may be asking, what the hell does “scrobble” mean? Well, it’s a nonsense word for the most part, but it means “to submit your currently playing song to a service which tracks your listening history.” Back in the early 2000s (2002 per a search just now), a service spun up called Audioscrobbler. The idea was that you’d play music, and your music player would send metadata about the song you were playing to Audioscrobbler’s site, and eventually it would build up a sort of personal listening profile of you. You could share it with friends and say “hey, look at all the cool music I listen to! You should too!” or whatever. Or you could learn about others’ music taste in turn, and discover new artists. It all started out very inauspiciously and homebrew, very chill. Eventually the venture capitalists and music industry took notice, and well, y’all know what that means. It became corporate and boring and annoying. The service rebranded as Last.fm, which was a more suitable name for the service, probably, but it was never the same. I don’t like it anymore.

CWs: work, mental health, physical health, stress

πάντα ῥεύσεται (panta rheusetai), “all things will change”

It’s been a weird week. Lately we’ve been facing a lot of changes at work, changes at the local but also state & federal levels, and that’s been stressful. I’m just trying to roll with it the best I can, but it’s hard. And we had a meeting yesterday morning where we were informed about some further changes in our department. Some good, some bad? I’m not sure how it’ll all play out. One change is that, at least temporarily, our team won’t be handling phone calls (directly). So we’ll be doing callbacks, &c., but otherwise just working through our workload. Which is good. Phones have been a source of stress for me, but I felt like I was just making peace with them.

CWs:

I’ve been thinking a lot about depictions of the future, lately and in the past. There are so many dystopian ones out there, largely reflecting our current fears and worries and issues, but just pushing them to a safe, arms’-length future. It makes it easier to endure the hellscape of the present if we think the future could be so much worse, I guess? And it’s fun to speculate, I guess, but it’s also depressing. I don’t want to dissociate from the present by deferring grief. I’d rather feel it in the present.

CWs: work, physical health

We got our first snow on Tuesday night into Wednesday. Maybe 3-4" when all was said and done. It was a pain to shovel, but hey, here we are. This is probably the latest it’s snowed since we moved here. We’re still about 3 weeks out from the solstice (just about) and the proper start of winter. It’s been cold lately; the heat’s been on a bunch, and the car has been unhappy with the cold (worse mileage, unfortunately, but not terribly so; our commute, which normally takes 10% round-trip, took 13-14% instead). But I love the cold and it’s nice, and snow is overall pretty great, at least in the backyard.

CWs: food, alcohol, work, death

I was thinking lately about how my time is structured and how I tend to move through the world. Patterns and such. What I do now is very different than earlier in life, say 10 or so years ago. 10 years ago, I had just finished my PhD (well, 11 years ago), and was trying to find a tenure-track job. Tail end of grad school, tying up loose ends. Now I have a career and a life with my spouse and the kitties and our town and it’s just all way different. I’ve been reading Tricia Hersey’s fabulous book Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto and it’s so good. Rest is extremely important. Avoid burnout. Take enough time for yourself to recharge. It’s not always easy and not always possible, but a good balance can be found.

CWs: physical & dental health, alcohol, food

Earlier today I was looking at my work and personal calendars, which are oddly full of doctor’s appointments. I had my annual physical a couple of weeks ago. Mostly fine, although my doctor said I had randomyl elevated level of liver enzymes, which was unusual. So she wants me to come back for blood work a few weeks after that. The earliest I could make work was 01 Dec, so there we go. Hoping it was just a fluke; otherwise more tests will be needed. She said that if I’m having more alcohol, or acetaminophen, than usual, to cut back or eliminate it. Neither are an issue; I rarely use acetaminophen, and I have maybe 1-2 drinks on the weekend, if that, most weeks. So that’s odd. She also said my calcium was low, which is also weird, since I drink a lot of milk and eat cheese &c. I’m wondering if I try to take my multivitamin and D3 supplement more regularly, that will sort itself out.

We had a fierce windstorm a couple of weeks ago (I think?), and it blew the leaves all around the front- and backyard. I think it stripped the ash tree in our backyard of the rest of its leaves, too, and of course we got some from the surrounding trees. I had hoped to be able to put away the lawnmower for the season, but alas! We did a bunch of errands Saturday but usually try to mix that with fun stuff. I did the yardwork Sunday. After our grocery run, I got the lawnmower out, fired it up, and set to work on crunching up the rest of the leaves. The mower has a “mulch plug” which you can install so the catcher bag isn’t needed; all I wanted to do was mulch up the leaves and cut the grass.

CWs: physical health, food, alcohol

I have been remiss in writing on here. Most of that is due to being obsessed with Silksong for the last nearly 2 months. I finally beat the game. 96% completion, just shy of 90hrs put in (Steam says 10hrs more, so the timer is strange). It was so incredibly good. I don’t know how to describe how much I loved it. I was all-in and I’m sure, if Team Cherry ever releases another sequel (one was teased, in a special ending), you know I’ll be there to get obsessed all over again. I pretty much spent most of my free time playing that, almost since it came out at the start of September. I loved my time with it, but in a way I’m glad it’s done, since I am moving on to other stuff.

CWs: nonzero Silksong spoilers, caveat legens

Well, if you’re a gamer, you’ve likely heard about Hollow Knight: Silksong being released on 04 September, after a wait of 5-6 years. I didn’t think it would ever come out; it seemed like vaporware for so long. But it finally came out, and wow, was it worth the wait. I was immediately enthralled and obsessed. I loved Hollow Knight; by the time I finally got around to playing it, everyone else had been recommending it for years. I explored everything very thoroughly, and completed basically everything, but couldn’t figure out Godhome and its ridiculous boss rushes, though I am in awe of anyone who can get through all of that. But I beat The Radiance and got a pretty decent ending, so I was happy with it. Now my gamepad won’t really behave with the game, so I haven’t played it since then, but I’d already beaten the game, so it’s cool. I moved on to other games after that, but Hollow Knight has stayed with me for years now; at very least I listen to the soundtrack pretty regularly. It’s funny, I kept confusing Shovel Knight and Hollow Knight for years, and I finally played the latter and ended up absolutely loving it.