💾 Archived View for quasivoid.net › gemlog › 2021-05-03-zetsubou-zetsubou.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I'm throwing myself a pity party in this one. I expect no sympathy. This state of affairs is entirely my fault.
On the seventeenth of April, I wrote about my non-success attempting college full-time after having involuntarily taken some college classes during high school. In this post, I wrote about my downward spiral from having a something of a grip on things to having to drop most of the classes I started with, in direct consequence of having not given these classes the respect they require for me to be successful in them.
The last class I am still in this semester is trigonometry. I had taken, and failed, trigonometry before when I had to take it at the college as my high school did not have a teacher for it during my final year. Now, I am about to fail it again, and have missed the withdrawal date believing I could make it. I now doubt it.
Three punches to the face later and I'm hit with a dilemma. I am holding a D, and have a series of due dates followed by a test approaching. The workload is fundamentally one that I cannot cognitively handle. I may just be being a little bitch about it and need to man up and get to the grind, but I know the precedent I have set for myself. I am going to try, anyways, but I already know what the outcome will be.
In the event that I fail this class a second time, that is the second F on my academic record, with the bonus that it is +1 attempts at the class towards not being able to attempt it again. At my community college, the maximum amount of times you may attempt a class is three. It is also the case that I do not have the record or background to make it into any other schools.
Whether I make it or not in the end, the future is brought into question. The online environment is incompatible with me. Maybe my laziness or bitchiness is to blame, but I cannot learn anything when the professor decides to dedicate the real class time to "homework questions" and leaves the lectures to prerecorded videos.
Similarly, the monotony of the computer screen is unlike any classroom boredom imaginable. I do not have a problem with external distractions, as I am the distraction. I can work on a problem or read a textbook for a minute, begin to zone out, tangential thoughts are pulled from the depths and I forget that I was doing anything at all. Catch myself five minutes later into my aside and return to work, only to repeat the process after not progressing any further. This is a problem for me which extends beyond academics. There are times where I have to open my work timesheet several times before I can get my hours entered without thoughts beginning to tangent off eachother.
On one hand, my historic precedent, from a freshman in high school to now, has been that I am incompatible with academics. On the other, I have never given it a real shot. People say everything is better after high school, and my first year as a full-time college student (kinda) is in the worst context possible. At the same time, there are so many things I have repeated a cycle of expectation and failure, as I come up with some new way to convince myself I had made some trivial mistake or the conditions were less than ideal. How do I decide to keep trying?
I know there's an out. The only remotely desirable career at the end of a degree path for me is software engineering, and ending up in an enjoyable place on that route anyways is near impossible in todays scene. There's still the trades, or flipping burgers. I've got at least a couple years left before I get kicked out. In my area of suburban hell, learning to drive is a must, but that is my only roadblock towards going another route entirely. I've been considering this again, but I don't believe that I can consider this line of thought to be rational until I've been free of dealing with the higher education pathway for a while.
I hate that I haven't done anything since graduating high school. Somebody reminded me of my age a couple of days ago and I felt panic in my gut as I realized that I have gotten no closer towards any of my goals. I know some people will turn around and claim that it's okay to relax, that you don't need to work to be valuable, but that's an extraordinarily reductive claim and it makes my blood boil. Because without a way forward, I am as good as dead.
Shimeji Simulation is the only manga I keep up with nowadays. It's by the same author as Girls Last Tour, tkmiz (the reference to Girls Last Tour in the previous section was not premeditated and happened purely coincidentally), and there is nothing like it. I've heard it described as "surreal depressive comedy", and that's probably the best description there is. Wonderfully serene, and relatable in an entirely down-to-earth manner. Its' setting is one that makes me wish tkmiz tried their hand at making a walking simulator.
I wrote an IRC bot a while ago which would announce RSS feed updates in an IRC channel, mentioning users who subscribed to that feed. This was how I kept up with Shimeji Simulation for a while. Shimeji Simulation was actually the reason that I wrote the bot in the first place. The RSS feed was provided by MangaDex, and I had the feed filtered on a specific release group and language family.
Unfortunately, MangaDex has been down for a very long time, taking their sweet sweet time to recover from a hacking incident. So both the IRC bot has been mostly disused, and I had to find a new place to read the latest chapter from. There are not very many good places to do this.
Before aggregate sites, like nyaa.si for torrents or MangaDex to read directly from a webpage, you would fetch your releases directly from the release group. Back in the day you could join IRC channels on Rizon and download subtitled anime or scanned manga using (X)DCC.
A website called Baka-Updates keeps track of manga scans and scanlation groups, but doesn't host the scanlations themselves like MangaDex had. I knew I was reading Orchesc/a/ns' scans before, so I found their info page there. Baka-Updates cited their hompage as MangaDex, which was a non-start, but I saw they had a Discord as well. A little bit more annoying for me to use than Rizon, but whatever.
I joined their Discord and browsed their updates channel until I found the most recent chapter of Shimeji Simulation. It looks like they are defaulting to DynastyReader for now.