rskyeauthor

[rskyeauthor]

The Flower, the Black Hole, and the Pompadour

Diary of a Girl Who Clicks Things for a Living

As I often do when I'm finishing my data science projects, I indulged in a bit of magic and turned a bunch of boring looking columns and logs into beautiful graphics which shareholders die for; and as usual there is always a queen of the party, my cherry on top.

It was a gentle seaborn cluster map with lovely colours and a most enigmatic complexion: a blooming flower, or at least what I thought was a flower with soft arcs, gentle loops, a delicate and asymmetrical structure as if nature herself had kissed my scatterplot.

My colleagues disagreed.

One saw a planetary orbit system. Another insisted it looked like a galaxy spiraling into a black hole. And someone else - who I now fear and respect - said he thought it was a guy in a wheelchair with a pompadour; which, now that I think about it, kinda makes sense... kinda...

Regardless of what it was - or wasn't - we all agreed it was a very beautiful surprise (except the Pompadour guy but only for a couple of minutes until he fixed his typo and apologised for the stupidity of his autocorrector).

It had been a rare day where all code ran with virtually no headaches, outputs were straightforward and made sense, and no one - absolutely no one - had any sort of silly complains to make.

It was a very medidative day - if meditation involved Matplotlib and mild GPU anxiety (still waiting for a new laptop).

Sadly all good things must come to an end, and as such we said goodbye to the clients and closed the chapter on this project. Which means I must return to the dreaded department of search engineering...

Back to working with clients who demand the impossible, had zero to no clues about the tools they want us to use and their limitations, misread specs for the simplest of things - yes I'm talking about you ChatGPTed simplified pieces of documentation that even a baby could make sense of - and decide that shouting at us because we can't exerce the power of mind-reading psionic Githzerai upon their beloved data lakes.

"Why isn’t this ranking what I expect?" Because you’ve uploaded a JPEG of a spreadsheet, Sharon. That’s why. “Do we even have enough water to keep the lake alive through summer?” Sharon… it’s a data lake, not Loch Lomond. It doesn’t evaporate when it’s stressed.

Regardless of all this nincompoopness, I do have hope; my team lead is a genuinely decent human being - and secretly a super human - with the power of delfecting client rage like a shield forged in Slack, and has a knack for unearthing sexy machine learning work for me.

So I engage in polite smile exchanges, configure search weights and language, and patiently wait for my next data science flower to bloom.

[rskyeauthor]

These will be going straight from the printer onto my wall

5 Tiny Writing Tips That Aren’t Talked About Enough (but work for me)

These are some lowkey underrated tips I’ve seen floating around writing communities — the kind that don’t get flashy attention but seriously changed how I write.

1. Put “he/she/they” at the start of the sentence less often.

Try switching up your sentence rhythm. Instead of

“She walked to the window,”

try

“The window creaked open under her touch.”

Keeps it fresh and stops the paragraph from sounding like a checklist.

2. Don’t describe everything — describe what matters.

Instead of listing every detail in a room, pick 2–3 objects that say something.

“A half-drunk mug of tea and a knife on the table”

sets a way stronger tone than

“There was a wooden table, two chairs, and a shelf.”

3. Use beats instead of dialogue tags sometimes.

Instead of:

"I'm fine," she said.

Try:

"I'm fine." She wiped her hands on her skirt.

It helps shows emotion, and movement.

4. Write your first draft like no one will ever read it.

No pressure. No perfection. Just vibes. The point of draft one is to exist. Let it be messy and weird — future you will thank you for at least something to edit.

5. When stuck, ask: “What’s the most fun thing that could happen next?”

Not logical. Not realistic. FUN. It doesn’t have to stay — but chasing excitement can blast through writer’s block and give you ideas you actually want to write.

What’s a tip that unexpectedly helped with your writing? Let me know!! 🍒

[rskyeauthor]

Of Clusters and Crises

Diary of a Girl Who Clicks Things for a Living

Given the recent and sobering discovery that my machine is, in fact, a Human Resources laptop [1], I was granted access to the fancy Databricks development environment. The promised land. The chosen cluster. A realm whispered about in Slack messages and onboarding slides.

I arrived full of hope. Great expectations. Gigantic RAM - heavens of it! Speed, elegance, seamless weight updating... the works.

Instead, I was met with betrayal.

No matter what I tried, it refused to update the new weights for my subvariables. I double-checked everything. Re-ran all cells. Rebooted kernels. Weaped softly at the screen like a Victorian widow. But the clusters just... wouldn’t. Cluster. Correctly.

Why are you not using the new weights??? What is wrong with you??? If a bloody HR-grade PDF-scrolling laptop can do it - albeit one eternity later - why can’t you, Databricks? Why???

And so I wasted another day - watching logs scroll, re-reading the same four lines of code like they were tea leaves, whispering sweet nothings to my code, promising convergence and stable gradients...

Nothing. Nada.

My workday ended. The clusters still sulked.

And I decided to be the bigger person. Killed the terminal, shut the lid, and decided to sleep on the matter.

[1] Skye, R. (2024, February). The laptop that time forgot. Tumblr.

[rskyeauthor]

The Laptop That Time Forgot

Diary of a Girl Who Clicks Things for a Living

Work laptop updated itself over the weekend. I came in this morning expecting to do Data Science™. Instead, I did Tech Support Theatre: Solo Edition.

The update somehow broke half my environment: Python gone, packages missing. A project I’ve been building for two months now throws errors like it’s a Greek tragedy.

Spent my morning reinstalling dependencies, trying to run a program I know works... Then another four hours on a call with a very patient colleague, who deserves an actuall decent raise for troubleshooting across eight time zones while I slowly lost my grip on reality.

The culprit?

My laptop is not a developer laptop. It is a Human Resources laptop. It has no GPU. No CUDA support. Not enough RAM. No real will to live.

I’ve been training models on a machine designed to open PDFs and play around on PowerPoint for months!! Oh how I feel my will to live vanish like system resources on a Teams call...

Well, I got it working - eventually - on Linux - barely.

Now I get to email IT and request “a laptop suitable for machine learning tasks,” which will indubitably take six weeks, twelve approvals and a blood pact with Procurement.

Until then, I am just a girl… Standing in front of a sad HP machine… Asking it to please pip install anything.

[rskyeauthor]

"Praise" Be

Diary of a Girl Who Clicks Things for a Living

There’s this new internal platform at work; think LinkedIn, but somehow worse. It’s called something like GlowUp or Gratify - I couldn't tell you actually since I keep instinctively shutting pop ups out of emotional self-preservation.

Anyway...

It’s a system where you can send little public "praises" to your coworkers: virtual head pats, shiny gold stars, participation trophies in corporate prose... You know the kind:

Huge kudos to Sharon for stepping up and leveraging cross-functional synergies during Q2 alignment!

It’s utterly unbearable. A compost pile of self-congratulatory beige people clapping for other beige people. I swore I’d never touch it.

But then today… I got one.

A real one. A non-beige, actually-human one.

Someone - an actual colleague, not a VP with a bullet journal of buzzwords - praised me for my client relationship work. Apparently, I helped keep two big contracts from walking. I don’t remember doing anything revolutionary. I just... listened? Answered emails? Talked like a human being?

Still, reading that little message - "Thanks for your incredible work with the renewals. Clients love working with you, and so do we." - it hit me.

For a brief, shimmering moment, I felt... good. Proud, even. It was getting to my head and I felt myself fluttering with excitement!

And then I remembered: this is all corpo bullshit. The serotonin is synthetic. The praise is pixelated. The gratitude is KPI-aligned. And now I'm just another person who clicked "💖" on someone else's performance-based dopamine drip.

Anyway, I gave them a lovely heart back. Because I’m polite. And because apparently, I’m fully assimilated now.

See you in tomorrow’s GlowBoard or whatever.

[rskyeauthor]

Joy Sullivan, from "Late Bloomer", Instructions for Traveling West

[rskyeauthor]

“If someone treats you badly recognize that there is something wrong with them, not you. Normal people do not go around destroying other people.”

— Unknown

[rskyeauthor]

When the Sun Kissed Good Morning

I was awaken from a tumultuous slumber When the Sun kissed Good Morning In such gentle encounter I fear I would have missed His warming.

[rskyeauthor]

I want the Sun, Moon and Stars

I want the Sun, Moon and Stars, To know how much  I adore you, How much you light My days in unimaginable Ways so sweet and tender I often feel I am  In a dream.

I want the Sun, Moon and Stars, To think of you whenever Love so much as drips From one’s lips,  Love so much as glimpses Through their eyes, Love so much as ignites Their hearts. 

I want the Sun, Moon and Stars, To elevate you to  Godhood, For none in this  Sphere of reality  Comprehends love In the way you make Me experience  Devotion.

[rskyeauthor]

Doing a giveaway for Kinder World's Cottagecore item pack!! 🌺🏡✨

🍄🌿 Participate on my Instagram 🍄🌿

Winner will be announced on Thursday, 18 July. Good luck! 🍀🎉

🍄🌿 About Kinder World 🍄🌿

Kinder World is a free to play, ad-free mobile game for Android 📱 and iOS 🍎 with an artstyle inspired by Studio Ghibli 🎨 and Animal Crossing 🏡

It promotes wellbeing activities such as Emotional Naming 🧘‍♀️, Gratitude Journaling 📔, and a Pause and Breathe activity 🌬️

You can find cozy animal neighbours 🦊🦔 that love speaking with you 🗨️ and explore personal themes of identity, burnout, chronic illness, family tension, and more 🌟

[rskyeauthor]

Pathwords for Kinder World!

Pathwords are game codes that you can enter when Exploring the Woods to receive decorations and free rewards 🌿

Download Kinder World for free 🔗 playkinderworld.sng.link/Dqiel…

Kinder World is a free to play, ad-free mobile game for Android 📱 and iOS 🍎 with an artstyle inspired by Studio Ghibli 🎨 and Animal Crossing 🏡

It promotes wellbeing activities such as Emotional Naming 🧘‍♀️, Gratitude Journaling 📔, and a Pause and Breathe activity 🌬️

You can find cozy animal neighbours 🦊🦔 that love speaking with you 🗨️ and explore personal themes of identity, burnout, chronic illness, family tension, and more 🌟

[rskyeauthor]

My Kinder World inspired bingo

🎉 In the mood for some bingo? Try my Kinder World-inspired bingo!

🌟 Share your bingo results by tagging me! 🌟

🌸 As part of my collab with one of my favorite wellbeing apps, I created this cute little bingo to help you navigate through the app and relax after a long, stressful day.

📝 Some quick notes:

To complete this, you'll need to download the Kinder World app by @kinderworldgame. The app is free to play and does not contain any ads.📲✨ You can download it here or use the QR code below:

Don't have a friend's code to add their flower to your garden? Check Kinder World's Discord (you can find it on their page) for other people's codes. 🌺👥

Happy playing! 🥳🌼

[rskyeauthor]

I'm doing a collab with Kinder World!

I'm doing a collab with kinderworldgame to bring the healing powers of poetry and doodling into your daily selfcare routine! 🌿🍄✒️

🔗Give the app a try here

I downloaded this game almost 1 year ago to help me cope with depression, dissociation and PTSD. It has done wonders for me and I can't be thankful enough to be given the opportunity to share this amazing app with others 💌✨

A Kinder World is a free to play, ad-free mobile game for Android 📱 and iOS 🍎 with an artstyle inspired by Studio Ghibli 🎨 and Animal Crossing 🏡

It promotes wellbeing activities such as Emotional Naming 🧘‍♀️, Gratitude Journaling 📔, and a Pause and Breathe activity 🌬️

You can find cozy animal neighbours 🦊🦔 that love speaking with you 🗨️ and explore personal themes of identity, burnout, chronic illness, family tension, and more 🌟

[rskyeauthor]

Dear soul

Dear soul, Remember to be kind, gentle, understanding, brave. Remember that when the skies grey and the sun shines away, it is you that must brighten the dark.

Dear soul, Forego that fear of standing out, Pride yourself for your uniqueness.

Dear soul, Be proud of who you are.

[rskyeauthor]

I wrote a book!

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am now a published author!! ✨📚

A slice of life, romantic and transformative five-year journey, navigating the depths of depression, overcoming artistic challenges, and finding solace in the therapeutic power of poetry 📝💖🌟

Add illustrations and cover drawn by me! 🎨📖

🔗Find your copy here: https://linktr.ee/rskyeauthor

[rskyeauthor]

To know oneself

To know oneself is to doubt Conventions and expectations, To question actions and repercussions, To ponder heartbeats and the aftermath Of rashness.

To know oneself is To balance Heart and Mind In ways one might Have thought impossible.

[rskyeauthor]

Earning for You

When I turn in bed and feel not your warm embrace, Your scent on the sheets calms my being. 

Just a little longer, Be patient.  I will love you today, Tomorrow, For eternity.