Asstd. Misc., Etc. - Ask Me Some Questions

[silveradept]

So some of that "asking questions of people" went around again, and redsixwing asked me some questions that I decided I wanted to answer.

1. What's your favorite subject to investigate?

   I don't know that I have a specific subject that I always come back to and try to get more information or deeper knowledge of. Both personally and professionally, information tends to be sought to handle the thing in front of me. Or, if not that, I do things like cruise TV Tropes or play linguistic games like Lexica or Cell Tower. It's probably related to the variable attention stimulus trait - can deep drive if warranted, can bounce among several surface-level things if that's what's going to keep me out of trouble for not noticing others around me who might need help.

   For example, just a few days ago, I got the "graceful handoff" from another co-worker for something that was out of their understanding. It turns out that the person coming in had some old currency and wanted to see if we could get a specific book they remembered as having pictures and values of that currency in them. And thus, I learned about Military Payment Certificates, a scrip issued to troops who were deployed in places where U.S. dollars were forbidden or could command far greater value on the black market than the local currency. I managed to find the book that had been mentioned (the person wrote down the authors), but it looked like the most recent edition of that book had been published seven years ago, so instead I looked at the coin guide the library had (because every library has numismatists), looked up the publisher's websites, and placed a couple of inter-library loans for the latest editions of the two books about U.S. currency they put out. I hope they arrive safely, and contain the information that this person was looking for. Plus, I also got to see some sterling examples of those certificates. They're bright and colorful things.

   Does that mean I'm now going to do a deep dive into United States currency? No. But when that was important to the person that was in front of me, I did my best to become a quick expert on the subject so I could answer questions and find useful-looking resources. And that pretty well satisfies my desire for some novelty in my professional life.




2. Is there a particular art form that's caught your attention recently?

   Also no, not as such. Which is again not as much about there being only certain forms of art that I like and then finding out that I really like this thing I have never heard of as much as it is that I consume and enjoy a lot of different forms of art regularly, in different media. It looks like I'm starting to build up a little bit of that webcomic reading situation that I was doing back in the 2000s when I had a regular set of websites to visit, many of them either hosted on Keenspot or using Keenspot technology. I could go back to some of them, but some of them have stopped, others completed, others aged…poorly, and I have grown and changed significantly from then. Which isn't to say I'm not capable of deep dives and the like, but I'm also trying to manage my time and make sure I leave enough of it for the important things, like making sure I turn in all of my fanfic assignments on time. Also, work. It's a lot easier to maintain a reading list when you have several hours to spend between waking up and having to go to your first class.

   That said, I feel like a lot of art that used to be out more in the open has retreated into Discords or behind age gates that require accounts to get past, as part of the great shift from the Internet as a "Choose Not To Warn" kind of space to a very strongly imposed "No Archive Warnings Apply" kind of space. Or as places stopped being about sharing and interconnectedness and more about being walled gardens that desperately don't want to let anyone inside find a way of getting outside or sharing outside, because that might mean less ad revenue. And I also try to segment my life some, so that if I'm presenting as someone remotely professional, I'm thinking about what that remotely professional person would be following and interacting with. It's not perfect, of course, but I don't like crossing the streams unless it makes sense to do so.




3. Is there a certain topic you really enjoy seeing in the news (or any other source of information you like)?

   Given how much mainstream news coverage seems to be concentrating on the terrible things in the world, or the political figures most interested in making the world a more terrible place, or how the things that are actually good are secretly bad and going to hurt the person trying to do good, I'm pretty fond of news stories that are about good things with no hidden agendas or milkshake duck moments. Which mostly means that it's things like what the QI elves come up with or sites like We Rate Dogs or tales of cats getting themselves into trouble because they're smart and crafty, or when things like Batkid happen that I enjoy the most, even as I consume a whole lot of the other news, because I like to be informed about the world going on around me, and because it often becomes relevant in my professional life to navigate those situations and their contexts in pursuit of accurate information I can deliver to other people. So I like to hear about the good things in people's lives. (Especially now.)




4. What kind of games do you enjoy the most?

   Long RPGs, generally. Which, I think, are a byproduct of having had time to play such things in long stretches, uninterrupted. I still like them, I still want to play them, but I'm definitely accumulating games at a faster rate than finishing them, which is a trend I'd like to reverse, but just about everything that's happened since I've been employed full-time has been against the idea of me having time to myself to play my long games. Ironically, I have the setup now that I would have wanted when I was younger, where I could have a game that I was watching on one screen and a game I was playing on another one and be able to pay the appropriate amount of attention to both of them.

   I also like puzzle games, especially ones with interesting concepts or the kind that can be solved with some application of the principles of the game. And then I can watch them get broken in entertaining and sometimes unintentional ways by speedrunners or by noticing that there are sometimes alternate solutions to the levels that rely on using the mechanics in novel ways.

   I think that to make a serious dent in my game library, I'd need to both practice a lot (because for some reason, game designers like putting achievements on the "you have to display inhuman skill" tier) and to have uninterrupted time to make progress on things that need things like two eight-hour sessions to make a solid dent in things. (Plus food and other such necessities.)




5. If you had a year sabbatical with no bad job consequences aned unlimited funding, what would you do with it?

   That would depend entirely on whether the sabbatical is just me, and what qualifies in the "unlimited budget" department. If it were "unlimited budget" to the point of "the house gets maintained, cleaned and organized while we're traveling, or even while we're home," and possibly even more to "costs of travel included," then I could focus more time on fic writing and working through my games library, and possibly having my partner take me places they've always wanted to go. If it's just that my salary continues to get paid over the course of the year, I think a fair amount of my time will get eaten by projects that I will be home for and be able to devote time and energy to, like shelves or painting or yard work or, or, or. This is mostly because I'm the most consistently able-bodied person in the house, and the joys of home maintenance are neverending. Dishes, lawn, repairs, landscaping, organizing, beating back the clutter piles, all of that, but probably also building some shelves here and there and getting some of the books onto those shelves. It's only when the unlimited funding applies to basically every aspect of what might get done that things get exciting, because otherwise, time and money are already basically spoken for. It's part of the "fun" of being middle-aged and paying not just a mortgage, but several loans taken out against the equity or secured with a creditor's interest in the house. That doesn't leave a lot of spare cash lying around for going off on vacations or employing people to assist with the things that we don't actually want to do. If'n ever someone chooses to include me in their sweepstakes or lottery winnings because I was a good person and they want to repay me with millions of dollars, that would allow me to dream better about what an "unlimited budget" might look like, but for now, small and pedestrian is the way to go.

That's the five questions that redsixwing asked me.

Comments

[thewayne]

I would expect that presidents always have contingency speeches, just in case, much like newspapers and TV stations have obits that just need a bit of a refresh when someone dies.  I wonder if a copy of the Nixon alternate speech could be found in his presidential library.

[silveradept]

It can. I think the Library of Congress highlighted it once, but the alternate speech is definitely findable. At least one commentator used it as a way of introducing how far apart from reality significant elements of the conservative movement are.