Wow, a long time has passed since I last wrote a blog post, huh? I’m pretty bad at doing this blogging thing. Also I guess maybe a few things happened this past year. Just a few.
Make a New Excuse
Last year, I dared myself to make it “my year.” Specifically, I wanted to focus on personal growth and creativity, and rekindling some of the spark I felt I’d lost over the previous few years.
Overall, this was an effort that saw mixed success. The ol’ mental illnesses are hard beasts to shake, and ultimately I didn’t necessarily accomplish everything I set out to do, but in my own little way I’m chipping away at them.
Music
The big thing that I wanted to get back into was music. This, at the very least, was a resounding success!
Last year I declared that I would be working on 12 in 24, a musical project of once-a-month piano pieces. This ended up working pretty well, although it’s not strictly “finished” as several of the pieces exist only as sketches still, but I’m going to punch those up and then get the whole thing recorded I swear. Even if they don’t strictly hit the internet in 2024, they at least were all (mostly) written in 2024!
But the bigger reason my return to writing music was a success is: I’m composing music for a video game! The Spiral is an indie dungeon crawler with retro-style early-3D (think Quake-era) graphics. It’s a passion project by an old buddy of mine from my NYU days, who’s been developing it solo for a while now. He reached out to me to develop the trailer music, and liked that enough that he brought me on to compose music for the rest of the game too, which was quite an honor. It’s still under development but the goal is to have it finished this year, and a demo is available with several tracks already!
The fact that there is now an actual factual video game with my name in the credits on Steam is very surreal, but very cool.
Blaseball
I’m sad to say that I did very little to pick back up on the old Blaseball projects. One major blow to this was the fact that the app that I used to model the case for the Mlattel handheld was acquired/shut down, so I’m going to have to actually learn Blender if I want to continue with that.
I will say, though, that I do still miss Blaseball and there are some other thoughts that I’ve been working on that are more “inspired by” than directly related. I don’t want to say anything too soon and jinx it but maybe keep an eye on this space.
The Cold War Clock
I think the only major thing that happened on this front was that I found an image that perfectly captures what I envision for the faceplate, so that’s something at least.
Oh, also, I found a CLI for accessing the Plex API which will be good reference for when I want to get it actually playing music.
Other Stuff
I think it’s finally time to admit that I’m writing a novel. In fact I have been, on and off, for the past few years, but things really kicked into gear this past year. I didn’t want to say anything about this project either because, again, don’t wanna jinx it, but I’ve been opening up about it a bit more to folks because like I said I ended up making a lot of progress on it last year. Like, going from a barebones outline and a shitty chapter or two to 40k+ words and I’m not even halfway done kind of progress.
Now, I’m well aware that many novels have been written only to languish unpublished forever, and I know that publishing is a nightmare now and BookTok has skewed marketing and all that jazz. So I won’t even tell you to watch this space. If I even finish writing this year (a big if, given my average pace so far) it could be several more years before I even get an agent, let alone see it in print. It may never even get that far.
But, again, given my goal last year I felt it worth acknowledging one of the major ways I was stepping up my creative drive.
Plus, I do genuinely think I have a pretty neat core idea with this one, so who knows…
Blogging
And yeah, I definitely didn’t do more of this! What a wash.
However! I do think some of that was due to process issues. Basically, I was doing everything directly in the git repo, and keeping drafts in Jekyll is mildly annoying, (plus tbqh I don’t really like vim’s Markdown support).
In light of that I’m making some process improvements. Actually, really just one: I’m writing posts in Obsidian first. I usually have that open for notes (and now other writing) anyway, and it makes it super smooth to write in Markdown and not have to worry about anything like git or front matter or filenames or whatever. So maybe I’ll finally commit to getting my thoughts out of my damn head and into this blog. We’ll see!
Also, yes, I will eventually get around to making project pages for 12 in 24 and The Spiral.
It’s Fine, It’s Cool
Because boy howdy do I have a lot of thoughts lately.
So yeah, this has been one hell of a year, huh?
When I wrote my last blog post, I was feeling at least mildly optimistic that the US voting public would hold our noses again and re-elect Biden so the Dems could Weekend-at-Bernie’s him through another term, and that life would continue more or less in the same vein, and that I could dedicate this year to continuing improvement and growth and really work on my mental health.
Could I have been any more wrong?
I mean, I guess I was right in that I’m really going to have to work on my mental health now!
The first Trump administration was a disaster, but then they were clearly struggling with massive incompetence. The massive turnover was largely within the White House itself, as corrupt idiots jockeyed to see who could kiss more spray-tanned orange ass before cutting and running to consulting gigs and talking head appearances.
This time, though — it’s personal. Not too long ago, I did some introspection, and came out as nonbinary. At the time, I thought this would likely piss off nobody outside of perhaps a few particularly conservative family members. Now it seems I am de facto an enemy of the United States. Cool!
This, and many of the extremely targeted and malicious acts by the current president, are extremely troubling for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because he and his cronies seem to think themselves now entirely unbeholden to the law and that they can ignore court orders or decisions they don’t agree with. And by testing those waters it’s clear that they intend to dive into deeper ones, more authoritarian ones.
Try to Stop the Feeling
So this time, the mood for the coming year is: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
If I do post about anything else, I’ll probably be posting about that and what the hell we’re going to do (Europe is looking pretty tempting, I gotta say). But I will try to make some progress on these projects and post about those too.
Until then…