Sunshine has streamed through our house the past few days, lightening the mood here in Chez Redbeard.
You never quite realize how much the lack of clear skies can depress a mood until you find yourself mired in the middle of it.
Back in 1997, I spent an entire Summer working through my own version of crunch, arriving at work at 4 AM and leaving at 8 or 9 PM. Wash, rinse, repeat. At one point I joked that I could walk out the door in mid-October and not return until after New Years, and still have enough excess hours left over to take another week off.
I'd leave in the morning before dawn and go home as the sun was setting in the west. The hours in between were spent in a desperate rush to try to stay one step ahead of the developers as I was building testcases, testing code against them, and then debugging the results. On top of that, I was converting the homebrewed test harnesses and reporting scripts --typically written in Korn Shell-- into Perl and then into C just so I could get enough throughput to keep up with the demands of the job.
At one point in mid-July I sat in a co-worker's empty window cubicle, sipping coffee and watching the sun creep over the wooded hills in the distance, and I wondered just what the hell I was doing here anyway. Sure, management had promised bonuses and an extra week of vacation for the project I was working on*, but a few weeks prior --on a week that I'd worked 89 hours ahead of a holiday weekend-- the exhausted technical lead had left after pulling an all-nighter, fallen asleep at the wheel of his car, and crashed into a parked car on the side of the road. Luckily for everybody concerned he emerged without a scratch; he told me later that one moment he was driving into the community square and the next thing he remembered was the airbag deflating. But still, it was a sobering moment for me.
I've been wrestling with the question of what the price of work is ever since.
Two years later there were similar demands made of my time, but with an infant in the house I finally found some measure of spine to push back on what management's expectations were of me versus being there for my wife and daughter. Maybe reducing my hours to a "manageable" 55-60 hours/week doesn't seem like much, but compared to the 80 hour work weeks I had been pulling that Summer of 97 it was heaven. But the realization that the crunch would never truly go away is what motivated me to find a new job, which I eventually landed a couple of years later.
Fast forward from then to now, and those days truly are a fading memory.
There are some nights I wake up in a cold sweat, believing that I have reports to get out and the app build had crashed in the night, and I had to figure out which code change broke the app before the devs got to work. Then I'd remember where I was, breathe a sigh of relief, and roll over.
But still, the balance between work and play has blurred over the years. Certainly this has been accelerated for many people by the ongoing pandemic, but I've had this issue ever since I began to work from home. My work and home life have sufficiently blurred that my boss is constantly pestering me to shut off the laptop when I reach 5 PM, but there's always just one more thing to take care of before I finish.
And now we come to my other "job", the blog.
I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for Blapril2020 --or at least I thought I did-- but I've found the dedication to this a lot more than I ever did for NaNoWriMo. Right now I'm on target for writing a post on 17/30 days in April, which is the busiest this blog has been since May 2010**, and back then we had three writers at PC. (Please don't read them. They're really badly written.) I wasn't sure I'd be able to maintain that output, but once I got started my notion of duty kicked in, and you can guess the rest.
I've wondered just how much this Blapril will change things about my approach to blogging; for a while I was concerned that I'd not have enough things to write about, but that doesn't seem to be the case.*** I was also concerned that the blog would simply turn into a "Travels with Red" event where PC becomes a personal self-absorbed blog in the same manner that some influencers have, but I hope that hasn't been the case. But about 15 days or so ago I was thinking to myself "I don't think I can keep doing this" and now the end is in sight.
Is the slog worth it? I'm not sure.
It's not like I've experienced demands placed on my time before. After all, I have plenty of experience dealing with insane work experiences (see above), and by comparison this isn't that big a deal. But still, this does turn gaming into a version of work, and that's something I've become acutely aware of this past month.
As my blogging output has gone up, my enjoyment with gaming has gone down a bit. Not that I don't have a good time goofing around in WoW or Stardew Valley or any other game, but I'm always looking for an interesting story to write about. In as much the same way that someone who gets really good at music never really approaches listening to music the same way again, I've found a similar experience with gaming.
I think that when this is over I'd like to go back to a more normal level of blogging, which for me is 1-2 posts per week. I can handle that amount of demand on my writing, and it also means that I can spend more time simply enjoying games for their own sake rather than always looking for that angle to write about. Plus, it also gives me time to tinker with some other writing I'm doing, because Cardwyn can be a pretty harsh taskmaster when I'm not writing about her.
Maybe with some more distance from Blapril I'll be able to answer the "is it worth it?" question better, but we'll see.
#Blapril2020
*And yes, they did deliver. This post would have an entirely different feel to it if they didn't. Trust me.
**There were 22 posts that month, which is the current record for posts on PC. The only times we've come close to that were March 2020 --driven primarily by One Final Lesson-- and this month.
***And I did it without resorting to politics or name calling, either.
EtA: Cleaned up some grammar and restored half of a sentence that I'd accidentally deleted.
You never quite realize how much the lack of clear skies can depress a mood until you find yourself mired in the middle of it.
Back in 1997, I spent an entire Summer working through my own version of crunch, arriving at work at 4 AM and leaving at 8 or 9 PM. Wash, rinse, repeat. At one point I joked that I could walk out the door in mid-October and not return until after New Years, and still have enough excess hours left over to take another week off.
I'd leave in the morning before dawn and go home as the sun was setting in the west. The hours in between were spent in a desperate rush to try to stay one step ahead of the developers as I was building testcases, testing code against them, and then debugging the results. On top of that, I was converting the homebrewed test harnesses and reporting scripts --typically written in Korn Shell-- into Perl and then into C just so I could get enough throughput to keep up with the demands of the job.
At one point in mid-July I sat in a co-worker's empty window cubicle, sipping coffee and watching the sun creep over the wooded hills in the distance, and I wondered just what the hell I was doing here anyway. Sure, management had promised bonuses and an extra week of vacation for the project I was working on*, but a few weeks prior --on a week that I'd worked 89 hours ahead of a holiday weekend-- the exhausted technical lead had left after pulling an all-nighter, fallen asleep at the wheel of his car, and crashed into a parked car on the side of the road. Luckily for everybody concerned he emerged without a scratch; he told me later that one moment he was driving into the community square and the next thing he remembered was the airbag deflating. But still, it was a sobering moment for me.
I've been wrestling with the question of what the price of work is ever since.
***
Two years later there were similar demands made of my time, but with an infant in the house I finally found some measure of spine to push back on what management's expectations were of me versus being there for my wife and daughter. Maybe reducing my hours to a "manageable" 55-60 hours/week doesn't seem like much, but compared to the 80 hour work weeks I had been pulling that Summer of 97 it was heaven. But the realization that the crunch would never truly go away is what motivated me to find a new job, which I eventually landed a couple of years later.
Fast forward from then to now, and those days truly are a fading memory.
There are some nights I wake up in a cold sweat, believing that I have reports to get out and the app build had crashed in the night, and I had to figure out which code change broke the app before the devs got to work. Then I'd remember where I was, breathe a sigh of relief, and roll over.
But still, the balance between work and play has blurred over the years. Certainly this has been accelerated for many people by the ongoing pandemic, but I've had this issue ever since I began to work from home. My work and home life have sufficiently blurred that my boss is constantly pestering me to shut off the laptop when I reach 5 PM, but there's always just one more thing to take care of before I finish.
***
And now we come to my other "job", the blog.
I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for Blapril2020 --or at least I thought I did-- but I've found the dedication to this a lot more than I ever did for NaNoWriMo. Right now I'm on target for writing a post on 17/30 days in April, which is the busiest this blog has been since May 2010**, and back then we had three writers at PC. (Please don't read them. They're really badly written.) I wasn't sure I'd be able to maintain that output, but once I got started my notion of duty kicked in, and you can guess the rest.
I've wondered just how much this Blapril will change things about my approach to blogging; for a while I was concerned that I'd not have enough things to write about, but that doesn't seem to be the case.*** I was also concerned that the blog would simply turn into a "Travels with Red" event where PC becomes a personal self-absorbed blog in the same manner that some influencers have, but I hope that hasn't been the case. But about 15 days or so ago I was thinking to myself "I don't think I can keep doing this" and now the end is in sight.
Is the slog worth it? I'm not sure.
It's not like I've experienced demands placed on my time before. After all, I have plenty of experience dealing with insane work experiences (see above), and by comparison this isn't that big a deal. But still, this does turn gaming into a version of work, and that's something I've become acutely aware of this past month.
As my blogging output has gone up, my enjoyment with gaming has gone down a bit. Not that I don't have a good time goofing around in WoW or Stardew Valley or any other game, but I'm always looking for an interesting story to write about. In as much the same way that someone who gets really good at music never really approaches listening to music the same way again, I've found a similar experience with gaming.
I think that when this is over I'd like to go back to a more normal level of blogging, which for me is 1-2 posts per week. I can handle that amount of demand on my writing, and it also means that I can spend more time simply enjoying games for their own sake rather than always looking for that angle to write about. Plus, it also gives me time to tinker with some other writing I'm doing, because Cardwyn can be a pretty harsh taskmaster when I'm not writing about her.
Maybe with some more distance from Blapril I'll be able to answer the "is it worth it?" question better, but we'll see.
#Blapril2020
*And yes, they did deliver. This post would have an entirely different feel to it if they didn't. Trust me.
**There were 22 posts that month, which is the current record for posts on PC. The only times we've come close to that were March 2020 --driven primarily by One Final Lesson-- and this month.
***And I did it without resorting to politics or name calling, either.
EtA: Cleaned up some grammar and restored half of a sentence that I'd accidentally deleted.
I'm starting to wonder whetehr Blapril was such a good idea after all. Each Blaugust there are always a few people struggling and not enjoying it all that much but this time it seems to be more than usual. Despite all the caveats about not taking the posting targets and awards too seriously there always seem to be people berating themselves for not posting as often as they hoped or wanted to.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me to be defeating the object of us all having a fun thing to do during lockdown if we're not finding it fun. I have a post on motivation due tomorrow that touches on this although I'm in the exact oposite position myself. I've been gaming to write more than gaming to game for years now and I find myself wanting to spend more time writing every day. Being off work just makes that even more the case.
There's also the problem of reading all these posts. Yours has been one of the blogs I thoroughly enjoy and never skip during Blapril but some days there are more posts than I can readily get through. I wonder if the format needs tweaking once again next time, whenever that is. I'm not sure we'll all be ready for another round as soon as August...
I think the biggest downer this month has been the weather. Typically April is a lot sunnier than it has been, and the grey overcast clouds have been really a depressant on the entire household's mood.
DeleteThank goodness for a couple of days of sunny weather this week.
I'm hopelessly behind reading my blog roll at the moment. I'm finding myself wanting to play more rather than read, and with the added output from Blapril that hasn't been a great combination for keeping up with the blogosphere.
DeleteI haven't commented on hardly any of your posts this month, Redbeard, but I have enjoyed reading all of them.
ReplyDeleteWe've had an unusual amount of snow in our precipitation where I live, too -- this has just been a strange spring all around!
You've been getting snow out there in the PNW? Last year, we got enough rain to think that I moved from Ohio to out there, but while this year's rain hasn't been that bad it's just been... gloomy.
DeleteOh, and thanks for your kind words, Kamalia!
DeleteI'm in the Mountain West, actually :)
ReplyDeleteHuh, I always thought you were the Washington or Oregon area. Go figure.
Delete