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Showing posts from March, 2026

Really wanna cruise again

Haven't cruised since 2017-18 (over New Year's) and my parents paid for it then since we all went together. That's, well, probably not going to happen again now that I'm well past undergrad. :p But when I'm not freaking unemployed... Think about a nice Royal ship: Water slides! Pools!  Hot tubs! (I think) Bookstores! Hot weather! A park you can walk around in! And read books in.  Lifting at the gym! Going to cool islands! Especially CoCo Cay! Running with a view of the sea + trying not to fall on your face! Dying of norovirus on the toilet in excruciating agony with flooding in both the attic AND the basement -  Oh wait.  But yeah, at least while funemployed you can look up cruises you are 100% not taking, all while dying on the toilet. 

3/20.

Taste my own tears. I felt the same when you were staring at me, with no regrets.  I'm all alone, hunted and weak. But I'm stronger than you may decide.  - The Lust, Dear Diary

Theme park notes

Yesterday I did SFMM with no Fast Lane (because #FUNEMPLOYMENT, I am NOT having fun) and it was wicked. 98F but without my knowledge of how to navigate Lagoon in the heat and only the river rapids ride open for water attractions, which I didn't do.  11 rides from 10:30 (well, more like 10:50) to 6 (more like 6:15). No purchases except lunch because #FUNEMPLOYMENT (I am NOT having fun).  Cherry Hill, Splash Summit, and Cowabunga Bay have all released their summer 2026 hours. Not sure if I'm going to buy a pass to SCERA because #funemployment (I am NOT having fun). Lagoon is still slacking on the Lagoon a Beach hours specifically but we know the regular park hours and they need to hurry up and fix their Cloudflare. 

3/18/26

  I thought I found what I always wanted  I got what I wanted  I got just what I always wanted.  - Kittie In a way I did find what I always wanted at DreamWorks. Or so I thought. I thought I'd be there forever. Laid off, landed somewhere else, laid off again.  No more faith in tech. It's gone. 

14 tabs barely enough for WDW full mara!

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But we are IN. If I don't have a job by 2027 we will have a lot more serious problems than just being able to hang out with mickey for a weekend.  Pro-tip: caffeinate your Macbook once you're in the queue and have the dang thing PLUGGED. IN.  And don't predict your real time right away. You can fix that later. Instead, pretend you're gonna run it in 5 hours so you don't need POT as this is a waste of time. Remember, there is no Easter Bunny, there is no Tooth Fairy, and there are no cart holds in RunDisney. (Santa Claus is real though. Jussayin) iPad Pro: Safari iPhone 14: chrome  MacBook Pro: Safari, Chrome, Firefox + 1 private for each  Windows PC: Chrome, Edge, Avast Secure Browser + 1 private for each  I'm pretty sure we got in via the incognito Chrome on my windows PC but I was in the ZONE. I thrive on this stuff. It's my inner competitive streak. PWN THE N00BZ like it's 2010 again.  I had to remote into my PC using Chrome Remote Desktop because I...

dropping Dell IT cert

why?  It's crap. It's extreme crap. The whole course after the customer support module is AI slop. The quizzes are badly formatted -- short answers that want hardcoded strings -- tons of typos. No, no, no, no.  I pushed for months and eventually realized that investing time into it was counterproductive.  I have already bought a "Learn computer repair" course on Udemy which should be roughly similar to what Dell was supposed  to teach me, in addition to Tech+ and A+, which are also on my learning path.  Apple's support certificate makes way more sense because, you know. it's Apple. And therefore it's actually good. I was already going to do it. 

that was a stressful 60 seconds

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Matiks has been throwing me division sometimes, I didn't get it this time, but I fumbled the last multiplication problem and this was the result: narrow victory by 1 point 😵

it's a sacrifice to live this kind of life

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I have to remind myself that THIS is why I do what I do. Take out any pillar, and the whole thing collapses. But stay the course, and no one can stop me. No company can take this away from me.  Fitness too: Boston qualifier  Visible muscle. 

the eventual exit of corpo life

in this post, I announce my inevitable exit from the corporate world.  Not now, because I still need funding. I unfortunately need a new job.  But I'm done after that. After this next job, once I can actually fund myself -- if I lose the job yet again, I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm tired of being a spreadsheet item. I work my ass off every single day  to learn computer science, cybersecurity, mathematics, engineering, and physics. And music, art, and writing. At work, I wrote the entire documentation, automation, deployment scripting, QA testing docs and standards, unit tests, pipeline runners, I reduced deployment time from 5 hours to 2 hours, and I got cut off anyway and all my stuff was instantly deactivated. Why - Because some sociopathic, elderly, uncaring business bro with no drive or passion for learning or loving anything other than money cuts me off and forces me to eat away at my savings. Again.  Three times in a row. All full-time jobs ending in layo...

people NEED to stop suggesting the radiorunner self-taught artist curriculum

It looks fancy, with a cute UI. However,  It's riddled with spelling errors.  It's more of an art BA than a BFA that trains you for animation and/or illustration. Compare to the Catalog for BYU Animation and BYU Illustration and see how divergent it is from both.  It's the most grindy thing I've ever seen  There's so much traditional art  that it loses the majority of its audience -- most of us want to do digital concept art, illustration, or animation , with a traditional drawing foundation as backbone, not set up shop in an art gallery as much as I love going to galleries :)  Where's the 3D? Oh...at the very bottom..."lol there's blender guru, do it...somewhere"  When do you get into digital? At the very end of the curriculum, and you're not supposed to use undo or multiple layers (????? That's the dumbest thing I've ever read) I have heard of exactly ZERO people who have ever completed it. Including radiorunner.  ðŸ˜‚ WTF.  We're f...

mantra.

The feeling of letting go, I guess we'll never know. - Owl City maybe one day you'll understand why, everything you touch surely dies - passenger I don't know which one rings more now. I guess it's a bit of both. 

Predictions for Lagoon opening day...

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And these are not going to be very reliable because I'm not a meteorologist.  We have Lagoon opening on 3/28/26 (Saturday), though this is, as always, tentative.  There's a crappy screenshot.  I doubt Nutcracker (snicker) will be open on time, but it's possible , because it's just a standard Screaming Swing - albeit with some custom scenery and art.  Lagoon-a-Beach is still showing 2025 hours, unfortunately, so there's no way of knowing yet if they're going to have a 10 AM, 11 AM, or 12 PM opening this year. Last year the return of 10 AM was quite nice, even if I myself never quite made rope drop.  Accuweather is showing pretty standard weather for opening day (again, assuming the target is hit, you never know with seasonal parks) meaning that crowds should be somewhat low. I myself will probably only take a 1/2 or 1/4 day if this is the forecast that holds. 

3/03/26

The room is spinning like a roulette wheel landing on the black I put a wager on my sanity  and I ain't getting it back So raise a glass to the lady who thinks she's won the pot I traded heaven for a hangover, it's the only prayer I've got  smear the lipstick, drown the whiskey thoughts inside my head I'd rather feel the burn of bourbon than wish that I was dead -  one project

More lessons from Beautiful Demons

A few observations:  attacks happen seemingly constantly . It's almost too much in my opinion -- there is very little breathing room -- but I tend to have the exact opposite problem; too much  breathing room. So, it is good to study this.  When POV characters are attacked, it is seemingly random... ...but it very much is not actually random . Cannon's villains have already all devised their own plans and are executing them. The main cast pieces those plans together as they go.  Whenever my stories were starting to feel slow and clogged, I instantly went "yeah...make something blow up" which is fine  as an instinct, but the attacks were feeling disjointed.  I'm more of a plotter than a pantser, so I am now going back to the drawing board. The antagonist's plans need to be fully defined and executed so that way everything starts to connect.  I will say that the books do tend to weaken slightly in what is effectively this series' "war chapters" (tha...

let's go all-in

There are way too many games I want to play.  My parents never explicitly forbade video games, but they did limit our hours severely.  By the time they stopped, I had accidentally developed an irrational guilt complex over playing games, even though my logical brain knew it was stupid. So it was hard to sit down and just do it  even though I knew it would make me more creative.  when I played adastra in 2021 I somehow managed to break through and play for at least 30 minutes a day, but usually 1-2 hours. This was extremely effective for immersion. I LIVED in that world.  So I am going to allow myself to do the following:  Backlog and sandbox games on the weekend. pokemon, portal, donut county, halo, skyrim, mass effect, dream logic, cattails, VR with Orion Drift and Dungeons of Eternity, etc. Replaying vns is allowed also. I realize this means it will take forever to get through them  But pretty much every day I want to be in: Genshin Impact and BG3. Y...