Major bits:
- LJ acts predictably; Azz throws hissyfits.
- Azz is upset about lack of job.
- Azz writes a lot (but not on the NaNo)
- LJ search is love.
- Social, mostly with JD and my aunt
- If there's a Twitter user in mortal peril and you don't know enough about them to call emergency services yourself, let a Twitter employee know.
Tuesday, October 20th was a day like almost any other.
phoenixdreaming departed that day, though I wasn't around to see her off. As I was trying to catch up with my non-friends-page tasks, I neglected reading anything but Twitter. Thus, it was evening before I heard that SUP had made tupshin redundant, and I spent the remainder of that evening and well into the early parts of Wednesday morning in an incoherent and bitter rage. Wednesday, October 21st was naturally marred by the bad news, although I had mostly simmered down into a cold sort of fury. There had not been a public announcement of the bad news, nor even one in a venue that could justify me sharing with anyone who I didn't know already knew, so I was not only incoherently angry, I was cryptic. I caught up on summing up the events of previous days.
Something I had been in various stages of partial denial about for approximately 18 months chose that opportunity to knock me over the head, so I got extraordinarily flustered and ... exceedingly not-quite-cryptic. (At request, I later moved the babbling about that topic to filter, as it's not necessary for the whole world to see me acting like that.)
This was then followed by an epic booze-up composed solely of people who had heard the news. (I got a callback from a potential job lead, but it was noisy and they said they could call back.) Tupshin appeared in rather better spirits than I had been fearing, and therefore there was less commiseration and more whooping it up. In the inevitable shop talk, new!Brad and his general awesomeness came up; as I had in fact been mulling over a "hi, welcome to the wonderful world of using your LJ in the workplace (and guess what, you work for LJ)" guide since new!Brad came into IRC, I volunteered to start fleshing out the draft I'd already got slightly outlined. (This was to consume quite a chunk of time in coming days.)
Thursday, October 22nd brought sobriety, a return home, sleep, and eventually, a public announcement in
lj_support about the departure of Tupshin. This removed the lid from my volcano. Happily for everyone around me, the previous night's fun had assured me that Tupshin was going to be OK, so even my locked rantings and ravings didn't have quite the same invective as Tuesday night. Hot on the heels of that followed a 
news post, which later proved to be bluemeringue's first solo. The abrupt change in style gave me a most unpleasant jolt. I tried to keep a lid on the worst of my temper in the news comments, and compared to how mad I actually was, I succeeded admirably, I think. (Translation: I came off as actually kind of furious in the news comments.) By evening I had not got the callback from the potential job lead. I was also not entirely certain whether I was going to burst out into tears. I arrived late for TV night. No-one was particularly up for anything intellectually challenging; I was thus introduced to "So Notorious", which has approximately Zachary Quinto to recommend it to me. It was good at cheering me out of the about-to-cry state, but after I cheered up I realized how very much it is not my usual taste. (Which is to say that it's one-episode-at-a-time unless circumstances are dire, and then it'll either cheer me up or make me explode. The character is an idiot and I can only take that if I've not been dealing with idiots.)
Friday, October 23rd saw me arriving home less about to cry but still mad; I abandoned an attempt to tabulate comments from the news post (sitting around 220 at that point) and then write up helpful critical feedback based on them (pleasant writing, a la carte userpic comments declining is actually a bit of a warning sign about loss of faith in LJ keeping their word about promised products, #1 feedback was request for an lj-cut, #2 was photo contest entries, #3 was "this is not news") at about 4 in the morning because my blood pressure had skyrocketed and after all they do not pay me to do this and I did not feel like doing anyone except the volunteer team and associated staff any favors. I called the potential job lead, but they had already filled the positions. I kept myself busy and worked on Suggestions, although I couldn't keep on with my task of migrating the old planned things tag into Jira, as its settings were awry. I was going slightly nuts.
Saturday, October 24th involved a certain amount of hanging out with my chatfish. I flailed about some things that were contributing to a good mood. I have been shamefully neglecting my chatfish lately, in a large part due to being on the netbook so much (desktop was behaving badly and my fixit efforts did not seem to work; I'm leaving it be and using the netbook until such time as I have a job so I can have someone who gets paid to fix that shit look at it).
Sunday, October 25th I went on a walk with my aunt and the dogs, then watched some episodes of The Big Bang Theory.
Monday, October 26th and Tuesday, October 27th I see I was doing a lot of news-reading and I was probably writing too.
Wednesday, October 28th The hoped-for meetup with in-town LJ people didn't happen as there was collective exhaustion. Sad but understandable. I went on a shopping expedition with JD to help him locate makeup for his planned Halloween costume, then hung out late into the evening ...
... and early into the morning of Thursday, October 29th. (Sometimes, social is two geeks both reading their Google Reader in the same room.) I set up the filter for the thing that had hit me on the head on the 21st. The second LJ news post in the new format came out, and perhaps the less said about that itself, the better. I did, however, get into a productive discussion in the comments. Actually productive, resulting in a new writing project: breaking the values of LiveJournal users and camps of directions to steer LiveJournal into "old school" and "new school", then stacking the values against each other. SPN night was cancelled for very sad reasons.
Friday, October 30th Comments in the news posts, the translation of, led me into a basket of Russian proverbs on Wikipedia. This entertained me greatly. As a geek who has worked with end-users, cynicism, justified paranoia, and heavy drinking are all things I can appreciate, and as an Alaskan, I can appreciate the cold and dark (and the midnight sun). Shared my thoughts on the news posts. I explored the utility of http://www.livejournal.com/search for actually finding comments in a specific timeframe in a specific journal (ok, not going to lie, I was looking for non-Support-affiliated users raising drama about the canning of Tupshin in news post comments), and started falling in serious real love with the feature.
Struck with depression about the job situation, or lack thereof. (This has been a constant, actually, but one I've not been talking about except to one or two people, and not even often to them.) I keep searching, I keep applying, I keep only rarely getting contacted back, and despite the shitty economy you cannot convince me that it is not my fault (due to me sucking and being unemployable and being actively bad at job search). I determined to see exactly how far I could make my current stock of groceries stretch (actually, also ongoing).
Started debating the circumstances under which I will and will not wear the pretty silver star my best friend gave me.
rm retweeted a report of a suicidal Twitter user, about whom no one involved in the situation itself seemed to know quite what to do. I frantically pinged @tiger, as I knew Twitter had to have some procedures similar to LiveJournal's about what to do in case of a user in danger. She relayed the message to @andr8a and it was out of all of our hands then. The user turned out to appear to be a cruel hoax. To continue the trend of the day being actually kind of not that great and weird, I was awakened around 8 in the evening by thumps and shouting, and wound up inquiring at a domestic disturbance. I then wound up in the support boards working. (That's been a trend lately.)
Saturday, October 31st was, of course, Halloween. I stayed in and did not go and party, as my sleep schedule was alarmingly out of sync with the actual daylight thing, and I could not justify any unnecessary expenditures.
Sunday, November 1st started NaNo. Despite being up at all hours, I only got 400 words in the first day (not quite feeling it yet, but I know it's there). I did, however, finish my current guide to my writing projects.
Monday, November 2nd was marked by me noting that my netbook has been making the occasional alarming noise.
Tuesday, November 3rd In my rounds of LJ Support, one of the darling users made explicit reference to male-types as being the people who would answer his support request. As my answer was the one about to be approved, I changed my name quickly from the fairly androgynous "Azz (bolt of blue) - makes surreal things more so" to "The Reverend Miss Lunatic (bolt of blue)". There was a walk with my aunt and the dogs; I was happy to suggest that we go a little more than usual. My aunt would like to take me to chicken camp; I think that would be fun. My sleep schedule featured me going to bed around 7pm, and waking up at the butt-crack of early in the morning.
Wednesday, November 4th involved another silly-sleep-schedule day, with about a 22-hour circadian cycle. Not fun. However, I didn't feel the walk at all. I found a job possibility, but then realized that it was the same place I'd not been picked for in September. They said they'd call me back letting me know if there would be a problem with me re-applying, but I didn't get the call back. Bedtime was near unto 4-5pm.
Remember, remember Thursday, November 5th, when I woke up at half past midnight. Morning involved the farmers' market. I got apples, corn, a bundle of dill, and an optimistic handful of relatively small cucumbers. (I promptly took two of them and ate them dipped in a bowl of vinegar/salt/dill.) I got some serious writing done ... on the old school/new school essay. Still not feeling the novel. There was a new news post, featuring some highly relevant stuff at the top, and the direst of the bottom stuff cut. Between that and stuff that I was eyeing in the pipeline, I am charmed; my trust levels are still not what they ought to be but the platform is engaging me again.
Chatter about this was interrupted by walkies with my aunt and JD. Ryan popped out to say hello, but went back inside to Get Stuff Done. It was getting dark by the time we got to Fort Funston, so we parked at the bottom of the hill. We walked quite a ways. One dude had his dogs with rescue light-up collars, which was kind of really awesome. They're visible for a very long distance. We then stopped in at D Town and the movie rental shop to get dinner materials and a movie. We finally settled on Mamma Mia, which they'd seen already but I had not. JD and my aunt bonded over making spanakopita. We watched some Blackadder as well, then everybody went home. I slept a normal type bedtime.
Today so far: got voicemail from someone who found my resumé online; called them back and left a message. Here's hoping.
Crossposted.
