Blog 4.0

Overheard our social media person at work trying to explain Gen Alpha slang to our brand person today. The latter, who is the older one, was entertainingly confused ("But what does Ohio mean?"), but what was really amusing to me was that I had heard pretty much all of the terms she was explaining before - which was weird in so far as I'm an elder Millenial and among the oldest people there (most team members are younger Millennials or older Gen Z). I guess it's something about my degree of online-ness? I'm not really sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I like understanding what people are saying, even if they are using terms I wouldn't necessarily want to adopt myself, but on the other hand it kind of makes me feel like that "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids" meme .

Tomorrow is the big day, when the new website is supposed to go live. You'd think with the event being mere hours away, I'd be able to speak with more confidence, but well... Last I checked, payments were still not working correctly. Just a minor thing for an e-commerce business. At one point during the testing, literally only one guy could get his payments to go through. At least my colleagues still had a sense of humour about it. "All future sales will just have to go through him then." "You'd like to pay? Please hold while we connect you to George." I wonder what I'll wake up to tomorrow.

The big project is still targeting the 1st of October for launch. With less than a week to go and everybody scrambling like crazy, somebody up top decided that this was the perfect time to announce an internal reorganisation including a bunch of job cuts. I can only guess that this was driven by a desire to have all the redundant people gone by the end of the year (as I think most of them probably had a three-month notice period). I get to stay employed, but my little team of four will basically cease to exist, with two people's roles being made redundant and me and one other guy getting shunted off to somewhere else in the org chart. The talking points were about what great growth plans the company has for the coming years, what agile innovators we are, and what amazing new opportunities this will bring for all of us. I guess I should be grateful that I get to keep my job, but I just feel bad. I'm simply not good at this capitalism thing. All I want is to earn enough to get b

I finally opened my mail-in ballot for the upcoming Austrian national election today and actually had a laugh-out-loud moment when I finished fully unfolding it. You see, the final of the eleven options states: "Keine von denen - KEINE", which means "none of these - NONE", so my first thought was: Wait, did they add an "official" way to spoil your ballot if you want to take part in the democratic process but don't like any of the available choices? But no, it's an actual political party. Their whole thing is that they do say they don't feel represented by any of the current parties, so I guess their mission statement is in the name... but it does seem like a bit of a legal loophole and like they could potentially get a good chunk of votes simply out of confusion. Very Austrian, is all I'll say.

I work in what can only be described as a pretty cushy office job. Since the pandemic I only need to actually be in the office once or twice a week; the rest of the time I can work from home. The job is engaging but generally not hard - since I've been performing similar kinds of tasks for several years now, I'm pretty good and efficient at them. My co-workers are all a lovely bunch. And my employer is pretty decent, as far as evil global megacorporations go. However, earlier in the year they decided that our e-commerce website would move to a new platform. This doesn't have any immediate benefit to us as the people managing it, nor to our customers - if anything, there are quite a few downsides at least in the short term. Mainly the project seems to be something to satisfy bean counters and higher-ups who want to save money by having more brands run on the same kind of software, that kind of thing. It's not the most inspiring goal, but understandable. What was less und

For as much as I'm into PC gaming, I've never really had the slightest interest in virtual reality. I'm not sure why, other than that watching other people with a giant brick strapped to their head doesn't exactly convey an image of fun. Then again, I'd never really had a chance to try a VR headset for myself either... until last week, when the husband and I visited a friend who made us put on his Meta Quest 3 and play some games. I had some familiarity with the concept of Beat Saber from YouTube videos I'd seen, but I've got to admit I was still kind of shocked by just how fun it was. I can totally image buying that headset purely to play this one game for hours and hours , I thought to myself, though I didn't want to quite admit the level of my delight out loud. Then it was my husband's turn and he was even more excited than I was. "I've got to admit, I'm considering buying one of these for ourselves," he admitted when we went to

I have this (occasionally) re-occurring dream about my first boyfriend. In it, I go to visit him for some reason (he lives in the Netherlands) and we're really friendly and get along great... as if we'd remained friends over the last twenty years instead of breaking up and never speaking again (which is what actually happened). Sometimes I may even end up getting flirty in this dream and express an interest in getting back together... though around this point a part of my subconscious usually seems to raise the alarm that something isn't quite right with this scenario and throws some kind of curveball into the mix - in the case of last night's dream, this meant me finding out that he's actually married and has a six-month-old baby. The latter was funny to me upon waking up in so far as I could tell exactly what piece of real life news my brain had pulled inspiration from for that one. As far as I can tell from my ex's public Facebook profile, he's not actu

I remember hearing about this film around the time it came out and thinking that it sounded right up my alley. Ridley Scott, historical drama... I think I briefly looked into whether I'd be able to see it in my area, but the answer at the time was no, so I just forgot about it again. The other week something reminded me of the title, and while looking it up, I found that it was now on available on Disney+ so I ended up watching it there. And wow, what a movie. Great drama, great visuals and great medieval vibes. The fact that it's based on real events adds a lot of weight to the story too. I really enjoyed the three-act structure that depicted events from different perspectives. First we hear from Jean de Carrouges, courageous and honourable knight who repeatedly bleeds for his king and loves his wife, but keeps getting fucked over by life in general, and by his former friend Jacques Le Gris in specific. When we see the story from Le Gris' point of view, the picture of Jean

I'm visiting my mother for a week again, specifically to spend tomorrow's Mother's Day with her in person. She's doing alright and we're getting along. It's also been a really good opportunity for me to recharge though. For several months now, I've felt like my brain is constantly in overdrive, between keeping track of tasks at work, doing chores around the house in a timely manner and ticking boxes in multiple MMOs every day. Here, my only real "responsibility" is to ask my mother whether there's anything she wants to do today and to make myself available if she needs help with anything, but otherwise I pretty much just get to eat, sleep and chill. It almost makes me feel like a different person in a way. I'm more serious, without the cute affectations I share with my husband, and I just feel like I have a lot more time to think. It's a kind of mental cleansing that's good to have every now and then I believe. More than ten years a

Processing my feelings about my co-worker Al's death has turned out to be somewhat strange. He started work at the company about two months before I did, so we worked together for the better part of ten years. However, we didn't work in the same department, and I never got to know him beyond work either. In fact, whenever we interacted it often struck me that we were polar opposites in many ways. He was outgoing, stylish, and apparently an absolute riot at parties, while I'm a mousy introvert who's not great at socialising. While our interactions were always friendly, I never really felt that we "vibed" - which is totally fine, by the way. When we got the news of his passing though, I cried. It was just an awful situation all around, plus my waterworks get going quite easily - you bet they were going to do their thing when something of this magnitude happens! I was sitting next to another co-worker who was pretty much best friends with Al and was naturally hit