Derik Badman's Journal

Daylight savings time ended last night, which means I have to start remembering I'm UTC-05:00 now. To most people that probably means nothing, but a lot of my work involves timestamps and they are always in UTC, so I do a lot of converting to my local time. If I'm looking in some logs to troubleshoot a problem that happened at 8am my time, I have to convert that forward to search or scan the logs. Getting that wrong because of stupid daylight savings time can really be a pain (I've wasted time in the past before realizing I was an hour off in where I was looking at logs).

It's nice and cool and the air is crisp outside this weekend. Enough to wear a flannel shirt and a sweatshirt when leaving the house. This is my favorite time of year, before it turns too cold.

Spent much of yesterday playing The Outer Worlds on my PS4. It's a new sci-fi action RPG. It doesn't seem terribly new at this point, but it's a solid game. My main issue with it so far is that it's first person which I really dislike. I find the way first person is handled in video games odd and inadequate, and I really prefer to be able to see my character as I move around, it's much less confusing. It's also weird in that this game, like most RPGs let's you customize your character but then... it's first person so you never really see your character. In general, the game is most reminiscent of Fallout 4, which I think is not unexpected as this same studio made some of the previous Fallout games. It has a similar sarcastic sci-fi setting, though this one is in space, so there are multiple planets to visit. It does seem to nicely allow for multiple ways to solve problems and for decision making. From a review or two I've read I understand that there are actual changes that happen based on your decisions. I seem to, I think, have found a better solution than one of the reviewers for the first major decision you have to make about a colony on a planet. So far, fun, not too difficult, and plenty of time wasted on it.

Finished up The Sacred Era by Yoshio Aramaki last night, another one of my library books from earlier in the week. It started out well enough, a sci-fi setting that was at least partially dystopic, with some kind of religion having started a new era on Earth. Technology was clearly not too advanced (there's a train and a later spaceships, but not a lot of tech evident early on). There was a young naive character, passing an exam to be in the "sacred service" (basically some kind of sort of religion/science work), and trying to figure out what he was supposed to be doing. But the longer the book went on the more it devolved into this dreamlike Surrealistic fugue about repetition or rebirth or something. The plot sort of dropped away, and the protagonist was pretty much completely passive, just going along without making decisions or taking any actions or really having much in the way of thoughts. In the end I was just bored and confused about the point of the whole thing.

November started and some folks on Instagram, at least, are doing #30dayscomics. I started that way back... when?... and it's always cool to see people still doing it years later. It almost motivates me to try making some comics, but at this point I feel like I've lost all my procedures and processes. I have to learn new programs, new keyboard shortcuts, recreate templates. I could always just use paper, but then... it's been so long, my drawing always looks so bad. Not loose enough to be cool and sketchy, not tight enough to be refined and slick. Just... kind of dead lines. I guess I could go back to photos again, probably where I feel I was most successful with a lot of those comics anyway. I don't know. Would it even be worth the effort anymore? I guess I don't think so, since it's been this long.

This journal at least provides some creative outlet, such as it is. Though sometimes it ends up becoming more rote than I would wish, and I've missed more days than I like. There was no reason I didn't write yesterday, just that I... never put in the time.