Boy, I think that last post deserves an update! There's been some spicy new developments, all for the positive, and I'll have to start a new journal page if I wait any longer.

Came into work on Thursday to as close to an apology you'll get from a two-faced ratfuck manager (and I'm not the only one there who thinks of him like that). "I was driving home that night, and I realized that you were really just doing what you were told." Yuh-huh, boyo. "Neither of us were necessarily wrong." Correct in the sense that he's right about it being a dumb rule, and I'm right for literally doing my job. Not so much in how he handled it. Anyway, I'll take it.

Especially now that I've been hearing rumblings of other folks above him getting involved in how he manages. Here's where it gets juicy, lurkers.

There's another guy who works the store, older dude, 40s, worked his life doing medical insurance until he destroyed his back, and he got hired here because it was an easy way to ease back into being employed. He used to work beer with me a lot of nights, so we'd chat. Funny guy, smart guy! His advice about "you should always move up at least every two years" has been my yardstick for measuring my own progress in jobs so far.

Anyway, he's not been able to get the hours he needs for months now, and there's been a ton of excuses, but he really does have a point that every new hire after him is getting a much fuller schedule than his 16 hours a week.

So, he contacted HR. And HR stepped in to demand to know why this guy was getting stiffed on hours. So that might've played a role.

I've also been hearing some of the lower managers threatening to also go to HR on the manager's insistence that we buy our water from the store instead of having it provided to us in the break room. (I do buy my water, but mostly because I feel like the stuff for the customers is less likely to be diseased than break room stuff. Even if that's superstition, people are dirty. And anyway, it shouldn't required, especially when there's break room sodas and sodas are 50c anyway.) Literally got free cases of water as a donation from a manufacturer and the store manager insisted we sell them instead.

The front end manager threatened to get her entire staff of cashiers to call HR about it. I think he's feeling a little bit of pressure right now about how he treats his workers, so that might've also played a role.

God, I love it when bad people get smacked in the cock by folks with much bigger sticks than them, but enough about MiloHax.

Anyway, beer lead position's going to someone else, which I'm fine with. Inverting my entire schedule and having to do a bunch more work with vendor contact, orders, schedules, and tags for an extra $2 an hour is just not my bag. If I'm gonna be doing more work, I want to also have less contact with customers, so get me doing inventory in the back or something. Otherwise, I'm happy where I am.

Hearing rumbles that the new beer lead person is normally the daytime receiving person, and she has zero experience with the department. Hope she does well. My future at this job (which may or may not last the year, I still have my doubts, but obviously I'd like to if it works out) depends on it.

Y'know how sometimes life turns in a weird direction? Yeah, that kinda just happened to me.

My store's in chaos at the moment. The beer lead (my direct boss) is moving to center store inventory, the former center store inventory person is moving to floral, several people got fired in the last few weeks for apparently stealing literally hundreds of dollars from the customer service desk registers, it's a fucking mess. That alone would make me iffy about sticking around at this store, but the store manager, a six-foot-something balding walking talking overcompensator (the type to rib workers and tell people to have a laugh about it), is looking to push his weight around, and I'm not a fan of it.

So let me back up a bit. The former store managers got fired around the time I started for trying to punch out a shoplifter. They were more interested in eating than they were in enforcing rules, so a lot of the old-timers got used to doing whatever they felt like, effectively. Given the pay and given that the store hadn't imploded from the hands-off approach, can you blame them? The current manager started last May, and he's got this grand plan to overhaul everything. So, he's cleaning house and moving people around.

Through a transition like this, I might be willing to stick by that kinda manager, but I've also ended up on his shitlist for various nebulous customer complaints he apparently gets about me. Keep in mind, I work a register where I have to tell people no. I have to tell people no when they want to purchase alcohol over a certain volume. I have to tell people no when they don't have valid ID, regardless of their age.

I am legally required to do this; I literally have a PLCB certification I paid for saying I would do these things to be able to work this job. There will be complaints about me, because people got told no and because I wasn't nice enough about it, and I'm getting paid $12/h. I will not be people's best friend for $12/h.

There's a stupid rule that the beer lead set up where people can't mix the "beer recovery" packs, which are made up of otherwise fine product salvaged from damaged cases. Given that I've been told on occasion that I was hired not to sell beer, but to do "literally whatever we tell you to do", I enforced this rule and got shit from this testosterone freak because he also found it to be a stupid rule and I defended myself. I later found out he'd instructed his night person to look for reasons to cut my shift short. Ratfuck couldn't even send me home himself, he had to get the old night lady to do it instead.

Keep in mind, I've come in on my days off, I've always left the department nicer than anyone else, I go above and beyond to put out stock, and I'm as helpful as I can be to literally every other department working at the time I am. One customer complaint later and I'm cruising to get fired for defending myself against said complaints. He's hinted at there being others, but I haven't heard of any since maybe early December?

In case you need further proof of me not being a shitty worker, I had a lady from New Jersey the other night tell me that I was the first nice person she met in the state. They walked out with probably $80 in wine and slushies, and I got to be highly amused by the antics of her drunk friend who was amazed she could drink in the passenger seat in Pennsylvania. Apparently, that's another stupid law, just a New Jersey one.

The store manager is very fond of pushing the concept of sales above all and to just take it with a smile, and it's getting a bit ridiculous. I've since heard stories where some of the front end girls are being racially harassed by customers and nothing's being done about it. One had a gun flashed on her. Nothing! Not even cops called. Further evidence of this came when I got interviewed for the beer lead position. In the process of the grilling, he used the example of a guy who used to come in to harass me and complain about me near-daily. "While we think he's an asshole, when he stopped coming in, we lost a sale."

That man only ever bought a $3 tallboy of Coors Light, maybe two some days. That's what sale the store lost.

I was told that my emotional health was worth less than $3.

As you can well imagine, this has tanked my desire to stick my neck out for anyone at the store. Normally, openings mean an opportunity for advancement, and I did interview for the beer lead position, but nah, fuck em. I'd have to uproot my entire schedule and switch to days for a $2 increase in pay and ten more hours a week, along with a ton more work doing orders and schedules and tags. They don't even know if the beer lead will stay a full-time position. Not worth it.

Unfortunately, it's also killed my desire to do much outside of work either! I didn't even write a journal about my four-year anniversary (we had a great time on the 20th by the way, and same with today). Just not been doing much of anything, outside of playing games for RetroAchievements. (By the way, if you've got an account, and you really should if you like games from the PSP on backwards, friend me. I'm almost in the top 2,000 users on site!)

The good news is that this kind of experience has helped me see what all this job has been worth to me. I applied for money and work experience, and I have both now. I've been asking some of my superiors (the not-shit ones) if I can use them as references if I do get shitcanned, and thankfully the answer's yes. Savannah also relayed a ton of her own experiences with wage jobs before she got hired by the government and said she never lasted much longer than the better part of a year in any of them, which was hugely relieving and encouraging. I'll be a year on March 30, so almost ten months. I've done fine.

Also good: we're expecting inclement weather tomorrow, so there's a good chance all my modes of transportation will be unavailable. I will be calling out if the snow appears and getting a two-day break for my troubles. If they complain, they can find someone to replace me. I'm a bargain for what all I'm willing to do for the pay I get. You will not find another of me. Fuck around and find out.

The plan is that, if I'm still working there by the time of the Wales trip in April, my last day worked there will be shortly before my departure. I'm looking forward to the downtime between jobs, frankly. Even on a good night, this job physically destroys me. A few weeks of being a NEET again will be kinda nice.

There's some pages and stuff I've been working on that I really ought to get out soon, I just have to finish up some navigational illustrations for them first. Have a sneak peek at one, plus the new way the site will be organized:

Drawing your site is tough, man. But rewarding! Highly proud of that guitar.

I'd like to start off this journal entry by eulogizing the PhotoCam. Just—my entire saga with it has been a shitshow. I literally had a working one eat itself on Tuesday.

Let me list off all the attempts at getting a single working camera so far:

1. The first one didn't power on and had a battery door that wouldn't stay closed.
2. The second one was never shipped and eBay wound up refunding my purchase automatically.
3. The third one was a Pretec DC-600, and its battery door won't stay closed, but at least it works? It takes pictures? But without a reliable means of transferring them off the camera (PhotoRec on the CF card usually does the trick, but sometimes shots are inexplicably not recovered despite existing on the camera), it's a crapshoot if I can retrieve what I took.
4. The fourth one, another PhotoCam, finally powers on and has a good battery door! Then I formatted the memory. And it failed the format. And now the camera reads actual corrupted data in trying to retrieve photos, save photos, or even just get the amount of shots left in the roll. Sometimes, it fails to even survive the boot.

At this point, I'm just convinced I'm not supposed to have one of these, and that's okay. I finally got to see what kinda pictures it took, roughly (the Pretec and the PhotoCam Plus do not take exactly identical shots, the PhotoCam definitely has a better sensor with much better indoor capabilities). I suppose if I had a microsoldering setup, I could try to open up the first camera and transfer its flash memory chips to the fourth camera. I'll probably have something like that someday, so I'm keeping it all in the same box and waiting until then. Not like I can break either of them further.

If I do want a retro camera (and believe me, I still do), I think I'm better off aiming for something slightly newer. Something natively USB, something a little less odd and esoteric. It's not gonna be as ~aesthetic~, but oh well. Honestly, just as cameras, the Canon Powershot series has always appealed to me. I now have the S30 on my radar, especially since it can do manual white balance and RAWs, which is mind-blowing to me in a point-and-shoot. (And apparently it can take 640x480, in case I still want to LARP. Obviously, it has a much better sensor, so it'll still look nicer than the PhotoCam, but hey.)

In much more productive news, I've been writing again. I don't know if I've ever addressed this publicly, but Pokémon has been on my mind again, back when I used to write fanfic for it in 2015 or so. Some of my first (not so great) moments with being creative came from my work on, and the reaction from friends to, Pokémon fanfic. It was all a little bit unfortunate. Being creative is hard and emotionally taxing enough without someone blatantly only being interested in your characters if they can get their drowning kink from it. Definitely not the nicest way to dive into writing and characters at a young age.

I've been wanting to do a fic that's sort of a gigantic tribute to my old characters, me as a teenager, and the music I liked back then for a few weeks now, and I wrote 1,500 words, the entire first chapter, over a few hours into yesterday morning. It was easily the most automatic and least effortful writing I've ever done. The shame of ~writing fanfic~ is well past me, and I can't be happier about it. The lads all loved it too. I'm getting to bring back some of my oldest characters, Woopers and Minuns and Totodiles, and finally do them justice in a way I wasn't quite able to do almost a decade ago.

At the moment, I don't really have a great place to share it. mari.somnol really needs that redesign before I can start getting art and writing back on there, and I'd need art before I can submit the lads to toyhou.se (oh yeah, that's something else I gotta do more of...). Maybe I'll try for an invite to AO3. I've always thought it's a good looking site, even if I still can't navigate it for shit. Mostly, I'm looking to write it and put it in Somnol. The rest of the internet can read it or not. If Somnol likes it, I'm happy.

And so we begin a happy new year, random visitors to cammy.somnol. I know the people at the store are ringing in 2023 in style; had a guy sitting in the cafe for three hours drinking Natural Ice and nursing a bottle of Xanax, pacing very bizarrely and apparently buying lots of cigars. There was another one at the store today (day off but we had to run in for milk) pressed up against the glass window in the front, staring and making faces.

I'll admit, I did not end off 2022 the healthiest camper. I've built up a lot of bad habits in the past year, some behavioral, some dietary, some mental. 2022 was very much the year of necessary change and a lot of good news that never quite felt like good news. A lot of that was due to a lot of extra stress I put on myself, and a feeling of not being able to finish anything. It felt like I was doing a lot and never getting anything good out of it.

2023 is the year of all that stress and hard work paying off. The past few days have been great. Very free-feeling, no stress, and things are starting to feel very real and warm and gooey between me and Caby again. Stuff is moving! I got my photos done today, but the actual passport filing requires an appointment we didn't know about, so I'll be going back on the 10th for that. I like to think this is all a very good omen for the rest of the year.

I've made it a point several times to myself, Caby, and the lads that the only things we have to do are our real-world obligations and everything else is a hobby. As I alluded to in a previous journal, I'm going to be moving a bunch of my subsites to archives and calling them finished. I did the last round of backups with them as active sites last night. I want as few things as possible up in the air, and even if they weren't a focus, having them officially done is honestly quite the mental pick-me-up. I've found that my favorite part of any project is when you cut half of it out to be able to officially release it finally.

For new stuff, I have some pages for this site I'm slowly completing, and I'd like to get back into the art thing after taking a few weeks off to destress. Really, I'd like to do everything. I have a story idea in my head and decently thought out (just need to get it down), site pages looking promising (some returning from the old cammy.somnol, some brand new), a new mari.somnol that really takes the Mac OS 8 concept and look to its logical conclusion (plus just features way more of me than even v2 did), music???? God I'd love to make some more music. Perhaps I'll do an EP. Four tracks, in and out.

Have a card from Caby that finally came last night!! (There's a goddamn essay written inside with another Cammy, but that's just for us~) Look! She made this in her dining room and I'm holding it! She's real!

Oh my gosh I love this boy, I need to find a good way to start displaying cards. Orange Cammy is kind of a vibe,,,,