Tag: Rambling

Community improvement

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How would you improve your community?

This is a tough question…

On one hand I can approach this less seriously and throw around (potentially) lofty ideas regardless of feasibility, and on the other I could do what I usually do and analyze the hell out of it while only sharing a small amount of my thoughts.

I’ll just stick with the “lofty idea” one.

Lofty idea: more public events/classes for teens and adults, like the fun ones through the library system. Space/class sizes would still be limited but if there were more of them then people wouldn’t have to miss out too often because the classes/events wouldn’t be “one and done” on an annual basis (because it already feels like they don’t exist.)

Meeting people and making friends as an adult is already a challenge, and modern dating can be even more of a challenge, especially when it feels like the only thing to do out here is go to the bars. (I live in an area where there are, on average, more bars than churches by a fair amount.) So, why not introduce more ways to be social without breaking the bank AND finding people who might have common interests? Or even just having activities for date nights that aren’t just going out to dinner and maybe a movie? How about an hour long class on archery? Or a two hour stained glass session?

A community is only as strong as the bonds we forge together in a personal way, face to face. Not digitally where everyone can hide behind a keyboard and avoid reality. (I say all this knowing full well how introverted I typically am and avoiding social outings with strangers.)

My life post pandemic

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Daily writing prompt
How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?
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I’ve talked about it before multiple times but only really as brief mentions for other topics.

The way I adapted to live during and after the pandemic.

During the pandemic, I ordered a LOT of food through DoorDash and Grubhub. An embarrassing amount, considering I was basically confined to the house and could have cooked my meals anytime I wanted. Afterwards, when restrictions lifted and I was going back into the office nearly everyday, I try to avoid that and remind myself of just how much money I could be saving by not using those apps, but I still do use them on occasion. It’s nice to be able to have something delivered to the office (on very rare occasions) when I know I’m going to have a busy day full of meetings. It’s also nice to use those apps purely for reference too! I can pull them up, see nearly every restaurant near me, and check what hours and menus are for each. Then I can either order for pick up or remind myself I’m not really THAT hungry to warrant ordering out. The cost of convenience is not really worth it anymore.

Technology and the home work setup changed during and after the pandemic in a way I never really thought I would feel okay with accepting. I need my separate spaces for work and home. During the pandemic this sucked because I basically lived in my bedroom for 20+ hours a day. Work, eat, play, sleep. At the time, I built a room divider to help separate my bedroom into sleeping area and gaming/working area. (It’s just a 4×8 sheet of wood cut to a 4×7 shape with a cube storage shelf screwed onto it for stability and organization.) After the pandemic was more or less ended, I moved my computer setup back into the basement along with the room divider so that I could kind of shut it off from the rest of the basement for some privacy and to serve as a backdrop for when I was streaming.

Before the pandemic hit and everything shut down, I used to go to Walmart and other late night stores all the time. 2:00AM and can’t sleep? Walk around Walmart and do some light shopping. Although technically I did that a lot anyway because I enjoyed the peace and quiet of shopping when nobody else was around. Now I can’t really do that, unless I wanted to spend time at gas stations that are open 24/7. I’ve had to adapt to the idea that I’ll just have to be quick and methodical about my grocery shopping excursions and plan them as best I can at times of the day when the crowds are lightest. That usually means early mornings are an hour or two before close.

I’m sure there are probably some other ways I’ve adapted to life post-pandemic but if I can’t think of them off the top of my head they probably aren’t as broad or significant as the things I mentioned above. Oh well, life changes all the time and I’m sure I’ll have to adapt to new things again in the near future.

The current morning ritual

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Daily writing prompt
What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?
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My morning ritual depends on Weekday versus Weekend but they’re still fairly similar and simple.

Monday through Friday, as long as I have work, I get up around 7am. I take my morning meds, brush my teeth, shave, shower, all that bathroom stuff, and then get dressed for work. Then I’m off! I live relatively close to work so I don’t typically worry about morning rush hour traffic. If I happen to be working from home I like to stretch out the morning routine a little bit, but only in so much as I can log in by 8am, check emails and see what meetings I have for the day, and do my morning routine in between those kinds of tasks.

Saturday and Sunday are similar in that I wake up around the same time to take my morning meds, which only takes a minute or so if I have my water bottle filled, and then I go back to sleep for a couple hours (typically because I stayed up late playing games or reading.) When I wake up for the day I go about the rest of the morning routine. That’s just about it. Nothing special. No “ritual”, just the standard types of things people do in the morning.

Happy Easter 2024

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Today was a really busy day and I didn’t get around to answering the daily prompt like usual, but for good reason! I’ve spent just about all day with family for the Easter holiday and a belated birthday dinner for me.

For those of you out there that celebrate Easter, I hope you had a wonderful day!

Tying my name to something

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If you could have something named after you, what would it be?

This is a tough question to decide on, not because it’s going to be a serious answer but rather that it CAN’T be serious. I have nothing noteworthy to tie my name to, to have something be named after me and carry on a legacy of sorts.

I’ll just go through a couple ideas.

I think it would be neat to have a technique named after me, the Taylor Technique, and it could be in something like construction. No idea how or why, I just think it would be amusing to me and neat to see.

Or maybe a demolition technique. The Taylor Topple? I don’t know, it’s silly, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

Laughing at things

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What makes you laugh?

There are a lot of things that can make me laugh. Sometimes it’s just a matter of mood or circumstances.

I enjoy dark and morbid humor, but I respect that there is a time and place for it. I won’t always laugh at it but I can definitely still see the potential ramifications for why it would make someone laugh even if the current situation is very serious and not a laughing matter.

More often than not, though, I am enjoying silly humor, dirty jokes, terrible puns, and creating stupid portmanteaus for situations. Kind of like the silly and clever names for the daily special in Bob’s Burger’s.

I’m not a big fan of situations where someone is harmed or injured. If I was a part of the situation or present for the incident and I can look back on it years later with everyone, then that’s a different story.

Honestly, there’s quite a lot that can make me laugh.

When I grow up: perspective at five years old

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When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I can now say that this was over 30 years ago for me, so I can’t really recall if I had ever answered this question when I was five. Not that it really mattered then and I only cared about having fun. In the eyes of five-year-old me the world was very different and much smaller, so I probably gave stereotypical answers like wanting to be a firefighter or astronaut.

While I can’t recall what I might have thought at five years old, I can at least say that somewhere between the ages of 11 and 14 I had wanted to make games for a living and was even looking into how to enroll at Digipen in Washington. That obviously never happened, but that should give you some idea of how differently my life turned out by going from Colorado to South Dakota instead of Washington.

Streaming takes a lot

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Daily writing prompt
What’s something most people don’t understand?
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I feel like the vast majority of people who see people posting dumb shit on social media and YouTube don’t fully understand the effort that can go into content creation.

Now, this also includes the people who decide to post that dumb shit, because a lot of them start off with the mentality “oh that’s easy, I can do that too, and I’ll make millions!” That’s not the case. At all. Granted, the most popular people on social media had to start somewhere but there is also the element of luck to consider.

Putting luck aside, the effort that the SUCCESSFUL people on social media and streaming platforms put in is incredible and varies depending on the style of content they’re choosing to create. In my case I can at least talk about streaming since I did that off and on for years as a hobby.

Most people don’t understand the amount of time and effort that gets invested into streaming. You might think it’s as easy as pushing a button to stream to the world and just sit at your desk playing games for a few hours, but there is much more to it than that. Especially if you have any intent to turn it into a “career” of some kind. You need the right equipment/software and know how to use it. You need to understand the target audience. What games do you like? What games do THEY like? What is your style of game play and audience interaction? Are you really good at a particular game, or are you clever/witty/funny? What’s the best time to stream at and can it fit into your schedule? How are you reaching your target audience to let them know you’re live? Are you streaming often enough? Are you limiting yourself to just streaming on a single platform or are you branching out somehow? What are the current trends in gaming? How do you get ahead of everyone and not feel like you’re riding on the coattails of big streamers who are nearing the end of their time interested in a game or genre? Boiling it all down into a singular question “How do you go from pushing the Live button to making it into a career?”

More and more questions your should be asking yourself the further you go down that rabbit hole. You can’t just record yourself doing something silly or dumb and expect to be famous the next day. People who experience that are incredibly lucky, and chances are it’s a flash in the pan kind of moment and it’ll never happen again. You can increase your odds of success by answering the questions I asked above and putting in the effort, but even then, it isn’t a guarantee.

If you want to break it down into something quantifiable like making a living then you can look into the numbers that are out there, but I can at least provide a hypothetical example for you to chew on.

on Twitch a Tier 1 sub costs a user US$4.99 before taxes. The streamer receives a 50% cut of that. Using nice even numbers that puts it US$2.50. If you were lucky enough to live in a part of the country where the cost of living was cheap, and you had no debts, and you could live off US$50,000 per year, what does that equate to in Twitch subs? That’s 20,000 subs. I don’t have the actual Follower to Subscriber conversion percentages at hand as I’m writing this, but if you were fortunate enough to have 20% of your followers convert to subs, you would need 100,000 followers on Twitch. Let me share a tweet with you all to offer some perspective. CommanderRoot shares a lot of fascinating statistics, and this tweet of theirs from December of 2020 likely still holds some truth to it in 2024. https://x.com/CommanderRoot/status/1336488690986717184

By the end of 2020 less than 4,000 streamers on the entire Twitch platform had greater than 100,000 followers. There are roughly 7,000,000 streamers on Twitch today in 2024, so assuming the numbers haven’t changed drastically between then and now we can do some more math. Using nice even numbers, if my math is right, that means approximately 0.06% of streamers on the entire platform meet the completely hypothetical criteria I set before. (Personally, I’d say the criteria are very optimistic compared to whatever the real numbers are.)

This is why I say most people don’t understand the effort that goes into streaming. If you want this to be a career and you have nothing else going for you, if you want to keep trying, then maybe someday you’ll get up there, but it’s going to take a TREMENDOUS amount of time and effort that you’re not going to get back, and this is all just in streaming on Twitch. At the core of all of this, you can figure out the basic idea and apply it to other forms of content creation, like writing. Follow the questions, follow the numbers, get your answer. No matter what you’re doing, do you understand it enough to know where to aim yourself?

Technology makes a difference

Taylor Burian1 Comment

How has technology changed your job?

Growing up I always watched my Dad leave for work in the morning and come home in the evening. After I finally graduated college, I was doing the same. Leaving home for the office in the morning and returning in the evening.

Well, until the pandemic happened. It’s the same story as a great many people. Technology had come a long way in the decades preceding the pandemic to allow millions of people to work from home. In my Dad’s case he lives in the country and has fast enough internet to do his work and stream Netflix. Myself, after restrictions in my State were lifted, I chose to go back to the office because I don’t have an entire house to myself to make an office and I didn’t want to feel locked in my bedroom all the time again.  Well, after a couple years of that, I more or less went hybrid, but only based on need. That is where technology has changed my job.

I have a work laptop set up at home near my normal computer and hobby space, and a desktop machine back in the office. On the days I work from home I can remote into my desktop and take advantage of its better hardware and processing power, and then minimize that window to use my laptop properly for other things. It’s a little awkward, having a pseudo four monitor setup on a laptop screen and one spare monitor, but it works. The days I choose to work in the office I just need my desktop and the three monitors I already have there, no need to remote into a less powerful laptop.

That’s about the gist of it lately. I know it’s one of the biggest topics in the last few years but I don’t use any sort of AI tools so I can’t talk about how those may have changed my job. So we’ll leave it at the remote telecommuting for now.

Trouble saying No

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How often do you say “no” to things that would interfere with your goals?

Short answer: Not enough.

I’ve talked about some of my goals previously, like losing weight/getting in shape/eating better and aiming to get a novel published. One of my problems is that I enjoy some of my hobbies so much that I prefer to do those instead.

Another problem, and one I see as having more impact on my decisions, is that I don’t always have the mental or physical bandwidth to work on those goals when I already dedicate quite a bit to my full-time job. The funny part of this is that I don’t really have a problem saying “no” to things at work!

It isn’t that I refuse to say “yes” to things at work, I’m just very conscious of the work my teammates and I do. Every “yes” and “no” is very calculated. I will bend over backwards to help my teammates because I know they would do (and have done) the same for me. We each bring to the table different skills, personalities, and work styles. I try to keep these things in mind every time I have to help them, even if it’s just to be a sounding board to bounce ideas off of because sometimes the situation they find themselves in requires a “no” and they struggle to accept that conclusion. The reason being that a couple of them will sometimes take on work that they aren’t responsible for and not ask for help from the rest of us or put the onus back on the appropriate team/individual who SHOULD be responsible for that work.”Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” That kind of thing.

So, from a work perspective I say “no” plenty enough, but on an overall personal level I could stand to say it more often. Especially to myself.

I’m sure some armchair psychologist/psychiatrist behind a screen could stumble across this post and think they know exactly what is wrong with this picture, but I have a sneaking suspicion it isn’t that easy. (This means I’m not looking for unsolicited advice, thank you.) I bring this up because I see people on social media think they can do a self-diagnosis all the time, plus I was recently watching some videos on YouTube from Dr. K (HealthyGamerGG, in case anyone wants to look into it themselves.)