Category: The Ghost Archives

Posts written primarily on the Ghost blogging platform or prior to this website’s current implementation.

  • The Warning Signs

    Hi! It’s been a minute. Life’s been hectic. So much so that I’ve got a cautionary tale to tell, which involves me getting hired at a new job, starting work, and quitting all in the last week!

    Some of you may recall that I’ve been looking for a new gig since April of last year. If you’re new or unfamiliar, you can read all about my trials and tribulations from around that point and onward in the “Retail Therapy” section on this post. I had spent the year (or more…) learning more about programming and coding, but also desperately applying for any job that came my way. Anything that I figured I’d be able to do, anyway. I’m a 40-year-old college dropout with very few in-demand skills (working on that, obviously!), so it’s not exactly an easy path in what is already a challenging job market. The icing on the cake is that I also now live in an area of the country that has practically zero jobs unless I want to return to retail. There’s also manufacturing and factory work, but I passed out working behind a customer service desk at a big box store in this town, so I’m not so sure manual labor is going to be on the table for me either.

    In late March, my sister, MissFiasco, emailed me a job listing for a work-from-home role with a healthcare company. The title was “Radiology Scheduler.” It mentioned how much it paid — not much, but more than what any retail job in the area was dishing out — and as the title suggests, would involve scheduling patients for medical imaging and diagnostic procedures. It did involve talking to patients on the phone, which I honestly despise, but it didn’t necessarily sound like a call center, either. So I figured it would probably be okay. Not only would I get to work from home in my pajamas and start earning some dough again, but it also sounded like I would play a role in genuinely helping people, which is always a nice feeling. So I gave it a shot and sent them my resume.

    A couple of weeks into April, I received an email back from the company. They were interested in interviewing me! It was the first time anyone had even shown interest in me professionally since I went to talk to a temp agency in February with no success. Naturally, I booked the interview. And that’s when things started getting strange…

    My first interview was conducted by an AI chatbot. Yes, you read that correctly. My interview was basically conducted by ChatGPT or Copilot or whatever. It asked me some fairly standard questions and suggested that I be as thorough and detailed as possible because, if I passed this round, then I would be invited to interview again with a human representative. It was weird, but I kept going because… Well, because I needed a job. I did enough to impress Chad (a nickname MissFiasco and I gave to ChatGPT), so I progressed to the next interview. It was scheduled to be a 30-minute video chat, and I was advised that the dress would be business casual. I did my best to look presentable since I’m almost always dressed very casually, snapped a photo to my family’s group chat on Discord, and joined the Zoom meeting early and prepared.

    The selfie that jiggyflyjoe snapped before his interview!
    Photo of me looking my “best.” 🥴

    Much like the interview with Chad, the interview went well enough, but it still just felt odd. The woman that I was speaking to seemed highly indifferent throughout the entire conversation. On the other hand, I like to sprinkle in a little sarcasm or jokes here and there, so the contrast was a little jarring. I’m not one of those creepy dudebros who think that women always need to be warm and receiving, but man… She did not show even the slightest hint of a sense of humor. It was as if smiling were simply not allowed while on the clock. Regardless, the process continued afterward, and I was sent an offer letter by mid-May. An offer letter that invited me to accept the role of an “Engagement Specialist,” which I had not applied for. The shift that I had requested was also changed, and the compensation was a bit less than the radiology scheduling role. I emailed back the recruiter and inquired as to why I was being offered a position with hours and wages that I did not apply for. She simply stated that the Radiology Scheduler role was “no longer available.”

    This was my first major red flag.

    The interview with Chad and the subsequent recruiter were strange, but I brushed them off because I was desperate enough to get working. But this was the exact moment that I remember thinking, “I don’t know about this.” The vibes were off and, frankly, I felt that they had pulled a bait-and-switch on me. And in retrospect, I see now that this is when I should have declined the offer and dodged the bullet completely. But again, the siren song coming from incoming money was too strong. I signed the offer letter and, in return, they shipped me a computer with which to work from home. And the family rallied to help me prepare. To the point where my brother-in-law (aka MrFiasco) transformed a room in our home that had been serving as a storage room into a home office for me. Complete with an actual cubicle! I was getting nervous but excited, especially by my new workspace. I was no longer going to be crammed into a small corner of my bedroom, where my current desktop setup is! I was going to be an unstoppable workforce of one back here!

    An animated image of Brie Larson as Carol Danvers becoming the superhero Captain Marvel in the film of the same name.
    Okay, I’m not Captain Marvel unstoppable, but I felt pretty close.

    Last Thursday was my first day. I went through orientation and training on both Teams and Zoom, and learned that the company was effectively a healthcare call center. I cringe at those two words together because working for a call center is one of the last things I have ever had any desire to do. As I mentioned earlier, I despise speaking on the phone in the first place. But they informed us that we would only be making outbound phone calls to insurance members to try and convince them to schedule an in-home health assessment, which is where a nurse practitioner visits their home and reviews their overall health, medications, etc. My last office-based job that I had worked at for more than 8 years eventually threw me a phone and told me to play call center, but this company surprisingly had an entire automated phone system that included an actual script, and you were able to schedule the appointments in the same software! That seemed fairly easy and convenient. Maybe I could do this job! The trainers also seemed friendly and very knowledgeable. I won’t lie: The first three or four days were even kinda fun. I was digging it.

    That was until Day #5. I don’t know if my trainer was just having a spectacularly bad day, but there were a few moments throughout the morning where her friendliness seemed as though it was starting to wane. At one particular point, I was essentially told to stop taking notes on a topic and to start doing a quiz about the same topic instead. And then, earlier in the day, we were directed to complete an activity that involved us recording ourselves doing a practice phone call with yet another AI chatbot. When the AI chatbot broke down for numerous people in the training class and stopped letting us progress, assistance was not exactly forthcoming. And when the assistance finally did show up, it was entirely useless. By the time we went on our lunch break yesterday, I started feeling pretty triggered. I’ve described the feeling to my family multiple times now as feeling like workplace PTSD. My eagerness to keep learning and to try and make things work for this job withered away and was instantly replaced by a sense of panic and dread in the middle of my stomach. My spidey sense was tingling. I’d been here before.

    And in a moment of clarity, I came to the entire reality of the situation. This was a call center, I was a salesperson (there was even commission!), my higher-ups were unwilling to help, and I was once again going to be expected to address questions for people that I did not know the answers to. Furthermore, my target demographic was vulnerable elderly people who were likely being taken advantage of by their insurance policies anyway. We were instructed that these health assessments were yearly benefits that they receive for free, but as my famously inappropriate father likes to say, “there ain’t no free lunch.” And sure, the calls were mostly scripted, but we were also advised to “manage resistance” when folks tried declining the assessment, which also felt scummy. I quickly realized that I wasn’t digging it, after all.

    Then I quit! I was that guy who went to lunch and never came back. After I signed off, I packed up their computer and immediately shipped it back out to them this morning in the very same box it arrived in.

    CTA Image

    Jiggy’s Journal now has an AMA (Ask Me Anything) page! You got 🔥burning questions🔥 for me? Maybe a comment or suggestion? Check out the page here and submit everything that’s on your mind. Afterwards, I’ll respond in a future post!

    Ask Me Anything!

    And while I’m absolutely certain this was the correct decision to make, I’m disappointed to say the very least. Nobody knows how much I wanted to be a productive member of society again. My family has been extremely supportive for the most part, but I know that I’m a drain on them financially, so I think they’re at least a little disappointed in me, too. I know that I’m also exceptionally privileged to have enough of a support system currently in place that I’m granted the option of even considering leaving a job when I’m mentally in distress. Not everyone can do that, so it wasn’t a decision that I made lightly. I did try my best. I took several pages of handwritten notes throughout training, did my best to fully understand the company’s campaign that I’d been hired for, and adjusted everything else in my orbit to rotate around my new work schedule. Despite my gut instinct frequently trying to communicate to my brain that this wasn’t going to work.

    So my unemployment journey continues. I’m still working on coding. Maybe even refocusing on it a little more since I started to slack off on that a bit. Hopefully, I can eventually develop that skill into something employable. I’m still making web content, like always, for the love of it and because it earns me a little pocket change here and there. (By the way, have you subscribed to this publication? What about my Twitch channel?? Or maybe you’d like to buy me a cup of coffee??? 👀) I’m still open and looking for any other jobs that might surprise me and somehow won’t be completely soul-crushing. And otherwise, I’m chillin’ with my silly little games and shows. (Yo, Severance, Silo, and Foundation have been rocking my world lately. Get you some Apple TV+!)

    Let this also serve as a reminder to listen to your internal monologue! Trust your gut instincts! I understand that they aren’t always right, and maybe we are just cucumbers with anxiety, but your feelings are valid, and there is a reason why they are making you feel that way. Don’t ignore the warning signs! Otherwise, you might just unwittingly find yourself in a call center.

    In the meantime, you know if anyone’s hiring? If they aren’t completely drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, shoot me an email! We’ll be besties forever. ❤️

  • AMA #1: Ice Ice Baby!

    Hi there!

    You may or may not have noticed that I added a new feature to Jiggy’s Journal within the last month. That feature is the AMA (Ask Me Anything) page! It’s just another way to provide a little more open dialogue with you, the readers!

    I got the idea to do this from a similar feature built into most blogs hosted over on Tumblr. Essentially, it encourages readers to submit questions, comments, suggestions, etc. that can later be addressed by the author in later posts, like this one! It’s also a way to provide a little more of an open dialogue with you, the readers!

    I’ve only received two legitimate submissions so far (and a whole bunch of spam…), but the AMA page remains open and active. If you’ve got questions, I’ve got answers… Probably. Maybe. So here we go…

    C.R. asks:
    What kind of filter do I need for the ice maker in my refrigerator?

    I feel like it’s probably necessary to disclose that this question came from my sister, who is trying to troll me. Not because I’m any type of filter or refrigeration pro. I honestly don’t even know what brand of refrigerator she has.

    Now that we have that out of the way, you’re in luck! I did a cursory Google search and found this inline water filter kit from PureWater Filters! Looks to be compatible with just about any kind of ice maker!

    Bet you didn’t expect a real answer, huh? Also, just in case you’re curious, this is the kind we have. 😉

    A. Nonnymus asks:
    Your cat Rufus is cute, but why is he a turd?

    Huh, I wonder who would submit this type of question! How rude!

    Jennifer Lawrence sarcastically saying "Okay" and giving a thumbs up.
    J. Law’s got the perfect reaction here.

    Aaaaanyway, for anyone who isn’t familiar, Rufus is my sweet summer child. He’s very cute, very sweet, and very skittish. When we moved out here from Indiana in early 2023, it actually took him about two days before he would even exit his carrier. Even for food or water. That’s how scared he can get!

    And with him being the very definition of a “scaredy cat,” he’s got a very strong fight-or-flight response. When he’s scared of something or someone, he usually runs away and hides from them. If he’s backed into a corner, though, he’ll hiss and start throwing claws. He’s still my “baby angel” around those of us he lives with, but he still runs or skibidi baps my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, who lived out here before we did. Mostly because he doesn’t know or feel as comfortable around them.

    That explains why he’s allegedly such a turd. Anxiety. He fits right in with me!

    A photo of my tabby cat Rufus sitting by the window.
    One of my favorite photos of Rufus, because honestly, have you ever seen a more adorable kitty?

    And that’s all for this round! Make sure you get your submissions in for the next round later this month!

  • Going Live: Streaming Through the Anxiety

    Before 2019, I didn’t understand Twitch or live streams centered around gaming. At all.

    I love video games, but the concept of watching someone else play them seemed completely foreign. You could reason that maybe this other gamer might have a different approach to parts of the game you were stuck on, or they were able to complete a puzzle that you weren’t entirely sure how to solve yourself. But even then, you could simply look up the solutions in a walkthrough — which, for years now, have been available both in print and online — or even find a video on YouTube guiding you through that one specific pain point before continuing onward. Watching a total stranger play video games, potentially for hours, just didn’t sound like an ideal way to spend time. It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense on paper for a lot of people.

    So, how did I come to love and start streaming on Twitch? To paraphrase the very awesome and hilarious Elyse Myers: That’s a great question, I’d love to tell you!

    Twitch Beginnings

    By the mid-2010s, I found myself with a Twitch account. Initially, it was mostly so my immediate family and I could stream games like The Jackbox Party Pack to one another, but we quickly caught on that there didn’t seem to be a relatively easy way to prevent strangers from viewing what you were streaming. You would think that would signal the end of Twitch for us, but we found ourselves using the streaming service again in 2016. At the time, we were very obsessed with World of Warcraft, and frequently grouped up together to play as a party. Since our little family group is comprised of only six people, though, that meant we couldn’t typically complete dungeons or raids, which required parties of up to 40 people, though 10 and 25-man groups were the standard. Not unless we joined groups that were recruiting, but often led by nerds who were craving power and were willing to kick out the first person to make a mistake, or unless we made some new friends really fast. And if you think I’m the only introvert in my family of six, you’re sorely mistaken. That meant we were frequently left out of Warcraft‘s endgame content.

    Then we heard about something happening over on Twitch. A few players who had practically become professionals at completing that very content were starting a little operation they were calling “Friendship Moose.” Essentially, they were taking their parties through the notoriously difficult raid dungeons and were live-streaming it on their Twitch channels. Not only that, but they were also giving away the chance to join them in their raiding parties and be carried through the content. The incentive? Players who completed the latest raid dungeon at a higher difficulty level were rewarded with the Grove Warden mount, an exclusive in-game moose the player could ride throughout the digital world of Azeroth. Handy and beautiful for sure, but it also served as a badge of honor. You see, when the next chapter of World of Warcraft was released — and its new, even more difficult endgame with it — the Grove Warden would become unavailable. Seemingly forever.

    World of Warcraft's Grove Warden mount. Image from WowHead.
    World of Warcraft‘s Grove Warden mount. Image from WowHead.

    We were fervent mount and pet collectors in the game, but typically just accepted that all of the higher-tier spoils like the Grove Warden were out of our reach. We would just have to deal with feeling envious of those running around on their own. That was until Friendship Moose came along. Thankfully, I pushed my pride aside one night and was able to get into one of the raiding parties. And let me tell you: They label the higher-level difficulties as “Heroic” and “Mythic” for a reason. They are extremely punishing to players who are not accustomed to content at that difficulty. But I pushed through and did obtain my Grove Warden that night. All thanks to Friendship Moose.

    And through Friendship Moose, I was also starting to see the value of Twitch. It isn’t just about “watching someone else play video games.” It’s about bringing people with a similar interest together and forging a community around it. And that had a certain kind of appeal to it.

    Learning to Love Twitch

    By 2019, I found myself watching a few other Warcraft streamers who regularly went live with their adventures in Azeroth. It started to turn into a bit of fun. Getting to watch what other people were doing in the game while participating in chat, and very often playing the game myself on my second monitor. Getting to know the streamer and their community, along with occasionally even getting to play with them, was becoming one of my new favorite things to do in my spare time. I even started branching out into watching people who were doing other things like playing live music, making arts and crafts, programming software, or even just going live to chat with their audience! The Twitch channel that I’ve personally been subscribed to the longest, in fact, is a violinist who not only plays games live, but she’s also well-known for her live music streams playing the electric violin!

    The desire to make an attempt at streaming to my own channel started to grow. I was beyond nervous to do it, though. I would venture to guess that a good majority of the most popular Twitch streamers are people who had established audiences before stepping into streaming. Mostly celebrities or popular YouTubers. If this wasn’t the case, then it’s likely that they grew their audience on Twitch from before the platform became completely oversaturated with ambitious new streamers that also want to get in it for the “big bucks.” Or… They just have an amazing skill or talent to draw people in. I was none of these things, though. I am just some dude who likes to play video games and vibe with fun people. Why would anyone bother turning on my channel? Nobody even knows who I am!

    A moment clipped from one of my Palia streams, currently on my YouTube and TikTok channels!

    But also… Nobody knows who I am. That weirdly made the concept less daunting. It wasn’t like going on the air and immediately being in front of several hundred people. There weren’t going to be a lot of people watching me right away, so it provided me a little bit of a safe space to figure out exactly what the vibes were going to be like for my channel. Nevertheless, thanks to my little gaming family and the various connections I had made on Twitch before streaming for myself, I was still able to reach Twitch Affiliate status by September 2019.

    That was the exciting first step. It meant that viewers could start supporting me and my channel monetarily with a small subscription fee or by donating with “bits,” a type of currency you can purchase on Twitch with the sole purpose of using them to boost your favorite streamers. It’s also your first little bit of recognition from the platform that you’ve acquired at least 50 followers and an average of 3 concurrent viewers. To obtain the status of Twitch Partner and get the coveted purple checkmark next to your name (among other nice benefits), you have to do even more.

    Overcoming Anxiety

    I’m still not a Twitch Partner. I still don’t even have much in the way of a regular audience. There’s a handful of pals that I’ve made on the platform over the years that will swing by occasionally to hang with me and the family, but I still generally find myself with less than 10 viewers during any given stream. And I’ll be honest with you: That used to hurt a lot. Sometimes I would get depressed and even give up on streaming for long periods. My brain gremlins would rationalize the hiatuses by saying that hardly anyone would miss my content anyway. But I still eventually found my way back to it. I always missed the community and the connection that wasn’t there when I strayed.

    When you suffer from generalized anxiety like I do, you know that those brain gremlins are always trying to make you believe the worst about yourself. And while sometimes they do manage to prevent me from showing my face on camera, it’s never permanent. Strangely, being live on Twitch has been a practice that has helped me become more comfortable with myself and more confident with public speaking. And in the process, I’ve also learned to stop stressing about the numbers. I would love for more people to discover my content and join us in the fun. And who wouldn’t love to build their entire career around it? But right now, I’m just having fun with it and enjoying the company of the 2 – 8 people who do join me on a good night. And if I manage to snag a new follower or earn a little pocket change at the same time, then that’s just a bonus.

    You Should Stream, Too!

    A question that often emerges in streamer communities is whether someone is “cut out” to be a streamer or not. In my opinion, I always say yes. If you’re interested in giving it a shot, then you should. Go for it! But there are some things that I think a budding streamer should know first:

    • Don’t do it for fame and money!
      It sounds like pretty standard advice, but a lot of people (kids and young adults especially) think that they can jump into the world of streaming or creating videos on YouTube and that it’ll be their express ticket to fame and fortune. There are many Twitch and YouTube channels that cash in some pretty hefty checks, but I would go out on a limb to say that a solid majority of new streamers burn out within a few months. Many of them never get a single viewer. You have to start somewhere, and unless you’re lucky enough to find that famed lightning in a bottle, you aren’t going to start big.
    • Network with other creators!
      You’re going to want some friends and allies in your corner who are in the same place you are. And your fellow creators and their communities are where you’re most likely to find them. Don’t just join in someone’s chat and start inviting people to your own stream. It’s actually considered poor etiquette to mention your stream or content at all unless directly asked. But joining in and making genuine connections with other streamers also increases the likelihood that they will also check out your channel.
    A very corporate-looking man states that "You gotta network to get work baby."
    This guy seems sleazy but he knows what he’s talking about!
    • Be consistent!
      This is the thing that I struggle with the most in almost any of my many projects. Developing a consistent schedule so that your audience knows when to tune in is very important. If you are consistently cancelling streams or your schedule is erratic, viewers might not bother trying to find you. And although yours truly needs to practice what he preaches (I’m the king of variety, honestly), it’s also not always good to stream a variety of different things. Variety might seem like the spice of life, but viewers who have come to watch you play Dead by Daylight might not be interested in sticking around for your crochet crafting stream.
    • Invest in your tech!
      You can stream to Twitch from a cell phone and some gaming consoles, but generally speaking, you’re going to want to go all-in on a decent PC to manage the best possible stream. You don’t need something super high-end, but you’ll likely need to get something with a dedicated graphics card that was made in at least the last 5-10 years, especially if you’re going to be making gaming content. You will need a fast and reliable internet connection. You’re going to need basics like a good microphone, webcam, and some decent lighting. You might also benefit from a few extra peripherals like the Elgato Stream Deck. And you’re going to need to learn how to use a few pieces of software, primarily OBS. And all of that is just scratching the surface! But I strongly recommend not spending a huge fortune until you know that you love and are committed to streaming — just get the basics you can afford to get you up and running first.

    Once you’re past the learning curve, you’ll come to find that streaming can be a lot of work behind the scenes, but can also be a lot of fun and completely worth the effort. And it doesn’t matter who you are or what you look or sound like to be successful. Content creators come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and creeds. To emphasize this fact and to promote diversity, Twitch even offers users membership to what they call “Unity Guilds.” Anyone can be a successful streamer. It all just depends on whether you’re dedicated enough. So to that I say:

    Why not?

    Build your channel and your community. It’s all waiting for you! And be sure to let me know when you do. I’d love to be your first follower. 😉

    🍑
    Hey! You! Yes, you! I used the peach emoji that “the kids” use in place of a butt to get your attention. Are there any Gen Z readers out there who can tell me if I’m doing this right???

    Anyway, Jiggy’s Journal now has an AMA (Ask Me Anything) page! You got 🔥burning questions🔥 for me? Maybe a comment or suggestion? Check out the page here and submit everything that’s on your mind. Afterwards, I’ll respond in a future post!

  • Leave Out All the Rest

    “Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That’s all. The rest is confetti.”
    — Victoria Pedretti as Nell Crain in The Haunting of Hill House by Mike Flanagan.

    In my very first entry here in Jiggy’s Journal, I wrapped things up by briefly touching on being a lonely kid who felt like nobody was interested in befriending. I think this might be my first memory where I felt a sense of social anxiety. My medical records state that I still currently suffer from a “generalized anxiety,” so the idea that it started manifesting as early as kindergarten kinda tracks.

    Although the feeling of not making friends eventually went away, I still spent massive amounts of time as a teen and young adult feeling worried and concerned about what other people thought of me. Even though I am, without question, a nerd at heart, I wasted so many of my younger years trying to mold myself into whatever my version of being “likeable” was. I bought and wore the name-brand clothes, I listened to the music that was popular at the time, and I hung out with people who drank and smoked weed! (I’ll give you a minute to clutch your pearls and collect yourself now.) But I would come home from being out with my so-called friends, and instead of feeling the joy and exhilaration that friendship and a hoppin’ nightlife are supposed to provide, I would sometimes cry myself to sleep instead. I would wake up with massive headaches, not from hangovers, but from dehydration. I hated trying to keep everybody but myself happy. Then one day, I woke up with that dehydration headache from crying the night before, and it was literally like someone flipped a switch in my brain.

    I didn’t care anymore.

    Which isn’t to say that I didn’t care about my life or my friends and family anymore. I’m an introvert, but I have still always loved meeting new people, chatting and being social, and my close friends and family are the most important thing to me. But I think I was finally developing the tougher skin that I probably should have started out with. I was starting to believe that “quality is better than quantity.” I can’t please everyone I ever meet. There are going to be people who don’t like me. There will be people who are friendly but not your friend. There are going to be people who will both enter and exit your life. And the only person who can best take care of you and your needs is yourself. And that’s okay. I don’t want to go get turnt or do things for “the ‘Gram” and a billion followers anymore. I’ve even recently noticed that I’ve been having far more fun on my Twitch streams since I stopped stressing myself out over the numbers. Yes, social media and creating content on the web are essentially numbers games or popularity contests, but I don’t think fate or the universe or something is going to let it just happen for someone who wants it too bad. Relax. Just find your zen.

    Animated GIF image of Taylor Swift singing "You Need to Calm Down."
    Taylor knows what’s up.

    The problem I’ve been facing in recent years, however, is that I’ve let the “I-don’t-care-what-you-think-of-me” attitude snowball into letting myself match people’s energy. And frankly, that’s not a great way to handle your differences with people who might already be having a bad day. And look, I still don’t care what most strangers on this rock think of me. But I do care what the people I love think of me, and ultimately, getting labeled as “the mean one” was not on my bucket list. So I’ve been trying to remedy things by trying to filter my thoughts a little more, maybe make them sound a little less venomous. I’m trying to remember that kindness makes a world of difference. And that I still love them even when I want to punch them in the throat.

    I have made a lot of social posts regarding how fun my streams have been since I stopped obsessing over follower and viewer counts. Just a few hours ago, I wrote another one in which I paraphrased a quote from The Haunting of Hill House. That same quote about life’s moments just being confetti is prominently featured at the top of this post. I’m not sure what initially made me think of it and then use it, but after I did, I wanted to see if director/producer Mike Flanagan had explained what exactly it was that he meant when he wrote that line for Nell. And boy, did I luck out! Mike explained his entire thought process at length in a post over on his Tumblr blog. At the end of his post, he beautifully explains the following:

    “And it’s about how, outside of our love for each other, the rest is just… well, it’s fleeting. It’s colorful. It’s overwhelming. It’s blinding. It’s dancing. And, if we look at it right, it’s beautiful. But it’s also light. It’s tinsel. It flits and dances and falls and fades, it’s as light as air.

    The rest is the stuff that falls around us, and flits away into nothing.

    It’s the love that stays.”
    — Mike Flanagan on his Tumblr blog.

    And it’s the truth. In the grand scheme of things, the people that I love are what matter the most. We always forget how influential our lives are to others. I still have habits that rubbed off on me from my mother, who has been gone for nearly 25 years now. In a way, her knowledge, her stories, her legacy, and her impact continue and live on through those of us who remember her. She was my mother. I love her completely, and she loved me the same. I can remember her hugging me close and apologizing for our trip to Disney World getting ruined by the torrential rain that had us completely soaked, I can remember the hand-drawn maps she made to guide her way through dungeons in the original Legend of Zelda video game, and I can remember the awesome muffins she used to bake from mixes she got at Sam’s Club. But that’s all the confetti. The brilliant and colorful but fleeting moments of my life that were shared with hers.

    As I get older, I just hope that my family will feel the same way about me. Sometimes I can get upset with them. But while I hope they’ll remember plenty of shiny and sparkly confetti that I’ve sprinkled all over their lives, I hope it’s the love that stays.

  • The Big Buffy Reboot

    If the apocalypse comes… uh, message me on Signal???

    My time these days has mostly been engulfed with doing techie things with my computer and gaming, but did you know that I’m also something of a TV show connoisseur? I think I can pinpoint exactly why it is that I prefer television over film, and it all boils down to a conversation that I had with my sister recently. While working on a bit of writing herself, she had asked me if I ever get sad when a really good story ends. And I do! That’s why I love serialized storytelling like you see on TV—episode after episode usually expands upon the last. And don’t get me wrong: I also love and greatly appreciate standalone movies and stories in other media with firm beginnings, middles, and ends. But at the end of the day, isn’t it a little more exciting knowing that there’s more story yet to come?

    There are plenty of shows that could probably make it into my personal Top 10 Favorite list, but I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had a pretty high-ranking position on that list for 20+ years now. People who have never watched the show often dismiss it as silly and frivolous based on the title alone, but honestly, the only thing you should judge the show on is its use of uh… Questionable special effects, especially in its early seasons. The show is built around the central character of Buffy Summers (played by the remarkably underrated Sarah Michelle Gellar), who is the latest young girl chosen by fate to fight against vampires, demons, and other nasty monsters that lurk in the darkness. Joining her in the show’s cast is her mentor, Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), and an evolving cast of friends, family, allies, and enemies alike, played by Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Charisma Carpenter, David Boreanaz, Seth Green, James Marsters, Eliza Dushku, Emma Caulfield, Marc Blucas, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Amber Benson.

    The Buffy cast reunited for Entertainment Weekly in 2017. From left to right: Amber Benson, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Emma Caulfield, Alexis Denisof, Charisma Carpenter, Seth Green, David Boreanaz, Sarah Michelle Gellar, James Marsters, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Kristine Sutherland. Below: Joss Whedon.
    The Buffy cast reunited for Entertainment Weekly in 2017. From left to right: Amber Benson, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Emma Caulfield, Alexis Denisof, Charisma Carpenter, Seth Green, David Boreanaz, Sarah Michelle Gellar, James Marsters, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Kristine Sutherland. Below: Joss Whedon.

    Pre-dating teen girl fantasy vampire dramas like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, Buffy was ahead of its time and the curve. The show’s writers brilliantly used its supernatural theme as a metaphor for the horrors of high school and adult life in later seasons. For example, in a first-season episode, a fellow student of Buffy’s feels so ignored by her peers that she literally becomes invisible. After going off to college, Buffy’s first roommate is so annoying that she turns out to be—surprise!—a vile demon. The ultimate metaphor that the show employed throughout its seven seasons was a second-season arc in which Buffy’s ensouled vampire boyfriend loses that soul and reverts to his wholly evil and murderous persona after sleeping with Buffy for the first time. Raise your hand if you have ever had an ex turn into a massive jerk at perhaps your most vulnerable moment!

    The show fit into the supernatural and horror genre perfectly, but for these reasons, its storytelling was also surprisingly relatable and compelling, and perfectly encapsulates why it’s still relevant and beloved by its cult following to this day. It should come as no surprise, then, that series star Sarah Michelle Gellar is planning a return to the role in a series revival in development at Hulu. The new series is being spearheaded by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, Poker Face writers Nora and Lilla Zuckerman, and executive directors from the original Buffy include Gail Berman, Fran & Kaz Kuzui, and Dolly Parton—yes, that Dolly Parton!—with her company Sandollar. Thankfully, the show’s original creator, Joss Whedon, is not involved with the revival after facing a boatload of misconduct allegations in 2021 from numerous Buffy cast members and his own ex-wife.

    The thought of the big Buffy reboot has me feeling two disparate emotions: over-the-top excited and grimly nervous.

    Sarah Michelle Gellar talks about the Buffy reboot on Access Hollywood.

    Excitement because… of course I want more of the Buffyverse! Is that even a question? The fictional world that was built in Buffy and its spinoff, Angel, honestly lends itself to infinite expansion. Even as early as 2003, when it was reported that Gellar was leaving the show after its seventh season and that the series was effectively ending, there were reports of additional spinoffs in development that could continue the story of a few other popular characters. Those spinoffs never happened. It is not even the first time a revival of the show has been planned. Back in 2018, before the allegations against him came out, it was reported that Whedon was moving forward on a reboot with TV writer Monica Owusu-Breen, who had worked with him on Marvel Television’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series. That reboot never materialized either. But the hunger for more from this world is real, and the fact that it could happen very soon has me delighted.

    There’s a great deal of trepidation on my part as well. It’s common knowledge now that Hollywood has produced a mixed bag of revivals, remakes, reboots, etc. Another one of my favorite series, Gilmore Girls, got a revival with a four-part miniseries on Netflix back in 2016, and feelings on it were middling at best. While it was lovely to step back into the show’s world again, the story left a lot of fans questioning why they bothered. If Buffy receives similar treatment, it would be enormously disappointing. I’m cautious, but optimistically so after Gellar’s recent remarks. Over the years, she has also been understandably wary about returning to the role of Buffy, but Zhao was the one who changed her mind.

    “Every pitch I heard was just like, ‘Let’s just do Buffy again.’ Why?” Gellar said to Elite Daily last month. “But the passion that [Zhao] came to me with, what she wanted to do with the show and the character, and why Buffy is needed now — it was the first time where I thought, ‘OK, there’s a reason.’”

    And frankly, in Sarah Michelle Gellar, I trust, so I think it’s time to put on our stylish but affordable boots and pick up those stakes again, friends.

  • Server Shutdown

    The past several months have been a rollercoaster for dabbling in tech!

    As most of you know now, I completed my Responsive Web Design certification over on freeCodeCamp back in January. I knew a little bit about designing static web pages with HTML and CSS from my younger days trying to make my LiveJournal or MySpace pages much more stylized, but there were a lot of new concepts that I wasn’t familiar with. I still struggle a little when it comes to Flexbox and positioning things exactly where I want them, but I got through the course and I felt really accomplished. So much so that I wanted to start building right away, so I coded my own website, started blogging again, and even started my own web server! You can read more about that and the trouble I’ve had with it over here.

    Coding my website and watching it evolve as I learned more CSS tricks and even a small bit of JavaScript was a lot of fun and very educational. I completely understand now when seasoned pros at this stuff say that the best way to learn is by doing it independently. I also love blogging, writing, and creating content on the web. Even though my websites seem to change and vary and eventually disappear over time when I decide to start fresh or whatever, I’ll probably always have something similar somewhere on the internet. But let me be the first to tell you that installing and maintaining an instance of Ghost (the platform that powers this blog) was a struggle. Especially for someone with little to no knowledge of how the command line works. I’ve learned the whole process of cloning and pushing projects to GitHub, but that’s about it! What do you mean I have to make and move directories? What do you mean I have to edit a configuration file and set up my own transactional emails? What do you mean I have to expose ports on my server for things to work? That sounds dangerous!

    Jennifer Lawrence on Hot Ones painfully asking what someone means.
    I’m equally confused, J. Law.

    With each new update of Ghost, I wound up breaking things and then spend hours trying to fix it. I had to uninstall and then reinstall the software three separate times. And don’t misunderstand me — Ghost is incredible. It is, by far, the best blog and email newsletter platform that I have ever used. And I’ve dabbled with quite a few over the years. The problem was me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I think that I bit off more than I could chew. I guess, by my flawed logic, I thought that managing my own personal server and hosting a bunch of different little things made me more of a tech enthusiast. In some ways, it kinda did. I learned quite a few new things. I even spun up an instance of Flarum to create a sort of chat forum on that server, which was a lot of fun and I really liked it, even though only one other person ever joined. I also wanted to spin up some wiki software for my family to privately use for important documents and information. But constantly breaking things and then spending hours trying to research the necessary fixes got tiresome really quickly.

    So I scrapped the entire server.

    Subscribe to www.jiggyflyjoe.com/!

    I rolled this blog and the www.jiggyflyjoe.com/ website into one and the same and imported it back to Ghost's own hosting servers. And in the process, I feel like I freed up an enormous amount of time. I felt a little like a failure, but I was recently told that most developers don't self-host anyway unless they have to. And honestly, I felt that in my soul.

    The good news is that we’re still here and this publication isn’t going anywhere now that it’s being hosted by the pros instead of me! And I can turn to other solutions for the private wiki, our planned media services, and maybe even still a forum at some point. I really love community building, and I keep telling myself that if I build it, they will come… But for now, if you want to join, you’ll have to join my community on Discord. Which, by the way, I had also been unknowingly giving out the wrong link to that community for years now. This one should actually work if you’re interested. You can also always find it through the Discord icon up at the top of the page and on the contact page! I’m still working on updating it across the board, so make sure you don’t click on any older links for it because it will take you nowhere. Into a scary, dark internet void.

    And we don’t want that now, do we??

  • The Homesick Hoosier

    I used to hate being from Indiana.

    As a kid, I legitimately despised being from and living most of my life in a state that most people have never thought twice about. I grew up in a small, suburban town just south of Indianapolis, and while my childhood was pleasant enough, I had the great misfortune of growing into a weirdo. I was a weird kid, and I liked weird things, and I likely have at least an ounce of the ’tism that made me act and feel very awkward. None of that made me very popular among my fellow Hoosier children. Even though there have been a couple of chapters in my life where I’ve had a solid circle of friends, I’ve never really ever been Mr. Popularity. You know where I did find friends, though? Online. Friends who lived in really fun, exciting, or fancy-sounding places like New York or California, or even foreign countries! England, Australia, India, Sweden, Italy, Japan!

    Cole Sprouse as Jughead announcing that he is a weirdo.
    My condolences to Jughead!

    It’s not too hard to see why this weirdo spent a lot of time dreaming of ways to escape from Indy.

    FedEx Foundations 📦

    I think my perspective started changing around the time I got my job at the Indianapolis International Airport, working for the regional hub of FedEx Express. Back in 2006, I was in my early twenties and pretty much only making beer money flipping burgers. My older brother had been working at FedEx for a few years at that point, so when he suggested putting in an application, I was more than happy to do so! By the way, I wouldn’t normally advise working with family, but he had also mentioned that the facility was pretty massive, so the chances we would actually run into each other while working were kinda slim, so I was chill with giving it a shot. The company took about two months to give me a call back, but once they offered me a job that June, I jumped on it.

    I’ve always been a tiny bit concerned that trading the smell of fries and onion rings on my clothes for jet fuel was probably going to cause me to develop some sort of terminal illness, but it was a trade that I was more than willing to take at the time!

    FedEx was an important chapter for me, though, for a lot of reasons. It gave me my first “adult” responsibility outside of my sheltered little “small-town” life thus far. And some of those responsibilities were big. I started out just sorting packages and rewrapping packages that had broken open upstairs in a conveyor belt “matrix” of sorts that scanned the bar codes on mailing labels and then routed them to their appropriate destinations afterward. But the responsibility seemed to increase tenfold by the time I transferred to a position working outdoors on the ramp. Driving tractor-trailers, pulling long strings of huge aluminum containers filled with sorted packages, and trying not to hit the sometimes actively taxiing multi-million dollar aircraft with any of it in the process. It was stressful, and that wasn’t even half of the job! Those kids (and a few old dogs, too!) who are still out there doing that job, running heavy machinery and loading and unloading aircraft in practically every imaginable type of inclement weather situation, get the highest regards from yours truly. Especially since they’re only doing it for like $16 an hour!

    WRTV 6 in Indianapolis reporting on the Indy Hub, my former stomping grounds!

    I eventually became a “ramp agent,” a title that required me to go through several rounds of interviews and get a decent pay bump. My professional development skills weren’t the only things that grew while I was at FedEx, though. I made friends in my various work groups, many of whom I’m still in contact with and consider some of the best friends I’ve ever had. I attended numerous parties, festivals, concerts, graduations, trips out of state, at least four weddings, and two funerals. We did dinners, went out for drinks, had coffee or brunch on Sundays, holiday ugly sweater parties, retro-themed pub crawls, and formed a beer club at Shallo’s (one of Indy’s best hidden gems, by the way!). A few of us even got to join in Super Bowl festivities together during Super Bowl XLVI back in 2012 when Indy played host! These were the days when I felt young and fun and maybe only a little intoxicated.

    I had quite a few personal milestones during this era, too. Since the “Express” division of FedEx operates as an airline, they also used to have a perk where we could purchase standby seats on passenger flights through Southwest and other airlines for ridiculously low prices. Seriously, during a week of PTO, I flew from Indy to Arizona to visit some friends for like $75 round-trip! Is that even possible anymore with today’s prices? It was my first time flying alone, however, so even though I’d been an adult for a few good years, it still felt like a big deal. During this period, I also bought (and paid off!) my first car. It was a 2006 Chevy Impala that needed tons of work done on it after I got it, but it served me well up until the pandemic, when everyone stopped going places. That same Impala is still in the family. We had to tow that bitch all the way to Kansas when we moved, so needless to say, it’s still a hoopty, too!

    “How Cosmopolitan!” 🍸

    As much as I still love and appreciate FedEx for what it was, at the end of my tenure there, I had learned from experience that I’m not supervisor material. I may know the ropes of a particular job really well, but I’m not someone who can execute all of my job functions while also keeping tabs on what everyone else is doing. Nor did I appreciate taking the heat for what others failed to do. So by mid-2014, some friends from outside FedEx started helping me plan my next move, and that meant completely flipping the script.

    In October of that year, I found myself getting employed by a local office that handled drug and alcohol testing for employers. A few good friends who already worked for the company vouched for me when I applied, so it made the hiring process a breeze. I was already acquainted with two of the three people who interviewed me for the job, so it was also the most comfortable job interview I’ve ever completed. And when the HR lady took me around to introduce me to everyone on my first day, it was almost comical that many of my new co-workers had the same response: “Oh yeah, we already know him!” So I went from working overnight with airplanes and boxes to data entry and paper pushing during the day.

    The office was located in a fairly convenient spot in downtown Indianapolis. There was an office kitchen with free coffee! I had my own cubicle and a phone on my desk with my very own extension! And parking was free, which struck me as a rare perk among folks who live and work in urban environments! The first few weeks at this job felt impossibly cool. I was doing a big boy professional job in an office with a computer and a phone and coffee! Isn’t that like the poster image of an American working man? Now I was really living the life! It felt like I was living an episode of Mad Men or something. To put it into perspective, a former FedEx co-worker once asked my brother how I was liking the new job, and after he described all of this to them, they replied with a two-word exclamation:

    “How cosmopolitan!”

    Christina Hendricks in Mad Men giving someone a judgmental glance.
    Literally the rest of the office staff while I was hyping up my new job.

    Throughout my twenties and thirties, and between working at FedEx and in this new office role for a majority of those years, my distaste for Indy started turning into something else. Eventually, I found myself growing fond of it. When big things happened for the city, like hosting the aforementioned Super Bowl or the annual Indy 500, it was a big thing for everyone. You couldn’t help but develop a little bit of pride in being from the Circle City. It was a blast whenever I got the time to get out and about in the city with my pals. I discovered new parts of the town that I didn’t know about before, including the city’s “cultural districts” like Fountain Square, the Wholesale District, and Broad Ripple Village. These are the places you could find most of Indy’s vintage, artsy, and independent restaurants, shops, and entertainment venues. Who doesn’t love the opportunity to shop at Silver in the City or go party at The Vogue? That honestly describes some of the weekends I’ve had in Indy.

    Indianapolis is extremely underrated by the rest of the country. The entire state is often overlooked as “flyover country” to most of the population on the coasts. Honestly, I can kinda see why. Indiana is well-known for its miles and miles of corn and soybean fields. But it was also a really special place that is growing and creating its own cultural identity. Areas of the city, like Fountain Square, were being revitalized and were slowly moving away from being the kinds of places my family used to worry about me getting stabbed at. Buildings that were previously abandoned and run down were being transformed into funky spaces with stories to tell. A cross-section that mirrors Indy’s own mixture of young and hip with classic elegance and rural simplicity.

    I wound up moving away from Indiana in early 2023. That was when we decided to join my sister, her husband, and their son out here in small-town Kansas. Two years later, I’m still trying to find my appreciation for this different kind of lifestyle. Moving so far away has allowed me to grow and spread my wings in different ways. And I love being closer to my family, and the convenience of being able to see them whenever I want is paramount, especially as the world grows weirder and more frightening every single day. But Indiana will forever be my home. I miss it deeply. It’s the place that raised me.

    And I would kill for just a slice from Jockamo Pizza right about now!

  • We’re Not Alone

    “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”
    — Arthur C. Clarke

    Looks like we might not be alone in the universe!

    In case you missed it, scientists at the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy last week discovered the first hints of an alien world being potentially inhabited. And it’s not that far from Earth.

    The planet in question is currently called K2-18 b, and it’s only about 124 light-years away. Don’t get me wrong, 124 light-years is still a pretty big hike, but to put it in perspective, our Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across. In cosmic terms, that’s like walking a few city blocks to visit your favorite coffee shop. The possibility of there being a planet that’s teeming with life that is that close to us could be huge. Especially when you consider that we’re just now detecting light and the potential biosignatures from over a century ago. How far could life or even a potential civilization evolve in that timeframe?

    Max Evans (Jason Behr) points his finger toward the sky when asked where he's from.
    Max was from up north, right??

    As a self-proclaimed “nerd,” I’ve watched, read, and played through endless sci-fi titles. While I tend to prefer the Star Trek adventures to those from the Star Wars franchise, there’s a lot of other stuff out there that I’ve loved, too. Roswell was one of my favorites in high school. The OG, of course, but the CW’s attempt at a reboot was decent from what I saw of it, too. Last year, my brother also finally got me to sit down and watch the remade Battlestar Galactica from 2004, and I completely understand now why it ranks on so many people’s “best of” lists. I love it and can’t believe I didn’t watch it sooner. Joss Whedon’s short-lived “space western” Firefly and its film continuation are big favorites in our home, too. I’ve also played and loved No Man’s Sky, Stellaris, and The Outer Worlds, the latter of which I still need to complete one day.

    These are all sagas that take place in space or adjacent to space and feature intelligent lifeforms from other worlds. Sometimes these lifeforms are allies, and sometimes they are adversaries. No matter which angle the story in question decides to take, it’s given me a lot to question and seriously consider over the years. If and when we make first contact with an alien species, how exactly will things go? If they do exist, which seems incredibly likely now, why haven’t they found us yet? There are a few popular theories, and I have thoughts.

    Why should we be terrified?

    I don’t want to be accused of being a fear-monger or anything, but there are plenty of reasons to be terrified about the universe and what could be out there.

    Before venturing further into popular theories, I think we have to first consider something called the “Fermi Paradox.” In 1950, an Italian-American physicist by the name of Enrico Fermi posed the question, “But where is everybody?” That question highlights a discrepancy: the idea that advanced intelligent life in other areas of the universe is highly likely and that it should therefore be extremely common for us to detect it. Yet… we haven’t. Why is that?

    The Great Filter

    In 1996, economist and author Robin Hanson proposed the “Great Filter” theory as an explanation for the Fermi Paradox. The Great Filter suggests a hypothetical event or barrier that prevents intelligent life from advancing too far into the cosmos. It takes into account that, yes, intelligent life on other worlds is probable, but somewhere in their evolutionary advancement, something is making it improbable or maybe even fatal for them to achieve interstellar travel or communication. Perhaps advanced civilizations do arise on other planets, but are always doomed to destroy themselves.

    The big question about the Great Filter is this: Is it behind us, or yet to come? Some argue that abiogenesis, the process where life emerges for the first time, could be where the Great Filter falls in the evolutionary chain. That would mean that we’re past the hard part, and could explain that it’s actually rare for any life beyond microbes to form elsewhere in the universe. We were the exception, and amazing discoveries could still be in our future!

    But… what if the Great Filter is yet to come? It could mean that we still have yet to reach a step in the process that any other advanced civilization didn’t survive. And we may not either.

    The Dark Forest

    Another theory, and perhaps the most chilling to me personally, is that of the “Dark Forest.” Even though the concept predates its publishing, this theory derives its name from the 2007 novel The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (the second book in a series that inspired a popular show on Netflix). It suggests that perhaps there are many advanced, spacefaring civilizations in existence, but they are all silent and hostile. They maintain their cloak of obscurity because they are already aware of others and fear their destruction if detected.

    Sci-fi author Greg Bear, describing this concept as a “vicious jungle” prior to its Dark Forest designation, wrote in his 1987 novel The Forge of God that the human species and its broadcasts into outer space are similar to a baby crying in a hostile forest filled with hungry wolves. “We’ve been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that’s why,” one character explains in the novel.

    Similar to the Dark Forest theory is the “Berserker Hypothesis,” also known as the “deadly probes scenario.” I tend to find this hypothesis considerably more unlikely than the Dark Forest theory above, but it does still provide an entirely compatible explanation for the Fermi Paradox. The Berserker Hypothesis, which is named after Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker novel series, suggests that we have yet to detect intelligent life elsewhere in the universe because it has all been or is currently being systematically destroyed by a series of lethal, self-replicating probes. Could it just be a matter of time before Earth is visited by such a probe?

    A few things in my mind when thinking about malicious machinery are not just the origins of the Cylons and their nefarious “plan” for humanity in Battlestar Galactica, but also the emergence and current prevalence we are seeing with AI and robotics here in real life. Could the creation of such technology lead us to eventual ruin? Will ChatGPT or Copilot one day take over Earth?

    Tell me those aren’t some terrifying explanations for the Fermi Paradox!

    The Zoo Hypothesis

    Another one of the many explanations for the Fermi Paradox is the “Zoo Hypothesis.” While not quite as terrifying as the Dark Forest, it’s still a doozy that could have many different outcomes. This one suggests that extraterrestrial life may be common and is already very aware of us here on Earth. They have already observed us and are intentionally avoiding contact. As if the entire planet is a large wildlife preserve or zoo for them.

    The first handshake between a human and a member of the Vulcan race in Star Trek: First Contact.
    Earth and Vulcan unite!

    There could be a few different explanations. For example, in the fictional future that Star Trek inhabits, the good guys in Starfleet are supposed to abide by a rule they call the “Prime Directive.” This prevents them from prematurely interfering with the natural evolution and development of alien civilizations. The aim is to prevent any unprepared race from being introduced to advanced technology, knowledge, or values before they are ready. Typically, once a civilization has demonstrated its ability to achieve faster-than-light travel or subspace communications, they were deemed ready to make “first contact” with Starfleet. The franchise’s best feature film (in my humble opinion, of course) is 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact, which depicts the iconic crew of the Starship Enterprise-E travelling back in time to prevent their cybernetically-enhanced nemesis, the Borg, from halting humanity’s historic first warp-capable flight—an event that eventually leads to first contact between humanity and their famed allies, the Vulcans.

    As you have probably surmised by now, the Zoo Hypothesis also has some darker applications. For example, a variant of the hypothesis includes one called the “Laboratory Hypothesis,” which was developed by former MIT Haystack Observatory scientist John Allen Ball. That variant posits that humanity is being actively subjected to experiments and that our planet is serving as one single laboratory. It’s totally possible in this scenario that the experiments are also for the greater good of our species, but honestly, the idea just makes us sound like a bunch of lab mice, doesn’t it?

    But there’s also hope!

    There are obviously a lot of reasons why we should be terrified of the existence of alien life. And none of the aforementioned theories even have to do with aliens just showing up and immediately deciding to exterminate us, Independence Day-style. Think too long and hard about these ideas, and you’ve definitely entered into nightmare fuel territory.

    But listen—hope springs eternal and all that. So I also want to share some solid reasons why the discovery of intelligent life in the cosmos could actually be really great news. Assuming any advanced civilization were to make contact tomorrow and extend their hands (or tentacles??? 🤷) in friendship, we could possibly benefit from all of the following:

    • Advanced Knowledge!
      Even a tiny glimpse at alien science could propel us hundreds or thousands of years ahead of where we currently are in our own scientific and technological communities. I’m talking interstellar travel, medical miracles, clean energy, and even solutions to climate change, poverty, and world hunger. The possibilities would be endless.
    • Paradigm Shifts!
      Science and technology wouldn’t be the only areas of our society to be touched by alien life. Discovering proof that we’re not alone in the universe would lead to colossal changes both psychologically and spiritually. How would world religions integrate this new knowledge into their belief systems? Would humanity embrace a sense of comfort knowing we’re no longer isolated?
    • Galactic Peace!
      If an advanced alien race chooses to make contact with Earth, it stands to reason that they may also have discovered the key to overcoming violence and greed themselves. They could provide us with the ability to do the same.
    • Unified Earth!
      Once we’re presented with undeniable evidence that something bigger than us really exists, maybe we could finally push ourselves to unite as one. And then maybe the idea of a United Federation of Planets isn’t too kooky anymore.
    • Cultural Evolution!
      Being influenced by a foreign culture could conceivably revolutionize our own. Language, art, music, ethics, and the understanding of life as we know it could change overnight.

    Personally, I’m thrilled to learn more about K2-18 b as scientists continue their investigation. You could probably say that I’m cautiously optimistic about what we could find. Described as an “ocean planet,” it seems pretty likely that any organisms living there are probably microbes, or what we might consider marine life at best. But there could also be forms of intelligent life there that we just can’t imagine yet.

    Let’s just hope they keep the space rays at home!

  • A Love That Lingers

    Last night, I saw a ghost.

    The idea of ghosts has actually been on my mind a lot lately. I’ve been reading Trap Line by Timothy Zahn, a short story I found on Kindle that revolves around one engineer’s ability to “project” a ghostly apparition of himself across vast distances and makes first contact with aliens. I’ve also been listening to a lot of P!nk on Spotify while my sister and I continue our obsession with Palia. Recently, while reminiscing on a quest I had done for two of the game’s characters involving their mine potentially being haunted, the song “When I Get There” played, which is a beautiful and bittersweet song P!nk wrote as a letter to her late father in heaven. Today, my older brother told me, during a conversation about UFOs, that while he’s never seen an alien or a likely UFO, he is convinced that he’s seen a ghost. And lastly, I’ve mentioned a dozen or so times that Jiggy’s Journal is a blog and email newsletter publication powered by a platform incidentally called Ghost.

    Needless to say, my vision last night could have just been light and shadow playing tricks on my fairly vulnerable psyche. Maybe this is all just coincidence? But I’m thinking not after last night.

    “When I Get There” by P!nk.

    Kitten Season 🐈

    To tell the complete story, I need to bring you with me back to the summer of 2016. I was torn when my Dad came to me with a proposal: a friend of a friend of his in Kentucky had two kittens that were only a few weeks old, no longer wanted them for whatever ridiculous reason she gave them instead of “the novelty wore off,” and was simply going to dump them on the street if she wasn’t able to find a new home for them swiftly enough. “Do you want these kittens?” Dad asked, knowing very well that I wasn’t going to let two kittens get dumped on the street as an alternative. “Do I have a choice?” I asked him, looking at him like he were completely nuts.

    I had little time to deliberate whether or not I was okay with forcing Tigger, who was my one and only pet at the time, to adjust to a more chaotic living situation with what amounted to two new babies in the mix. There were also a lot of adjustments to be made on our end in order to accommodate them. Including, but absolutely not limited to, kitten-proofing the house. We even bought a small dog crate to put them in at night when we slept because I was fearful that one of us might squish one of them on our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. (Don’t worry—two nights into having them at home, they were completely free to roam the house at all hours. I couldn’t listen to them cry!) But I wound up deciding to take them anyway. Because, honestly, who says no to sharing their home with kittens?

    Then, one weekend in June, Dad brought home the two adorable little furballs of joy. I didn’t know quite enough about cat biology this early into our journey with cats at home and wrongfully assumed that one of the kittens was a calico—a type of cat that is tricolored and almost exclusively female—due to him being mostly white with patches of gray tabby stripes in places. That explains why my nephew and I had initially given them the Star Trek-inspired names Curzon and Jadzia. We felt that they were highly unique names for kittens, but in retrospect, felt a touch too nerdy when my co-workers wound up needing a pronunciation after seeing my updates on social media. After learning at their first vet check-up that Jadzia was actually a boy, their names were quickly changed to what we know them as today: Rufus and Oliver.

    Only about a month later, on what was easily one of the saddest nights of my entire life, Dad and I took a trip to the emergency vet with Oliver in tow. In the few hours up until that point, he had rapidly grown remarkably ill. So rapidly that it almost felt as though someone had flipped a switch in him. He had gone from energetic play with his brother to vomiting and was demonstrating an inability to stand or walk on his own. Dad could tell from his labored breathing simply sitting on the exam table that he was already suffering, and I did not want to subject him to further testing or procedures that they weren’t even sure would help him. Ultimately, as extraordinarily painful as it was for me, I said a tearful goodbye and chose the only humane thing left to do.

    The only photo that exists of me with Oliver.
    The only photo that exists of me with Oliver.

    I was profoundly heartbroken. The veterinarian, who remained very kind and compassionate throughout the entire ordeal, had told us that it was likely that Oliver had been suffering from an underlying disease such as FeLV (Feline Leukemia Virus), and we just didn’t know since he hadn’t been exhibiting any symptoms up until then. It wasn’t our fault, but it didn’t feel that way to me. I was highly upset at the possibility that maybe he had gotten ahold of and eaten something that he shouldn’t have. I was also wildly fearful that his illness could have been spread to Tigger or Rufus, which resulted in us taking them to two different vets to be tested for FeLV and other diseases known to affect cats. Thankfully, except for Tig’s constantly recurring issue with ear mites, they both checked out to be perfectly healthy. Thus, the world spun madly on…

    The Bond That Lives On 💖

    Even though Tigger and Rufus received clean bills of health, I was still uneasy about them. Especially when it came to the youngest of the two. Oliver had technically been the only constant presence in Ruf’s life up until then. The way that Rufus constantly searched for his brother in those first few weeks without him made my heart hurt to watch. Sometimes, I think that animals have a better awareness of emotions and the world we live in than we do, but this was one instance in which I wish that I could have somehow given him the ability to say goodbye.

    I consider myself a “crazy cat guy.” I love all three of my kitties, including my old man Tigger and our more recent addition, Cinnamon. They are practically my children. They are, without question, the loves of my life. But my bond with Rufus is special. The day we came home with Oliver’s empty carrier, I made a promise to Ruf that I would always love and take care of him. Now that he didn’t have his brother to confide in or to protect him, I felt like he was going to need a little extra love. While still painfully shy and could be considered the very definition of a “scaredy cat,” Rufus has been my best friend. He sleeps every night right beside me. And he has a way of always finding me when I need him. That old cliché about rescued pets rescuing their owners instead is true in a lot of ways between us. I tell my father constantly that Rufus is the best gift he ever gave me.

    Perhaps the recurring theme of ghosts visiting us was what set the stage for last night’s encounter. I’ve been up late gaming, tooling around with my website or server, and launching my new public forums (which you should totally join!) a lot lately. Last night was no different, until I walked into the kitchen to grab another soda and caught, out of the corner of my eye, what looked like a white-ish colored cat sitting in our living room. I had to do a double-take, and even after taking a second look, I still thought the cat was sitting there. It wasn’t one of the others either, since they were all accounted for. It took completely glancing away and then back to the same spot again before the realization set in that no cat was sitting there and likely never had been. It was alarming, but after thinking about it from a few different perspectives, I’m convinced…

    Oliver had paid me a visit that night.

    I’m still uncertain as to why, but I do have a few theories. The first is that I’ve been dwelling a little on my own mortality. I’m still just learning at the ripe old age of 40 how to code/program and actually develop an understanding of how computers work. You see, I thought that gaining these skills might make me more employable, but I’m also aware that I’m getting into an age bracket that makes companies think twice. I’m also facing the unfortunate truth about how difficult it is to make friends as an adult. I’m an introvert, so it was already pretty hard, but trying to find time to “hang out” just isn’t a top priority for people who juggle multiple jobs and/or take care of children. Almost everyone else my age has a mortgage and grandchildren. It’s probably why the only other people I still know in this town outside of my family are retail co-workers that I don’t even work with anymore. Whatever the case may be, I think Oliver’s appearance last night—whether it was actually him from beyond or just a personal spiritual experience—means a couple of things.

    It was a reminder of him being one of my babies, as brief as it was. It’s a reminder of how much I love my family and my other cats. It’s a reminder of my hometown back in Indiana and the friends I still have there. And the friends that I make going forward. I’m choosing to believe that the significance of Oliver’s spirit being felt nearby means something. These connections never truly fade away, despite time or distance. Love transcends physical boundaries.

    My grandmother passed away in 2011, but I still recall having a serious conversation with her during one of the major holidays before her death. I told her about how the days leading up to holidays like that one made me incredibly anxious. I knew that I was going to see distant relatives that I rarely saw throughout the rest of the year, and I would be socially inept. But it never shook out that way because when the day actually came around, striking up a conversation with everyone wasn’t difficult at all. It was always as if no time had passed between any of us. And she told me that’s just what it’s like with family. My grandma, my late mother, and even little Oliver all remind me that love is maybe the only thing that lasts forever.

    And forever is a pretty long time.

  • Tech Trouble

    I have been in a literal state of PANIC the last few days!

    Since the widespread adoption of the internet in the ’90s, much of our society has developed a very co-dependent relationship with technology. And that relationship only seems to grow stronger as time marches on. It’s not just Snapchat and TikTok-obsessed teens that are driving the demand, either. Businesses large and small, schools and libraries, financial institutions, and even our government officials now leverage digital tools to complete and keep track of sales transactions, provide informative and educational material to the public or to their students, and communicate with or keep tabs on allies and enemies alike. And hey, don’t tell me you aren’t looking forward to streaming the latest episode of Yellowjackets every damn week. (I know that I am!!!)

    Key art for the Showtime series Yellowjackets.
    Key art for the Showtime series Yellowjackets.

    Staying connected is a necessity now for people all over the world. Yours truly is no different. And I had two major scares the past few days! Fortunately, they are both lessons learned and can perhaps serve as cautionary tales.

    Server Trouble⚙️

    As I’ve mentioned before, one of my latest pet projects has been building and tinkering with my own little web server. This publication and Ghost, the software that powers it, are hosted on said server. I’ve also used the server to host my website and started trying to throw up some other fun projects here and there. One of the projects that I was going to spin up was an instance of Nextcloud, a service that functions similar to Google Drive, only it’s completely private, under your oversight, and out of the hands of a mega-corporation.

    The problem is that Nextcloud seems only willing to operate with an Apache server, while my server has solely been using Nginx. There do appear to be ways to make both of those things play nicely with one another on the same server, but it involves a good bit of technical know-how to change which ports the two are listening to on said server and, to be honest, I don’t know that I was doing it right. Plus, I was having difficulty getting Apache to start up at all while Nginx was running simultaneously. So, after several days of trying to tinker with things to get them just right, I finally threw up my hands and hastily decided to just completely uninstall Apache, Nextcloud, and all of their modules. All of it. Every single bit. Gone. Scrubbed. Done. It can be a project for a future version of me to figure out.

    An animated GIF of a computer displaying an ERROR warning.
    Computer errors are infuriating!

    Later on that evening, I went to click on my bookmark to access the backend of this very blog only to find that it was serving up an error message. “Um, what??” were the immediate words out of my mouth. I didn’t recall having uninstalled or otherwise messed with any settings or files associated with Ghost. The entire clean-up spree of that mess was isolated to only Apache and Nextcloud. So I consulted my trusty sidekick, the internet, and eventually discovered that in the process of removing Nextcloud and all of its modules from the server, I also uninstalled the MySQL database that stores all of the content on Jiggy’s Journal. That meant that every single post, page, photo, link, settings, design options, and even my list of subscribers were all gone. And not just gone! Unrecoverable.

    They were gone gone.

    Thankfully, reinstalling MySQL and enabling Ghost to start working again behind the scenes was an easy process. I also had my subscriber list and the first two posts from the blog backed up from when we moved away from Substack. Most of the settings and design options were also easy enough to get back in the right place. Perhaps my biggest saving grace was that I was able to reconstruct the posts that weren’t properly backed up from the versions that were emailed out to our subscribers. I wasn’t able to save most of the images or reference links that were originally included, but my written text was still available, and I was able to post them back up right away.

    I’m very fortunate that everything wound up being saved after all. But the idea of this publication, which I’m still just starting to get underway, being wiped away without my consent was highly alarming. You may notice some small changes in the blog’s main page and some other areas, but everything should be back in place now. It should also be common knowledge and practice at this point, but the lesson to learn here is this:

    ⚠️ Do NOT update, install, or uninstall files or software unless you have backed things up first!

    This will be something that I do regularly going forward, regardless of how fed up I might be with the server being cantankerous.

    Palia Pains🌿

    I’ve been playing the life-sim video game Palia since early December. I’ve had the game for quite a while, especially since it’s the right price (FREE!), but I didn’t start playing it regularly until December. I was on the lookout for a “cozy” game that I already owned that had some winter or holiday-themed celebrations going on to fit in with what I was going for on my Twitch streams at the time. Palia wound up fitting the bill since they had their “Winterlights” events happening. So, in the process of getting festive, I also wound up getting… Well, a little bit addicted to the game, too.

    I’ve been playing fairly regularly for the past several months. I managed to get my sister, followed by the rest of our immediate family, interested in playing as well. It turns out that when something is this entertaining and the cost of entry is nothing, it’s actually pretty easy to convince people to give it a try! Who knew?

    Palia for Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Official Site
    Key art for the video game Palia.

    Palia has been plagued by many issues lately, however. While the game is widely available for free and very fun and playable, it is still technically in a “beta testing” phase, so finding bugs and other things that are broken is pretty common. Especially since its last update on March 25th, where a large portion of the playerbase is reporting that the game completely crashes when transitioning between areas. I’ve personally experienced the game crashing a number of times myself, but I’ve typically been able to send a report to the developers and then either re-open the game or just move on.

    Things were different today. Something you should know in advance is that my PC has extremely limited storage space left on its hard drive, so a majority of my games and files related to them are stored on a portable hard drive with 4 TB of storage. At some point earlier this evening, while I was in the middle of trying to obtain some in-game resources that I needed for my home plot on Palia, the game locked up on me, indicating that it was about to crash. This time, the game never closed and just sat there doing nothing. I was also having difficulty getting other things to work, so I opted to do a hard restart of the entire computer.

    And then… Nothing.

    The case of my PC lit up like it was starting and the internal fans started running, but my monitors were completely blank. Just a black screen of nothingness. I tried two more hard reboots to see if maybe it hadn’t finished processing something, but nothing was happening. It seemed like my PC was just dead in the water. And that’s when panic set in.

    I don’t have a super high-end computer, but it was a fairly pricey one when I purchased it in 2019. A comparable machine today would be even more expensive. And without my computer, I’m cut off from a wide variety of things that are currently sustaining me. I would no longer be able to effectively stream to Twitch or YouTube, I wouldn’t be able to access and write to this blog/email newsletter or any of the rest of my server or web projects, I wouldn’t be able to continue my developer education at freeCodeCamp, I wouldn’t be able to game with friends or family online anymore, and my ability to continue the ever-frustrating search for a job or source of revenue would be extremely limited. Sure, I still have a laptop and my smartphone with which I could use to access information and perhaps “stay in touch,” but neither of those devices has the necessary power or capacity to do these things efficiently.

    An animated GIF features LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge looking very serious and crossing his arms.
    Enterprise Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) has some serious questions for me.

    However, my nephew saved the day when he was able to get my PC back up and running. I often jokingly refer to him as our “Chief Engineer.” This is because he’s a genius at networking and getting our devices to power on. I love and am learning about software and web development, but hardware issues are kind of my blind spot. Plus, he’s also a fellow Trekkie, so bestowing him a starship-related title feels appropriate. He recalled that computers can sometimes have issues if they’re trying to process too much information at startup, so he started unplugging various USB devices from the machine. That turned out to be the trick! My PC started up immediately. I thought it would be smooth sailing from here on out!

    Nope!

    Things weren’t fixed yet. Upon going to sign back into Palia to try and finally get my game objectives completed, I was surprised to find that Steam didn’t seem to think that I even had the game installed. In fact, numerous titles from my collection were missing. All titles that were installed on my external 4 TB hard drive! Eventually, I discovered that the drive wasn’t being recognized by Windows at all anymore and, upon unplugging it from my system entirely, it had no more issues restarting properly. After a few more hours of troubleshooting and running Western Digital‘s diagnostic tools, I believe the crux of this issue is that my PC was in the middle of a read/write process with Palia on my external drive when it seized up on me. It was likely my hasty decision to do a hard reboot that broke things and left the drive in an error state. I also recall having Windows Update download new drivers for Western Digital devices a couple of nights ago as well, but I’m not sure if it played a hand in my dilemma at all.

    After the diagnostics determined that the drive was still okay and healthy, Windows started recognizing it again and everything was good in the long run. Also, I could have lived without the drive if necessary. It would have sucked, because it was FOUR TERABYTES of storage that contained a lot of game data, but I could do some organizational gymnastics and reinstall whichever game titles were necessary. No big deal. Thankfully, now it seems that I won’t need to. So the next lesson we can all learn here from my stupidity is:

    ⚠️ Do NOT reboot your system or disconnect drives or devices from it while it is still processing!

    This is also now something that I will keep in mind moving forward. I hope that all of you have learned something new as well! 🫠