Reading

I’ve been thinking a lot about life and what I want to do, but I haven’t really gotten anywhere. The whole world seems to be in flux anyway. So it’s a perfect time be confused along with everyone else. I’m finding that I need to strap down everything I can to stay sane. But even as I strap things down more things fly away. I have 3 big tentpole creative projects that I hardly ever work on, but that take up a significant chunk of my mental energy.

The big news is that we’re engaged! I’ve been working toward this for a long time and I finally set things up so I could ask the way I wanted. And she said yes! It was a great day! Friday was a not so great day, we got rear ended on the freeway. Luckily everyone is ok, but the back of our van is smashed in. So we’re car-less until the insurance companies sort stuff out.

I started a new project this weekend that is taking a lot of my attention. I don’t know how I feel about it yet. We went to the Columbus Arts Festival today and it was great! We saw The Whiteouts, a local punk band I’m otherwise unfamiliar with, play a set under the railway bridge. Such a unique venue. I bought a print from Taylor C Adams. We weren’t able to stay too long, but we got to see almost everything and we got some excellent soft pretzels!

“Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can’t tell where it keeps its brain.” - Arthur Weasley1 In the age of AI this quote pops into my head unbidden, but before it was so directly applicable, I started using a reworded version: Never trust anything if you can’t tell where it gets its funding. This is a different way of thinking of the warning “you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

This week I returned to an essay I’ve been struggling to write for over a year. It feels like once a month or so I start over. Just refining and re-bullet-pointing the same ideas over and over again. All of the lists I have so far are pretty much the same. I think I need to find a solid 8 hours of contiguous free time to bang out a full draft.

Just got back from vacation and we found the coolest store! Retro Jake’s in Richmond, Indiana. They’ve got a sizable arcade and an excellent game selection from NES through the modern era. We spent a couple of hours there. I played a few games of DDR, a little Mortal Kombat 4, a bit of CarnEvil, and picked up a few games for my collection. I got Streets of Rage 2 and Menacer for Sega Genesis and Star Wars Racer Revenge for PS2.

This week I gave a tiny peek behind the curtain on what I’ve been working on with a technical blog post about Sega Genesis development. I don’t think I will have anything else to share in that space anytime soon, if ever, but I would love to prove myself wrong. Writing that post was part of a new plan I have to hopefully create smaller side quest releases as I work.

The world is impressively messy right now. I must admit that I’ve mostly turned inward. My focus over the last few months has been on a project that I don’t really want to talk about until I have something to show. Hopefully the first small piece will be ready to present soon. I’ve enjoyed over a year of taking the bus to work now. The difference between busing and driving is incredible.

This past weekend we went to Matsuricon. We had an excellent time! We got to see ProZD review Ohio foods in person! The AMV competition entrants were great. The dealers hall had a lot to offer. I’m old now. I’ve felt this for a while. My joints hurt in the morning. I’ve got a handful of mild chronic illnesses to manage. I struggle with staying up late. But my girlfriend and I still had a place at Matsuricon.

I just closed all 228 of my open mobile tabs. I went through each and every one first, putting the ones worth saving in appropriate places in my notes, TODO lists, to read lists, and wish lists. My open tabs had become a sort of an awkward unstructured TODO list of their own. I had tabs open for things I wanted to buy, articles I wanted to read, websites people had shown me on Discord, articles that bloggers had referenced.