20080708 – Minor tweaks and dialogue changes. Who the fuck cares what a Cycom message pad is, anyway?

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The exposition, it burns. The bird head in panel five, it burns more.

In my defense, I’m feeling absolutely ROTTEN. This is due entirely to a broad variety of impending (but, unfortunately, not immediately pending) life changes, all of which may be for the better, all of which could be absolutely assrapingly disastrous – both for my mental health, and for ATC production capabilities.

“Fortunately” all of this stuff will be playing out within the next month to six months. Since I know about it now and can’t actually do anything about any of it, I’m in for weeks and/or months of continuous anxiety and general freaking out.

This stuff, in no particular order: my sister-slash-roommate inexplicably decided to enlist, which means I’m about to lose a roommate. That’s a freakout point. I’ll probably have to move. I haven’t moved in years and during that time pretty much everyone I’d want to live with has left the city, so that’s another freakout point.* On top of that, there’s been some not-so-vague mutterings at work about a “restructuring,” which could – among other things – mean a shift to offices in a different part of the city. That’s a big freakout point.

Any one of these I could handle. All three at once?

Boys don’t cry. They binge drink.

In short, my nicely entrenched routine – an arrangement that has enabled me to be extremely productive – will have the legs kicked out from under it over the course of the first half of 2008. Any of these things could turn out well. Any of them could turn out badly. All of them are going to happen. None of them have a concrete date. I am not financially capable of preparing myself for any of the worst case scenarios, let alone all of them.

So. I’m quite grumpy, and I’m probably going to stay that way for awhile. Since I can’t do anything about any of this and I can’t get timetables, I plan to keep doing what I’ve planned on doing – spend large amounts of my free time and vacation time working on ATC.

I really wish lexapro was available over the counter.

That said, this is the last page for this environment – for this chapter, anyway. Now it’s time for backups, hardware deployment and repairs. Then modeling. Lots more modeling. With any luck there’ll be more pages before the end of the year.

* I’ll probably end up with one of the few friends who’s still in town, but probably with a third person I don’t know.

Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Rewrote parts of panel three.