I’ve come to the conclusion that, once again, I’m at the mercy of another cycle of depression. It took me a while to recognize it this time, maybe because I’ve been so busy, but today I’m characteristically sluggish, disoriented, irritable, hopeless, etc. Merely enduring the bus ride that gets me to the train (that gets me to the bus that gets me to work) was a struggle due to the black hole pulsing inside my brain. Later, I sat at my workstation only to find out I had five tickets and eight requests waiting for me to solve them, and I wanted to break down in tears. Such urges don’t translate into actions, though; it would be unsightly.

Throughout this week, my mind was filled with the usual thoughts: given that my job makes me miserable, why not quit, even though I would hardly find a better one? Better yet, why not just give up and not have to deal with this world anymore? I assume this cycle of depression will be spent like all the others: dragging myself through my responsibilities while brute-forcing through my brain’s suggestions that it would probably be better for me not to continue existing. I suspect that some future cycle will find me too exhausted and destitute to muster up the resolve to resist. Not that I care particularly about that, because my life has been shit on average.

Fallout: London finally came out. Although I really don’t have time to spend on video games, I figured that I might as well give myself a break. But the game crashed at a certain point, and looking online, it seems that many people are struggling with the same issue. I found out that the mod team suggested installing ten or so mods to improve the experience, and that might fix the crashes, but I can’t be arsed. I’ll wait for a Wabbajack modlist or something. Too bad; I had gone through the trouble of opening my computer case and installing the M.2 drive that I bought months ago, because I was running out of M.2 space on my main. Oh well, at least I transferred my original files for the Odes to My Triceratops albums to a sturdier location.

I’m supposed to return to my ongoing novel We’re Fucked. Maybe due to the depression, I’m having a really tough time. I haven’t even finished working through my notes for the current scene. Unfortunately, I went on hiatus right at a moment that would require me to do some research and come up with reference images, which is one of the most annoying parts of writing (the fact that, in most cases, you’ll likely win the lottery before managing to monetize your writing may be the most annoying part).

What else, what else. I’m finishing the first version of a new song, titled Knife-Beard Dreams. Quite the cool tune. Udio, the AI-service I use to produce my songs, recently improved its sound quality, and figured out a way to divide every song into stems (bass, drums, other instruments, and vocals), which has made me slide further down the spiral of song mastering. It satisfies my OCD, but I suspect in a similar way that pulling the lever on a slot machine satisfies some other people’s neurological configurations.

I’ve been reading book after book of the Mushoku Tensei series. I wonder what makes it so compelling for me. Is it the notion of exploring a fantasy world? Of meeting intriguing, exotic individuals? Of possessing undeserved power that dwarfs most other people’s? Of amassing a harem and impregnating your wives one after the other? Maybe a combination of those and other reasons, along with the fact that I vibe with the author’s humor and general pervertedness. There’s also a solid feeling of progression, of accompanying these people as they travel the world, enroll in college, deal with a growing household, find their place in a troublesome world, etc. It’s also light reading that distracts me from my woes.

I think that’s all for today. Why did I bother writing this post? I wanted to fill some time at work in this Friday afternoon, as a form of procrastination. Why did you bother reading, though? Don’t you have better things to do?

I work IT at a hospital, so as you might imagine, I’m living a nightmare. Yesterday morning at about seven in the morning, some dickhead working for CrowdStrike decided to push an update incompatible with certain builds of Windows (not sure about the specifics), causing dozens, potentially hundreds of PCs on my hospital to be unable to load into Windows. The only way to fix it is to walk over to the computer (which may be located in any of the numerous buildings of the hospital complex), claim a working computer to access remotely my office workstation, and perform the following steps on the inoperative PC:

1. Reset it until, instead of constant blue screens of death, you get the chance to restart it in Safe Mode.
2. Enter the base admin’s credentials, which regularly change, so I need to access my office computer remotely to retrieve them.
3. Remove every instance of the file C-00000291*.sys located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike.
4. Restart the PC and hope that everything is solved.

That might not sound like much, but given how slow the computers around here are, solving each case might take about thirty minutes, and that’s not counting the process of locating them then heading over there and back.

It’s not just the users’ computers, though: both local and remote servers have gotten screwed as well. These last few months I’ve been tasked with coordinating three technicians to replace about 930 printers. Yesterday, the print server was down, meaning that only those PCs physically connected to a printer could print. Some obscure servers in unknown locations have also died.

An hour ago, the engineer on call has informed me that all user permissions have gotten wiped, meaning that thousands of employees can’t access some basic applications. I can only hope that the relation of permissions still exists somewhere, or else I’m talking months of work returning everybody to normal.

On top of that, which is the worst issue I’ve come across so far, some odd stuff has stopped working: the card readers installed on some warehouses don’t read cards all of a sudden, and we don’t know why; Some obscure apps related to medical specialties don’t work properly, maybe because they’ve lost connection to wherever they usually reached, etc.

Until yesterday morning, I already considered my regular life a nightmare, due to the constant pressure upon my mental health and poor heart caused by managing three technicians and dealing with about a couple dozen random users (nurses, admins, doctors) every day, so they would allow us to change their printers. Even years from now, I bet I’ll still have nightmares about users whining, “You’re changing my printer? Whyyyyy? It works well right now! Can’t you change it for one in color? I don’t like the new printer, I can’t cancel the printing process fast enough when it’s printing something I don’t want to print. The new printer is too noisy, can’t you make it quieter?” I already disliked human beings to begin with, but this process has cemented the notion that most people will annoy or make things more difficult for you if they can, even if all they get in exchange is to feel slightly superior for a moment.

One a less despairing note, I’m surprised by how many people greet me by my name. I come up to some random medical department and face some person (usually a woman) whom I rarely recall ever seeing (due to this face blindness of mine), and sometimes that person smiles at me and calls me by my name. I don’t retain people’s names, partly, I suppose, due to my lack of interest in humans. But I can only assume that most people genuinely do enjoy interacting with others in person and that brightens their day somewhat, even if the person they’re interacting with is a computer technician that an employee recently described as “big and bearded” (he didn’t know he was talking to me on the phone).

Anyway, I want this contract to end so I can return to blessed unemployment, which I’ll spend writing, producing songs, reading, watching shows, walking in the woods, and jerking off to pure filth. But I must earn money monthly, money that each year is worth less, hundreds of which the government steals from my paycheck to fundamentally change my society into something hostile for my kind. How grand!

Whoever is reading these whining words, I hope you’re living it up not having to work for a living, relying on someone else to pay your bills, hopefully a beautiful, big-breasted mommy type who calls you a good boy or girl in bed. Just know that I’d strangle you to take your place.