Happy New Year, everyone!

This is probably going to be the most belated New Year/year-in-review post you’ll read this month; and to be frank, I was quite close to missing the end-of-January deadline as well…

It’s been far too long since I last wrote anything on this blog. I’ve maintained most pages here up-to-date, and I’ve improved the design here and there, but as for new articles, there hasn’t been much of anything at all.

What could urge me to finally dust off this place again? The shutdown of alternative social media platform Cohost late last year, for one.
Cohost was a beautiful, earnest attempt at doing social media differently, with some flaws alright, but losing it has nonetheless been painful for me.

In its wake, and while Twitter’s undead corpse keeps rotting inside out, there’s been a renewed push within alternative Internet communities to value the art of creating smaller, independent websites, outside of major platforms entirely.
It’s not an end-be-all to be sure¹, but it is a start to try and escape from the inferno of the modern Internet at our scale, all the while being a generally fun endeavour to boot.
Some of the artists, game devs, archivist and all-around media enthusiasts I follow (many of them being former Cohost users to begin with) have definitely taken up or resumed blogging on their own sites, when they did not already have a blog.

All this is to say that I felt it was time to dust off this blog with one big life update. This one turned out a bit introspective and not super happy, but I hope you’ll enjoy it all the same!

Be careful what you wish for

Where have I been all this time? I’ll get into it, but honestly, you’ve heard this story a million times before.

I’ve been largely overtaken by the new job (new position same workplace) I was about to start when I wrote my previous life update, at the end of summer 2022.
It hasn’t been easy.

I’ve had the immense privilege to discover the joys of understaffing and of unfeeling hierarchies in the public sector.

As we speak, Macron’s whims and antics —his refusal to admit electoral defeat or to face his widespread impopularity, the snap election he called this summer with disastrous results for all, and the enormous resulting instability— is still producing concrete ripple effects in my workplace, as in many other public institutions, making an already tense situation budget-wise even more unpredictable, and untainable long-term wise.

I’ve always known that an important thing about living with myself honestly would be to avoid trapping myself down dreary life paths where I’d be rewarded for efficiency but deeply unhappy at the core. You know the kind I’m speaking of.

I remember hearing about crunch in the video game industry as a teenager on Twitter and thinking this is so awful.
I remember reading about karoshi, albeit in the slightly orientialist bend the phenomenon was always described in back then, or about young London lawyers dying of a heart attack from clear overwork, and part of me, knowing my perfectionist streak, saw that and intuitely thought:
Oh… That could legitimately be me, I really have to be careful about not trapping myself within this kind of life by mistake just because this is something I could do.

So I’ve had a very meandering path, a lot of self-doubt; made choices which were not always the most lucrative or rational, but without too much overall regret.
In the end, I was able to learn a lot, to mostly study what I liked, and I did avoid myself trapping myself in this fatal way.

And in recent years, I thought, quite naïvely, that working in the public sector would shield me from part of of the violence from these inhuman environments.

It turned out as well as you can imagine.

A trap of one’s own design

As you may realise, what I hadn’t quite foreseen, is that burnout and overwork are just as common in the public sector!!
They just take a different shape than they do in other environments.

Where I work, it has to do with the trap of vocational awe, with the invisibilisation of “glue” work, and more prosaically, with chronic understaffing.
None of this is should be particularly surprising or novel; teachers, nurses, social workers around the world are much more familiar with the issue and in more dire ways than I’ll ever be.

I guess that quite naïvely, I did not expect it to find myself in a somewhat similar situation so easily, even though this general sense of exhaustion is pretty widespread nowadays.

It’s been better recently though, I don’t want to sound too grim either.

Stepping back from work a bit has helped a bit.
Some of the colleagues that I already mentioned in my previous post have become very dear friends of mine outside of work as well, and I feel thankful every day for having met their paths, and for being able to see them so easily during the week. A few colleagues from the new position are also close to me, and since we share the same experiences and gripes, I at least do not feel all alone in it all.

But maybe the most useful thing has been to recognise how much of this situation is, at least in part, a trap of my own design.

On Christmas Day, I finally watched Justine Triet’s Anatomie d’une chute (2023). Yes, a snowy, psychological homicide(?) trial was exactly my idea of a Christmas movie, why would you ask.

More seriously, I think every writer or artist should just watch it because it plays so well upon every creative person’s familiar anxiety of not being able to preserve time on their own terms to create.

At a late point in the trial, a crucial piece of evidence emerges as an audio recording of an argument, from just a day before the victim’s death. (I’ll refrain from major spoilers regarding the ending, but I will discuss in depth this particular turning point in the movie.)
The audio file starts being played out in the courtroom, and after the first few seconds, Triet treats us to the fully acted scene of the argument in a flashback; something which audience members in the courtroom can only imagine, but not see as we do.

The fight occurs between Sandra (Sandra Hüller), successful German-French translator and author, and her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), the victim from the movie’s onset; a loving father, but in his own view, failed writer, who grapples with his guilt improductively.

In the scene, Samuel accuses Sandra of not taking her fair share of household chores, and in particular of lacking in her care-taking duties for their blind son, which strips him of crucial time to write. He believes things are “out of balance” between them.

But Sandra doesn’t see it that way.
While she doesn’t deny that each of them must do their fair share, something she asserts she does, she doesn’t think this is what Samuel’s grievances are about at all.

She knows Samuel is a writer, just like her.
And she knows, as Samuel should, that it is up to each writer to create for themselves an environment where creativity, and creative work are possible at all.

As for herself, she asserts, she can always makes time to write, by adjusting her whole life around that core; the need to write.

Getting deeper into the argument, she reminds him that it was his own choice to homeschool their son, to live in a remote moutain location, and to start an expensive home renovation—all things she had warned him about ahead of time: these were generous endeavours and beautiful projects, but all equally time-consuming, and they would steal more time away from his core creative aspirations.

There’s much I cannot cover from their heated confrontation, which is both a treat and an horror to watch, and to imagine a whole courtroom watching in silence.
But right before the end, after the uglier grievances have resurfaced, and the whole thing threatens to turn into physical violence (that Triet dares not film; the sound of it alone is far enough), Sandra circles in on the unspoken core issue:

It was “[his] own trap” that left him with so little time to himself to begin with.
His own “pride” and “fear of failure” that paralysed him. And now, “waking up at 40” with no published book to his name, he’s looking for “someone to blame”, turning what had been a beautiful partnership between two creative souls into a game of unreciprocated marital obligations.

On the outside, with little context, one can be struck by Sandra’s seeming coolness in the scene.
It’s part of the genius of it: the “evidence” alone is ambiguous, and the full meaning of the movie (and who’s really to blame for Samuel’s death from the first scene) is really derived from what you as a viewer bring to the movie.

The prosecution is more than happy to capitalise on it too. Adding in the ambiguous signs of violence from the end of the recording, Sandra’s great independence of character, her foreignness, together with her sexual history, unceremoniously extracted from the argument, there’s much to draw an unflattering portrait.

Though it’s not expressed as blatantly, the prosecution weaves a narrative along these lines:
Wouldn’t a more understanding wife have expressed true concern for her husband in his moment of vulnerability? Isn’t it proof that she really is not a much of a wife to begin with; isn’t it proof that she really could, and really did in fact murder Samuel?

I just love this scene so much!
I came out of the movie thinking that Anatomie would make such a perfect Ace Attorney case (with perhaps even more space for ambiguity than usual), and I could practically picture this scene in particular play out as a climactic piece of evidence.

But what hurts so much about it, other than the brilliant acting and crescendo, is the foreknowledge of the viewer, who knows it all ends with a dead man only a day later, and who watches initially mundane life frustrations and creative unfulfilment come to such a boiling point.

Samuel’s fears and sense of being robbed of time can ring very familiar, but it’s the twisting of them, the assigned blame, the implicit appeal to traditional gender roles to restore a presupposed “balance”, that makes it all so much more horrifying to watch and to take in.

In the struggle, Sandra asserts to Samuel that she “sees him” as he is, that he is certainly smart, but that, however, he is not a victim. He was always free, and Sandra, being equally free, categorically refuses to take up responsibility for his own life choices.

Side note: If you've seen the movie: I think you should be able to see where I stand on the truth about Samuel's death. Click to unroll, major spoilers inside.

Of course, it was suicide.
I won’t deny that it is what I want it to be, but Triet drew a beautiful portrait of a complex, flawed man, and, just like their son says, when you really do try to imagine what could ever have happened, it becomes impossible to ignore all the signs.

In other words…

In other words… I think Anno said it best:

It feels like a trite cliché to say, but no one’s going to write your book for you. You are on your own in the end. And that remains fundamentally true regardless of structural constraints that apply on one’s life.

This isn’t to deny the fact that much of our free time is robbed from us, and that we’re not all equal at all in terms of the time that is granted to us; that this is grossly unfair, and that we should help others access creativity where they can in their lives.

But it is equally true that creativity is about shaping nothingness into shape in a way that is fun, that is joyful, that makes you feel alive; and that no one but us can create and protect these pockets of time where we find the space for it.

More to the point, this kind of epiphany readily applies to making certain life choices and feeling constrained by them later down the road… like say, working for an understaffed IT department in a public institution while knowing one’s worst compulsions to be helpful and thorough, and then wondering where all the time or mental energy or creativity went.

It was well-played of me to avoid the trap of the corporate game from the start.
It was naïve not to see that working “for the public good” can be as easily exploited in various ways, especially if you have the personality structure for it, and like to be helpful.

I feel like many of the tech hobbyists and tinkerers I admire online tend to fall in similar traps. More than one of them has been speaking about their open source projects overtaking their lives in a negative way.

Looking at their curiosity, their ability to communicate about it clearly, their willingness to explore an obscure rabbit hole to the end of the Earth, no matter how deep it goes, I’m not too surprised they would find “fun” such projects, and become pillars of their respective communities.

But nor am I so surprised when they end up swallowed by the rabbit hole altogether.

It’s hard to stress the point I’m trying to make without blaming it all on individuals. Let me tell you about another similar story that circles around it with some amount of care.

Cornelia the New Priest

In Umineko Tsubasa, the official Umineko fandisc released at the same time as the main story’s 8th and final chapter in December 2010, there’s a particular side story centered on a minor character known for her diligence, aptitude, and rigid demeanour.

Cornelia’s a member of Eiserne Jungfrau, which is more or less the prosecution side Umineko’s metafictional layer of the story, tasked with piercing illusions in courtroom-style battles of wits within the mystery genre. Yes, Umineko is quite something.
In the main story, she’s the one to present evidence to refute the opposite team’s (the witch’s side) claims, always using highly formal turns of phrase that display the officality of her role as a law clerk.

Cornelia the New Priest specifically focuses on the first days of Cornelia in the bureaucracy of the Court of Heaven, right after having proudly passed her examination with top marks, but before joining Eiserne Jungfrau.

The culture shock awaiting her upon arrival is rough to say the least, and she has the maybe the worst first office day I’ve ever seen.

She’s awed (in a bad way!) by the general idleness of her senior colleagues.
The first task such is entrusted, far from fitting her high-minded ideals, is to order delivery for lunch over the phone for her colleagues. But even this proves quite the ordeal.
Refusing to relax her stiff use of court language, that no one but her bothers with for mundane interactions, she completely fails to clearly communicate her coworkers’ orders over the phone, and almost no one ends up with the meal they’d asked for.

To try to make up for her mistakes, she takes on a large public outreach project, trying to refrain her colleagues from drinking and smoking on their free time, only to be rebuked by the intervention of the workers’ union.

If “paperwork movie” or “office drama” were its own microgenre in visual novels as it can be in movies or TV, then Cornelia the New Priest would be a great representative of the genre.

It’s a fairly short read (30-45min) that satirises the trappings of administration, building upon writer Ryukishi07’s experiences as a civil servant², something he also did in Higurashi before from another angle.

But where Higurashi focused on community spirit in the face of inaction, Cornelia the New Priest’s centered on the naïveté and insignificance of newcomers inside the bureaucratic machine.

In typical Ryukishi07 fashion, Cornelia’s tribulations and bullheadedness are rendered with a good deal of pathos, but lead to a didactic epiphany, once she meets Getrude, a current member of Eiserne Jungfrau (alongside whom she will work in Umineko’s main story).

By talking through things with her, she understands that for all her coworkers’ flaws, change can only be achieved by talking to them, and working with them, by their side. Cornelia’s productiveness and diligence are plainly wasted as long as she refuses to bridge the gap.

Although much of the story carries a mixture of hilarious satire and bleak dream-crushing, there’s a hopeful tone to the resolution, with Cornelia’s epiphany promising her more future belongingness, if she can dare work with her colleagues as they are.

It’s not a story of changing the world in the face of impossible odds; it’s one about adulthood and facing reality honestly.

I’m obviously speaking from a very different context than the early 2000s Japanese bureaucracy that inspired the story (I would be thrilled to work in a department where excessive idleness was the main issue of the day) but it’s more than possible to envision more critical ways to engage with immutable power structures³.

Still, Ryukishi really does excel at making his characters’ inner struggles come alive dramatically, and I couldn’t help but think of poor Cornelia and her disillusion when thinking of my own strange choices.

Our circumstances are fairly different (I’ve yet to mess up my coworkers’ takeout order by speaking in French civil law redactional style), and connectedness with colleagues has never been such an issue for me… but the quiet introspection, and the need to face reality honestly are more than real.

I guess this is all to say I’ve been trying to assess how much of my own tendencies are to blame for my predicament, without internalising too much either, since it is also, undoubtedly, a shared predicament. It’s a tough balancing act—it’s been a hundred years and I don’t think sociologists or novelists have quite cracked this one yet.

Part of me would like to get into the “why” here for fun and after all, this is my blog, so I very well could… But alas, I feel like I haven’t earned the degree of uninhibition that’s required for it and I’m recoiling at the edge.

But yeah, Anatomie d’une chute certainly made me very pensive, and that is where I’ve been lately…

Where does this lead me?

Alright, so where does this lead me for the future?

Speaking purely for myself, I’m not really one to make New Year’s resolutions, because I’m far too deeply wired towards perfectionism for that to be a good thing.

For someone who’s trained themselves for years and years on end to suppress their needs in service of arbitrary, unrealistic external expectations they think they have to abide by at all costs, adding fuel to the endless self-optimisation engine can be the very opposite of a good thing.

I think if I adopted a yearly resolution to just identify, express and act on my actual needs in life and in my relationships, instead of denying them, to value these relationships in and for themselves, it would be enough for the rest of my life.
It’s hard work enough to counteract one’s basic programming in this way.

The “funny” (read: predictable) part is that when reviewing things I did achieve in 2024, there’s a lot to be proud of, whether in the amount of reading I’ve done, of enjoyable physical exercise, of chances I’ve taken on people, and so on… but it’s all a downstream effect from having finally prioritised what I found intuitively enjoyable.
The second I set these in stone as “goals” to be achieved is the minute I get into my self-made mental prison again, so I’ll avoid doing that!

Trying to keep hobbyist creative work as enjoyable in and for itself has been the one through-line through almost each of the articles on this blog, and I think that’s telling enough in itself; so I’ll stand by that.⁴

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Part II incoming

That’s enough sappy stuff! This post is already far too meandering and self-indulgent…

I wanted to get into the fun stuff at the end; cool stuff from the past two years outside of work, in terms of creativity or not, and things I look forward to also.

But I think it’d make this post far too long, so I’ll split it in two here and there.

I often fall short of my promises on this blog, but have faith, part II will definitely come along… Until then, take care everyone!