Comic for Thursday, September 13th, 2018
Well, I’ve run out of buffer, but I’ve also made it past worst of it for work, so I think I should be on schedule for monday, and able to rebuild the buffer again next week as I have a couple days off work. It’s possible they might find more work for me to, but it’s also possible that if they do I may tell them to fuck off, in which case I would have a lot of time for drawing the webcomic… It wasn’t a great week last week. The correlation between lack of sleep and cantankerousness grows stronger as I get older, and there were a few sub 4 hour sleep nights last week.
I reckon Mium is a bit more used to playing in 3rd person with camera toggle than most people. I think Ila takes an out of body experience fairly well for the opposite reason – she just doesn’t reflect that much on it – things just don’t seem that weird to Ila, because her bar for normal isn’t really in the typically spot.
Loading ...
Monday’s page will be up late (on Monday). I have Monday off work though, so should be able to use that day to catch up on comic.
Apologies for the delay… it seems like I was a little too ambitious. Things will resume as normal with the Thursday update. I was able to get most the way through the comic, but it’s not finished yet; I could maybe get it done tomorrow, but than I’d have trouble getting one done by Thursday, so I think we’ll just have to take the hit and resume Thursday, and that will let me get some start on the buffer again.
It is okay, take as long as you need. I’m sure it will be worth the wait.
Seconded – some things just can’t be rushed 🙂
I appreciate the heads-up. I was starting to get a touch worried that the police had found you covered in the blood of your coworkers and laughing maniacally.
What? Am I the only one with that fantasy?
I guess this explains why you missed my comment on the last page. as for helping you relax, why don’t you imagine you’re at the beach? with the sunset, the calm breeze, and the relaxing vibes.
Beach? Relaxing vibes?
Happiness is a warm gun.
Hey, sorry, yeah. Monday/Tuesday of this week were sort of lost to darkness. I will go back and take a look 🙂
I am notoriously bad at meditation and related exercises. My brain tends to veer between dull stupor and being off to the races, either working on programming for work or various story writing flights of fancy. I’m not saying that’s not something I don’t need to work on… but I’ve made historically little progress 😉
In general, running and sleeping more are usually the things that maximize mental health and general overall daily relaxation, but both of those tend to be squeezed out of the schedule first when things are hectic.
It is actually one of things I like about drawing is that it is a good “brain middle ground”; it doesn’t have to be spun all the way up to draw, so it’s sort of like a mediation time but with enough turn over to not get distracted with the latest shiny problem – unfortunately the brain still needs to be operating above dull stupor to have to motivation to actually do it :p
Things I want to say because I’m a bit of an ass: Tell them that you’re taking a vacation. If they try to argue, tell them that you aren’t asking permission. And if anything comes up during that time, tell them to figure it out.
Things I will say because I’m not that much of an ass: Don’t listen to my advice unless you want a creative way to get fired.
My work has pros and cons, it’s just in the last couple weeks the cons have been more heavily emphasized. Honestly I probably should be looking for something else; the company has been in a weird limbo since they got bought out and I’ve been hanging to see what they will offer to me stay, and what the buyout for my stock options will be, but at this point I’ve probably hung around too long, mostly because I’m not particularly fond of change, as least when it comes to work.
I prefer less work over more money, as I have a lot of hobbies I prefer to work on. I just sort of need money to live. Unfortunately (and fortunately) I work in software engineering, where there is really no such thing as work being “done” – things can always work better than what will be called done, and I have a semi-compulsive obsession with making things “good” when the time allocated for a project is “barely functional” that leads me to overwork for reasons I can’t always grasp. I keep telling myself I just need to give less of a shit about how well things work, since some monkey is going to run out and break it as soon as they get their paws on it anyway. This also leads me to spending my night occasionally rewriting the garbage code that cheap outsourced resources wrote because I refuse to put a code review on their incoherent gibberish, and know that if I just keep sending it back to them, there is zero chance things will stay in schedule.
Realistically I am supposed to mostly just be reviewing and assisting outsource development resources, but as they seem to all wear their pants on their head and write utter tripe, I end up doing a lot of their code for them, which makes my job and everything about it ridiculous. Honestly I worry about getting fired not at all, which is sort of why it is ridiculous I put up with their crap.
Anyway… /end rant (for now).
And by continuing to enable their incompetent production how does that motivate change? Is it on your shoulders to salvage the company if it was their choice to outsource development?
Perhaps it would be better for all to just keep rejecting the outsourced code, miss any deadlines and even let the company fail as a lesson to the rest of the industry. Enabling and rewarding incompetence is a dis-service to everyone, including your self.
The problem Past faces is that, depending on the management team he’s dealing with, both missing deadlines and allowing utter tripe to go through could be seen as him failing to do his job. He’s probably reporting to someone who would not understand what was utter tripe without a demonstration that showed the product failing in all the ways it failed. My recommendation would be to schedule a demonstration of the current project state, with a focus on the things that should work but don’t, if at all possible.
It’s possible that this is really not the right time to make such a statement – or it could be the ideal time. I’m not socially clueful enough to be able to make that determination without trying.
Anyone who wants to support PastUtopia in being able to make that statement for the rest of the industry should become a patron, or increase their pledge. $4 per day does not provide anything of an alternate money stream. When one considers the additional wear and tear on his computing resources and the additional hardware requirements he has to cover, it’s probably close to the break even mark on his costs.
At least you don’t work with someone who insisted they needed to be taught how to *think*, and not in the specific sense, in the general use your head sorta way.
In a way, I would like more of my co-workers to demand that they be taught to think. It would mean they’ve gotten past the delusion that they already know.
I deeply sympathize with Past, and I hear Someone’s Ed. Sometimes companies hit that spot where not hitting your goals is failure, and it isn’t conceivable that the fault would lie with the really cheap outsource agency that claims it does 100% of the job at 20% of the price.
If you think this is uncommon, go try to tell someone something they don’t want to hear. See how well it works for you.
-G-
Wrong kind of think. I’m talking about the think where you ask someone what two plus three is and they give you an ‘I don’t know’. Because they just don’t think at all.
Yeah. I get it.
Help me! I’ve tried nothing, and I’m all out of ideas!
Something that my teachers in Engineering school (former mechanical engineering student here) impressed upon me is, you have to find the ‘good enough’ point. You literally can’t afford to be a perfectionist, otherwise whatever you’re designing will never ship. It will always be over time and over budget. I believe that’s true for all forms of engineering.
Amen.
There three virtues of software development.
1. Hubris. You actually believe you can do it.
2. Laziness. Reuse that code.
3. Impatience. Close enough! Ship it!
A nice feature of software engineering, is that the ability to patch the product exists. Try doing that with a turbine.
It helps if you stop the turbine first…..
Just saying.