Category: Uncategorized

I rather fancy writing a Cthulhu mythology based short story. Perhaps I’ll write one in instalments…perhaps not. I have some ideas. I would also like to merge it with some fantasy tropes or something like that. Or horror. Vampire fights Cthulhu monster, something silly like that. I could just write scenes; something to set the bar low, as usual.

I used to read a lot of fantasy as a teenager. Nowadays I’m too snobby or embarrassed to (shame on me). I like the idea of Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulhu; the idea of interactive adventures, and the stats and books and worlds you can build, but it seems to just be too difficult to get a group of people together…so in some ways the same thing can be kind of achieved by writing a story. Though somehow the quality bar seems higher. I need to practice just writing a skeleton hodge-podge of ideas, and even just being happy with that. Half the fun is the creativity around the ideas and possible story lines…I don’t have to write the thing perfectly.

I just watched Bad Times at the El Royale. It’s from 2018, directed by Drew Goddard.

It’s actually a fun movie. I’d somehow never heard of it. It’s described as a “neo-noir crime mystery”. It kept me guessing quite a bit.

Jeff Bridges and Lewis Pullman were the star turns for me, but everyone was pretty good.

Anyway, another quick one tonight, as it’s past my bedtime. Monday tomorrow!

I was inspired to pull the trigger on a Novation Circuit Tracks the other day. It’s already paying me back. It’s just great fun and very intuitive. I have only watched one 5 min tutorial so far, so there’s lots to learn, but I have been playing around with making “live” tracks with the two synths and four drum tracks, the mixer (turning different tracks on and off), and master filter.

It’s exactly what I wanted; something creative that takes me away from the computer and gets me into a flow state. Hopefully I’ll try to master it for a while before being tempted to buy other things (my friend introduced me to GAS the other day, Gear Acquisition Syndrome:)). I already own a Korg Volca Drum, and have quickly plugged that into the Tracks, and that kind of worked straight away (though not in the way I think it can be made to, for more fine-grained control); but it’s better to be a master one one thing before wasting money on more toys. I don’t really have the room for a start.

The fact that soup weather has returned brings me joy. I suppose I should learn how to make bean based stews as well.

Marks and Spencer do a range of “small batch” soups in their M&S Food Collection range. The Rich Italian Tomato and Basil is my favourite, followed by the Golden Butternut Squash and Sage one. I sometimes add some garlic granules or chickpeas.

I have some simple go-to tinned green lentil single-pot “concoctions” I make. Mainly tomato based, with garlic and onions and other things added. Sometimes curry flavoured. They’re basic, but very tasty and satisfying.

Following on from my previous post, this will be a quick one that I will hopefully expand upon at a later point. But essentially I’ll focus on the last option in the list of the last post: quitting my job altogether, without another job lined up. Taking a career break.

I think it makes sense to map out various ways that might look; various plans; various backup plans; etc. That will make it a little less risky and will make me feel more comfortable that I’m not doing something disastrous to my life. And it also gives me something to point at when I explain to others what I am doing: I’m not the kind of person who won’t care what others think.

Of course, it’s unrealistic to map it all out precisely, but I should at least list some rough options, and some rough safety net procedures, to start with.

Part of me wants to make it the kind of career break that takes as long as it needs, giving me the space to really go back and start again in terms of discovering what I want to do; a little bit of a midlife crisis career break maybe. That would be the brave option, because it’s the most risky.

The less risky end of the scale would be to decide that I will take something like 3 months completely off, to explore career options, decompress, travel, experiment with hobbies, before starting to look for jobs again, most likely in the same rough area that I was working in; or in a slightly different domain, depending on what skills I have spent time learning in the break.

Of course, there might be a long period of looking for a job if the market is tough, so that’s where some backup plans come in. But the backup plans could also be used to extend the 3 month exploration phase whilst minimising financial impact. I.e. some kind of job that is not a “career” job.

I need to work out what the financial impact of each of the options might be, along with margins of error in case things go really wrong. This will enable me to properly decide what level of risk I’m comfortable taking.

I should also keep in mind that this is not necessarily a once in a lifetime chance. It could be something I do for a short period now, re-enter the job market within the year, and then do it again in four or five years time.

I also need to outline various options to keep myself usefully occupied. What do I want to do with that time? I need to write down hobby ideas, map out travel ideas, volunteering, mentoring, part time jobs, etc. Write down the schedule across the 3-6 months and what weekly schedules might look like. It would be terrible to take a huge financial and career, and maybe even relationship, hit to sit around on the sofa staring at my phone all day.

I think it would be helpful for me to connect with a community of people who have done this before, and people who might be able to connect me to the opportunities I want to explore.

As I write this I realise the danger in waiting till I feel I’ve planned it all perfectly…I never decide the time is right. In some ways, a 3 month notice period would light a fire under me (I hope it would anyway), so I could pull the trigger to force my hand, so to speak. But there’s a balance to be struck.

Anyway, it’s late again, so I’ll rather abruptly leave it there for now!

I’ve been in the same job for 8 years now. Same company, same team, same role. I have been promoted to Senior in that time, but that’s it.

I had some things going on outside of life in that time, along with covid happening, but it is also a reflection on prioritising comfort over change and also of the sort of guilt I feel at not completing a job and “abandoning” something halfway through. A lot of what I do is very specialised and tends to end up with one person on the project doing the actual analysis. So I often felt that I couldn’t leave until the project was complete. But then other projects would start before the first had ended, and I ended up with this chain of never finding the right time to quit.

I can go into the guilt, and what might cause that, in another post, but recently I took what is for me a big step, and told my manager I am going to start applying for other roles. Primarily the idea was to apply internally, but my thoughts on that are already changing.

Anyway, like many things in my life that I put off for a long time and have visions of how terribly they’re going to go, it turned out to be fine. Of course, it sounds completely reasonable to announce after 8 years in a role that you are after a change, so my manager seemed to understand, and also asked if there’s anything in the current role they could change to help me find something else internally.

As a quick aside, they would prefer if I stayed internal because I have a lot of specialist knowledge; but being relied on for that knowledge is another reason I feel a bit stuck, and a bit bored, and a bit guilty. I don’t really want to be the go-to person for this specialist knowledge for the rest of my life, and it already leads to me performing iterations of the same analyses over time!

Anyway, my thoughts are evolving on the whole thing, and I am a bit stuck on how to find a way forward, so I thought writing it down might help me.

Just to note, everything I say below comes from place of privilege: I have a good job, that I do often enjoy, is convenient to get to, is an overall positive contributor to society. So I am lucky. And I don’t want to come across as ungrateful, but nonetheless, I feel things need to change.

I am bored of working 9-5 (or more like 9:30-6:30/7), 5 days a week. Just having evenings and weekends to fit in relaxing, fitness, hobbies, family and friends, reading, hiking, etc. The relentlessness has got to me. Maybe it’s low level burnout, I don’t know. And I don’t feel I’m growing at work, or have learned new skills, and I don’t think my boss brings out the best in me, and I don’t feel the job plays to my strengths.

There’s a lot in there, I know! Some of it is on me. Have I pushed to learn those new skills, have I been ambitious and tried to excel? No, not always. I can coast; I am not ambitious; I’m not always the hardest worker. But there’s the idea of being motivated by your job, by the new things you are learning and building.

Anyway, the overall important point is that something needs to change. I have taken steps to start that change, and I have actually applied for two internal roles already (quite different to my current role), but have been unsuccessful in both applications.

I think I need to take a step back though, and not rush into a new internal role purely for the sake of change.

As I see it, I have a few options; some easy, some more uncertain.

1. Ask to go down to 4 days a week: use the extra day to explore my career, or for fitness or hiking or developing other hobbies such as this blogging, or writing/making music – this could be the easiest, as I think my boss would be inclined to say yes, even though we always have so much work to do that projects never go as fast as my manager would like
2. Go on sabbatical: this has recently become a policy at my work, so could be an option. But I don’t know if I want to come back to the same role. And I think the prep to leave would be quite stressful (which is different to if you are actually leaving the job completely I suspect)
3. Move internally: again, a sensible and potentially easier option, because I know the company and can leverage that knowledge. But the two rejections show me that I need to build more skills if I want to move roles. Plus, I think overall there is a boredom around being in the same company for 8 years. But perhaps this would disappear if I move from the current role into something more exciting
4. Move externally, to a similar role to what I currently have: this might not be as easy as it sounds: the job market is not great out there at the moment. Plus I kind of feel I’m bored of my whole job area! When I look at external roles similar to my current role I don’t feel much motivation. Quite the opposite, I think, “god, not more of that thing”! Again, could just be a result of being in the same role for 8 years
5. Career break: potentially the most uncertain but most rewarding. Stopping work without another job lined up. Taking the time to try to plan the next step. But also to take a rest, to see if it is a bit of burnout I’m experiencing. Take some time to travel, to write, to explore career ideas. But the scary side would be to not have an income, to feel a loss of the societal value I believe and hope I am contributing, to become unemployable. I would have to plan this option in fine detail, because unfortunately I am not the most personally motivated of people. I generally need a job where someone tells me to do something and if I don’t do it I get in trouble (although that might not be true; for example, no one is forcing me to write this blog!)

Anyway, those are the options I see at the moment. As it’s nearly my bedtime, I think I will break them down further in another post – the last option in particular could fit over many posts. But I’ll leave things there for now.

Just thinking that unless we’re saints, none of us have no one that doesn’t annoy us a little bit. And no one’s a saint; even saints.

That’s perhaps a complex triple negative, but what I mean is that even the people we “love” have little things that annoy us about them. They interrupt, they go on about themselves, they never pay their fair share….

So no one’s perfect. Even the people were the most fond of. That, to me implies we should simply cut more people some slack: if even the people we love annoy us, then the strangers on the bus are of course potentially going to try our patience even more. But we cut the people we love some slack, even though they annoy us, so let’s cut the people on the bus, train, in the office, a tiny, tiny bit of that slack, and see what happens.

I’m not explaining it that well, but…the fact that we can cut the people we love some slack, means we have that capacity. So let’s stretch it a little bit, to the strangers around us, who are going through their own version of the same shit we’re going through. It’s not saying cut everyone the same amount of slack, or large amounts of slack; it’s just saying try cutting a tiny bit more than you might otherwise. And report back in a week.

Super quick tonight. I was just watching this video: https://youtu.be/HjKnNVucsbI?si=6GEgt4jjFCvv7nAh

Besides the music sounding great (must check out Electric Sea), it was very interesting for me to start seeing what goes into this kind of set up and performance. It’s so new to me, and I had hardly any idea how these things pieces of equipment fitted together. It’s a very inspiring video!

I’m returning, once again, to considering learning the piano. Why not?!

I have a midi keyboard and GarageBand and today I was watching a video that taught four chords A minor, C, F and G, and how to play them in combination with the note of each chord on the other hand. It was deceptively simple. Not easy, but simple; and I really enjoyed the ability to play around with those four chords and make some music that actually had emotional content. I surprised myself with how quickly I picked it up (not saying I was great or fast or in time), and how much fun it was!

I have been playing around with GarageBand a bit on and off, but I think I want something a little more interactive, so am considering getting a synth. But at the same time, I realise I’ll get a lot more enjoyment out of a synth if I know how to play chords and progressions and have a little theory under my belt. That’s not something that comes quickly, and I don’t need to hold off on buying a synth till I’ve mastered that, but I think learning a bit alongside makes sense.

The question is do I get lessons. I know that’s the recommended thing to do, especially at first, to get into good habits, but it’s a serious step in terms of commitment and money! I’ll have a think about it.

A friend of mine who moved to New Zealand a few years ago told me that he recently got very drunk with someone who comes from a small town not far from Matamata on the North Island, and claimed to work in the Kaimai-Mamaku Forest Park.

After having met on a technical training program. They had gone for a drink with the rest of the class, and had been chatting on and off all night. At a certain point, late in the evening, it was only him and this guy left, and they were both pretty steaming by now; talking nonsense. Or so my friend thought.

But then at a certain stage the guy started going on about this secret he had. Something he was sworn to secrecy by the government on. My friend said he started goading him on, because the guy was so serious about it being a secret on the one hand, but kept saying it was something the world deserved to know on the other; that it wasn’t right it was hidden.

Eventually he seemed to suddenly crack, and poured forth a horrifying tale. Apparently not all of the hobbits from the filming of Lord of the Rings were accounted for after filming was over. Some either escaped or were let loose. This must have happened in small numbers during each of the films. But eventually enough of them must have been out there, in the wild, to form a stable community; able to breed and sustain itself over time.

He said no one knew at first, but there had been rumours. At a certain point the rumours became too numerous and convincing for the local government to ignore, and they had sent out some trackers to see what could be causing the rumours. And lo and behold, what was causing the hobbit rumours was actually…hobbits.

My friend said this was when the guy started to get really upset. Because what happened then was that somehow news of the hobbit population got back to some people in Wellington. And what they decided was not to leave them alone, or to try to relocate them somewhere. What they decided was to quietly set up a program of extermination. Certain people in the government decreed that this was an invasive species that put native wildlife in jeopardy, and could even harbour diseases that could put human life at risk. But that because of the global popularity of hobbits, this would have to be carried out under the shroud of utmost secrecy, lest New Zealand become reviled the world over for killing this most popular of fantasy creatures.

The guy my friend was talking to claimed that he had been employed years ago as one of these hobbit hunters. All these years later, he was riddled with guilt; it was a burden he lived with everyday. His wife had recently given birth to their first child, and with that, all the guilt and all the horrors that he’d seen, out there in the forests, came back to him. The innocent little life he saw in his wife’s arms represented the innocence of all the hobbits he had mercilessly slaughtered.

In the end the guy passed out on the table, sobbing. But my friend thought I should know. And I, in turn, feel duty bound to share this shameful story with the world.

(*names and countries and fantasy creatures have been changed to protect the real identities of those involved)