The good news is that I'm surviving. The bad news is that I'm still in Pretoria. I really, really don't like Pretoria, and I like it less every day. The only thing I can say I like about it is that cars in town actually stop and wait for pedestrians to cross the road, which my years as a Joburg pedestrian had taught me never to expect (since I started driving, I have always made an effort to give pedestrians the right of way myself, often shocking Joburg's pedestrians). Apart from that, I don't think much of Pretoria drivers. There basically aren't any of them within the city bowl, yet they still manage to crash into each other regularly and as soon as they're over the rim, on the highways around the edge of town, they turn into vast numbers of speeding, aggressive arseholes.
And don't even get me started about the work I do. Worst research project I've ever been involved in, wasting 2 months of my life. Approximately half of that was literally completely wasted, with work thrown out and never used for anything ever again.
Weekends are now vital to me. I've been developing a big, convoluted analogy between emotions and electrical capacitors, but the short version is that some relief is essential. I'm buying a weekly six-pack, which is unusual for me, and cramming as much fun into my weekends as I can manage. I have to. But that also means I'm just plain wearing myself out. I need some days off to simply do nothing at all, all alone, and get my oomph back. This week, I get half a Sunday of that. I think 3 weeks ago, I took a full Sunday. Before that, my memory gets fuzzy. It's not really enough.
And this next weekend is going to be crazy-busy (in a great way) because the USS Dauntless is mounting a group expedition down to Sutherland, to see the pretty sky and telescopes. We're going by bus, which may be a little gruelling over that distance, but I've been wanting to go for years, since I first read up about the place in my first year of teaching (it was also partly covered in my first ever guest hosting of Consilience).
Otherwise, DeeTwenty [EDIT: I no longer associate with DeeTwenty and can not endorse it in any way] and its soon-to-be-public venue is looking to be the great center of my life's happiness (apart, obviously, from visiting Byron and Moxie at my parents' place). It's a damn fantastic idea, and you should throw all your money at them. Now. Go. Throw digital cash. Then play games with me and/or people you like.
Sunday, 29 September 2013
Monday, 9 September 2013
Good, Bad and Geeky Places
It's been suggested that I've been far too miserable the last month or so. I'm inclined to agree. It's been suggested that I should try to cheer up or do something to fix my situation. I'm inclined to agree with the latter, but because of that, I'm not happy to accept the former. I may reach a point where it does me more harm than good to be unhappy with my new status quo, and then I can look at ways to cope with it better, but in the mean time, unhappiness is good. It keeps me motivated to aim for something better, like Joburg. Apologies in advance to anyone who finds my grumpiness unpleasant, but you can't have your literal chocolate Sham until you've cleared all the metaphorical broccoli Sham off your simile-like plate.
But it's not all grim with me. Weekend visits to Joburg are a poor substitute for actually living there, and I keep running short on time for everything, even completely missing some events, but it's never bad to see friends. It adds even more motivation to get my life back on track, so that I can have more happy fun time with them. It's a carrot and stick thing, I guess.
And it's kind of fantastic to know that I have too much fun stuff waiting for me. How crap would it be if I was miserable and lonely and bored in Pretoria, and didn't have anything to look forward to in Joburg either. In terms of roleplaying groups alone, I need a 4-day weekend, so I can carry on with my own Star Trek and Warhammer campaigns, fit in the other complex stuff planned for my formerly-usual Thursday group, and also start off with a new D&D campaign run by Damon White (a name that will soon be revealed to be of broader relevance to this post) just like the ones he used to run in the old days.
Particularly exciting among the good times this past weekend was the meeting to learn about Owen Swart's new project, a dedicated geeking venue. Unlike geek shops, which kind of want you to buy stuff above all else and tend not to have very comfortable gaming areas, this venue is intended to be a place to gather a fair-sized mob and get some proper gaming done in homely comfort, but without actually hogging someone's home while they're trying to sleep. It's a damn fine idea, which immediately reminded me of Babylon White, the residence of the White family, friends of mine since early high school. Bab White always fulfilled a similar role, as the Whites were up at all hours, very hospitable and unusually well stocked with games of all descriptions. The big difference here is that you don't need to be a family friend of the Swarts to enjoy Owen's cunning new plan. (Also, nice coincidence with the names there.)
I will certainly report more as I learn it.
But it's not all grim with me. Weekend visits to Joburg are a poor substitute for actually living there, and I keep running short on time for everything, even completely missing some events, but it's never bad to see friends. It adds even more motivation to get my life back on track, so that I can have more happy fun time with them. It's a carrot and stick thing, I guess.
And it's kind of fantastic to know that I have too much fun stuff waiting for me. How crap would it be if I was miserable and lonely and bored in Pretoria, and didn't have anything to look forward to in Joburg either. In terms of roleplaying groups alone, I need a 4-day weekend, so I can carry on with my own Star Trek and Warhammer campaigns, fit in the other complex stuff planned for my formerly-usual Thursday group, and also start off with a new D&D campaign run by Damon White (a name that will soon be revealed to be of broader relevance to this post) just like the ones he used to run in the old days.
Particularly exciting among the good times this past weekend was the meeting to learn about Owen Swart's new project, a dedicated geeking venue. Unlike geek shops, which kind of want you to buy stuff above all else and tend not to have very comfortable gaming areas, this venue is intended to be a place to gather a fair-sized mob and get some proper gaming done in homely comfort, but without actually hogging someone's home while they're trying to sleep. It's a damn fine idea, which immediately reminded me of Babylon White, the residence of the White family, friends of mine since early high school. Bab White always fulfilled a similar role, as the Whites were up at all hours, very hospitable and unusually well stocked with games of all descriptions. The big difference here is that you don't need to be a family friend of the Swarts to enjoy Owen's cunning new plan. (Also, nice coincidence with the names there.)
I will certainly report more as I learn it.
Monday, 19 August 2013
The Fuck Has Happened to August Too
I don't like being a development economist. I've been mostly moping for 2 weeks, physically and emotionally worn out. It's been a difficult month, even with all the pieces falling together surprisingly neatly in the end, especially finding a really nice place. But now, after my first relaxing weekend since this began, and with the pounding war drums of the BSG soundtrack rumbling in my ears, I feel resolved to let it be known that I'm quite sure this isn't the job for me. It's a tricky admission when you're trying to avoid a reputation as a quitter, but I'm not simply giving up. I'll do this job professionally until I have all my dominoes lined up for the next step. (Besides, I stuck out the last job for 3 years, which ain't bad commitment at all, considering it never paid my bills.)
There are a few reasons. The first and most obvious I noticed was that I'm largely cut off from my friends. I've spent enough of my life feeling (though, fortunately, seldom really being) friendless and alone that the idea of voluntarily isolating myself from my social circle seems completely perverse. Quite a few people have told me I'll meet nice new people in Pretoria, and that may be, but also fuck that! I have excellent friends back in Joburg, friends I've invested years in, and I don't want to treat them as disposable or replaceable. I'd finally built up a fantastic social life, with all sorts of things to do through most of the week. Not big things, mostly, just small, fun things to keep life worth living. Now I have to plan well ahead just to be able to pop back to reality for my single weekend event. I used to have 2 regular (in fact, far better than regular, they were fantastic!) roleplaying groups, and now I have none. (I have one Pretoria friend, and I think she's annoyed that I keep complaining that I have "nobody" here.)
Adjunct to this is the increased stress and danger of the driving. Driving within Pretoria is probably much safer than driving within Joburg, because nobody fucking lives here, but the damn N1 between the two is crap to have to drive regularly. The 6 rises and falls along its length mean you have to concentrate deeply on your car's momentum the whole time, especially when you've got a little Corsa like mine. And people drive so shitly along it, perhaps partly because of the challenges of the rises. You can see ample fresh skid marks near the top of each, as someone's come rushing up too fast behind a sluggish truck or something but not seen it til the rise was crested. (The alternative N14, while flatter, is worryingly scattered with burnt-out husks of cars every time I follow it, possibly reflecting its lack of street lights.)
But I digress. My sole point there is that it's not just the extra travel time I face now, but shitter, more stressful travel too. Not a nice way to bracket all my leisure expeditions.
But another, less immediate reason I don't want to be a development economist is simply that I don't like the job. I've been monitoring my thoughts on this very carefully. I was initially worried about impostor syndrome undermining my life for me, but it's actually been quite the opposite. The work is piss easy. I get frustrated that others are going too slow for me, that I'm stuck twiddling my thumbs for hours waiting for information I need, and then completely unchallenged when the work does reach me. Working from home or at least somewhere comfortable, that might be tolerable (not anywhere near ideal, just barely tolerable), but instead I'm trapped in a silent, blank room behind a blank desk for 9 hours at a stretch. Some people like constancy, but I actually prefer a variable schedule and even some travel, adventure and new scenery, so long as I'm based in the blessed confines of Joburg more often than not.
Most people seem to agree that I probably asked much too little for my salary. Clearly I've been an oppressed, under-paid mass for too long, that I've gotten used to peanuts. My mistake, and lesson learned, but it doesn't help the situation either.
But I've done dull work, in dull settings, for much less money than this before. The tipping point to the nature of the work is that I just can't give a shit about it. I may have fluctuated in my choice of specific career a lot, but I've been absolutely certain since high school that I wanted to help people, make the world better. It was the addition of Isaac Asimov, Star Trek and punk into the mix of my general upbringing that did it, I think. This current job may sometimes help people indirectly, as successful economic development sometimes can, but I find it hard to believe managment really aims for that. I contractually can't write any details of my work, but it's all tedious corporate shit, not what I'd call real development. It's the sort of stuff you can pull income with in this field, but I don't believe we're really adding value to society (which was exactly my experience the last time I tried a job like this, over 6 years ago). To put it slightly more technically, I am a firm believer in bottom-up, rather than top-down development.
I'm nearing 30. I've likely got another 50-60 years ahead of me, at least 30-40 of which will have to be filled with employment. I'm not getting stuck down a depressing career path for that long by failing to act now.
What would I rather be doing? NGOs! Abso-fucking-definitely working for NGOs. And I still definitely see education as the absolute most vital long-term development goal (almost more of a meta-goal, really), so an education NGO seems the obvious choice for me. Find me one! Find me many! All I need is a foot in the door, and I can do a world of good. This is my goal for 2014. (P.S. Make sure it's based in Joburg.)
There are a few reasons. The first and most obvious I noticed was that I'm largely cut off from my friends. I've spent enough of my life feeling (though, fortunately, seldom really being) friendless and alone that the idea of voluntarily isolating myself from my social circle seems completely perverse. Quite a few people have told me I'll meet nice new people in Pretoria, and that may be, but also fuck that! I have excellent friends back in Joburg, friends I've invested years in, and I don't want to treat them as disposable or replaceable. I'd finally built up a fantastic social life, with all sorts of things to do through most of the week. Not big things, mostly, just small, fun things to keep life worth living. Now I have to plan well ahead just to be able to pop back to reality for my single weekend event. I used to have 2 regular (in fact, far better than regular, they were fantastic!) roleplaying groups, and now I have none. (I have one Pretoria friend, and I think she's annoyed that I keep complaining that I have "nobody" here.)
Adjunct to this is the increased stress and danger of the driving. Driving within Pretoria is probably much safer than driving within Joburg, because nobody fucking lives here, but the damn N1 between the two is crap to have to drive regularly. The 6 rises and falls along its length mean you have to concentrate deeply on your car's momentum the whole time, especially when you've got a little Corsa like mine. And people drive so shitly along it, perhaps partly because of the challenges of the rises. You can see ample fresh skid marks near the top of each, as someone's come rushing up too fast behind a sluggish truck or something but not seen it til the rise was crested. (The alternative N14, while flatter, is worryingly scattered with burnt-out husks of cars every time I follow it, possibly reflecting its lack of street lights.)
But I digress. My sole point there is that it's not just the extra travel time I face now, but shitter, more stressful travel too. Not a nice way to bracket all my leisure expeditions.
But another, less immediate reason I don't want to be a development economist is simply that I don't like the job. I've been monitoring my thoughts on this very carefully. I was initially worried about impostor syndrome undermining my life for me, but it's actually been quite the opposite. The work is piss easy. I get frustrated that others are going too slow for me, that I'm stuck twiddling my thumbs for hours waiting for information I need, and then completely unchallenged when the work does reach me. Working from home or at least somewhere comfortable, that might be tolerable (not anywhere near ideal, just barely tolerable), but instead I'm trapped in a silent, blank room behind a blank desk for 9 hours at a stretch. Some people like constancy, but I actually prefer a variable schedule and even some travel, adventure and new scenery, so long as I'm based in the blessed confines of Joburg more often than not.
Most people seem to agree that I probably asked much too little for my salary. Clearly I've been an oppressed, under-paid mass for too long, that I've gotten used to peanuts. My mistake, and lesson learned, but it doesn't help the situation either.
But I've done dull work, in dull settings, for much less money than this before. The tipping point to the nature of the work is that I just can't give a shit about it. I may have fluctuated in my choice of specific career a lot, but I've been absolutely certain since high school that I wanted to help people, make the world better. It was the addition of Isaac Asimov, Star Trek and punk into the mix of my general upbringing that did it, I think. This current job may sometimes help people indirectly, as successful economic development sometimes can, but I find it hard to believe managment really aims for that. I contractually can't write any details of my work, but it's all tedious corporate shit, not what I'd call real development. It's the sort of stuff you can pull income with in this field, but I don't believe we're really adding value to society (which was exactly my experience the last time I tried a job like this, over 6 years ago). To put it slightly more technically, I am a firm believer in bottom-up, rather than top-down development.
I'm nearing 30. I've likely got another 50-60 years ahead of me, at least 30-40 of which will have to be filled with employment. I'm not getting stuck down a depressing career path for that long by failing to act now.
What would I rather be doing? NGOs! Abso-fucking-definitely working for NGOs. And I still definitely see education as the absolute most vital long-term development goal (almost more of a meta-goal, really), so an education NGO seems the obvious choice for me. Find me one! Find me many! All I need is a foot in the door, and I can do a world of good. This is my goal for 2014. (P.S. Make sure it's based in Joburg.)
Thursday, 1 August 2013
What the Fuck Happened to July!?
I had so much to write about over the last month, and always some combination of lack of time, energy or will to do so.
The last 12 or so months have been shitter than average. There have been ups and downs, but the downs have been pretty bad and I'm just tired now. So it's perhaps not the best time to have to move to another city and start a whole new career path, but I'm kind of stuck with that now.
That's not to say I'm unhappy with my new job - I'm most grateful to Alison and Leila for helping me get a foot in the door - but just that I'm in a generally bad mood because of life in general. I'm sure I'll make a fine development economist, and I really couldn't see myself cycling through the annual education routine over and over for the rest of my life. But I'd finally gotten really on top of teaching and felt like I knew what I was doing. Learning a new thing from not-quite-scratch again seems a little daunting. Leaving behind my social life is extra painful, and I'm not quite sure how I'll cope with that.
And that's why I've been silent for a month. Plenty to go back and report on belatedly, but in a week or two. For now, I just need a vent and a chance to breath.
The last 12 or so months have been shitter than average. There have been ups and downs, but the downs have been pretty bad and I'm just tired now. So it's perhaps not the best time to have to move to another city and start a whole new career path, but I'm kind of stuck with that now.
That's not to say I'm unhappy with my new job - I'm most grateful to Alison and Leila for helping me get a foot in the door - but just that I'm in a generally bad mood because of life in general. I'm sure I'll make a fine development economist, and I really couldn't see myself cycling through the annual education routine over and over for the rest of my life. But I'd finally gotten really on top of teaching and felt like I knew what I was doing. Learning a new thing from not-quite-scratch again seems a little daunting. Leaving behind my social life is extra painful, and I'm not quite sure how I'll cope with that.
And that's why I've been silent for a month. Plenty to go back and report on belatedly, but in a week or two. For now, I just need a vent and a chance to breath.
Sunday, 30 June 2013
Hear Inaudible Darmok!
So it's perhaps appropriate that my first public talk to mostly-adults will be about the challenges of communication. Of course, since I'm speaking officially as an officer of the USS Dauntless, at Science Fiction and Fantasy South Africa's Star Trek MiniCon, I won't be looking at conventional terrestrial human communication. Instead, I want to look at how talking to aliens might go, once we realise that they're unlikely to have much in common with us either physically or psychologically. And rather than just making shit up out of thin air, I'd like to look at what we've learned about communication with non-human animals here on Earth, as a rough, general analogue for extraterrestrial communication. This has some important limits, which I will address, but I think the basic idea should be good as a crash intro to how much we take for granted about humans-only language and interaction.
So, use your human eyes to detect the squiggly absences of EM radiation in the part of the spectrum you're accustomed to detecting visually from the monitor ahead of you, and take note of the brain-sounds these squiggles denote within your shared social context, to interpret the space-time coordinates of this talk of mine, and the MiniCon in general:
The Star Trek MiniCon (which will also feature a talk by the Dauntless's dauntless leader, Owen Swart, plus lots of other fun stuff; see links above) will be from
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