Blue Saturday

half-joking, i just never realised how extreme today's Scouts was

I am sure we did mad things like that at scouts and came home fine and happy-exhausted except for bramble scratches.

i'm chill, she just seems v. little all of a sudden

granted Han will be probably be the one giving orders and dragging other kids etc

I mean, exactly. C'mon now.

I wish I could stop my overthinky brain from thinking myself out of feeling good with insecurities and self doubt.

Forgot the A-number-1 rule yesterday. Pop stars are not your friends. Music is your friend. Music is your boyfriend. Pop stars make music which fills up all the holes in your emotional life. But pop stars themselves, are just the Signifier and not the Signified.

Anyway. A shoot of what seems like good news...

Headhunter called me today about the first role where my ears pricked up and I said "Yes, that is what I do, and that is what I want to be doing!" and then when they told me the organisation I actually thought "YES. THAT IS THE KIND OF ORGANISATION I WANT TO WORK FOR." Please cross fingers and hold thumbs that it is what it is represented as being, and that the they are Good People and that I can get this job. Yes.

digits crossed

Tick

And this is how I get seduced back into ~life~ and ~work~ all over again, when really I just feel kinda done with it.

genuinely wishing you the best of luck m8

Good luck BB!

don't fear the reaper cpa

how come you get headhunters and I only get drunk people offering to be my "mentor"? good luck!

Thx guys.

Headhunters, ugh, I wish I could never have to deal with them. But it seems to be an unavoidable part of getting a job in this country. I've got good advice from various people about this job hunt which I'm trying to put into practice: 1) make tiny changes in your CV and re-upload it at least every week, because that makes you look more active & recent. 2) don't put your actual job title (which will often be meaningless bullshit anyway) but your desired job title in your CV when you upload it. What I didn't realise is that they make your whole CV searchable so stuff like that is important.

Oh well, we shall see how it goes.

That's just me; ILX's resident shiny metal box. Into which people peer, and attribute all sorts of motivations and descriptions, and yet only ever see themselves, reflected back grotesquely.

wd like a pill to help me concentrate, a pill to help me care, a pill to fill my skull with cavity wall insulation

wd quite like a bunch of heavy tranqs i think

might go and see Under the Skin later, on my own, feels like it might be appropriately isolationist lulz

Trying to get myself up and out of bed to go and see the Ruin Pr0n exhibit at Tate Britain and feeling quite sluggish TBH.

i feel quite stately and benign apart from unpleasant icebergs of work-related horror that keep bobbing in the way, but at least i shd finish early today and the sun is shining right now

Originally man lived in isolation. Supported by nature, every individual sought to maintain his equilibrium between sinful temptations. That filled the whole of his life; there was no involvement with others, nor was there any worry about the future. As a result hard work did not exist, nor did sorrow, hatred, fear, or lust. But man was not content; he started to exert control over his fellow men and to search for certainty about the future. And so the balance was lost: labour forced onto the oppressed became ever more distressing and the conspiracy of those in power ever more wicked. We have now reached the point where everyone has power but at the same time suffers oppression; the old instinct of separation and isolation now only lives on as pale envy and jealousy.

Where is that from? That sounds like some cranky 18th Century Philosopher who lives in a dank, crowded London house and just wants some peace so he can *write*; albeit made up shit about humans which is supported by no anthropologists or ethologists or anyone ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._E._J._Brouwer

L.E.J. Brouwer. He's interesting. but there's a bunch of not so interesting probly misogynist gender essentialism in there too. i can't help being a sucker for a good anti-productivity/anti-enlightenment origin myth

a worldview that doesn't admit support from anthropologists or ethologists sounds right up my street atm

You know, I have a fair amount of sympathy for the idea that all "people who study humans or animals in their environments" bring their own bag of assumptions to the study, that inherently taints any conclusions drawn thereof. But the problem is, the opposite approach (sit in a room and try to imagine ~what you think people came from~) opens the door to evo psych and stuff which is 100% drawn from one's own assumptions and completely tainted. Observing things wrongly still seems a better option than "don't observe things at all, and pull everything out of your own ass."

idk some ppl's asses are more fertile than others'

And some people's observations are keener than others. Swings and roundabouts.

Oh definitely, I just wanted to say that

Oh god phoner interview in half an hour.

(Not for the job I really want, but for another job who saw my CV and were super keen because of all my experience. My experience in a field I'm desperate to leave, but ho hum.)

Totally blew the interview. Test of (mostly developer) ends of SQL I have never used in 15 years of working daily with the thing. And doesn't ask a thing relevant to anything I ever used daily. There are tests that are "assess your knowledge and skillset" and then there are tests that are "catch you out with this obscure thing you'd only know through taking a course" and I guess the fact that it was the latter just kinda shows this isn't really someone I'd want to work for. :-/

can't even tell if this is seasonal crappy weather or the lingering on of the ash-pall of impending doom

"catch you out with this obscure thing you'd only know through taking a course"

I had an interview like that once:

interviewer: "Diagnose this network problem."
snoball: "Well, it's most likely to be A, or possibly B, or C (...) or very very rarely it could be Y."
interviewer: "You're wrong. The answer was Z."

I'd listed every possibly cause under the sun apart from the totally obscure one he'd decided was the correct answer. And I didn't get the job. But I would have turned it down anyway, because forget working for someone that inflexible.

reminds me of last bit of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-wfO6_eq-A

Sorry, I've been talking about my jobsearch woes on the Unemployed Watercooler thread, but yeah. That's the kind of thing in an interview that is a red flag of "nope, you really should not work for that person."

I shouldn't indulge it, but the blue part of my head wonders what happens if most employers wave red flags and if I as an employee have so many red flags and unattractive features of my own that I am in no place to pick and choose, and yet having one is almost essential to keeping a roof over my head. At least, it's been wondering nearly the same thing wrt relationships for a while.

I've been amused by the talk of Freecell on this blue thread for a while, and the recurring theme of Solitaire in Perec's "A Man Asleep" (must get round to watching all of "Un Homme Qui Dort" instead of little ten-minute chunks on Youtube, but may not be good for mental state). I have a bad relationship with Solitaire games. When a blue phase strikes me I fill all my free time playing them while ruminating on the past, the future, imaginary conversations, etc. Moving the cards around from chaos to (near) order repeatedly while simultaneously rearranging the contents of my head makes me feel like the contents of my head are also becoming more orderly, but of course it's not true; it only makes things worse.

Been doing that with Threes lately too. It's a very Solitaire-like game, both in that respect and that for all the author had his little rant about the sheeple playing 2048 bcz his game is strategically more fascinating I don't actually seem to be doing any better at it than the day I first played it. My highest ever score was on day 2 of playing; still get a goodish game followed by six completely shit games. I like to think that's because there's too much of a luck element for strategy to help, but maybe it's because I'm just very bad at working out strategy.

There was nothing in this post of any interest to anyone else. German conversation class soon. Hope it will be a distraction. Hope I'm not pushed too hard, as I've been crying all day for no real reason, and am scared of starting up again in public.

There was nothing in this post of any interest to anyone else.

objection over-ruled

i wd be in a pleasantly wistful mood but i've either got a bad back or a bad kidney, no idea how to tell. it feels more to one side than right on my spine. either way i'm supposed to be going to watch kids do Kiss Me Kate tonight. seats better be comfy.

ouch, hope you feel better soon. Enjoy KMK but yeah, school production (if that's what it is) locations not noted for their comfortable seating arrangements I guess.

Learning irregular German verbs will keep your mind plenty busy! Better than Solitaire, at least. (I have such a Solitaire addiction, I've had to uninstall it from any computer where I've ever worked. I can play that game for days when my head gets a bug for it.)

YES. I had to delete Freecell and then I had to delete sol.exe and then I had to delete Spider Solitaire and now I'm just playing sodding Threes, which doesn't even bring the satisfaction of "winning" occasionally. Why can't I at least make myself write a Threes-alike instead, which would be good practice? Nooo.

Sometimes I feel like I procrastinate because useful tasks don't keep my head mindlessly busy enough to keep thoughtworms out, but that doesn't make sense, since Freecell lets them all wriggle about all over the place. But there's still a feeling that if I turn on Thoughts Mode to do some actual useful thinking I'll get rumination instead.

(I feel uselessly ashamed over something that happened yesterday and I have a work task that makes me want to die when I think about how much of it is left to do so I've been avoiding it for weeks and I have some other stuff that would just make ILX go "told you so" because indeed you did and indeed I told myself so too and I still fell for it.)

Why can't I at least make myself write a Threes-alike instead, which would be good practice? Nooo.

Ha, this is totally me. Watching silly 80s computer graphics demo videos on youtube when i 'should' or 'could' be making my own shit with openframeworks.
I've gotten better at trying to lasso myself when i do happen to have a measurable amount of motivation. It's really easy for me to just slide back into procrastination but lately i've been working on just 'grabbing myself' and thinking "No! Let's do this! I feel slightly up for it at this specific moment, let's get going before the feeling is lost!". Like a random jumpstart.

now I'm just playing sodding Threes

i like to mix it up with a little 2048 sometimes

Stopped awhile this morning on my way back home
I had to realize this time that I'd be all alone

Labour-run Dover town council said it was hoped the wave-shaped benches would deter "extended sitting".

The benches, which are made of seven curved strips of metal to blend in with the shape of the waves, do not have a back or armrest so that shoppers only sit on them for a few minutes.

The chair of the community and services department, Councillor Sue Jones, said: "If they were too comfortable, we would have the gentlemen and ladies of the day lounging on them. They discourage antisocial behaviour."

maybe wire them up to produce a mild electric shock every 5 minutes

this fucking country is dead to me

just spent half an hour extended sitting in the Peace Garden, in the sun

it was good, and i'm ok, and life is a thing. but

this fucking country is dead to me

they march right on in time
and straight into the pool
oh so quick and cool

would recommend Mike Davies' City of Quartz for great analysis of that kind of hostile urban design Dover are apparently going for

duly googled, pdf entering my "avoiding work" folder as we speak

Also, Joel Garreau's 'Edge City'.

ooh nice, we have that in our library, picking it up!

Doesn't surprise me that it's Dover. Presumably targeted at the refugee population. It's increasingly common elsewhere, though.