So I applied for three different gigs on UpWork this morning.

Didn’t really think about it and I definitely didn’t plan it. I just did it. Started scrolling through my job feed, saw some I liked, and submitted a proposal for them.

One person wants me to write a children’s book and get this : the main character is a fox! What are the odds?

So you can bet I pounced on that like… well…

The story is quite sweet and charming and has some good lessons in it that kids can take into the future with them, and so I really meant it when I said I would love to do it.

It’s like the gig was made with me in mind! I’ve been a fox for decades, I am a superb writer, and I have always wanted to write for children.

So I want it bad.

Another job also seems made for me because they want gamers writing about gaming. The prompt was to write about your three favorite games and why you like them, along with proof of how many hours you have played them.

And it took a lot of digging, but I was eventually able to find a URL on Steam that would lead to my list of games I’ve played the most and how many hours I’ve played them.

So that took care of proof.

Now I have never been able to list my Top Ten favorite whatevers. I have simply experienced far too much to choose. My internal list of things I have seen or done or heard or played is miles long.

Trying to rank those against one another is like trying to sort a million card deck all at once, at least for me.

So instead, I chose the game I love the most (Witcher 3, with expansions), the game I have played the most (Elder Scrolls Online, 1,670 hours), and to prove I have mad gamer cred, an incredibly obscure game (Etherlords 2) that I absolutely love.

That’s a deep cut, yo. To the point where for a while in the 2010s the game basically did not exist. Could not get it anywhere.

I started to wonder if I had hallucinated it.

Luckily it made its way to Steam eventually. And I bought it, natch.

Now if only I could uncover proof that Psychic Dust existed…. it was a really good game and it’s like it never existed!

But I’m not crazy. I’m not. Nope.

The last of the three jobs is a ghostwriting gig, so I can’t say much about it.

I am okay with ghostwriting. Not the ideal gig but work’s work. I’m just not going to invest my heart and soul in it. It would be a completely professional gig, not something I am doing to express myself.

I’ll still enjoy writing it, but I am not investing in it emotionally.

If the client is happy and the money comes through, I’m happy.

More after the break.

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The role of faith in business

And I am not talking about anyone’s religion.

No, what I am talking about is the sorts of decisions a business might make that you can’t make a solid business case for and that cannot be guaranteed to work, but you do them anyway because you have faith that if you treat the customers well, they will come to you for your product and/or service.

Like paying for comfier chairs in your waiting area. Will that generate enough new revenue to cover the costs? Probably not. Will it help in attracting new customers? Not by itself, no. Will it get us press coverage? No, no news day is THAT slow.

But it will make things nicer for people and make them feel like the business cares about them and doesn’t just see them as walking wallets or sheep to shear.

It also lends a sense of warmth to what might otherwise be a sterile and alienating waiting room environment, and thus will help our customers relax and feel welcome.

And that is something that the corporate hiveminds cannot do. There is no such thing as corporate warmth. Too many of the moving parts of a corporation are cold hearted and narrow minded bean counters who absolutely cannot handle concepts like warmth and friendliness and being welcoming in any kind of real way.

They can try to fake it, but they will fail miserably and only end up creating an Uncanny Valley nightmare of fake emotion and forced conviviality.

Thus, there is still room for small independent businesses. It’s not a LOT of room, but it can still be done.

I know that I would go to a business that makes me feel warmly welcome over some heartless corporate big box with slightly better prices every single time.

And obviously, corporate hiveminds can’t do anything on faith. They need proof that the thing will work, is working, or has worked in the past. They want track records, business cases, feasibility studies, and so on,.

My late grandfather ran his business on that kind of faith. He was the single owner of the business and thus made all the decisions himself, and he would never have bothered with a business case or a cost benefit analysis or any of the rest of the things a corporate hivemind excretes and consumes.

He just treated people right, and the people in my home town were intensely loyal to him and his business as a result. He did what he thought was the right thing and made sure to have what people wanted and he supported a family of six that way.

I miss him. He was a good man. Quiet but with a deep and unshakable integrity and great inner strength that you could feel when you were around him.

And his store will always be my go-to example of business done right.

And you can take your corporate hucksterism and shove it up your ass.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling kinda depressed right now, so it’s the perfect time to take out my shiny new puncture repair kit and learn how to keep this newly minted big ego of mine afloat even when I am feeling down.

For starters, it shouldn’t make the slightest difference. An awesome person is still an awesome person even when they are sick. Even if they get sick fairly often.

And that’s all my depression is : a sickness. A disease. A chronic aberration of the mind which causes delusions of one’s interpretation of reality that makes things seem quite different than they are in reality.

Its symptoms, therefore, are as irrelevant to one’s value as the flu or the common cold.

Depression lies. That’s all it does. It lies about everything because it distorts everything, tilting it toward the negative any way it can.

It’s hidden the truth of my radiant amazingness from me for a really long time. Worse, when it couldn’t do that, it actually convinced me that it was a bad thing!

Had me bitching all the time about how hard it is be so smart. And while all those concerns are legit, they should not get in the way of also appreciating and enjoying just how god damned smart I am.

And nice. And funny. And adorable. The list goes on and on.

And yet, somehow, this disease of mine convinced me that no matter how long my list of assets grew, it was never enough.

Of course it seemed like it was never enough – depression had its thumb on the scale!

So ya know what? I’m still an awesome guy even though I feel like shit.

I AM NOT HOW I FEEL. Mood is meaningless relative to self-worth. You’re the same person no matter how you feel, or how the world feels to you at that moment. And nothing you feel can change that.

Don’t get me wrong – thinking you are as bad as you feel is easier. There is a tension and a drain involved in maintaining the difference in your mind. There is a very important wall that needs to be maintained with a constant (tiny) input of energy and depression will try to use that to convince you to give in.

But it can’t make you do it. You always have to choice to just hang in there no matter how much pressure and/or pain it applies to you, all you have to do is focus on how much you hate your depression for everything it’s ever done do you and how much you would hate to let it win and you can power through.

Or at least that’s what works for me.

And the great thing is that depression has intensity but no endurance. So if you hold out long enough, it will give up, and suddenly you will feel a whole lot better.

And you will have proven to your depression that it’s not in charge any more.

And that will make the whole thing worth it.

More after the break.

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Hate and spite

They have their uses.

I know that’s not a very “liberal” thing to say, and that’s part of the problem. Liberals of the modern era are afraid of strong emotions of any kind but especially ones related to anger. There is a sort of mutual puddle of niceness that modern liberals like to soak in with other liberal minded folk and enjoy the shared smugness of knowing just how much nicer they are than everyone else.

Well fuck that. That shit is toxic to the cause. Getting angry as hell might not be “nice” but it gets shit done. And it sends the message that you won’t let the bastards on the right push you around.

Sometimes in order to fight for what is right, you have to go full reptile brain and make your opponents afraid of you. Every conservative pundit and politician should be just as afraid of what you are going to say as you are of what they are going to say or preferably a hell of a lot more scared.

The Americans need to take a hint from parliamentary politics because our system creates an opposition that is constantly seeking to undermine and undercut the party in power on all fronts, and to do that they are constantly looking for weaknesses in the majority’s policies and statements.

They do this not out of duty but because our system dangles the ultimate prize in front of their greedy little noses : in theory, they could actually bring down the government via a vote of no confidence and force an election – one they might even win.

Like a lot of British things, it seems more civilized on the surface but it’s actually far more savage than American politics. The opposition is on a mission to politically assassinate the party in power and that really keeps them on their toes.

Plus we have the biggest gem in the parliamentary crown ; Question Period. It guarantees that the party in power must answer the questions of the opposition. Silence is not an option. It would be political suicide in our system because it would let the opposition say whatever the hell they want, unopposed.

Now imagine if Donald Trump and his traitorous cronies had needed to face direct questioning from the Democrats every single day.

And imagine if the Democrats could cause his government to fall if they got enough public sentiment turned against Trump.

He wouldn’t have lasted a year.

I mean, talk about losing confidence in his ability to govern.

I see that I have once more completely threadjacked myself. I set out to write about hate and spite are a big part of my recent uptick and ended up talking about politics and systems of government instead.

Oh well. The whole point of this blog is to get thoughts out of my head and into the world, and I have done that.

So what if I didn’t end up where I intended to go?

I still went somewhere worthwhile.

Thank you all for putting up with my literary meanderings.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.