busybee fluffy rambles

From 2004 to 2005 I worked at a new Ubisoft studio. Technically it was “Guillemot Entertainment” at the time (before it was renamed to Longtail Studios, and then later moved to Halifax and became Ubisoft Halifax), but it was basically Ubisoft; we used Ubisoft corporate letterhead, our QA and publishing went through Ubisoft, our paychecks came from Ubisoft, and so on. And, most importantly, our studio head was Gérard Guillemot, one of the Guillemot brothers. Notably, Yves runs Ubisoft as a whole, and Michel ran Gameloft, which was (at the time) Ubisoft’s foray into mobile gaming.

Because it’s relevant to the current discussion around the games industry and its rampant toxicity, I have a few stories to share.

fluffy health

So, I had a very bad experience with my doctor with this latest chronic pain flare (and the short-term disability leave situation), and with encouragement from my therapist I am switching to a different doctor. The doctor I’m switching to specializes in LGBT healthcare (and apparently 10% of his patients are trans) and also has a specific interest in treating chronic conditions, which is what I need.

I’ve also gone back to my self-determined physical therapy regimen. You know, the one that my GP and the pain doc and physical therapist she referred me to all think will cause more injury, even though it’s always helped me in the past. So far it feels like I’m actually making progress on recovery.

Said regimen:

• Frequent powerball sessions
• Upper-body stretching and partial chin-ups using a chin-up bar
• Playing DDR (okay I haven’t resumed that yet but I’ll probably be starting that again soon, and I’ll be streaming it when I do)

Still on disability leave, and still in considerable pain. I’m trying not to work too hard on things, but it’s hard not to do things.

For example, I worked on a song with my friends Ken and Huan-Hua for this week’s Song Fight!; we entered the “We Did Everything We Could” fight under the band name Richard Donner Party. It was a fun song to make. Fortunately I didn’t have to even so much as look at a guitar. Most of my work was vocals, light keyboard work, and editing.

I got woken up at 7 AM by an onslaught of opportunistic vulture realtors trying to get my attention because my condo listing had expired, and it only went downhill from there.

There’s this hideous practice where if a housing listing expires or is pulled from the market, realtors go out of their way to try to get in touch with the owner with the hopes that they will be the person that the owner switches to. and they’re relentless and fucking entitled and have all sorts of clueless feedback for why my listing isn’t doing well and why I should dump my realtor and go with them, and they don’t care about my explanations about the actual problems and respond even more shittily if you ask them to stop or tell them why calling me at SEVEN IN THE MORNING is not appropriate (but of course they have so many reasons why it’s totally okay and even expected and why it’s justified or even my fault why they’re even contacting me?!), and at one point some of them were even calling my mom with the hopes that she’d be able to help out, somehow.

I don’t even know how they got her number, probably looking her up in the phone book by last name or something. She’s in New Mexico, and has nothing to do with my property.

So my mom’s (rightfully) freaking out to me about all the calls she’s getting too, and I tell her it’s totally fine to just tell them to fuck off, and then apparently some of them started calling my sister too? Which makes even less sense, she doesn’t even have the same last name as me anymore.

In the meantime, my realtor’s working on trying to get the listing back up and that takes way too long because the MLS is slow to respond and meanwhile I’m still having this gigantic fibro flare which the stress is NOT HELPING WITH, go figure. But she gets the listing updated and the calls stop. Whew.

After all that settled down I took a nap because this is already too much for me and I can’t even.

Then half an hour ago I woke up to find that Werner pooped in the bedroom, because he’s senile and has forgotten how the litter box works. Fine. I work on cleaning it up. Just after I’m finishing with that, he goes back into the bedroom and poops again, this time diarrhea. So I start cleaning that up. Then as I’m getting my carpet cleaner ready he goes into the living room and DIARRHEA POOPS AGAIN.

so yeah I’m not having a great day

Over the past couple weeks my pain has been flaring up again, driven especially by work stress. A few days ago I hit a breaking point and realized that this is something I need to actually take short-term disability leave for.

Fortunately, Moz has an extremely generous disability leave program, and management would much rather someone take it if necessary. So, for now I’m off from work until August, and we’ll see where things go from there.

Yesterday I participated in the IndieWeb sensitive data pop-up, or at least the first half of it (I had to disappear for my refrigerator delivery). It was really great to have some further discussion about what people want out of this stuff and how we’re all going to agree to get it.

Authentication stuff

One of the biggest pain points that keeps on coming up is there being no support for people to be able to get private posts without having to log in or be notified about them in side channels. Lots of people are doing things like making pages with unguessable URLs and then doing side-channel notification, but that’s unwieldy; fewer folks are doing things with actual login mechanisms.