Every day's a holiday

https://amw.livejournal.com/470155.html

I am tired. I am so tired. I am hoping that next week i will finish up all the outstanding stuff i had left over from Q2 and then i need to take a break. I am so fucking burned out. I don't know how to work this long in the same job, i haven't done it since literally the first and last time i ever worked more than 18 months in the same place - 2002 to 2006. And i remember after that stint i was like fuck the tech industry i am going back to work in a kitchen. Nowadays i am too old to change career, especially into hard labor/blue collar work, but i feel like i am on the edge of a similar breakdown.

So, anyway, here's a can of asparagus juice.



First big storm of the season is hitting today/tomorrow/etc. It's not officially a typhoon and may yet fizzle out, but all the alerts were posted so i went for a bike ride and it was really quiet out. I don't know why everyone decided to spend their Sunday sheltering in place when it was clear the rain bands weren't going to hit till the later afternoon at the earliest (it's now night time and they still haven't hit) but i'm not complaining when it means i got a whole-ass beach to myself. It was hella windy and i loved it.

Anyway, i left early and made it back early just to be sure and it was fine. I'm glad i got some sun and air. I also felt sad i didn't share with you all what asparagus juice looks like, so enjoy.

I did some shopping on Steam and Bandcamp to stock up with entertainment for the storm and it seems i was in a bit of an IDM/braindance mood. Here is some beautiful acid from a long-established figure in the scene:



But you know what the real treat is on Bandcamp? Random bedroom musician who nobody has ever heard of who lives in the ass end of nowhere and will probably never make any money from their music and still makes tunes as good as the top guys.

A masterpiece of wonky progressive acid from some mystery cat in China who is too busy with work to edit and upload: https://meowwood.bandcamp.com/track/processed-fm-acid

Fucking relatable.

Sigh.

Oh, and even though i didn't buy this game over the weekend, it's really worth sharing a game i just started playing this weekend. It's called Clarevoyance: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1145830/Clarevoyance/

The game is set in Nova Scotia, in an Acadian community, and the whole game is voiced in Acadian dialect. You walk around a village talking to people and looks like there is going to be some paranormal/supernatural/folklore stuff and it's great. All the character portraits and locations are photos, so it feels like you are really visiting the area. I play a lot of indie games that are set in small towns and they're often fun escapist yarns, but they often feel artificial, a romanticized or hipsterized IFC/Sundance version of the simple life... This feels more authentic to me somehow. I'm looking forward to playing through a bit more, and hearing more of that wild dialect.

I've been reading a series of articles in our local left wing rag about the indigenous languages of Taiwan and the challenges to try keep them alive in the modern world, and it makes me think that games like this could be a neat component of it. It's a way to involve members of a community in preserving their language, recording their everyday conversations and providing a fun way to walk around and hear those conversations in a culturally appropriate context. But then i'm an outsider so for me niche or endangered languages are curiosities that i can enjoy as part of a gaming experience... it might feel different for people whose ethnicity is more entwined with it?

I don't know how i feel about preserving language. I mean, i think all human knowledge is worth preserving just for posterity, but whether any particular language per se really matters? Eh. I do get that language impacts the way you think about things and thus forms a central pillar of culture, and that a key aspect of violent acts like genocide and forced assimilation is killing the language... But there's also a lot to be gained from having a common language that allows different peoples to communicate efficiently. I can't imagine that it would be a good thing for humanity to go back to a world where over every hill there's a whole nother language, a whole nother band of people who can't effectively communicate with their neighbors. On the other hand, from a romantic point of view, the idea of exploring and trading and having to spend enough time living with other peoples to develop a pidgin, to create a creole, that process feels like the essence of humanity, and in a homogenized world without that process perhaps we lost something?

Ha, there i go again, even when i imagine the past, i am imagining it through the eyes of a traveler, a migrant... I guess i'll never truly understand the mindset of indigenous peoples. I'm a third culture kid, my dad's a third culture kid, being an outsider is in my blood. What insight could i ever bring to folks whose identity is their connection with the land, with a particular place?

But maybe you don't need to really understand people to respect them. Actually, definitely you don't need to understand people to respect them. And that's the basis of solidarity, i suppose, just respecting that other people have different backgrounds that may lead them to a different system of values, a different prioritization of needs... I might not always get it but i do get not wanting to be marginalized.

I'm not sure where i'm going with all this. I just wanted to post a picture of asparagus juice.

Oh yeah, Sunday night blues. Thinking about anything but work. There are so many more interesting things in life than work. Why oh why do i have to waste so much of my life on shit i hate?

https://amw.livejournal.com/470155.html