How are you all doing? Here’s an update in the life of currently unemployed old me. My last contract ended on the sixteenth of this month, and ever since (and for a couple of weeks around that time as well), I’ve been busy:

Good times. By the way, I mentioned that some bug had gotten behind my LCD screen, then shat and died there. I had been tolerating its presence for a few weeks now, but today I discovered that two more bugs had crawled their way in. I have OCD, so this sent me into overdrive. I looked up videos on how to disassemble my monitor, then I set to work immediately. Well, that was a fucking terrible idea.

Thankfully I’m rich, so I just ordered a new one. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow. I’m currently writing this entry through the mostly defunct monitor. Apparently when you ruin a corner of a LCD screen, most of the remaining screen shows horizontal lines that resemble some monitor from the seventies or something.

I’m a bit pissed with myself. Even though I haven’t felt like writing in a while, this morning I was supposed to push myself to start the next scene of my novel. Unfortunately, right as I was reading through my notes, I noticed the bugs.

I think I’ll take a nice, long walk this afternoon to cool down. I’ll also have to figure out where people are supposed to throw away big pieces of hardware like computer monitors.

See ya.

After I spent the last hours of yesterday afternoon playing Baldur’s Gate 3 (a 97 on Metacritic, well deserved), and this morning on the train rereading Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph (one of his earliest, lesser works), I entered the office only to be greeted by the secretary and a coworker giving me a weird look. I greeted them, I walked to my workstation, then I heard them speaking in hushed tones, which, as far as I’m concerned, is extremely disrespectful in an office. I felt someone looking at me, so I glanced over my shoulder only to realize that the secretary was staring at me. What the fuck is wrong with people so early in the morning?

What was wrong is that the prick whose medical leave I’m covering has returned to work, and is currently sitting at his workstation. I have covered his suspicious leaves plenty of times (they sometimes take months, for no apparent reason), and whenever he returns, he never informs anybody of it, which is the least you can expect from a worker who knows that someone’s contract will end the moment he comes back.

I started laughing, then walked to my boss’ office. He had noticed that the prick was back. My boss seemed more pissed than me. “If we had known that he was going to return, we would have hired you to cover the vacation of X coworker, and instead we’ve gotten someone who has never worked in the field before. It’s not right.” Nothing we can do; it’s legal to refuse to inform in advance that you’re returning to work, and I’m not sure that the guy is aware enough to realize that others will get pissed at him because he’s screwing them over.

You see, this idiot is one of the craziest motherfuckers I have ever met, that are still somewhat able to hold a job. Whenever he has nothing to do, sometimes for hours, he browses Explorer windows idly, looking at the same files over and over (I know it because often I have sat down at a workstation from which I could see his computer screen). Other coworkers have told me that they think he speaks to himself on the phone, maybe to pretend that he’s working; most of the time he does talk very low into the receiver, and the snippets of conversation didn’t seem like the kind produced in the process of trying to solve a ticket. To be fair, though, we also had a coworker who would take calls and waste about fifteen to twenty minutes talking to users about her personal problems, to the annoyance of my boss and everyone around her (at least me).

Regarding the prick, he’s also done more troubling shit like following coworkers around in the hallways, standing very close while staring them in the face, and waiting outside of the bathroom when the coworker he was following clearly intended to lose him. When asked irately what the fuck he was doing, he answered with some variation of “Oh, nothing.” My main boss doesn’t engage him anymore, because the one time he yelled at him, the prick sicked some union guys on him and nearly got his job in trouble.

As you can imagine, most coworkers avoid that guy, and pray that they won’t get paired with him alone during the afternoon shifts; the times I had to endure that shit, I was forced to do the work of two people, usually because he refuses to do any work that his bosses don’t explicitly assign to him, even though the bosses, who don’t work afternoons, have made clear that in the afternoons the worker on the phone is the one assigning the tickets, so when I’m on phone shift, I would end up forced to resolve those tickets because the users would chew me on the phone otherwise. He has also resolved erroneously some tickets to the extent that my boss, suspecting the results, assigned me his tickets, only for me to realize that either he was incapable of resolving the incident, or screwed up deliberately. And those are the cases I know about.

Anyway, I’m thirty-eight years old and I’m always glad when I become unemployed. That means more time to write, to read, to play Baldur’s Gate 3, to work out, to go on walks in the woods, and to masturbate to vile shit. What’s not to love? I don’t have a social life nor expensive hobbies, so I have dozens of thousands in savings for when the world inevitably comes crashing down on me.

I’m about halfway through writing the current chapter of my novel. You know, in case you happen to be one of the very few people in this dying world that cares about my fiction. So I can look forward to waking up at six in the morning, sitting at my desk in my underwear, and losing myself in my inner world of unhinged depravity. Oh, what a joy! For a possibly brief time, I can disappear from reality and its many burdens.

What about that Baldur’s Gate 3, huh? Best, most immersive gaming experience since The Witcher 3 in 2015 and Skyrim in 2011. Some fancy game designer said that good games are a series of interesting decisions, and BG3 has taken it to heart.

A small example: at one point you come across the member of a society of intellectuals (two members of which I already met: one a hobgoblin and the other a mind flayer), who asks you to steal an egg of a brutish sentient species, so they can raise it in a kind, peaceful environment and prove whether their brutish ways are a matter of nature or nurture. My fighter, a member of that sentient race, suggested that we killed the stranger for her impertinence and devious ways. This issue seems black and white: stealing a future child for profit is a rather evil choice. But once you find the hatchery, you find out that the sole egg they have left has taken so long to hatch that they’re about to destroy it. Stealing it is right then? The face of my party is a beast at persuading people, so I managed to convince the custodian, who also wanted to avoid destroying the egg, to give it to me, after ensuring him that I would raise the child in a loving environment. After I left (more accurately, escaped) that building, I considered whether we should keep the egg and potentially ruin it, as we are a band of adventurers who know nothing of raising a kid, or give it to a society that wants to use the future child as a lab rat, but in a peaceful environment in which the child will be taken care of. What’s the right choice?

The team behind this game seems to have gone through every choice in the game and balanced the sides. There’s a point very early in the second act when you are supposed to meet the inquisitors of a race of multidimensional aliens who call themselves the githyanki. One of your team members stole an artifact from them, and they want it back real bad. They explain that the artifact, which belonged to them in the first place, is instrumental to stopping the evil designs of the worst people in the D&D universe. You should give it to them then. But the person inside the artifact tells you that under no circumstances should you return it, because the artifact is the only thing keeping your team from turning into mind flayers due to the parasite they put in your brains. Should you lose the one thing that keeps you and your friends alive in order to potentially save all sentient beings in the many dimensions? Are the githyanki lying? Is the sentient being trapped in the artifact lying?

Here’s one possible resolution to that extremely tense encounter, which involves meeting the goddess of those interdimensional aliens. This game has a cast of about three hundred voice actors, who were motion-captured as well to properly depict their facial expressions.

Regarding the people you come across in your bizarre adventures, treat them kindly or like a bastard, and you can be sure that you will experience the consequences, although often not in the ways you expect. During a potential siege by goblins, I convinced a couple of young people to be strong and fight. After I took care of the goblins by slaughtering every single greenskin freak I found (except one in a village, because he was cool, and another one who ended up in a cage), the two young people managed to get captured by some even worse people because they confronted them instead of fleeing. Now their remaining family member is pissed at me.

You have come across a special game when you want to avoid upsetting the nice characters in it, and want to brutally murder those who hurt others who don’t deserve it (like when, for example, someone pushed an innocent gnome lady into lava). Can’t wait to expend a significant part of the upcoming couple of weeks (hopefully) of unemployment losing myself in the grand fantasy that is far better than anything I have access to in real life. And in fifteen days comes Starfield, the next Bethesda RPG, biggest one they’ve ever done.

This morning, as I was reading on the train to work, I found myself unable to comprehend the printed symbols: I could tell that my eyeballs were capturing images, but my brain refused to process the contained information. I closed my eyes and tried to snap out of that confusion. In the darkness I spotted a jagged line of glitchy light. I was coming down with a migraine.

When I got off the train, I still had to drag myself to a bus stop, then stand inside, surrounded by dozens of people, until we reached the hospital complex where I work. I could barely process my surroundings; it felt like my brain was trapped behind a few layers of insulation. Performing any task at a human level becomes a huge struggle, so as soon as I sat down at my workstation, I gulped down some ibuprofen and hoped that my senses would return. Once they do, I know that it will come accompanied by a nausea-inducing headache that usually lasts a couple of days, but that’s still better than the experience of looking at words and being unable to process what they mean.

You see, I’m taking beta-blockers due to my heart issues, which should help prevent migraines as well. It’s a testament to how much stress I endured the previous day that the following one, soon after I woke up, I faced a migraine. Yesterday I was tasked with handling the move of a few computers and printers from the first floor of a building to the fifth and sixth. One of those computers was a custom-made workstation used by internal medicine for analyses and whatever else they do. I found myself having to carry a very weighty computer tower upstairs from the fifth floor (which technically isn’t part of my job, but the orderlies could have screwed it up). I also had to set up a dozen or so workstations and ensure that they were connected to the network (which involved visits to the corresponding network racks), that their programs worked, and that they could print through some of the available printers. Such a task involves coordinating with the local supervisor, nurses, and other types of human beings.

I tried to get back into weightlifting recently (I own dumbbells and a barbell, along with plenty of weights). I used to train regularly years ago, but I have discovered that I’m much, much weaker than I used to be, in part surely because of my health issues, and that my heart is prevented from pumping fast enough in case it reaches the rates of 180-200 that it hit during my last episode of arrhythmia. I have never felt comfortable in this body with which I was burdened, but these last few years the decay has gotten to me. I feel old and broken. On the train I have felt myself wishing I could get away with telling someone to give me their seat, because my back was hurting. It’s such a relief to know that life only gets harder from here on.

My lack of energy is also troubling, although expected. By four in the afternoon I’m done for the day, and I must be content with vegetating (browsing the internet, playing video games, etc.) for the rest of the day. It’s a good thing that I don’t have a social life, because I wouldn’t be able to handle going out in the afternoons to spend time with people, and I’d quickly resent them. Also, because I’m extremely introverted, the interactions I’m forced to tolerate at work drain me quickly. I almost feel myself desiccating.

I haven’t written any single word of my ongoing novel in a week or so. To be honest, I have barely missed it. Baldur’s Gate 3 has kept me entertained. The current sequence of my story requires lots of freewrites along with heavy emotional investment, and real life insists on dragging me back to its vacuous mundanity that erodes the heights that I glimpse when I’m immersed in the artistic process. Whenever I feel guilty for stepping away from my “art,” I remember that I write because it allows me to survive reality, but if I’m keeping myself distracted in some other way, I can give myself a break. It rarely lasts for a couple of weeks anyway, until I start feeling like I’m losing my mind.

It’s two in the afternoon on a Friday, and the one thing I’m looking forward to the most is putting my VR headset on, pulling my pants down, and masturbating to some carefully-arranged porn scenario in Virt-A-Mate. Last time it involved Cammy from the latest Street Fighter; a have your cake and eat it too kind of situation. But in matters of the penis, one needs some novelty, or else the old stick can be hard to stimulate. It certainly doesn’t help that the beta-blockers vastly lower my libido. VR aside, some of those kinky ASMR artists do wonders. Oh, if only some MILF could whisper in my ear that I’m a good boy and that I don’t need to change anything about myself, while actually meaning it. In another life, perhaps.

Aren’t you glad you read through this stupid entry? Here’s a creative promotional video that Joel Haver did for Baldur’s Gate 3:

As I mentioned at least in one previous entry, ever since I returned to work after my six-months-long break, the vibe at the office has changed for me. Beyond objective changes like the main boss refusing to greet me nor look me in the face, and some other coworker doing pretty much the same (in addition to whispering and murmuring about me from two meters away), I’m getting the feeling that something else is at play: last Friday, as a different coworker was whispering nearby, I caught a glimpse of him glancing at me, and I felt myself going into fight-or-flight mode. What’s your beef with me, motherfucker? But that same guy had been talking to me normally the previous day. To this minor incident I had to add numerous other impressions I have gotten at the office since I returned to work. I feel that plenty of the coworkers, as they pass me by, are projecting malice at me.

On top of that, there was a moment when I realized that my bowels weren’t complaining as much as five minutes ago. But I didn’t go to the bathroom, did I? My rotten guts never stop hurting spontaneously. Yes, I recalled having taken the decision to get up and walk to the bathroom, but I hadn’t retained any single memory of having done so. I don’t remember any other recent instances of such clear-cut short-term memory loss.

Something else had changed in my life ever since my last contract ended: due to my heart injury (I got diagnosed with atrial fibrillation, which is the least dangerous kind of arrhythmia), caused by Moderna’s so-called booster, I’m now taking beta-blockers in perpetuity. They were a good fit for me not only because they would prevent my heart from going haywire like it did during my latest episode of arrhythmia, when my heart rate got as high as 190-200, but it also helps with migraines, tremors (I don’t have them yet, but both my father and brother do), anxiety and PTSD, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which affect me to different extents.

Regarding migraines, I suffered them at work so bad that I couldn’t understand anything I was reading, and could hardly string sentences together. Migraines terrify me, as they offer a taste of how a stroke might affect a person permanently. In fact, migraines increase the risk of suffering one. John Fowles, a writer whose work I respect a lot (at least two of his novels), suffered a stroke that wiped out his need to write. He never did again. He said in an interview that the stroke had killed his imagination. If it happened to me, I can’t imagine myself living past that point.

Anyway, I have become addicted to these beta-blockers the same way one does to any such drug that he or she has to take in perpetuity. There are serious risks involved with cutting back. And as I was reading up on the long-term effects of this drug, I came across this page, paper or whatever: Neuropsychiatric Consequences of Lipophilic Beta-Blockers.

Over time, common side effects seem to be:

• Fatigue: for sure. I can barely walk upstairs and by four in the afternoon I’m done for the day, which is why I have moved my writing time to five in the morning. I’m having a very hard time returning to weightlifting; I have found myself much weaker than I used to be.
• Depression: I wouldn’t know. I think I have integrated depression to such an extent that I only notice the worst cycles. I’m not sure I know how the world feels like without some level of depression.
• Sleep disorders and nightmares: I experience very vivid nightmares, or what others would likely consider nightmares, but that feel like more vivid versions of my usual OCD-induced intrusive daydreams. I’m somewhat immune to them.

Last of all, hallucinations and delirium. That’s part of the issue here: I may have become delusional, have slipped into psychotic thinking, and it’s very hard to prove your way out of that when plenty of elements in your surroundings contribute to those impressions. I endured through my late teens in full-blown psychosis accented by a couple of guys who were genuinely trying to ruin my life, along with a physical fight I got into with an older drug dealer who wanted to prevent any classmate of his stripper girlfriend from talking to her. I made the mistake of trying to mediate, as my mother taught me. I didn’t fully understand back then that some people just want a target.

I was pretty much raised by a single mother (my father is around, but has brain damage from abuse and possibly some degree of autism). I was taught that you can solve every issue by talking, that two people won’t argue unless both of them want to, that violence is never the answer, and that the worse someone behaves, the more justified they must be in doing so. A let’s say feminine mindset that she has never grown out of despite the constant evidence to the contrary, a mindset that I had to shed in order to survive in the real world. That’s the kind of bullshit that produces societies in which criminals rule and decent, now castrated people are persecuted, while those in charge of ruining everything believe themselves to be great human beings.

Anyway, this last month I have been getting an updated taste of how it feels to stew in impressions and feelings that you suspect may not have interpreted reality correctly, no matter how much your brain emphasizes that they did. Due to autism, I have always known myself to think and react differently, which has led me to question plenty of my internal processes; this is the cherry on top.

How could I solve this issue? I can’t stop taking the beta-blockers, so I may need, like during the worst periods of depression, to sit tight and get used to the dark. An expression that I’ve had to use plenty of times, and that also reminds me of those many hours I spent in the dark, sitting on the stairs of random apartment buildings, waiting for the school hours to pass until I could return home, because I didn’t think I would survive high school otherwise.

I haven’t started writing the next scene of my ongoing novel, that four or five people care about. I have spent the whole weekend playing Baldur’s Gate 3. What a masterpiece. I would have never expected a RPG to offer fully motion-captured dialogue for every single character you come across, and generally very well acted too. For example, the compelling first encounter with a shady devil, one of the many people in this game who offer you help in exchange of potentially even worse consequences.

Too bad that this player has his or her avatar walking around with that mask on; I always take it off the moment I stop disguising myself. This is a game in which you can talk to certain dead people, but they will refuse to answer if you were the one who killed them, so at times disguising your form comes useful.

The companions that make up your team are fascinating as well. It had become a trope in such grandiose RPGs, like the Mass Effect series, that you would grow closer to your companions only to end up having sex with one or more of them close to the climax of the story, and afterwards the relationship would stop growing. In Baldur’s Gate 3, the first intimate moment for me involved my female fighter pursuing my character for sex, which for that relentless alien only means physical relief. This is the alien in question:

I grew tired of that “fling” quickly (she’s too abrasive for me), but I delayed telling her that I wanted to stop having sex; I wasn’t ready to find out how she would react. There was also an uncomfortably intimate moment with my male wizard, involving magic. At the moment I’m considering getting burned by a half-demon barbarian who escaped from the hells.

You can tell that this game was made by people who love their craft. Best RPG-makers in the business at the moment, above and beyond and all that. They even designed every goddamn goblin individually. I’m about forty hours in, but it feels like I haven’t gotten through any significant quest yet. Those who have finished the game claim that the experience only improves after act one.

Along with Starfield, that comes out in a month, I feel that we may be in the best year of gaming since 2015. I can’t wait to get home and keep discovering the strange stuff that this game will throw at me. That first encounter with a beholder nearly made me shit myself.

Jeez, it feels like I just wrote one of these. But I have nothing better to do now other than wait for tomorrow afternoon to come, so I may as well write about a few things in my mind.

First of all, the vibe at work has worsened. In short, back in January my contract was about to end. My boss offered me a finagled new contract that I’m sure wasn’t very legal, but I refused because it lowered my wages by thirty percent. I also was sick of working there, had experienced my second episode of arrhythmia recently, and I wanted to rely on unemployment benefits for a while. Last month I returned to work only to find out that the aforementioned boss (main boss of the place) no longer wants to acknowledge my presence. I could understand that. However, recently I have realized that another coworker has gone from speaking to me cordially (before my last contract ended) to refusing to look at me as well as return my greetings, and is generally being a dick.

For example, yesterday I entered the office only to realize that the guy whose workstation I was occupying had returned from vacation, so I had to pick another workstation. I switched on the PC of the guy whose medical leave I’m technically covering, but he’s the kind of nuts who altered the BIOS of his work PC in such a way that we can’t figure out how to reach Windows (not that I put that much effort in figuring it out, because I don’t want to be involved with that guy’s stuff). Then I moved to what I thought was the only other free workstation, that belongs to the aforementioned guy who had stopped greeting me. I thought he was on vacation, so I used it for a while. Then I was informed that he wasn’t actually on vacation, but had to travel to another hospital for a ticket. I finally settled for a fourth computer (which ended up having problems later on, but that’s beside the point).

When the guy who is acting weird returned, he went to his pal, who sits opposite me, and started whispering and murmuring about me (I understood “he reset my computer,” which I had to do because it was blocked with his user, as we usually leave them). A guy in his fifties acting like a schoolgirl. I could tell that his pal, who usually looks fed up with life, didn’t want to get involved in his grievance.

After a few years of tolerating the neuroses of this place, and particularly after my heart injury, I have become more and more retiring. I refuse to look up at people’s faces as I’m passing them in the hallways. I’m in one of those “I want to quit but that’s not feasible” kind of situations. I fantasize about winning the lottery, gaining the power to make everyone in my life forget about my existence, shapeshifting into a less disgusting form, etc. In general I just want to be done with it all.

Like thousands of people on X (formerly Twitter), I have been following the news of this LK-99 stuff, a supposed room-temperature superconductor fabricated by some reputable scientists in South Korea. I have joined the masses that read the excited posts in which materials scientists argue with each other, while the rest pretend to know what the fuck they’re going on about.

Some laboratories around the world have replicated the material, which is extremely promising. However, there’s further testing to be done. Apparently the original formula required lead and copper, but Chinese scientists have determined that gold works better than copper in that formula, which is a bit disappointing (gold is far harder to get, as well as geographically and politically limited). Anyway, the Korean scientists who have published the paper will either win the Nobel price or end up disgraced (and/or in a Korean drama).

A room-temperature superconductor is the holy grail of materials science. It would be apparently like discovering fire, like going from the wheel to steam engines. I’m talking a quantum computer on your desk. It would revolutionize every field.

As the last topic of this entry, Baldur’s Gate 3 comes out tomorrow. The Baldur’s Gate series is a legend in the genre of RPGs; I first enjoyed it about twenty-five years ago. It’s based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, which has accumulated a tremendous amount of intriguing and convoluted lore. The third entry has been developed for these last seven or so years by the best studio making CRPGs these days.

I feel more or less like a kid waiting for Christmas. I love cinematic games with an insane amount of choices and reactivity, and Baldur’s Gate 3, that has been in Early Access for the last three years or so, has proven itself a worthy contender for best RPG ever made.

Here’s the trailer (one of them anyway):

When I get home from work tomorrow, I’ll spend the entire afternoon either playing the game or just creating my player character. Such games also allow you to lose yourself in the fantasy for long stretches of time, which I require to prevent reality from crushing me like a bug.

See ya.

Yesterday, as the train was carrying me back home from work, I reflected on the unique strain that my job provides, one that I didn’t experience as a programmer. I work as a computer technician for a big hospital complex, big enough that the tasks sometimes pass through a few departments before they get solved. However, our office receives most of those tickets first, and deals directly with the users. Once we determine that we can’t solve the problem because we aren’t supposed to (hardware issue, some printer needs ink, it’s related to a malfunctioning machine that belongs to the electromedical department, etc.), we push the tickets away and hope that they don’t come back. However, whenever I do that, it injects a growing anxiety in me; those other groups may take days, a week, or even more to solve them, but I’m the one that will receive angry emails and/or calls from the users, who seem to believe that our office solves every little issue that involves machines in this hospital complex. As a consequence, I dread every email I receive, and particularly the phone calls. In fact, virtually every interaction with human beings in the context of my job is bad news.

I’m dealing with two such cases this week. In one ticket, the supervisor of a neighboring department, who is on medical leave, couldn’t access her workstation remotely. This usually means that the computer is switched off, but in this case, as I found out in person, it was stuck in a repair cycle, and wouldn’t reach Windows. We aren’t supposed to fix such issues, so I pushed the ticket to the department that does, and notified the annoyed supervisor.

In another ticket, a doctor couldn’t open the analyses of test results in the corporative app. That’s a big deal, because they need to do so for almost every patient. I hadn’t come across the specific issue, that seemed to be a bug in the app. I contacted their developers. They told me to reinstall the program and ensure that the PC ended up with the correct version. However, the app still refused to open the analyses. The developers told me that in previous cases, the corporative Windows image needed to be applied again (an annoying, time-consuming process that involves basically redoing the software of that PC, including Windows, so that we end up with a fresh installation). Our office doesn’t do that, so I pushed the ticket to the corresponding department through the usual channel (an intermediary department that’s supposed to validate these movements).

Yesterday I got angry calls from the users of both tickets. Why isn’t the matter solved? I was tempted, as always, to tell them that I’m no longer responsible for those tickets, but because they may end up stirring up trouble for me, I looked up the state of both tickets. Regarding the supervisor’s computer, the corresponding group had assigned the ticket to one of their technicians, but he hadn’t written any update. I walk to the supervisor’s office. I realize that the other department hasn’t touched the PC in the two days they’ve had the ticket.

I write an update in the ticket to emphasize that the user is bothering us about it. Nothing. I write the technician an email. No response. As I’m doing this, the supervisor writes me an email to indicate that she’s losing her patience. I talk to my boss. He understands the situation and writes an email to the computer technician from the other department to prioritize the task. The technician does respond in this case, and assures him that he will try to fix it during the morning. It’s now the following day, and they haven’t written an update. I’ll have to pursue them, likely through our boss, to figure out if they’re in the process of solving the issue. Otherwise, I’ll be forced to deal with the supervisor again.

Regarding the second ticket, related to the fact that a doctor couldn’t visualize the analyses of test results, I found out that the ticket was stuck in the intermediary department that’s supposed to approve the move. No idea why. I wrote them to unblock it. No reaction. When the doctor bothered me again, I told her that it was out of my department’s hands, and that she should call HQ and complain so that it reaches the proper department. They reacted a few minutes later, and finally pushed the ticket through.

Obviously I can’t stand this job. I was trained as a programmer, and I’m quite good at it, but I couldn’t get reliable employment; I was either let go or not hired after an internship because I’m weird and “wouldn’t work well in a team.” Now I’m too old and outdated to return to that field. Still, it’s a testament to my luck in life that now I’m stuck in a job that I can hardly tolerate due to my neurological issues (autism mainly). Interacting with humans in person makes my skin crawl, as I can’t predict what they’re thinking nor how they’re going to react, and I have to force myself to speak, stringing words together into coherent sentences, because my instinctive reaction is to keep quiet. Most interactions make me feel as if I’m betraying myself.

Unsurprisingly, turnover rate is somewhat high for this job. Some of my coworkers have moved out to greener pastures, preferring even relatively mind-numbing administrative positions instead of this shit.

On top of that, I’m quite sure that the main boss of my department wants me out. Seven months ago, before my last contract ended, he offered me a finagled contract through a company that received a grant for some biomedical research. I would be on that company’s books, but working normally at my regular office. However, that would not only mean that I wouldn’t receive “experience points,” that contribute to my ranking (which determines how often they call me back to work), but I would also get paid 30% less. I only work to earn money (writing doesn’t pay, folks). If I’m not working, I could get on unemployment benefits for about a year, so doing the same work, which erodes my mental and physical health, for 30% less money is an automatic no. I’m quite sure this annoyed my boss.

Now, not only he hasn’t looked me in the eye in the whole month I have been working here, but he goes to the extent of calling the other guy who shares my name, and who sits on the other side of the long desk I sit at, while I’m seated in the middle of their line of sight (meaning that the boss is calling my name even though he’s referring to the guy who’s seated on the other end of the line that intersects me). I’d love to be invisible, and I’d prefer if human beings didn’t interact with me in person, but this situation suggests that one of these days the boss will snap at me or give me worse shit, so my anxiety is forced to anticipate that situation.

However, this whole business with my boss could be in my head. I never know if the impressions I get of people are correct, as I don’t understand their motivations nor can predict their reactions. When I approach someone at work, I can’t tell if they’re going to listen to me or angrily tell me to fuck off. I’ve had cases of people sharing with me that someone clearly hated me (in the sense of, “can’t you tell?”), even though from my side I was approaching them cordially. Once, during my short stint in college, I found myself seated alone in one side of the classroom while the rest, shortly before the professor arrived, moved deliberately to the other side leaving me alone there, and I never found out why. I have no choice but to stay in a defensive stance and be generally paranoid. I have also been taken advantage of by human predators, particularly when I was much younger.

This morning I woke up with a worse discomfort than usual in the left side of my chest. It’s not muscular, because I don’t feel anything when I massage that area. The soreness in my heart in the early hours of the morning has been worse these past six months or so than it was in the first year after I got the so-called booster jab, Moderna’s, that gave me atrial fibrillation (arrhythmia), a permanent heart injury for which I’m taking medication in perpetuity. I can’t be arsed to look it up, but a few days ago I got ahold of a peer-reviewed paper (not that peer-reviewed seems to mean much these days) that stated that 1 in 35 people received heart injuries due to the Moderna booster. Most days I suspect that a significant percentage of people who got the jabs will drop dead in a few years, including myself. One of my coworker’s brother, a semi-professional football player, dropped dead in the shower from a sudden heart issue, even though he got tested regularly through his team. Another coworker’s friend, a healthy man in his forties, had a heart attack and died. Many studies out there have proven objectively that excess deaths have been overwhelming these past couple of years. Was this gross incompetence, or is everything working as intended?

I considered writing at length about the recent elections in Spain. Before the previous ones, the socialists hired the same companies that provided the machines that regularly malfunction in favor of a certain political party during the US elections. The socialists claimed that the goal was to (unilaterally) fortify our elections and provide anti-hacking measures. What confidence can we have that our elections, and I mean every Western country’s elections, are legitimate? How many cabinets are infiltrated with WEF goons who openly work towards a global unelected governance in which the citizens will receive expiring money as long as they don’t annoy their masters (if they do, they won’t even be able to pay for food)? I have little doubt that they’ll end up pushing CBDC in every country.

Other than exciting news such as the UFO stuff (most of my family, including myself, saw one in the early 2000s) and the possibility of a room-temperature superconductor (I want a quantum computer on my desk), everything seems to be getting worse and worse and worse and worse. Our countries are already unrecognizable from how they were twenty years ago. What is there to hope for? Do you want children to suffer through this nightmare?

Despair aside, I’m eagerly waiting for Baldur’s Gate 3 to come out, which will potentially be the best RPG ever made. A cinematic experience with off-the-charts reactivity and a tremendous amount of options to solve (not always murder-related) problems. You can also sort of have sex with a bear. Once BG3 comes out on the 3rd, I expect to do little else in the afternoons than lose myself in that fantasy. Then, a month later, Starfield.

Bye bye!

I have spent most of my weekend in the capital of the Basque Country, named Vitoria-Gasteiz. I traveled there by train because on Sunday I had to pass an exam that would determine how often they would keep calling me to work as an IT guy at the local public health care organization, for which I’ve worked on-and-off since 2018.

Half of the city was upended because it happened to be hosting the Ironman Triathlon at the same time, which filled most of the hotels. I ended up spending my Saturday night in a two-star hotel with rusted lamps, and that seemed to have been built in the late sixties or seventies. Check out the photos I took:

I didn’t appreciate the whole vibe of that area, so I didn’t dare leave my valuables inside the room. That night, a couple of dickheads spent about two hours having a shouting match in a nearby alley.

Big cities make my head pound due to the noise and to being surrounded by the dangerous, unpredictable beasts known as human beings. I don’t understand why anybody would willingly want to live in such a place. Dazed, wanting to spend that Saturday afternoon productively, I made the worst mistake of my life by visiting the local museum of modern art.

I was assaulted by the muddle of abstract words grasping at coherence that passed for the exhibition labels, by doodles that an eight-year-old would be embarrassed to show to his or her parents, by sculptures that resembled refuse, etc. Most of it done with a pompous sense of self-importance, a disdain for beauty, and a rejection of meaning itself. I came to the obvious conclusion that, in my daze, I had wandered into a den of marxism. A couple of exhibitions later I was standing in a large room, empty other than for the film that was being projected and that featured footage such as a sunny sky, waves coming on to shore, a hand peeling a fruit. When the credits rolled, I turned into this GIF of DiCaprio:

The mastermind behind the video, a Basque woman, proudly identified herself as belonging to the communist party, and added that when she traveled to California, she contacted a local communist organization in part to help her put together the film. How heart-warming. Fuck you communists and your CBDC.

On Sunday I visited a museum of natural sciences, where I stared at fossils, rocks, and taxidermied animals. They had an exhibition of drawings made by schoolchildren, featuring the animals and insects they liked the most, and they were lovely.

Anyway, I passed the exam, scoring 62. Perhaps I should be content; the shitheads in charge of putting together the exams for this organization never fail to screw up somehow or pick questions that are rarely related to our job as computer technicians; it has happened for the four exams of this type I’ve suffered through. In this case it was even worse: we were given a list of 266 questions featuring laws and normatives whose contents often seemed arbitrary, and I had gone out of my way to code in Python a system that would allow me to nail them, as they would make up about twenty-five percent of the exam. It worked so well that I was regularly passing those mock exams in Python with scores of 95-100%. But the imbeciles who decided the exam questions ended up mistakenly putting in laws and normatives from a different department (stuff related to contracts and wages). All those questions ended up being invalidated. I wasted days and days studying the obnoxious 266 questions that corresponded to our department. Regarding the remaining questions in the exam, they were more often than not only tangentially related to how we spend our time at the office, but that’s par for the course.

Twenty-seven people with a disability equal or higher than 33% signed up for this exam, including myself (thank you high-functioning autism, OCD, IBS, a pituitary gland tumor, and clinical depression), and I’m proud to say that my otherwise low score of 62 bested them all. King of the retards!

The train that would carry me back home came in late. I got off at Donostia, where I waited for another train that was coming late. When we reached the Renfe station at Irún, the employees in charge of letting us pass through the gates had clocked out, and two security guards ended up helping us through. I arrived home at half past nine. Thirty minutes later I went to bed so that the next day, at six in the morning, I could wake up reasonably refreshed. New week of work and all that.

I’m beat, back at the office and being forced to listen, except when I shove earplugs deep into my earholes, to the neuron-killing conversations of my coworkers. This afternoon I hope to finally start writing the next scene of my novel. Other than that, I’m eagerly waiting for Baldur’s Gate 3 (possibly the best RPG in twenty years) to come out on the 3rd of August, and Starfield (the first single-player Bethesda RPG since Fallout 4, and their most ambitious), that comes out in September.

It’s eight in the evening and I’m stuck at work, thankfully alone because during the last two hours of the afternoon, I’m the only technician on duty. I have spent most of my spare time studying for an upcoming test on the 16th, but I have managed to pull off two full paragraphs of the next scene of my ongoing novel, which is quite a lot considering how much returning to work has disturbed me.

On the first day back, about twenty minutes from the end of the working day, I received a call. That late, we usually don’t pick up, and I seriously considered just pretending I had already left, but the call came from HQ. They told me that some technician from the electromedical service was in need of a computer technician because the monitors that handle the delivery rooms in the maternity ward weren’t “receiving data.” That’s too convoluted of an issue to start investigating so late in the evening. I considered just creating a ticket and leaving a note for my boss to decide next morning what to do; I certainly wasn’t going to interview the technician from the electromedical service so that he would rope me in past my schedule; they don’t pay me overtime. However, I ended up contacting the engineer on call.

I had tried to forget about that incident, but the following day, that engineer approached me and told me that she had been dealing with the issue from 22:00 to 1:30. Turns out that the monitors weren’t “receiving data” because none of them would turn on. It was an electrical issue. The technicians on duty from the electromedical service seemed to be newbies, and they insisted that we were responsible because a switch (related to the computer network) was nearby, but that apparently was also dead because it wasn’t receiving power. Basically, it was the same situation as complaining to your internet provider that you can’t browse the internet, even though your computer doesn’t even turn on. Eventually the engineer managed to convince an electrician to go and deal with the situation; it was their responsibility, after all.

The supervisor of the maternity ward was fuming for hours, fearing that any of the newborns may die, and had to call in additional nurses. If I hadn’t taken that goddamn call, nor called the engineer on duty, my ass may have been toast. On my first day back.

Have I stated enough times that I hate this job? I’m autistic, for fuck’s sake. What the hell am I doing dealing with constant chaos, an open plan office in which half of the people act like they’re in high school or middle school, and with such a lack of training and documentation that you must pursue other technicians around to figure out how to solve plenty of tasks? My only hope in this organization is that I may receive a call to work at a smaller hospital, and get stuck working there with an indefinite contract that would allow me to pay my bills reliably. I’m too old and generally uninterested to get back into programming, because I’d have to learn lots of shit I don’t care about (such as programming for mobile phones and websites).

This segues awkwardly into the following: a few days ago I had a conversation with an autistic gal from the US I’ve been talking to online for a while. Not sure how it came up, but I told her that when I was a kid I felt compelled to drown in cold water (not a particularly odd subject among the ones we bring up). She was stunned, because she felt the same way back then, specifically in cold water. She suggested that in a previous life we may have drowned in the Atlantic. I proposed that we may have been citizens of Atlantis. In any case, I have always felt like there was something waiting for me in the cold, black depths of bodies of water. Perhaps a kind of home.

In my beloved previous novel, My Own Desert Places, my protagonist, Irene, killed herself by jumping off a cliff, intending to crush her skull against the rocks below. Instead of that, she became crippled, and lay there until the tide drowned her. This isn’t much of a spoiler, because she starts that novel as a ghost. That was somewhat autobiographical. Back when I was twenty-one or twenty-two, I had such a harrowing experience at my first paid job, that one morning I couldn’t muster the strength to get on the bus and face my bastardly bosses and the tasks that I wasn’t trained properly to fulfill. I had survived until then by luck; middle school was bad, but I spent most of my high school years in a psychotic state. I skipped most classes to wander around town, sneaking into random apartment buildings and spending hours in the stark darkness between flights of stairs, listening to the echoes. A few of those times, I prayed for real (never again afterwards): I asked whatever omnipotent creature may exist in the vast darkness of the universe to come down and kill me. She never came. That indifferent bitch keeps herself busy somewhere out there, spinning her web.

That day, when I refused to take the bus to work, I had a realization: my life until then had sucked major ass. My longest relationship had ended with her gaslighting me about a guy who “was like a little brother” to her. She cheated with him and left. I remember vividly the humiliation I tolerated afterwards; I had no self-esteem left, so I took her calls. The whole thing was a terrible mistake; I shouldn’t have met her to begin with. I hadn’t healed from that pain, and my first job suggested that the rest of my adult life would be strewn with even worse nightmares.

I had enough. At that point I intended to head to some cliff and throw myself off. Plenty of such spaces around. In my mind, I signed off on everything. But because I’m a coward, instead of that I went to the library, and as a result I’m writing these words. I must say, though, that earlier this afternoon, as I was violently expelling diarrhea in the bathroom because my IBS wanted to ruin my day even more than usual, I lamented, as I have done often, that I didn’t kill myself any of the many, many times that I have wanted to. Hell, even as a kid I remember clearly walking alone in the rain, under an umbrella, and wondering why did I have to be born and tolerate this cold, this grating world, and the constant pain.

Anyway, plenty of my stories have involved cold water. Diving into cold water and coming across a downed UFO. Being dragged into the cold depths by a sort of siren (in a novella I wrote in Spanish). Having to rescue your suicidal wife from the cold water because she doesn’t want to live in your manufactured paradise (in another novella I wrote in Spanish). Pretty sure there have been quite a few others. I also wish I could run some LiDAR on the continental shelves that went underwater at the end of the last ice age, when the sea level rose about 120 meters (400 feet). Atlantis went to shit when the North American tectonic plate got subducted and locked like a thousand meters underwater, submerging the Azores plateau, due to the catastrophic melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Or at least, that’s what I prefer to think.

Not sure why I felt like sharing these thoughts. Maybe because I wanted to give myself a break from studying, and I needed to get some stuff off my chest. Until next time, stranger who is reading this for reasons that would likely annoy me if I ever found out about them.

Today, at about one o’clock in the morning, I was thinking about food, but also daydreaming about winning the lottery so that I would never have to work for others again (I daydream about that often). Five minutes later I received a phone call. It’s usually either a family member or spam. Today, though, the phone number was a valid one, originating from my province. The fourth and fifth digits were zeroes, which meant that someone from a government-run organization was calling me. That likely meant one thing.

Oh no.

Someone at the office where I’ve worked on-and-off for a few years had taken a sick leave, and my services were required for this very day, on the afternoon shift, and until the guy returned. I’m familiar with the particular fucker, and he’s either gone for two weeks or an entire year. I was already fifteen minutes late from when I need to start preparing myself to leave the apartment, walk through the chaotic city center, get on a train to Donostia, then take a bus to the hospital complex where the office is located.

Back to the grind, back to either waking up at six in the morning or returning home at eleven at night. Back to wasting eight hours in an office, surrounded by about fifteen people even though I’m basically a hermit, having to avoid shitting myself due to my virulent IBS (as if the universe didn’t hate autistic people enough, IBS and other disorders such as OCD are more prevalent in folks like us), and having to meet strangers to solve their issues, issues that will come suddenly, and that I will be expected to know how to solve so that the tense users can return to doing whatever the fuck they were doing. On top of that, due to my vaccine-induced heart problems, I’ll likely end up in the ER again one of these days, because stress is a trigger.

Plenty of people out there struggle through far worse nightmares on a daily basis, but working for others has been my most dreaded one. My brain and body are unsuited for office work. Programming I can handle to a certain extent (I love programming, but doing so for others is a different matter). However, those jobs ended up letting me go, or not hiring me after an internship, due to some variation of “you can’t work well in a team.” Now I’m too old, unfamiliar with most modern technologies other than Rust and Python, and unwilling to get back in the game.

Hell, in my twenties, for long periods that I can’t remember properly, I likely classified as a hikikomori. I became that sort of beast that ceases to clean itself and stores its pee in water bottles, for no reason that I could discern. It’s been about 12-15 years since then, but I’m barely keeping it together as a human being, and that’s unlikely to improve.

So I’m writing this from one of the outrageously, maddeningly slow computers we are supposed to work with (they take about 5-7 minutes on a good day to reach the Windows desktop, and this is an upgraded line of computers from three years ago). I’m on phone duty, having forgotten most of what I learned during the few years I’ve dealt with this nonsense, and dreading the next moment when the work phone will cry out for me to solve some stranger’s problem, even though most of my problems, certainly the most pressing ones, have remained unsolved for my thirty-eight years of living (not for lack of trying, but psychotherapy didn’t work for me, and neither did pills).

Some people out there can write for a living. How lovely that must be. If you are one of those lucky ones, please jerk yourself off to oblivion. You probably deserve it. I can’t even masturbate in the bathroom down the hallway, because someone may call me in the meantime. Anyway, expect a new chapter of my novel, if you care about that shit, in like two weeks or so.

Are there any rich mommy types out there that may want to adopt and feed me? I only require a bed, a computer with WiFi, and a steady supply of milk.

I felt like writing this post due to something I have done wrong today, that speaks volumes about my life and my general state of mind these past few days. The thirtieth of June is when my city celebrates that in the nineteenth century we frustrated an attempt by the Napoleonic army to invade us, or whatever. Can’t say I care much about the actual details. I don’t celebrate festivities in general, nor my own birthday, but I dread such days because I’m forced to keep the peace with my family by attending the reunions. This time I was tasked to do one single thing: grab a take-out order because my parents were busy. I was told when I was supposed to walk into that store and grab the order. I wrote it on Google Calendar. After a morning in which I barely managed to write anything, let alone study for my upcoming exam, I went out and appeared at the store, only to be told by the shopkeeper that the order was supposed to take an hour longer.

The guy started apologizing, suggesting that he probably heard the order wrong or got confused when writing down the time. I told him that it was my fault. In any case, he was kind enough to cook the order and have it ready fifty minutes ahead of time.

When I left that shop, I was feeling like shit. How can any thirty-eight-year-old guy be able to fuck up something as easy as getting to a place at the specific time told a few hours earlier, written even on his calendar? I’m not surprised, of course, because stuff like this has happened over and over throughout my life. It’s pure executive dysfunction, a common part of being autistic. Your brain drops part of sequential logic of organizing something, to the extent that you screw it up as if you were a child. To curb this natural tendency of my brain to sabotage my life, at work I constantly walk around with a notebook and a pen. I write every step of every task, and when I’m applying a solution, I triple-check the results. I still screw up from time to time. Maybe I should give myself a break; I’m 52% disabled according to the local government. Doesn’t change how I feel, though.

And this happened after a few days during which I’ve been in a “fuck everything” kind of mood. I can barely write. I haven’t studied for the exam that I must pass in sixteen days so that I keep getting called to work as an IT guy at public hospitals, a job I don’t want to do and that I can’t tolerate for long periods of time. At the family reunion, I have kept my head down, unwilling to make eye contact particularly with the couple of relatives of my brother’s wife, who brought over their screaming baby (not the kid’s fault, of course). Yet another psychological and sensorial assault I had to endure so that my family members don’t make my life less manageable than it already is.

Unfortunately, I’m up-to-date with the mortifying riots in France, that are happening next door and that have spread to Belgium because they share the same demographic problems. I expect us in Spain, as well as throughout Europe, to suffer similar riots in about ten years. The president of France, that weasely minion of the WEF, has blamed the riots on video games, and has pushed for more censorship of social media. For all we know, they wanted riots such as these to present themselves as saviors by proposing digital IDs, a central digital currency, a social score system, fifteen-minute cities, etc. They openly talk about wanting to get rid of most private cars; during the riots, the government suspended public transport. Good luck fleeing anywhere when these video game addicts, armed with AK-47s and screaming islamic battle cries, burn down the stores in your bulding block, if not set fire to your entire apartment building. Ask what happened to many Swedes who couldn’t move out of their conquered neighborhoods. George Orwell said that if you want a picture of the future, you should imagine a foot stamping on a human face, for ever. To picture it more easily, just watch the movie Children of Men.

I have been wanting to feel a bit better, partly to ease the guilt of knowing that I should be studying but I can’t be arsed to (it has always been extremely hard for me to focus on anything I don’t care about). I put on a couple of movies, but they didn’t hold my attention. Same with a twenty-five-minute-long anime episode. Played through the intro of Baldur’s Gate 3 yet again to check out recent updates, but knowing that the full game is coming out in August made progressing further quite pointless. In the end I relied on the tried and true: I put on my VR headset, loaded up some 3D porn and masturbated the pain away. These silly brains get tricked so easily that VR-induced orgasms feel better than the real thing as I remember it from my wilder youth. During my time off writing, I don’t know why I bother doing anything else than masturbating. People are unbearable, and the world is going to hell.

Congratulations on bothering to read this shit.