What I’ve been up to

Working from home has been murder on my productivity.

Not on my work productivity. Work is great. I’ve been a full-time web content specialist/digital content specialist/digital producer — same job, sexy new titles every year or so — for almost five years now. But my creative productivity? In the toilet. It turns out that I need to be forced to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, regardless of whether there’s work to do, in order to turn out a steady stream of blog posts.

Here’s what I’ve been doing instead:

The Society for Creative Anachronism. My work on Ottoman Turkish names and clothing has been getting recognition, and I’ve started work on 8th-century Japanese names, because what’s life if you don’t shoot off in a random direction every now and then? I’ve been to Pennsic three times, which is like Burning Man for history buffs who don’t like the desert. This last year I volunteered at the heralds’ tent to learn to be a name herald, which is like joining a nerd guild within a nerd guild within an organization for the appreciation of nerd guilds. My goal is to be invited into the Order of the Maunche. It’s surprisingly difficult to achieve. I have chosen my small pond, I am a fish on the larger end of small, I am happy.

Gaming. Baldur’s Gate 3 (addictive, highly recommend). No Man’s Sky (differently addictive, highly recommend). My Time at Sandrock (addictive, massive culture shock if you come from BG3, highly recommend). A bunch of other games in the middle, especially Terraria and Enderal, but the first three are my current time sinks.

Doomscrolling. It was nice to not have to check the news every few hours to stay on top of things, but Biden’s first term is coming to an end, and the Incipient Felon has sulked his way back into relevancy. Hopefully we’ll go back to another four years of Biden, or, preferably, a younger Democrat with actual plans. But until then, doomscrolling.

CPS protestors. Though I’ve trailed off over the past year, I spent a lot of time following people who were fighting CPS cases. There’s a lot to say about them, but in so many ways it’s a repeat of what I’ve said about estranged parents. What’s new about them is the ways they engage with the legal system. Understanding the legal system requires you to open your mind to a way of organizing the world that doesn’t fit with your own understanding, that is bewilderingly rigid in some places and vague in others, and that is built up of layers upon layers interacting with each other. It requires you to throw away your preconceptions of what the laws are and how the legal system works, because most of what TV taught you is wrong. And it requires you to fully comprehend a system that labels you as being in the wrong, which is so difficult for some people that they would have an easier time hacking off their own hand.

The ways CPS protestors sabotage themselves are fascinating and horrifying. It’s like watching a train crash in slow motion, except that sometimes the train needs to crash.

And it’s hard. Most of my sources are on video. You never realize how much print insulates you from pain until you watch a parent cry.

(It doesn’t change my view of estranged parents — I’ve always believed that estranged parents’ pain is sincere, and I don’t believe that feeling pain is evidence that the sufferer is in the right. But it’s shown how much harder the research would have been if the parents were on YouTube, not forums.)

There’s quite a bit more, but writing about doomscrolling and CPS parents has made me glum. Time to fire up the gaming computer and let Baldur’s Gate 3 transport me to a world where the evil cult threatening to take over the world can actually be taken down.