Next for Dark Fantasy X

Well... personal things intrude. I got laid off early this week. My company has gone through many rounds of layoffs over the last few years, and I'd kept my head down and thought I was under the radar. Due to my extensive travel this summer, I wasn't really paying as much attention as normal to scuttlebutt around the office, plus I suppose I'd gotten kind of numb to rumors of more rounds of layoffs. And I'd thought that my position was more secure than most. Turns out I was wrong; and I know quite a few people who are in my same boat. Four people just in my small suburban church congregation alone, plus some in neighboring suburban congregations. Sadly, prior waves have hit many people that I know or knew well too. It's hard not to think of these corporations as sociopathic when they lay thousands of people off at a time, tell them that it's not personal, but then top management treats themselves to a nice bonus because of their cost cutting. But realistically, is there any large, bureaucratic organization that isn't sociopathic? Especially when the Cloud People who run our corporations have gone all in on the woke cult? 

I'm too young to retire, but too old to super easily pivot my career, so I need to find another job. Because we've had so many layoffs locally over the last few years, there's a decent chance that I'll have to relocate as well. Hopefully I can put my house on the market while housing values are still fairly high and houses are moving quickly. The first big round of layoffs I endured was in 2008-9, and people were really screwed on their houses back then. We had actually just bought ours at a high point in pricing, and watched it spend 7-8 years underwater in value before it climbed out too. Ugh.

Anyway, in one sense, I have much more free time. I'm not working! On the other hand, I have much more productive things than blogging about fantasy games, settings or stories that I need to be working on, such as rebuilding my resume which I hadn't looked at in quite some time, building up a LinkedIn profile, which I also hadn't spent any time on previously, but which seems to be the new way people do a fair bit of their recruiting and vetting, and applying to all of the jobs that I qualify for that I can. This will leave relatively less time to turn to hobbies, although maybe I'll need to make time every so often. Getting laid off is a stressful and anxious thing to go through, and I can't wallow in the stress and anxiety all the time without breaking, I suppose. And some of that stuff is coming along fairly well; I've got all of the severance paperwork just about done, I've got my revised baseline resume about done, just needing minor tweaks for the specific jobs I'm sending it to, and I'll be writing a baseline cover letter too. And then it's off to the races with applying.

Me in the near future rolling in dough again, hopefully.

Being optimistic and assuming that I find a job before running out of money (and my severance package is relatively good)—and I hope that that's not hard; my son recently changed jobs and seemed to have little trouble rounding up interviews and offers, although being more or less entry level is different than having close to 30 years of actual career-level experience—I'll be pretty busy. Interviewing, processing and onboarding for a new job, especially one that I'll likely have to relocate for, is going to be complicated and take a lot of time. Relocating itself is a big deal. Selling my house, which is kind of a mess right now because we'd gotten a bit too comfortable with it, is going to be a big deal. I don't want to dump all of the job of cleaning everything up, throwing out all of the junk, and arranging to get little things fixed so the house can be shown to my wife, but I might have to mostly do exactly that. (To be fair, a lot of that junk is because she has been reluctant to throw stuff out that I've wanted to toss. I think this shook her up out of that mindset, at least..) That will leave little time for blog posts, and little mental acuity left over for hobbies, probably for a few months.

Of course, being pessimistic, that impacts my hobby prospects differently. I'll probably have more free time if the job search is difficult or protracted, but less motivation because the anxiety of being out of work will be higher. In a pinch, I might have to take on some gig work to pay the bills while searching for a full time position, which means much less time and more stress and anxiety. (Unless I find that the gig work is more pleasant and the financial set-back isn't unbearable after all. Who knows? I know of one guy who got laid off in an earlier wave, and he's still here doing Door Dash and stuff like that while his wife teaches Zumba. He might have been old enough to start his pension under early retirement rules, though. I'm not.)

Me in the near future living in the gutter because I can't find a job. Not really; I have places to go if it really gets that bad. But it would be pretty sucky to fall back on living in my in-laws' basement.

Either way, I expect that blogging will become less of a priority for me, at least in the short and medium term. Blogging as a hobby for me is more about exploring thoughts on pop culture and hobbies, and sometimes other topics, when I'm comfortable, and have free time to kill, and want to do something with it other than zone out in front of the screen. I've already found that even just a few days being shocked out of my comfort zone has engendered in me some better habits, and that I've also lost some of my habits that weren't so good, because I've had literally no motivation to indulge them. And it's only been a few days!

The only way I see extensive potential blogging happening is if I find a job fairly quickly, relocate (maybe to somewhere out West, where I've always really wanted to live anyway) but have to leave my wife behind to finish stuff up with the house and my daughter's wedding plans for a few months. If the new job is relatively smooth and onboarding goes well, I'll come home to an empty rental with nothing to do, so maybe then I'll start blogging? Anyway, all of this is speculation. I don't know how things are going to go. Just a heads-up, though—if my posts become fewer and farther between, that's why. And I know that with all of the travel I did over the summer, you'd probably think; how does it get fewer than it has been? That's a fair point.

I will, however, try to allocate some "me time" to doing a few things. Over on my sister Dark Fantasy X blog, I'll be slowly building up iconic character sheets for the iconic characters, of which I now have way more than I really need. And when I have time and need to just get away from my worries, I may sit down and write up some setting material here and there, or another 5x5 column. I'd love to say that I'll start finally writing my novels, but realistically that won't happen until things settle down, at best. And things were settled for me for quite some time without me doing jack squat there, so don't hold your breath. Although if I die without having at the very least taken a decent stab at it, I'll be very disappointed in myself.

Anyway, I exported the blank character sheet spreadsheet to jpg, and here it is. I hadn't ever done that before and wasn't sure it could be done. Nice to see that it turned out great. Because Dark Fantasy X is a fairly rules-lite game, the character sheet is pretty clean and uncomplicated. Just the way I like it. One of the ways in which I'm old fashioned but not old school is that I dislike character sheets that I can't write up on a single sheet of notebook paper, preferably on just one side even, just like we used to do in our junior high games over lunch and study hour.