PUTTING THIS NOTE BACK AGAIN (after i had just taken down my last pinned freak-out sigh)
For what it's worth, you can find me as XCZIEL almost everywhere: bluesky, discord, dreamwidth, pillowfort, twitter i never use... [now deleted]i even still have my livejournal (i am not, however, on insta or the ticking tok site)
feel free to message me if you'd like to keep in touch should tumblr continue it's current trajectory (exploding car. hammers everywhere.)
_
There are currently SO MANY fandoms going on in this space:
OKAY definitely a BTS (as of like May 2023, so ... yeah) and kpop hyperfixation currently ongoing, not sure when normal service will resume
ALSO i have decided to just go ahead and let myself post about random new books that are hitting the shelves in US stores - not reviewing or recommending, just passing on a heads-up because ... idk. For me it's equivalent to: "oh look cool rock!" or "guess what happened on My Show!" but it's "here's what just showed up on the shelves! " *jazz hands*
ok the kpop Thing officially "Begin"s with OnlyOneOf (watch their mv and dance practices you will not regret it)
all things Kinnporsche and associated cast
Official Liu Chang Addicts Club Member (2020)
full on Liu Sang/DMBJ/Daomu Biji fandom freefall: holy heck are there some talented writers artists & creators in this fandom!!
an increased amount of CDrama, KDrama, BLDrama reblogs
the related asian actor fandoms and cultural interest
preferential reblogging of Lee Soo Hyuk, Woo Do Hwan, and Liu Yuning - uh, *all* DMBJ actors actually
The Untamed (MDZS, but mostly CQL)
Scum Villain's Self-Saving System (Moshang!) and TGCF reblogs
80s music nostalgia always happening
Black Sails (perpetual)
Murderbot
Star Wars, mostly Rogue One and Andor
Stargate and SGA (perpetual)
X-Men (mainly XMCU and cherik)
Killjoys (for as long as folks are making gifsets - ❤ u guys)
Marvel and MCU (still very conflicted, it's a one step forward two steps back situation)
plus a bunch more i've been in that come back around
Anyways, this blog is a mishmash of those, current events posts, cat and landscape pics, tumblr standard posts, fic recs, and memes.
I subscribe to the "if you like it, reblog it" philosophy of sharing creators' posts, because they put the effort in and deserve some appreciation.
Welcome!
Blanket creative works policy: if you ever see a headcanon, not!fic, tag ramble, or silly manip of mine that inspires you to write or art in any way: go for it!
just drop me a tag if you post it bc i'd love to see!
Re-creating my first webcomic from 12 years ago, "Hair Expectations vs Reality."
I can't help but feel all kinds of emotions after re-visiting the original comic: the one that started it all. A lot has changed since then, and I feel so fortunate to still create art and tell stories for a living. Thanks for your support, and sticking around for so long ❤️
spent forty-five minutes today helping an 87yo woman who does not own a computer or a cell phone try to set up an email account so that she could then set up a second account in order to access benefits. went with protonmail, because they don't require 2fa, but it turns out that while you can still make a protonmail account without authentication you can no longer use it to create OTHER accounts without it, and the benefits page she needed to get to required both an email and a cell phone to create an account anyway. asked if she wanted to try going in person to see if someone there could help her, and she said that she had, and they'd directed her to the website. she tried signing up with her landline, but of course that didn't work because you can't do SMS authentication that way. finally ended up writing up detailed instructions for how to log in and authenticate her account so she can drive to her severely disabled daughter's house forty minutes away because that's the only person she knows and trusts who has both a cell phone and a computer.
anyway i fucking hate mandatory 2fa and i think the people responsible for it should have to spend a year navigating their lives with no cell phone and no internet access beyond the public library pcs. fuck.
The worst part is that a lot of states are removing landline service in the next couple years, so people are going to be REQUIRED to get a cell. Therefore nullifying all legislated privacy laws for communication barring physical mail.
20 years later. you're kermit. opening night at the muppet theater. you look up. you can't believe it. those two awful cunts from next door are here. neither of them died yet. they're going to be here, forever.
Okay there are several major buckets that the majority of my job seems to fall into.
CX/Service Delivery/Account Management - this is where i run meetings and create service reports and check performance metrics and do things like build internal adoption surveys for clients or compile software installation reports or put together training resources.
Tech debt/lifecycle management - this is where i keep track of renewable licenses, hardware age, resource utilization, etc, to figure out when one of the 7k-ish pieces of hardware we manage needs to be replaced. This involves quoting and contacting clients, following up on declined quotes (because that becomes tech debt that the client carries) managing the documentation of the 7k-ish devices, reporting on company-wide tech debt, and also involves CX and account management because i have to know the client environments and budgets for about 250-300 clients.
Marketing??? - creating line cards for our products, tracking lead status, creating content for the website or newsletters, creating sales or informational mailing campaigns, creating video and written resources for our clients
Data analysis/extraction and reporting - creating reports and dashboards to track client information, handle ticket triage, provide sales and revenue reporting, etc. Making my feral databases. I've made something like 60 internal and client-facing dashboards, one of these dashboards freed up about a quarter million dollars of billable time each year because i can now do it in two hours whereas it used to take four hours a week each for four of out tier three techs.
Licensing and contract management - I'm the only one who understands Microsoft Licensing and I'm the only one who knows how to do our monthly license reconciliation. In May when I did our license reconciliation I found $8000 a month of unadjusted MRR and *today* i found another $1500 a month we just haven't been billing for no goddamned reason.
I think that's most of it, other than maybe like, CX is sales and contract stuff.
You know, it occurs to me that because I've got three supervisors and am working for a minimum of four departments, it's entirely possible that nobody in the organization knows everything that I'm doing.
Last year when there was a change to our Microsoft reseller tenant there was a problem that stopped us from being able to order licenses and after we had been submitting tickets to the vendor and Microsoft for 6 weeks I did a four hour research binge, identified a privilege escalation bug totally unrelated to the problem that i later reported to Microsoft, and was able to identify the tenant assignment that was causing the sales error and get the problem fixed within 72 hours (by weaponizing my totally-above-board escalated admin privileges).
We were the first reseller that either our vendor or Microsoft had seen with this issue. Microsoft didn't actually know it was *possible* to have this issue and used us to document it.
I put that on an internal ticket for six hours with the description "ms tenant sales issue resolution" and no further details because nobody looks at my time entries so i don't bother spending the time to explain what I'm doing.
Maybe I should see if someone in management wants to shadow me for a couple hours.
“Pratchett went back to older throwaway jokes (like dwarves being apparently unisex) and used them as metaphors to discuss social change, racial assimilation, and other complex issues, while reexamining the species he’d thrown in at the margins of his world simply because they existed at the margins of every other fantasy universe. If goblins and orcs and trolls could think, then why were they always just there to be slaughtered by the heroes? And if the heroes slaughtered sentient beings en masse, how heroic exactly were they? It was a long overdue start on redressing issues long swept under the rug by a parade of Tolkien successors who never thought of anyone green and slimy as anything but a notch on the protagonist’s sword, and much of the urgency in Pratchett’s last few books seemed to be related to them. ‘There’s only one true evil in the world,’ he said through his characters. ‘And that’s treating people like they were things.’ And in the last of his ‘grown-up’ Discworld books, that idea is shouted with the ferocity of those who have only a few words left and want to make them count. Goblins are people. Golems are people. Dwarves are people, and they do not become any less people because they decide to go by the gender they know themselves to be instead of the one society forces on them. Even trains might be people, and you’ll never know one way or the other unless you ask them, because treating someone like they’re a person and not a thing should be your default. And the only people who cling to tradition at the expense of real people are sad, angry dwellers in the darkness who don’t even understand how pathetic they are, clutching and grasping at the things they remember without ever understanding that the world was never that simple to begin with. The future is bright, it is shining, and it belongs to everyone.”
— John Seavey, The Evolution of the Disc (via liquidlightandrunningtrees)
