Last week before the cert exam, and I’m a wee bit nervous. It’s supposed to be a bear, and the course I’ve been going back through has me low-key panicking every time I finish a chapter because I feel like I didn’t recall any of it. But then the questions all seem common-sense and I nail the quiz. So who knows how this is going to shake out. I should finish the last of the lectures tomorrow, then I’ve got a couple of days to cram and test myself, and then go for it.
Hope springs eternal.
So, yeah, as expected, I got nothing done, just spent the weekend in recovery mode.
Not feeling super confident about the AZ-104. I start the testing portion of my process this week, and I’m always nervous before I’ve done the practice exams, because I have no idea how well I’m actually retaining info at this point. We’ll see.
I’m prepared to tank this one, though. The voucher was free so I’m not out anything, and I just got a free retake from PearsonVUE so if I have to go for another swing, I’ll get two shots at it for the price of one.
Or who knows, maybe I’ll nail it. I’ve always said I’d rather be lucky than good any day. If that shakes out, then I’ll have a free retake I can burn on another cert, just have to figure out which one I’d want to go after. Have to look at the terms; I think I’d have to schedule my first go by the end of November, and if I blow it, I get another shot in January. Weird promo, but whatever.
Also been thinking about this other job opportunity. A hybrid role would be nicely refreshing, as would FTE over contract. If it doesn’t happen, no big deal; I’m going to be getting two heavy-hitter certs in the next month or two, and the CCNA is the first one that really tends to start making a difference in the kinds of offers you get.
And I really hate to admit this, but with all the fucking noise I’m thinking about getting a couple of the dollar-store AI certs. The idea of working with that shit on a daily basis gives me the Ace-Ventura-touched-the-bat heebie jeebies, but I’ve had too many recruiters mention it to write it off at this point. I’m already trying not to cringe when my coworkers discuss it. My cognitive function is a little too important to me for me to become one of those drones.
Ugh. See, Sid? You left and everything utterly went to shit.
I don’t care ‘cause I’m not there, and I don’t care if I’m here tomorrow
Between working on the first chapter and a really great tropical storm rolling up (one that reminded me of another tropical system a couple of decades ago and someone I watched it with) I spent most of the night in memories and feeling a bit maudlin, so I’m skipping this one. No one needs to read 500 words of me feeling sorry for myself.
Back tomorrow. Probably won’t be much of consequence, as I’m in crunch mode for the AZ-104, but there will be something.
So originally I’d planned to be down in Panama City Beach around about this weekend, communing with my long-lost. The job change scuppered that a bit, only for a god damned hurricane to show up, right on schedule. Absolutely bummed I missed out, but it’s rolling up the highway and going to land on us anyway. Right now it’s cold and rainy and I’m having a ball.
(Yes, I’m mad I didn’t get to be at the beach when a hurricane hit. You’re going to have to understand, I have perilously little regard for my own well-being, and getting taken out by a storm would be absolutely on-brand for muggins here. Ah well, I promise to behave when the eye gets here tomorrow.)
Got hit up by a couple of persistent headhunters, and since I’m technically only on contract, I decided to hear them out. I try to save everyone time. “I’m currently working a contract role doing internal IT support at X per hour. I’d be willing to jump ship and move to full-time internal on-site at Y per hour, or I’d consider MSP work for Z per hour. Also, hybrid/remote earns you bonus points.” Just to try to head things off.
What always happens is “well, send me your resume and a good time to talk and we’ll discuss it” and then they pitch me on-site MSP work with on-call at roughly what I’m making now. No fuckin’ thanks, guys. Getting exhausted from the MSP grind is why I walked away from my last job, and I actually liked it there. No way I’m signing up for more of the same without a significantly good reason. I’d have to be looking at something like a 20% bump in comp before I’d consider switching back to that part of the industry.
So I had one of those calls this afternoon, and she offered me… what I’m making now for on-site MSP support. I gave her a polite no-thanks, but then she actually called me back with an internal FTE role that’s hybrid. Intrigued. I like the shop I’m in right now, as it’s one hell of a skive and the crew is really nice. But there’s one major caveat on the horizon; they apparently do self-paid insurance, so hiring folks on with health issues is kind of a stretch. And given my issues, that might be a potential roadblock.
So, as cringey as it is to accept an interview less than four weeks into a role, I’m considering it. In my defense, I am just a contract employee and have the luxury of being able to walk anytime, and a FTE job with at least two days of hybrid would be damn nice. And there’s no guarantees I get the job anyway.
But it’s kind of cool having recruiters coming to me instead of sending out hordes of applications and getting zero back. And if I can land these next couple of certs, my prospects should improve substantially.
Maybe everything is coming up Milhouse.
I just noticed that was my 50th post on this little thought experiment.
Not fuckin’ bad, Murph.
I’d better get that chapter finished.
Folks of my particular vintage, I believe, have a certain set of advantages.
Growing up in the 1980s and into the 1990s, we occupied a really interesting space in terms of technology. We came up with the personal computer, but we can remember a time before it was ubiquitous and powerful. We remember when tech didn’t hold your hand and required arcane knowledge to maintain and use. We’re young enough that computers are still a natural part of our skillset, but we’re old enough not to take the technology for granted. We still know how to rip things down and troubleshoot them and remember the ancient ways of the techpriest.
Likewise for the Internet. We remember a time when if you wanted to know something, you had to read a book. I had a set of encyclopedias, and I made regular trips to the library to look things up that I wanted to learn about. We remember what it was like not having an algorithm deciding what you wanted to watch and learn and spoon-feeding you a carefully curated drip-feed of information designed to skew your perspectives. We had attention spans.
We also were the last generation that was left to our own devices. Helicopter parents weren’t a thing. “It’s 9 o’clock, do you know where your children are?” was an honest-to-god real question. We didn’t have cellphones, so we could actually drop off the radar if we wanted to. Similarly, every dumb fuckin’ thing we ever did wasn’t instantly saved to the Internet for posterity.
(Although I’ll cop to a downside there; there are a few people who have left this world that I dearly wish I had more pictures and recordings of, and I’d commit a large variety of crimes to get them.)
We got to grow up under the doom of the tail end of the Cold War, and then lived through that brief seven-or-eight month period in the 1990s where it seemed like everything might actually turn out okay for our species. (Whoops. Almost as embarrassing an assumption as believing the Internet, giving people access to the sum total of human knowledge, would be a net positive for our civilization. Our bad.) We know in our hearts it’s Not Going To Be Okay and we’re not going to freak out when it turns out we’re right.
We got to watch when the music industry attempted to profiteer off us and a bunch of nerds kicked them in the balls so hard people think paying for music is wrong to this day. We got to see the government try to crack down on artists and watched long-haired weirdos absolutely clown on senators about free expression on live television. Our generation got handed ticking environmental and technological timebombs, and people actually fixed them instead of just making everything worse.
We still had heroes. And I mean real ones, not babyfaces packaged in densely-packed kayfabe to fool the masses.
Christopher Titus has a great bit where he talks about when the shit finally hits the fan, all the normal people are going to lose it and panic and cry. And all the people with fucked-up upbringings are going to be thinking, “Hey, nobody’s guarding the Lexus dealership.”
It’s kind of cool being part of the most dysfunctional generation.
Once again, between the writing and trying to knock out a certification by next weekend, I’m just not putting a lot of random words down on the site.
Space fub fact for the meantime: when the Apollo program missions began to get cancelled, they began looking for other things they could do with the extra hardware. The most famous examples were of course the Apollo-Soyuz project (where, hilariously, they had to design a special docking unit because neither country wanted to be the “female” end of a “male-female” docking system, and oh God I wish I was making that up) and Skylab, the site of the first real mutiny in space (if you don’t count the Apollo 13 guys ripping off their bio monitors).
But what they almost did was fascinating. They actually planned a Venus fly-by using Apollo era hardware. They would’ve used a hollowed-out upper stage of the Saturn V for long-term living quarters for the time it would take to pass Venus and return to Earth. It would’ve been nothing more than a publicity stunt, really; they would’ve rocketed past the planet without doing a whole hell of a lot of science. But it got vetoed and essentially eventually led to the Skylab project.
An interesting part of that plan, though, was their calculation that if they ever wanted to send a manned mission into Venus’s atmosphere, the density would mean that any vessel pressurized to the comfort of Earthlings would be so much less dense that it would act as a balloon and hold itself aloft. You could decelerate an Apollo CSM, and it would fall into the upper atmosphere until it found a state of equilibrium and just bob there. (The Russian Venera probes, of course, didn’t have cavities filled with air inside, which is how they were able to reach the surface and almost instantly melt.)
So actually getting somewhere on Elsewhere is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, it really feels great to write this stuff again. It’s from the heart, not me trying to plot my way through some overly intricate storyline, and the way some of these scenes have just flowed have been really cathartic.
On the other hand, the place in my heart it’s coming from is one that’s got a hole or two in it. And when I dig into my memories to crib from the wonderful people I’ve known, it’s just a reminder of how much I miss them. In a sense, I’m getting to revisit those I lost, or at least alternate versions of them.
I’m reminded of one of the surprisingly deep moments of the show Red Dwarf. In the season four episode “Dimension Jump,” the crew is visited by a parallel-universe Arnold Rimmer who isn’t the useless, cringy disaster the mainline Rimmer is. Seeing a version of himself that’s successful drives Rimmer bananas, and when he expresses this frustration to Lister, Lister tells him that “Ace” told him about the alternate-version Lister, who’s doing so much better than him, as well.
But instead of being jealous, Lister looks at it with pride, knowing that some version of him on some other plane of existence got it right, and maybe somehow him getting it all wrong paid for the other guy’s success. His losses balance out his counterpart’s gains on the cosmic scales.
So maybe there’s a version of me out there somewhere who didn’t fuck it all up, and this story is kind of my way of communing with him a bit. Here’s to you, Better Murph.
(It also doesn’t help that when you write a love story—if you really, really do it right—you kind of have to fall in love a bit yourself, and that’s always bittersweet.)
Well, enough maudlin shit. I got some interesting news today; it turns out that someone’s resurrected Heavy Metal Magazine. Originally Metal Hurlant, the publication was the platonic ideal of genre for me. They’d give creators a really short page count and so they’d have to drop readers into whatever vivid world they invented with little to no preparation, and the result was some of the most stylish visual storytelling I can remember.
You occasionally find that spirit still alive in productions, but it’s few and far between. There have been great animated projects like Scavengers Reign and Love, Death and Robots that have approximated it, but the best example I can think of is Arcane, which inexplicably turned a League of Legends license into the best visual storytelling in decades. It’s very much an every-frame-a-painting series; they spent hundreds of millions on it and it shows, unfortunately they also lost their shirts in the process. They effortlessly skewer gender tropes left and right, the show features one of the most compelling explorations of mental health and illness I can remember in recent media, and the series features a segment or two that rival Pixar’s Up for sheer emotional devastation. It’s not perfect by any means; the creators have one major-league blind spot in terms of representation in the series, the fanservice is laid on a little thick at times, and the storyline gets a little busy at times, but it’s better than it has any right to be and I’d recommend the first season to anyone. Frankly, watch the first three eps—it’s designed to be viewed in three-episode chapters—and it will hook you hard.
And it’s a fucking cartoon based on one of the worst video games on the planet.
So, hearing that Heavy Metal was back today gave me some hope for more great storytelling. Hopefully it’s not just some weak-sauce cash grab that’s a shadow of its former self, right? They wouldn’t bring back such an iconic brand just to ruin it, would they?
Shane?
Shane?
Come back, Shane!
(Hope springs eternal.)
Writing the scene in which my protagonist once again sees someone he cares about very deeply who he never thought he’d see again… kind of fucked me up a bit.
Taking the rest of the night off. Back tomorrow.
I actually think I’ve cracked the first chapter. I’m up to about four pages and I don’t loathe it. I got the first part out of the way, and it’s rough but serviceable.
Now I just have to sell the absolute hell out of my protagonist seeing someone he loves for the first time in a decade. Going to take a breather before I do that part, but I might actually have a first draft up in the next few days.
In the meantime, a fub fact from a discussion I had online today. The word “nimrod” meaning “idiot” is down to a misunderstanding involving Looney Tunes cartoons. In an old episode from the 1940s, Daffy Duck refers to Elmer Fudd as Nimrod. Now, kids at the time would be much more familiar with the Bible, and understand that Nimrod is a legendary hunter. So Daffy’s making fun of Elmer much in the same way you might call a dimwit “Einstein.”
But when these cartoons kept being shown to subsequent generations, that familiarity just wasn’t there. Much like kids of my generation were initially mystified by the episodes referencing Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, we heard “Nimrod” and didn’t know what it meant. The context, of course, was simply Daffy insulting Elmer, so we took it to be a term that meant “buffoon.” And that’s the modern definition of the word.
Language and its evolution entertain me to no end. (I also love getting in arguments over the pronunciation of GIF, having actually been alive when the goddamn format was invented.)