February 18: Nerdery at Work, Story-telling, Fantasy Promise

 Thursday at work was weird. It started out very frustrating: first one of my monitors wasn't working with the work laptop, then both of them, even after I unplugged them from the KVM switch to plug them directly into the laptop dock.  I ended up plugging in one directly into the laptop just so that I could  get to my second meeting of the day. I finally got the second monitor working through the dock after the umpteenth round of power cycling and unplugging and re-plugging things in. 

Everything is plugged back into the KVM switch at the moment (which works fine for my home PC.) No idea if I'll have to go through the same rounds of power-cycling and moving plugs around the next time I log in.

But after the second meeting, I had a quick meeting with a co-worker to resolve an issue she had, and that was nice.  My last meeting of the day was a one-hour mentoring session that ran into two hours as my mentee and I dug into a database to figure out what was going on with an obscure, little-used table. This is my weird specialty and one reason I am the person who knows everything: when I find undocumented things that don't make sense, I keep poking at them until I figure out what's going on. The particularly amusing thing was that my mentee was just as excited as I was to solve the riddle: I gave her an out after an hour because our time was up, and she was all "NO KEEP GOING" and "THAT WAS GREAT" at the end. 

Neeeeeeeerds. <3

So the day ended on a "yes this is the fun part of my job" note. 

I managed to squeak out an Apothecaria illustration before the end of the day, but I took a nap after work and was pretty drained for the rest of Thursday. On Friday, I wrote more Apothecaria and did another illo. Yesterday, I illustrated the entries I'd written on Friday and did a bit of editing on Dragonling. Didn't finish any editing points; I am now on the inevitable "double-check the timeline for your story because you always mess it up" stage of editing, which is fiddly and takes a while. On the bright side, finishing this point will get me to my goal for February. I might even finish it this week and maybe get ahead of schedule on something!

My Time Princess society has been working on Fantasy Promise this week, the monthly society event I actually enjoy (as opposed to Time Goddess, the monthly society event that irritates me). There's five tiers to Fantasy Promise, and my society is in tier 4. You move up or down depending on how well your society does. We're gonna stay in tier 4 this time, yay! As opposed to drop back to tier 3, which is what happened immediately after the last time we made it to tier 4. My management team is like "we'll need to make a mandatory goal if we want to get into tier 5" and I'm going "we'll need to stop being a free-to-play-friendly society if we want that." Like most free-to-play games, you can do basic content for free but the competitions generally go to the people who spend the most. We're doing well in part because many members are willing to spend and in part because societies cap out at 50 players and just getting "50 players who are all active daily" is An Accomplishment that gets rewarded. But tier 5 looks like it'd be grueling to enter and to remain in. I'll crunch numbers when the event is over but I don't see us making it.

Today is my local friend's birthday, and he's having a party at an arcade sort of place. I'll need to get ready to go to that soon. I am not a social creature and I do not want to party, but I haven't seen my friend in months so I will go. It's weird how I keep getting more introverted over time, though. I'd've thought that having more free time would make me more comfortable Going Out And Doing Things but no. All I want to do is sit at home and chat with online friends and play games at home and work on stories. And the more I do of that, the less I want to do anything else. c_c