Plaidophile

Meh. I've been on the verge of burnout for a while, but there were also lots of things I have to keep on coming in to do, like the UK build of Sprung, which I'm waiting on Nintendo of Europe for something for. But because of these things I never bothered to ask if I could take any personal days off, since I knew the answer would be "no." So, today I finally asked Jason if I could take part of tomorrow off (after getting the UK build done, assuming NoE gets the ROM header to us like they were supposed to do a week ago) and he said it was a difficult thing to approve because I was the last one to ask for specific days off.

This also includes my request to get the 3rd and 4th off, because my flight back isn't getting into NYC until 1AM on the 4th (getting it any sooner would have meant paying more than double for my already-expensive plane tickets, which in turn were expensive because I couldn't get a straight answer about days off until the very last minute, but of course Jason doesn't even remember having these conversations, though I had already cleared the 3rd with Antoine).

This is pretty frustrating, because practically nobody else is going to be in tomorrow anyway, there's no way in hell our current deadline is going to stay for any period of time, I held off on asking for so long because these stupid commitments kept on coming up and I knew I wouldn't be able to get out of them and so there was no "planning ahead" opportunity, and so on.

Jason has a lot on his plate. We all do. But it's frustrating that because I wasn't a squeaky wheel about things it means that I'm getting ground down even more, for reasons which are completely arbitrary and stupid and just boil down to "Gérard thought we'd be able to get another game done by January 15 on a platform which is even more byzantine and complex than the DS, and has about 20 variants thereof each with different levels and types of braindeadedness, and absolute crap for API documentation."

On the other hand, I was at least inspired to write a new Songfight entry... I did all the composition/arrangement in about 3 hours on Monday, and then spent another 3 hours mastering it last night. But this time it's not due until the 31st so I probably won't be posting it for a while (might as well take the time to tweak it all while I'm at my parents' house next week and so on). When I'm inspired I'm really inspired. This is also another case of a song deciding where it wanted to go without my input (I was intending to make it sort of electronic-folky but it turned out into some sort of hip-hoppy grungecore) and just using me as a medium.

Like, I didn't even plan out the length of the guitar riffage, I just jammed for a while and recorded it, and then did an initial scratch-take of the vocals I wrote, and they happened to work out to the same length, as if something else already knew how long each part needed to be.

Anyway, the song is about burnout.