The comments section under any post, picture, sound-byte, or video, is a wild place filled with varying levels of insanity. There are kind souls praising the ‘content’ and thanking the creators, and attention-seekers with divisive or inflammatory opinions. There are useless copies of ‘first!’ and memes that bring nothing to the conversation. There are doomers who take every opportunity to point out every negative – or conspiratorially *possible* negative – perceived throughout their supposed experience, whether they actually read, watched, or listened to the thing they’re commenting on or not.

Then there’s a special brand of comment which is both incredibly depressing and somehow uplifting at the same time – a type of comment I’ve generally considered to be attention-seeking and pointless among the typo’d masses. These comments are usually some kind of variation on this:

Thank you <creator> your videos helped me get through a very hard time. This year I <insert a long and winding story that shares too much personal information and often includes sensitive topics around depression, financial hardship, grief, breakups, and every other sad thing that might come to mind>

There’s no way of knowing if any of those comments are genuine, and they’re rarely acknowledged by the creators in question, so these comments come across as another form of attention-seeking spam. At least that’s what I thought.

But recently, I’ve almost left some similar comments myself.

I’ve made no secret in my blog that the past few years have been unkind. My health tanked, I lost people, I had to fight with my brain because it decided to be ill as well. I’ve made progress in recovering, but I’m not at the end of that road yet. I still have plenty of bad days where motivating myself to do literally anything other than laying in bed is an effort.

One would think that watching TV is a zero-effort activity, but one would be wrong. Maybe it was so back when people had cable and you just turned on a channel and left it, but in our modern age my primary video service is YouTube. I have to find something to watch. I have to be in the mood for it. 90% of my subscriptions up until recently were science feeds and sketch comedy, and sometimes that’s just not what I’m up for.

What am I up for when I’m sick? As it turns out, when I’m at my worst I can soothe anxiety and negative thoughts with ASMR from Gibi ASMR and Coromo Sara ASMR, When I’m feeling dull and bored I love to watch DIY videos from Evan And Katelyn or the silly improv from RageGamingVideos. When I go to these channels and put on a video it’s like I’ve pushed back dark clouds and I can just relax and enjoy something for a while without thinking too hard.

If I didn’t have these creators and their videos to lean on over the past year and a half, I’d have spent a lot more time in darker places, with more stress and anxiety and time wasted laying in bed to try to escape it all. These have been my ‘cozy creators’ lately, as I binged and rewatched their video libraries to keep myself afloat.

I still feel like leaving a comment on their videos would seem attention-seeking and somehow cringe. I don’t know if a blogpost is more cringe. I just know one person’s creativity has the power to carry others through the worst of their lives, whether they realize it or not.

The post Cozy Creators appeared first on Technomagic Arkana.

Hello blog, it’s been a bit. I had to take leave from work to experiment with medications and ineffective lifestyle strategies for feeling better. It took a year, but something finally clicked, and I’m probably at 70-80% capacity again. I’ve been back at work for a few months, streaming more regularly, and things are slowly getting back to normal.

In the process, though, I ended up moving in with family 9 hours away from my old city, and changing everything else about my life. So there’s a question of what ‘normal’ actually means at this point, and it’s something I have to decide for myself. So I’m using this blog post to think about the things that are important to me these days.

• Writing – particularly finishing Sendrask, but also things like my blog
• Working on the Untitled Zombie Game (I’ll write a post about this project at some point)
• Drawing (including pixel art for said zombie game)
• Gaming with friends
• Streaming 1-2 times a week

Then the stuff that I have to work on fitting into my life

• Regular exercise
• In-person social activities outside of the house

So if it isn’t obvious I’m a bit of a chronically ill shut-in, but it’s always a work in progress. One of the nice things about moving back in with family is that the town also has some old friends I’ve been able to get together with a few times. I’m optimistic about being able to get out more and do more when the weather improves, since the downside of moving back here is that last week it was -40’C and we have 4-6′ snowbanks outside right now.

I also have to pace myself with things. I was somehow expecting (maybe because the insurance company was expecting) that after 3-4 weeks of acclimating to a work schedule my focus and energy would come back and everything would be fine, but honestly my regular work schedule is exhausting right now. Those dreams of going to the pool once a week and trying to walk for an hour every day aren’t really feasible. Yet.

What can I do? Take mindful steps every day and do the small things that are achievable day by day. I’m not up to writing a sweeping fantasy epic today, but I did manage a blog post.

One thing at a time.

The post Getting Back Into Things appeared first on Technomagic Arkana.

This isn’t a happy post.

I haven’t been streaming consistently over the past year and a bit. I haven’t been focused at work. I haven’t been able to write posts for this blog. I haven’t been able to do much more than play video games, and even then, that’s been a stretch. I’ve spent a lot of time in the stereotypical funk that has you stuck in bed doing nothing.

Some of this is a continuation of the issues I complained about in my post about the way things never stop: challenges with physical and mental health and the systems that just barely help to support them. More recently it’s been driven off a cliff by a more universally awful experience… loss.

In less than a year I’ve lost my grandfather, my grandmother, and Atlas. These were the only grandparents I’d ever met, who were ever involved in my life, as well as my beloved cat of 9 years. They weren’t the first family members or the first pet I’ve ever lost… but between the other challenging things happening in my life, the losses cut deeper and weighed heavier than others have in the past. I just wasn’t in a place to handle them, but it’s not like we ever have a choice in the matter.

With how difficult things have been I can’t help feeling like I peaked at the start of the pandemic and this mess I have now is a new normal. Maybe my health has gotten the better of me, maybe losing these important people has finally broken whatever naive energy used to drive me through my projects and my work, maybe this is just how life is now. Maybe, maybe, maybe…

But I don’t want to believe any of that.

There are still good things I can do. I’ve had small episodes of function where I felt good about my work, where I managed to do some writing for NaNoWriMo, where I was plugging away at a personal project to draw spell circles with web code. I’ve had patches where I managed to get into exercise routines, put myself in a non-last-place position on the modded BeatSaber leaderboards, or play through new games altogether.

This week, after a month of grieving, I decided to fill the cat-shaped hole in my little family. For the better part of a decade we had 3 cats at home – and after losing Atlas it was difficult and quiet with only two… I meant to adopt one, but a pair of siblings were too loving to separate, so I adopted two kittens and now there are four little balls of fluff roaming around the apartment like little cheerfulness faucets.

Things never really get ‘better’ from a loss. I’ll always miss my grandparents, and the way we used to visit their cottage every weekend and make pancakes with grandma. I’ll miss my grandfather lighting up campfires and doing a terrible impersonation of Santa Claus every year. I’ll miss Atlas, and the way he used to indignantly complain about every little injustice right before curling up to cuddle with me. I’ll miss them, but I’ll find new things to love and be happy about, so those losses aren’t the only things I feel every day, so they aren’t dragging me down and keeping me from having anything good in my life.

It’s not easy. I just hope it gets easier over time.

The post Loss appeared first on Technomagic Arkana.

The end of 2022 was what we might call interesting. The start of 2023 is, thus far, the same. Not in a great way, either.

I’m never shy to admit to my stack of chronic illnesses. Around October last year, one of them came front and center to remind me that my baseline ‘ok’ status sits on top of a shaky house of cards. A medical device I rely on was invisibly broken, and I was sick and barely functional before I realized what was going on.

The next few months were brutal. While I fully support the Canadian medical system, I know first-hand that it isn’t perfect. It didn’t threaten my livelihood, and I was never at risk of not receiving care at all, but there was a lot of waiting and I had to follow up and push my case constantly to make sure the gears were still turning. I called doctors every day, got an expensive rental for essential medical equipment, got sent to a shady test facility to prove I still needed that equipment, discovered the facility was a scam and had to get a new referral from my doctor to get into a better facility, waited forever on test results, got the results and realized even the rental wasn’t actually fixing my problem, and got a new prescription.

Problem solved! The world is back to normal! Everything’s good, right?

Not exactly.

You can’t pick up the thing I needed at the drugstore, and the supply and demand situation isn’t great. I’m told that if I wanted to replace my original unit for any reason other than it being broken, there would be a waitlist of 300 people. Thankfully (?) because it was an emergency case, I just had to wait a few weeks to get an appointment to get one.

A few weeks, during which, I caught the flu. Or something. It wasn’t covid, but there are a lot of weird things going around lately since our immune systems have been taking it easy behind our myriad of anti-pandemic measures. Whatever it was, it sucked, and I was living under a cloud of anxiety that it would linger and I’d have to reschedule that essential appointment. That would be a bonus level of awful because right after that appointment I was supposed to be leaving to visit my family for Christmas. It’s a 9-hour drive to get there, and I only visit twice a year.

Thankfully I did recover on time – mostly. The virus left me with a nasty ear infection and a lingering cough that would bother me for a few weeks afterward, but I was assured that was normal. It didn’t help that the night before the appointment someone in my apartment building set a fire in the parking garage, and I had the pleasure of climbing down 14 flights of stairs with 3 cats arranged in a pair of carriers and a specialized backpack, but I made the appointment the next day and the trip went off without a hitch as we drove north just barely ahead of a giant snowstorm that would close the highways, ground flights, and trap trains over the holiday weekend.

DOMS from the fire alarm event caught up with me that weekend. By Christmas, I could barely stand up to get the cough drops or the ear drops or my regular meds. I try not to let my illnesses define me as a person, but there are some days when you struggle with those kinds of things, and months of fighting the issues every day made it more difficult than usual. My body sucked. My luck sucked. The doctors sucked. The world sucked. It was a good time to be home with family and a reminder that not everything in the world is terrible. At least it was temporary. At least it would pass.

Onto 2023.

I was on the mend. I got back home to my apartment, my cats, and my roommate. Given this is the first post where I’ve mentioned them I feel the need to say that I only have two cats and the third is hers, as if this spares me the crazy-cat-lady status. I had a few good days of trying to get back into a more productive work schedule and dreams of having the energy and the spoons to try the latest BeatSaber music pack. I actually had a few good days.

Then someone straight up broke the fire alarm. After a regularly occurring false alarm, the fire department forgot to reenable the elevators. The building staff tried to fix it themselves, and… well, having it turn itself on and off every two minutes for over an hour isn’t great for someone with anxiety. Especially not when I live on the 14th story of a high-rise and the elevators aren’t working. There was no escape. I can only imagine how the cats felt.

Another day goes by and I need to call my psychiatrist. My medication is disagreeing with me, and I’ve found some studies suggesting that it could be worsening the condition I needed the medical equipment for last year and possibly explain the need for a new prescription. Except – whoops! – I’m no longer registered as a patient! Apparently, we had been operating on a system where I had to have a follow-up booked every six months, and since their admin staff hadn’t automatically booked the follow-up like they usually did, and I was completely oblivious to this requirement, I’d been kicked out. Time to get back to our regularly scheduled slew of phone calls and follow-ups.

This is when, nerves already frayed, I notice that my work laptop’s trackpad is sticking weirdly up above the rest of the case. I vaguely remember hearing this was a bad thing and consulting slack. The particular model I was issued is known to have a battery swelling problem, and swollen batteries on laptops have been known to catch fire or randomly explode.

Queue a flurry of after-hours messages with my manager (who is an amazing person and has been incredibly supportive through all of this madness) and the next morning we go to the IT office for our otherwise completely remote workplace, where I get the laptop replaced by a newer model that is thus far not known to be a fire hazard. It’s going to take a day to set it up and install all of the dev software I need, but it’s not going to explode, so I’ll take the tradeoff.

Except I can’t set it up at all, because some third-party SSO provider we use is erroring when I try to log in – which I need to do just to start the process. Nobody else seems to be having this problem, so I spend most of the day checking status pages and exchanging messages with IT to see if I’ve gone insane. Then after a few hours, I get about 6 MFA messages at once and more constantly through into the evening, but hey, at least it’s working.

The next day the power goes out at my apartment, which has never happened for more than a minute in the several years I’ve lived here. It only lasted a few hours, but having to explain that there was yet another problem cost me more spoons than I had, and I still feel burnt out today because of it all. Then I got a notice that they’d changed the keys to the main entrance because of a problem tenant, so I couldn’t go out without getting new ones.

The way things never stop long enough for me to get my footing is exhausting, and just telling people about my day feels like making excuses for not being functional no matter how much of the problem at hand isn’t my fault. It’s exacerbated by the unending combo of unlucky punches that have happened here as much as the anxiety disorder on my list of diagnoses. It’s brutal.

My situation has been improving over time. As things go, not being able to work because of technical problems is a much smaller issue than having your health massively decline because of faulty but essential medical equipment. The issue is that none of these problems exist in a vacuum, and I haven’t had more than a few days of respite between them to feel like anything is getting back to normal.

It’s got me questioning whether this is just what normal is and whether I’m just weak for not being able to handle this every day. I keep telling myself no, but I really don’t know what to think, and I’ve been told that writing things out can help you see them as if they’re happening to someone else. This post is some combination of venting, expressing the challenges of chronic illness, and just laying out this madness in writing so I can see it all outside of my brain. It’s a lot to deal with. It’s a back-breaking pile of straw.

Quotes and adages that survive for generations do so because they resonate with people, either day to day or during the memorable parts of life, good or bad. A line I like that’s often passed around in mental health circles is a good example, and a good mantra, for these times in life.

This, too, shall pass.

Each of the little problems ends. Busy periods end. Nothing lasts forever.

I guess things never really stop, but I hope they eventually slow down.

The post The Way Things Never Stop appeared first on Technomagic Arkana.