ALT

May 2025

Work is fascinating. Diving headfirst into the concrete swimming pool of full-time, forty-hour-per-week employment after sixteen years of unemployment has been a trip, to say the least.

You may wonder what I’ve chosen to do after all this freedom. Here’s a succinct description:

I work for a global language and technology company. My job is to help improve AI systems by reviewing and refining the way they understand human communication. It’s like training a very smart assistant to listen better, think more clearly, and respond more naturally. Most of my work is behind the scenes, but it’s essential to making future technologies more useful and accurate.

Yes, I’m teaching our future overlords how to best deal with the mewling monke.

Prior to taking this job, I was aching for work akin to Severance’s “Macrodata Refinement”. I wanted a repetitive, butt in a seat, eight-hours-a-day job job, the equivalent of the ones seen in 1960s classics like Billy Wilder’s The Apartment: row upon row of suited laborers separated by desks, toiling away at earning the mythical and elusive “honest dollar”.

Jack Lemmon in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment
Still from The Apartment (1960), directed by Billy Wilder. © United Artists/MGM. Used under fair use for commentary purposes.

After a month of this, I’ve gotten what I asked for. I’d forgotten how validating it was to simply work and get paid. The heavier clouds of depression that were blocking my skies blew away, and there’s a real pep in my step.

I think much of this is to do with how a full-time obligation reminds me of the importance of my free time. When I had sixteen years of it, I took it for granted. Now that I’m limited to eight hours—six, if you subtract the two hours of physical training and personal hygiene I’ve once again become seriously invested in—and a weekend, the value of these precious seconds skyrockets.

My contract was renewed yesterday until the end of September. Whatever happens after that, I’ll have five months of experience in a field that perfectly suits my disposition. It’s so unusual to be this satisfied that I don’t know what to do with myself.

Suffering from Success

Last month, I formed an extensive list of topics I wanted to self-study. Since then, I’ve managed to give passing, longing glances at Rust programming language, and that’s about it. I’m still in “adapting to full time employment” phase, where I can’t yet completely switch from enslaved to freedom mode the second I clock out. I know I’ll get there: I was there with my last major employment, English conversation teaching for Berlitz, Japan, where I could pull a fourteen-hour day and then pursue my own interests the second the final lesson was done. The work I’m doing now isn’t draining, or even difficult, but it does require focus and I want to get it right.

Time and experience will ease the end-of-day transitions. As mentioned above, I’m at least back in the gym with regularity. Working from home and being able to walk ten feet to an equipped training area is magical, and I didn’t fully appreciate it until I had eight hours of stress to decompress from.

I would like to prioritize Rust and ProtgreSQL for self-study. I’ll let you know if I manage to settle into a routine.

Dark Acre Church Re-opens

DARK ACRE

I have managed to do one creative thing with regularity since starting the new job. I’m back complaining about Steam Discovery Queue video games, something I did for years on Twitch.tv—only this time it’s Monday through Saturday uploads to YouTube.

The last time I uploaded to my channel was ten years and a month ago. Something possessed me to spend a half hour before work recording my rambling while skimming twelve random video game store pages. I considered Twitch, briefly, but I didn’t want to get embroiled with all the nonsense that came with developing a parasocial community.

So far, four days in, it’s been so much more fulfilling. I think it’s because I’m not throwing so many eggs into the basket this time around. Previously, the effort was very much in pursuit of a “content creation career”, which is just slang for “unemployed desperation”. Now, it’s to make a record of how snarky I felt on a given morning.

We’ll see how it goes. This is the only time I’ll mention it here.

Media

I found myself consuming a lot of video media this month, as though making up for lost time on weekends. I built a couple of LEGO sets—Mona Lisa and the Bat Bike—with movies and shows running in the background.

Read

Watched

Played

It turns out that Grand Theft Auto Online was achievement therapy, and two weeks into the month I cancelled my subscription to GTA+ and uninstalled after not really playing much at all. Also important to note: my progress through The Horus Heresy is always accelerated the more times I hit the gym. This is an exceptionally positive thing.

You may notice I’ve significantly cut down the “Reading: Current” list. I had disingenuously put all the self-study books in there, alongside several long-term reads that I hadn’t made any progress in for months. Paul Sellers’s exceptional Essential Woodworking Hand Tools, a coffee table book I’m still not halfway through, had been there since August of last year!

To say I’m satisfied with the second month of my fiftieth year alive is an understatement. This was the most fulfilling stretch I’ve had since that first year of indie game/book publishing way back in 2010.

Here’s hoping it only gets better.

2025.05.01 – 2025.05.31

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