Xurnami

I disappeared for a bit after my most recent post and I figured that people deserved an update on that front.

I basically realized, with some help from people, that I was driving myself insane from staying at home all the time after work. Along with that, my therapist had suggested that I'm building a skillset for attracting attention to my depression in social media environments but that doing that is not the greatest use of my time either.

I spent the majority of this week getting out of the house and visiting other people instead. It was pretty great and I think I could stand to do even more than I did last week. I also re-re-re-started an exercise program and shifting my schedule around working with that which has also been helpful for dealing with my depression.

I'm going to be shifting downwards a bit just how much I am writing here except when I really have something to say that makes sense to this medium. I'm also going to move some posts to my website I'm working on to give them a more permanant location along with updates related to my recent realizations about asexuality.

Thank you to everyone who has helped me talk these things out and had me over in the past week. I hope to keep this up into the weeks, months, and years to come.

I decided that this year I am going to write down some goals for the upcoming year along with some basic tasks that I need to accomplish about them for people to see. If you have thoughts, comments, concerns, or otherwise, I am interested in hearing them.

Survive one more year at my job

Due to circumstances not fully under my control, my job has put me in a position where I can no longer get any advancement at all in it. However, if I stick around one more full year (quitting date of at least January 1st 2016), I end up with a huge payout. I have some frustration in my job due to the the lack of ability to advance which feeds some depression. The goal here is to just make it through this last year of work.

Attend one year of Magic: the Gathering tournaments

Due to some difficulties and frustrations around attending furry conventions, I am using the PTO time I have this year from my job to attend MtG tournaments around the country. I even start January 1st by attending Grand Prix Denver. I will be taking some weekends off to travel different places in the US and Canada along with attending some larger local tournaments to qualify for the big stage. My goal here is to either qualify for the Pro Tour once or at least figure out if I want to do another year of it.

Start brainstorming what is next and how to do that.

I have a few ideas for what I want to work on once I am no longer employed. I figure this next year is the time to figure that all out. My goal is to have at least have a few design documents/business plans written out and have had others look at them before I quit my job. As well, I need to figure out how I am going to manage myself without a job. Time management and other things will be important so figuring out a good toolset to use for that.

Create a better online presence for myself

I have been working off and on for a website to represent that Xurnami as a CEO of a corporation role. My goal is to roll this out with my commissioned artwork as well as move some blogging onto there. There is also work on resetting how I connect to different messaging systems to work better and maintain my various servers. This is stuff that will be useful for when I strike out on my own. I also plan to use this work to build a presence for my government alias. The goal here is to have a well managed collection of servers and online presences not connected as much to the big systems.

Expand social circle

From various things that happened over the past year, my social circle shifted severely and not always in the most pleasant ways. I want to try and open up more and have more people around me in the next year. Both adding people online and off though with some bias towards offline. One thing you might notice about these goals, except for the one about my online presence, do not involve side project programming. Even then, the side project programming is a means not an end (Reminder to self: stop bikeshedding!). I am going to spend that time I would have spent writing a compiler or other things like that working on doing more socially focused activities instead.

Five large overarching goals for 2015. My 2014 was kind of shit and so here is hoping that 2015 goes much better and I make forward progress somewhere on all of it.

The following entry might be quite controversial but I've been doing lots of thinking from a number of articles. If my argument doesn't make complete sense, I will be linking to the sources I am working from too which are even longer and more nuanced than this summary. I do hope that people I know read this and give their thoughts on it. ( This is going be long. )

While this post is mostly directed at those local to me, there are bits at here for those I know online too.

I would like to talk or visit with many more of you much more often than I am. However, I have some social anxiety issues about being a bother to people. I don't know what mediums people feel are interruptive or they are most comfortable communicating with me over. I also have difficulty breaching the topic of inviting myself into other spaces in reality or virtually.

Here is a summary of my current schedule for people to work from:

Monday through Friday I am at my job. I work from home so my commute is zero time. I usually start around 9 am PST and am at work for 8 hours after. This means I am off work between 5pm and 6pm PST. On Mondays, I have a therapy appointment in the evening and am usually not up for socializing afterwards. Every other day of the week I am usually open for socializing. Due to my schedule, I usually eat immediately after work so if you want to do food, let me know before the end of my work day so I can take that into account and not do that.

For those not local to me, I am completely open to be interrupted during my work day. I might have a remote meeting or something which I have to focus on every so often but these are few and far between. I'll try my best to let you know before I have them and not leave you hanging.

I currently have no regular weekend plans so most weekends I am completely free from whenever I get up to when I get to sleep. I keep a schedule fairly close to my weekday schedule during the weekend where I get up and can start chatting around 9 am PST to make plans.

For locals, I live very close to Wayward Coffee. I would love to meet there for chatting, games, or working on projects. I can bring pretty much any game from my collection over as it is so close. I am also able to invite people back to my place now as I am now mostly moved in. I have to check with my roommate (Verdauga) but it can definitely be done.

If people want to share with me thier availablity schedules so I can figure out who I can bother safely when I would like to socialize, that would be great. I will be reaching out to some people directly to ask for that information myself. If you want a more private way to communicate this to me, there should be plenty of options on my profile page here.

In a recent post, I discussed that I wanted to start doing some stuff with makeup. Shortly after that post, I ended up purchasing things from Amazon.

I could have gone down the street to the drug store to get nail polish but still being somewhat nervous about gender presentation stuff I ended up ordering it online. It took about a week for everything to show up but now I have it. Also, I feel much more confident ordering such things through that medium. I feel once I have the first coat on, I'll be more comfortable going into a store for it instead. I also had heard from some friends that it is great for stopping nail biting which is an awful habit of mine I'd like to stop.

It was also brought to my attention during the past week about Enter Pronoun concealer. I ended up ordering that from Amazon as well since shipping was cheaper through them.

There are two goals for this. The primary goal is queering my gender presentation. I would like to present to people a much less cismale identity in most circumstances. These feel like subtle things I can do to push a stranger's impression of me away from that.

Secondly, I am in the future interested in exploring other ways of experiencing anything close to transformation. Using makeup to achieve that effect is something I'd be interested in exploring and jumping right into the deep end seems like it'll lead to difficulty. Taking some smaller steps through concealer seems like it would be helpful in that direction.

Tonight, I'm going to try painting my nails for the first time. Wish me luck. Pictures to come soon too.

I really should get a "professional" blog for some of this commentary. brushwolf asked me about this and it is a large part of my identity so I figured it might be helpful for other people in my circle.

Programming is a relatively new career and what people believe it to be is very different from what it actually is. Popular depictions of it focus almost exclusively on the typing words at a computer for the computer to understand. However, this is not what programming is in the real world.

By far, the largest amount of programming is done in the service of another business. From intranets to scientific programming, this is the goal of programming. It is only a relatively small portion, the Google, Twitter, and Facebook level companies, which the product is almost exclusively the programming part. Even a large number of what are considered "tech startups" like Uber or Airbnb, the technology is a means but not an end.

What this means is that, in the large, code written is a liability, not an asset. Also, most code is code which has lasted for a while and needs to be modified, updated, or new functionality added.

If this is the case, why do these companies hire huge numbers of employees for thier technical staff? Mainly because of a tradeoff made in the 80s called Worse is better. The approach that won computing says that we should make designs easy for people to initially understand at the expense of things like consistency and correctness. However, when you layer enough inconsistent and incorrect designs on top of one another, you need huge teams of people to stand around it to hold it all upright.

In large part, this means that the modern programmer's job is trying to find the least bad combination of inconsistent and incorrect designs and telling a computer to use them. The actual programming part is translating that understanding to something the computer can understand. In fact, what is more important is communcating along side that code what combination was picked, why it was picked, and what issues you will have in the future. You might be communicating that to yourself in the future.

This is one of the reasons I describe my job as being clever in close proximity to computers. I personally spend most of my day trying to figure out what would be ideal interface for some problem in the future and then figure out the steps we can take towards that interface. The actual part where I type words for a computer to understand is much smaller than the part where I type words for other beings to understand.

The actual coding part, I feel, just about anyone can learn. Code.org is a relatively gentle introduction to the concepts behind programming. RailsBridge is a course which shows you how to make website on top of a modern stack. Stacks are exactly these sets of inconsistent and incorrect designs that people have curated to solve a problem and enough people use them that there is constantly work to make sure they stay upright for the most part.

Reading the Installation documentation will show you how to install exactly one stack and they are highly opinionated in order for people who are new to get to an end place where they can do something useful. If you look on the internet, you will find people arguing over literally every piece of that stack from operating system to text editor.

But at the end of the day, none of that actually matters for the product being made. It is a side effect of a large number of decisions by a large number of people, written down, and realized digitally. This sounds quite a bit like engineering. But it isn't. Estimating how long a task will take is a joke. The majority of software projects never actually complete. How often does a building start getting built and then abandoned half way through? Usually that only happens with major economic downturns, not constantly as it happens in software.

Most people think of programming as a task that is solitary but most modern work requires a team with different skillsets. One skillset which I don't even mention here but is extremely important is that of the User Experience designer. This is a skillset I have next to no knowledge of but is extremely important. This is figuring out how exactly other beings are going to interact with this software. The very best ones understand not just that but also the inconsistent and incorrect behaviors of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to then build these interfaces and make them work.

This is what I feel my job as a programmer is. I'd be very interested in feedback from other people in the field if they feel the same way or parallels to other fields of work.

Some people might be wondering why I haven't said much about some of these issues of the now. Some of my friends are even attending protests as I write this about one iteration of one of these issues. However, I have stayed silent on most of them. There are two big reasons for that. One of them is that I've just had lots of other stuff going in in my life which does not give me nearly as many spoons to handle such things. However, there is a much bigger reason.

I have a big rule on my list of people who I follow on Twitter. That rule is that if you are an asshole, you leave. I write my Twitter messages for those who I am following. Since the people I am writing for are not assholes, they don't need to be reminded by me that there are shitty things going on. Things like black kids getting murdered by white supremacist cops with grand juries not even allowing the cases to go to trial or neoreactionaries using pissed off gamers to push their agendas and harass female developers. I assume that most of them have their own sources showing them that news in the method they want to see it. They don't need it reiterated by me.

On top of that, Twitter is about the WORST medium for discussing these topics. You get 140 characters with maybe an image attached. Quite often that image is an iPhone screenshot of text in an article that I'd rather read using many other things than that Twitter message. I just saw an amazing thing about how 4chan's culture influences GamerGate but because every line in it was a tweet it was much worse to read, reiterated itself, not edited, and I feel a much better piece of work if it was just put in a pastebin. Not to mention using a service like Medium or any of the other free blogging sites (like this one!).

Edit: Twitter, I feel, encourages lots of this behavior for their own reasons. They have built a system that requires extensive amount of "engagement" to stay alive and so they have encouraged methods of discourse that are instant gratification. Making others aware is one thing. However, Twitter makes it so easy to just share your outrage and they love that since it increases "engagement."

While I understand Twitter is quick and easy, the retweets and everything else lead to people arguing with bumper stickers. All I can do is agree or disagree with whatever bumper stickers you are stapling to your timeline. All of these issues going on right now are infinitely more nuanced than the bumper stickers. In the second paragraph, I attempted to describe the issue with as much more nuance than a reference to the latest iteration of the problem. And still I had to use lots of jargon to make it not take a paragraph on its own. I can't even describe what we need to discuss in 140 characters.

Along with that is a rule that I've seen from lots of people in the sexism/racism discussions is that you should let the people who are affected by this issue do most of the talking. The best role that allies can take is shut up, LISTEN, and let others talk. In this reality, I present as a white mostly cis male. The best thing I personally can do is focus on discussing these issues privately when I see someone is being an asshole. I've found that comes across so much better than adding a slow trickle of outrage to other people.

If you are interested in discussing these topics, I'm more than willing to listen. But let's have a discussion, not bumper stickers. Let those who are being directly affected speak. I feel encouraging people to listen to direct sources instead of filtering it again is better. Maybe you missed some context with that specific RT you picked. I feel a message of "Go read ShaunKing right now." or "Go read Spacekatgal right now" is much more direct, gives people context, and allows them something they can decide how to engage in. Remember that not everyone has the spoons to take in the outrage at the moment.

Thank you for listening.