Marsden is Here

Well, what a year. One might have thought that getting married in January would mean the rest of the year would seem relatively uneventful, but Covid was already on the horizon.

Lockdown itself didn't affect us much, as I was able to work from home and otherwise we don't get out much anyway. Deciding that it was time to sell the house and move on came as a surprise, and the subsequent accommodation-related and money stresses have probably defined or at least outlined my life since. We were supposed to have foundations by this point, instead the consents have only just gone to council.

Work remains stable although I have been struggling more and more to make my targeted hours. We did take on a new programmer (after years of needing one) just after lockdown which has redistributed the load in a good way. I'm now primarily stressed only by not getting whatever my current project is out in a timely fashion and not also by the queue of waiting projects and have managed to find time to spend on future-time-saving improvements to our CMS and experimenting with better/alternate workflows.

Other things which have been chewing up my time included aforementioned property matters and looking after D who has sprained her "on" shoulder twice this year, once at the beginning of lockdown and again a few weeks ago (same shoulder, different muscle). If the inset sewing table I brought her for Xmas prevents a future occurrence it will have paid for itself in saved medical costs. The latter has also meant I have no choice but to shoulder more of the housework.

Time to myself has become more and more rare and is probably partly to blame for my current addiction to the Star Realms game on my phone. I resisted putting any games on this phone for a long time, but I also own the hard-copy version (a prize from Buckets of Dice some years back) and it provides excellent semi-mindless replayability with just enough luck involved that I don't feel bad on the occasions I lose to the AI. The free version is ad-free, but I will at some stage when I don't feel money is so tight drop the $10 to unlock the hard AI and more cards.

Related to this although I am technically on holiday I have been spending 2-5 hours in the office most days working on a project which needs to be done, but can't or won't be afforded by the (non-profit) client and will only continue to be a headache for me (and others) long term if it is not. It's nice and quiet in there with everyone else away and although progress hasn't been as fast as I would like it is still progress and I at least feel that I am achieving something and will eventually have one fewer concern weighing me down. (Also I've been able to quickly jump on the couple of live issues which have come up, so a bit of paid time on top of the annual leave burnt during shutdown.)

Contact with other people has also become more rare and in a lot of ways 2020 has seen further weakening of connections which were already on the way out. I had already been sacrificing attended SAGA for work for a couple of years and I now probably wouldn't recognise anyone on the committee. Gaming with friends has been rare and intermittent, I am enjoying being in the ongoing game Z started late this year.

Lockdown stopped KAOS parties and sheer exhaustion has stopped me/us attending many of the smaller KAOS-adjacent or friends events which I/we have been invited to or for as long as I would have liked. We always planned to start having small groups of friends over for dinner/board games at Gladson but actually organised it maybe twice, and our current flat has been decreed too small to entertain. We did make it to he New Years party which was relatively small and quiet and although I didn't interact much I did enjoy myself.

I still as frequently find myself thinking "I should reach out to [names here] and find out what is really going on in their life" on Facebook or via email/text to catch up, and either not having the energy or not knowing what to open with and not doing it :(

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Society wise

- lockdown(s) affected the country in ways which we probably won't fully understand for decades. I am more grateful than ever to be living where I am in the world, and that we had a government prepared to move fast and "risk the economy", rather than the plentiful counter-examples elsewhere in the western world.

- We had an election which returned that government in the unprecedented position to govern alone under MMP, and we are still waiting to see what they do with that. Significant structural changes to both the education and health systems are happening, it remains to be seen if the latter will be what is needed or any more than shuffling some chairs to the upper deck.
I can understand why they are moving slower on many issues than many people would like, both for long term political reasons and because it takes time to line up major structural change properly. Social welfare benefits should absolutely have been increased by more already though, there better be some damn good announcements coming.

- The same election contained referendums on assisted dying, which brought in a not perfect but also not "poor law is worse than no law" legal support for the option despite outright scaremongering and falsehoods from opposition groups, and narrowly rejected much better law for the legalisation and control of cannabis. Perhaps the next left-wing government will act on this since our current PM has a tendency to say "not on my watch" in response to even middling public opinion against significant law change (see also capital gains tax). (I maintain this is a long term strategy so she can step down and let her successor bring them back to the table).

I generally feel that as a snapshot these events indicate that we are becoming a more progressive society on several fronts, and there is hope on others. Not however on the housing market front :( Any money the government puts into the economy seems to end up there somehow, either landlords putting up rents to match benefit increases or investors taking advantage of ever lower interest rates to buy up even more properties.

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Going forward: basically I feel that I am surviving, little more. One more day, one more closer to house. Everything is an effort, often including spending time with my wife :( There is still time for something disasterous to come out of the White House or the stacked administration which it is leaving behind.

Still standing, but staggering.

This is something I wrote to someone who is finding everything too much at the moment. I have been asked to make it more widely available - if you feel it would help someone please feel free to share it. If that is the post, please use the Dreamwidth version. Link at bottom if you are reading this on LiveJournal.

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I don't know you very well, we've maybe spoken a couple of times at parties and other than that only what I see on FB. But I'd like to share something I've learnt in times like these - we're /taught/ that it's a bad thing to be a "burden" but that's a lie. People will happily carry something (or someone) they see value in. Additionally the context always seems to consider the weight as if it all has to be borne by /one/ person. This is also false.

Sometimes we just have to accept little bits of ourselves being carried by different people as, when and how they can. And life is a complicated beast so sometimes individual people have to set down the responsibility or they (and we) have to let it pass to a different person.

And yes sometimes it feels that we are the only one left to carry our own weight with no hope of respite, and that can be a terrible, crushing, soul destroying feeling. But it is never, ever true. Sometimes we do drop pieces of ourselves along the trail, or cannibalise our ability to care about something to make it through another day. There is always hope. There is always another day. Someone will smile at us, even a stranger in the street, or comment on something we post and the weight will lift a little.

We all become a burden at some point in our lives. I believe it is just part of the human learning experience. When we come out the other side - granted not all do and every one of those is a loss worth grieving - we are better prepared and equipped to carry not only ourselves forward but others as well, strength permitting.

The comments on this post show you have a lot of people who see value in you, even if you don't, can't believe it right now. I certainly do even if all I have to offer are my words. They are willing to lift and carry you for a while. Trust them. Lie back and ride the crowd. Rest. Be well.
~~~

As a bonus here is a something else hopefully uplifting another of my friends shared.

Ordo Cygni demonstrations and KAOS Execution


Update: video has finished processing

See also:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpj_TV7-Dlo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCXUx-QVCjs

Sir Paul Callaghan (Kiwibank "New Zealander of the Year" 2011) takes on some of the comfortable myths that keep New Zealand a hard-working, low wage, low prosperity country.
Embedding is actually disabled, but here is the link: http://youtu.be/OhCAyIllnXY (20 minutes)

Bullet points (some in my words, some direct quotes):

• Myth: "NZ is an egalitarian society" - actually we're down with the US in terms of income disparity and prison population - but despite this we do score well in education
• We like to climb on our clean and green high horse but our history doesn't actually give us a leg to stand on, and our journalism is kind of soft in this area
• Myth: "We don't need to be rich like Australia" - but if we were we would be able to afford the eg latest Cancer drugs which are available in Australia, infrastructure projects wouldn't need to beg for money. We would be better set up to handle events like the Christchurch quakes.
• Our wages used to be higher than Australia's (within a lifetime), at that time more Australians came to NZ than NZers went the other way
• Myth: "We need to work harder" - In the OECD only the Icelanders work harder than us - but we rank the lowest in terms of productivity. The French have it right - they hardly work at all but are the most productive per capita.
• We "choose to be poor" by encouraging our people to work in low paid, low return industries because "this is what we do in New Zealand"
• The Prime Ministers pet, Tourism, is great for employing unskilled people but contributes less to the economy (GDP) per-job than the average. So more tourism jobs is not the answer
• Food manufacturing comes in pretty close to the average but Fonterra is the biggie - $350,000 per job. This is still peanuts on an international scale.
• Myth: "You can't manufacture in NZ because the Chinese do it better" - is not the case. Manufacturing is our biggest aggregate export earner, especially "Elaborately Transformed Manufacture". High profit margin, high value per weight items.
• Directing all our (pitiful) R&D investment to the things we already do, which are mostly the sort of industries which don't actually need to do much R&D (explaining the low private spend), gets us nothing. Same for anything which can be classified ans the latest fad.
• What we're -good- at, is really weird stuff. Like sleep apnea devices / respiratory humidifiers - where F&P has the world market cornered. Like GPS chips (Rakon). Niches that are too small for the big players to care about, but where a little country like NZ can make a relative killing using the 500x multiplier that is the world economy relative to us.
• We only need need 100-120 companies like our top 10 manufacturing companies, but these companies are invisible within NZ. "They make weird stuff, they only sell abroad, they don't sponsor children's soccer or the ballet". So our kids (who are certainly bright enough), and their parents simply aren't encouraged to think that way for possible careers.
• If we can have 10, why can't we have 100?
• An extra 40 billion a year like that, ongoing and sustainable, is far better than the one-off 60 billion we might get from digging up our National parks in the process destroying something we hold dear.
• Creative/talented people have a choice where they live in the world. The companies we have stay here because their people say "sod it, I want to live in NZ". (See also: Peter Jackson Studios, Weta Workshops)

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I want to toss this "choosing to be poor" concept around a bit more, and I'll be doing that tomorrow.

via SciBlogs

It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press and a few hundred again before the telegraph. Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. A Flickr here, a Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges. New types of conversation, argumentation, and collaboration are realized. Using examples from anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, YouTube, university classrooms, and “the future,” this presentation will demonstrate the profound yet often unnoticed ways in which media “mediate” our culture.

[Edit: Fuck it LiveJournal, why won't you embed the video?]

40min, which is why it has been sitting in my inbox for 2 months.

via the Friday Spoing

(via P.A.)