General Updates
It’s Been a Minute
Yeah. I’ve been a bit all over the place the past year or so. Finally had a vacation (no more vacations plz), figured out a lot of cool ways to be a better care-taker, and went hard on the research and ground work for a practical-life project that will be rad if it goes through but is ultimately out of my hands.
Actually, it took me quite a while to recover from the vacation. The taste of freedom is too sweet when you just don’t have it, y’know? But in the end, it inspired some pretty rigorous scheduling changes that worked out to be better for everyone involved. I’ll write more about all of this later.
Items of Note
The comments on this website are still broken. I’m in the process of transitioning from Heroku-hosted Staticman comments to github-hosted Staticman comments. In hindsight, I should’ve done it that way in the first place - as intimidating as all of these head-ass dependencies and dips into spooky command line time have been, the resilience alone would have made it a higher-value endeavor.
The blog portion of this website is going to move over to Substack. I intend to keep local back-ups, but it’s hard to turn down the utility Substack offers - it’s also well-aligned with my “put it where it makes sense” treatment of other types of content. You’ll now be able to subscribe to the mailing list and comment to your heart’s content. I won’t move the old posts to Substack, so it’ll be empty until I have the time to sit down and finish some drafts (there are a lot of drafts).
Because the blog posts will now be hosted externally, I’m motivated to convert the home page here to… basically an RSS feed? It’s a project that’s outside of my comfort zone, but I can’t see why I would want it to run any other way given the circumstances. At the moment, it makes the website feel a little redundant; in the long-term, I’d like to host a comic here - but that’s a discussion for another time. For now, we’ll see if I can’t make this place more sensible to interact with.
Roadblocks
Loosely defined, anyhow.
At the moment, I’m working my way through some internet drama. Don’t worry, it’s not about me. I don’t dip my toes into online spaces very often because I find it immensely difficult to resist the distraction, but also because I tend to have a pretty strong allergic reaction to the social dynamics within them. Frankly, the way that drama bleeds in and then snowballs over time is appalling to me - so I put on my amateur investigator hat and committed to debunking the history of a particular string of drama and escalation in one game community I’ve been adjacent to for a while.
At this point, the project is mostly data entry and organization that’ll be capped off by a presentation that (hopefully) makes it easy for future members of the community to ease off the rage mill gas pedal.
It’s the sort of thing you can’t work on continuously without burning out, so I’m using it as a sort of scaffolding for re-integrating other types of work into my routine around the caretaking. I figure it’ll occupy at least another week or two of my life, and then I’ve got a couple of drafts lined up to talk through my thoughts on this particular type of social phenomenon.
After that, I’ll need to touch some grass. I’ve been struggling to get over the hump with exercise, largely due to weak accessory/stabilizer muscles, so I intend to spend some dedicated time training up. I’m not sure yet how to balance that with the work routine, or if I’ll need to transition back in.
Either way, I think it’s safe to say that new posts here are unlikely for at least a month while these efforts play out - although I may find some time to do some menial tasks to make the website better.