weeknotes 11

This week, my job was officially "sunset," as the people who fire people like to say. This has been expected, but the whole process has been so weirdly surreptitious that my coworkers and I had no idea when we were going to be laid off. Very frustrating. However, despite the shadiness, my position is in a union and we have pretty clear terms around layoffs and severance, so the positive is that I will be paid my remaining salary for the year as well as six months of severance. That softens the blow.

I still do not have a new job quite yet, though I have a very, very promising lead...however the hiring company is pausing the process till after next week! I am cautiously hopeful about it. It will start very soon if I am hired, so it would actually be ideal given how my current job is ending. (Essentially two salaries plus six-month severance; not bad for pocket change!)

I've been thinking a lot about video games, I don't really know why. A lot of organization. In some ways, I think this is about mucking around with something to fill time, but not really doing anything. A lot of this has come from my soft obsession with Marathon and thinking about buying a PlayStation 5 to play it. I have always had PlayStations, so I have a lot of games in my digital library; it wouldn't be absurd to pick one up to play a new game, since I would be gaining back all the old games.

This is a particular kind of mental gymnastics.

However, with this reporting that Sony is testing dynamic pricing, I'm really turned off from giving Sony any money. I think the only acceptable explanation (and execution) would be that purchasing power parity thing that adjusts prices for equitable pricing between regions. (Like Marathon, made by a USA company, costing 40 USD costing something less than 40 whatever in a country that has a currency "worth less" than USD—I'm explaining this poorly!) I don't think that is the case, however.

Anyway, all of this also made me think about my Steam library and thinking about, for me, what are "Switch games," "PlayStation games," and "PC games?" Meaningless and arbitrary categories, but I like the organizational divides.

Otherwise, I have two bags of books that I need to take to the bookstore to see if they'll buy them from me and, well, everything's sort of in limbo until I find out what's going on in my life!