Affray

My hands shake too much to do any type of drawing or painting. Plus, my art teachers usually didn't like most things that I tried making. Maybe that's only because they never gave me enough time to finish any of the projects they assigned to me. I have thought about building things that have instructions, but I don't have much space to put anything else in my house.

My art teachers didn't like my stuff either.

I didn't fit their preferred style so they wrote me off.

Now I design and digitise logos for my own business and create patches as well.

Teachers aren't always the best gauge for ability or talent.

The advice I've most heard from artists is to just practice.

Don't make excuses, don't half ass it, just practice.

The rest will fall in to place as you go.

I quit my job and found a new one about a month ago, but have been working the whole time.

I also tore down a shed and replaced it with a garden, rebuilt my bathroom floor and got a new toilet, and plan on building a wall sized storage shelf/cabinet in my kitchen.

This new job has given me more time and energy to actually get shit done and I'm digging it.

Omg Grolli. I love you.

 

Millionaire was great when you were super-sick. Yelling answers that weren't even remotely close and also shit-talking contestants whenever they'd screw up.

 

This may have just been me, however.

I actually won a million (theoretical) dollars a few times when I was younger.

And some contestants definitely had their faces verbally rubbed in their mistakes, from my couch.

I feel that weirdness sometimes.

It's kind of a hard thing to describe too, missing people you've never fully met but still mean something to you.

There's an investment there and it feels like anxious shit when that investment is suddenly gone and never coming back.

It feels like a childhood friend moving away and a part of you goes with them.

But it is what it is.

I'm happy to have the friends that are still here.

I think I said this in another post recently, but I watched Stargate-SG1 a lot when home from school.

I also binged The X-Files, MacGyver, Star Trek TNG & Voyager, Just Shoot Me, and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

Dr. Quinn seems out of place, but Jane Seymour is and was a smoke show.

She awakened some things.

It's been a fucked up world to work in for most of my life.

Minimum wage where I live is $14/hour, before the government did that jump it was $12/hour.

When the increase took effect my last place of employment just reduced the starting wage of their supervisors/machine operators by at least $2 to offset the potential loss.

I was making $16/hour doing a job that started at $18.50 six years before I started, and I had to fight for three months to get bumped up to $18/hour when a new operator was hired at the same wage as me. I had 2 years experience, could run every machine line they have, was a trainer on four of those lines, wrote several of the Standard Operating Procedures for those lines including health and safety guidelines, was on the joint health and safety committee, and learned Spanish so that I could better work with my crews of mostly offshore workers. Raises were infrequently annual and never exceeded 2%, overtime was not a thing, yet my work days routinely reached 12-15 hours, they would post tomorrow's work schedule somewhere between 4pm-6pm today, sometime I'd work a month straight of shifts like that without a day off, then get one or two and be right back in for more. They took advantage of the offshore program every way they could because the government pays a portion of offshore worker's wages, benefits, etc, and continually try to get better deals because "Canadians don't want to do the work so we need more migrant workers to keep the business afloat". While they make upwards of a hundred million dollars annually. Then I get to go home read articles in my local newspaper/online about how my generation is lazy because we aren't willing to work blue collar jobs like our parents did and earn our way in the world, we just want everything handed to us for nothing. So many companies are going this route and bleeding people dry, and not just young people, yet everyone points their fingers at the victims of a disgusting system instead of looking a bit higher at why these people actually don't want to do the work. It's an amazingly frustrating place to be in when all I want to do is live a comfortable life, be able to afford having children and a home at the same time, and maybe not work myself to death to break even. It's just, defeating.

I haven't seen Stargate: Atlantis or Stargate: Universe. I have only seen SG1, so maybe it was an unfair comparison. Stargate Origins was a pretty fun little web series though.

Atlantis was good, I also never watched Universe. I just never got around to it, though I did hear okay things.

And my little plot synopsis is entirely SG-1, though I can understand how some wouldn't bite into it like I did.

I'd watch marathons on cable in the late nineties/early two thousands when I stayed home from school.

So fucking good.

I watched Atlantis a loooong time ago. I thought it was solid; I was invested in the characters enough.

I liked where they went for the most part with the overarching plot, but much like SG-1 it was the characters that made me give a shit.

They definitely knew how to write some goddamn science fiction.

They have been choosing the lesser of the two evils since their 2012 election.

The current state of affairs there begs to differ.

You know what really made me not work so hard?

Not being paid appropriately for my time and abilities while my employers expected 1000% dedication to their regime.

My dad got a union factory job in 1980 and made enough money during his working like to sustain a family of five.

Both parents need to work full time now to afford maybe one kid if they live frugally.

We don't make nearly as much as our parents and everything costs significantly more (and more every year), you can only make people work for peanuts for so long before they start giving you monkey work. Broad sweeping generalisations have always bothered me, but not nearly as much as being called lazy because I'm forced into a corner where I have to decide between killing myself for the job that doesn't pay my bills or living with my mom forever.

I've got a lot of angry feelings toward this subject in general, but being considered lazy because I want to live a comfortable life with reasonable support is by far the most infuriating.

Choosing the lesser of two evils has never been a more real choice for the US.

There's some spooky things going on over there, spooky enough to make me nervous by continental proximity.

Ninja Sex Party, I was not aware that he had other stuff until I Googled Skyhill just now.

Sounds pretty beautiful, albeit a little slow for my taste.

My wife however will probably lose her mind a bit when I tell her about it.

I was listening to Dan's music before I know about Game Grumps so I've got a bit more of an attachment to him, but Arin is pretty excellent too.

He would probably be one of the best fits psychologically.

He might want to be careful trying that because it could very well be Mystique in disguise as a Mott's snack pack.

She always has been something of a snack......