(no subject)

Sometimes I'm not sure every week is worth writing about... and yet, when I devote a little time to thinking over what happened, there've always been some memorable stuff.

• Attended a Moth "story slam" event in my town, with squirrel, where we stayed to intermission before going back to our nest for some Super Mario World. It's clearly doable with some practice! We are both thinking of telling a story someday. It was pretty fabulous how raw and unapologetic some of the storytellers were.


• Attended a bodybuilding contest! Well, I guess we just saw the ceremonial flexing and giving out of awards. Again we stayed just for a while, long enough to see my friend from Costa Rica who was competing, and then we got out before seeing the women, which is probably okay because I think the fake boobs and over-done makeup were going to depress me. I don't really mind people doing extreme and probably unhealthy things to their body for the sake of a look on a particular day, etc, but let's at least have gender parity.


• Finished a book and The Three Body Problem (show) and a podcast I was listening to about the dangers of meditation, all in one day. On that last one, it was interesting to hear one expert on meditation-related troubles say that meditation helps about 1/3 of people, does nothing much either way for about 1/3 of people, and is negative for about 1/3 of people.


• The big tech horror show continued, with wide layoffs in our so-called "Core" division; the one that's been largely responsible for internal tooling and developer experience across the company, and also the one that we've been encouraged, over the last several years, to hand critical infrastructure over to for safekeeping. So much for all that; and yes, they got a friend of mine who I'm now trying to help out. In return or, rather, also, they're starting to offer dividends of 20 cents a share? NOBODY CARES, assholes. But the folks in charge now are just squeezing all the money out of the business, now. Juicing it, looting it, pick your verb. Oh, and did I mention that we've dropped our requirement that vendors pay at least $15/hr and offer benefits? Yech. I am truly disgusted that the stock price is up on all this news.


• In my small locus of control, I pushed on my little spite projects, and to get a document of my own reviewed and also to get my reports to sign up for design reviews. I talked -- again -- with one of my more senior direct reports, about picking up management for my little legal team, in an attempt to keep the group together without me one day.


• I talked with the squirrel about aging/dying parents and how, apparently, it's very difficult to transfer wealth out of India. My dad also has some very illiquid assets, and the conversation was enough to get me to look up estate liquidators in my dad's state. I mentioned that if he dies this year I'll get paid bereavement leave, and was told that was a macabre thing to think about; well, maybe so, but just mentally playing out what would happen. Part of me is sure he's too ornery to go just yet.

I haven't been stretching as much as I'd like to be, overall, but I did do a Micah Walters middle-split workshop (on video) and liked it enough that I'm doing it again with afelsingail tomorrow. And this weekend I had actual fun at open studio. The bug came, there were no Lions in sight, it was a lovely day, and I did a little bit of acro with a friend who, like me, has been doing less acro and more handstands lately. More of that, please, yes.