Back once again with the renegade WEAK NOTES, D4 damage with the ill behavior…

I’m not really sure what happened. Everything was going so well, I was feeling fit, healthy, productive, moderately well adjusted.

And then it all just fell apart as it got darker and busier and I stopped blogging, stopped running, stopped eating properly and generally avoided people. Just a month of general malaise. It’s depression, basically, and these things happen and I’m not going to beat myself up about it. As an old dog, this isn’t my first rodeo and I managed to hit the vital marks I had to for life to go on (family, work) even if the self-care went by the wayside.

Maybe it was too many open loops in the brain. Maybe it’s just the weather - I’m a firm believer that happiness is solar powered.

(I’m pretty sure a bout of ongoing shitty head cold hasn’t helped though.)

Anyway, time to pick myself up, get myself back under control and lean into the positive.

On the bright side, I’ve done a shedload of work while I’ve been avoiding all contact with humans and eating all the biscuits, and as a result have largely broken the back of the thing I was building. All the big problems are solved and it’s just some drudgy production stuff and a quick roll in the glitter to go.

Sadly, it looks like some major reshuffling is happening at the client (they’ve just been acquired) and they’re not exactly approving new work at the moment so our minimal viable product release may end up as our only actual product release in this case and I shall have to find a new gig in January. So it goes, but I was actually quite looking forward to landing this one, there was some good stuff in it.

There’s a very old Scott Hanselman podcast about the scars you get from working on death marches but this one isn’t actually a death march, I think… it’s just a “we’re panicking and not going to pay for that” march. The work, on the whole, is still valid and good.

It could still go alright and the rest will be signed off before we hit the end of the current piece in mod-December… but I am not hopeful.

I’ve stopped even the bare minimum auto-reposting to Twitter from Mastodon in the light of Elon Musk’s ongoing racist bullshit and the general deterioration of the site. At this point I literally only have an account (set to private) to check the Strictly spoilers.

Spider-Man 2 (the PS5 game) is properly good. Also, though, short-ish. I hundred percented it on whatever the normal mode is (“Amazing” I think) and platinum-ed it too, which I’m not sure I’ve done for any other game. And then I immediately went back and started playing the original game and my word do you miss the parry move. That had become totally wired into my muscle memory.

I did more or less finish the Jag I was building. More on that later, I think. But I went with a white pickguard / black pickup covers and a couple of red Switchcraft switches in the end to set it off. The pickup selectors are now series mode in the “both down” position and the “strangle” switch (a bass cut, effectively) is now a phase switch.

Only thing left to do is install a very slightly narrower (two whole millimeters!) StayTrem bridge and arm/collet when they arrive. Back order on those is 8 weeks though so it’ll be a while. In the meantime I’ve mixed the original bridge with some Mustang saddles and applied plumber PFTE tape to the arm.

Goals for the coming week:

  • get back on the healthy eating
  • run a bit
  • cycle a lot
  • don’t worry, be happy (doooo do do do-do-do, etc)
  • play guitar

Once again, with feeling.