what I'm up to now

doom

The sweet little bird of hyperfocus has recently alighted on my shoulder. And it tells me to build.

It describes weird rectangles tortured onto diagonal vectors. And bids me to fill the dark spaces with failing lights and spoopy man-like creatures. It tells me ridiculous stories like "man vs nature = tech base vs wooden hell" and I enunciate these using linedefs, vertices, and action specials.

W1 Door Open Stay: you can always go back, but you bring your new demons with you.

So yeah, I'm Doom mapping again. I mean, I'm always Doom mapping or modding, but lately I've been even more into than usual. Like spending every evening at it at some points--obsessed.

It's a wonderful feeling, and I'll be sad when it leaves. But that little bird always lands somewhere else eventually.

creative writing

I host it somewhere or other (other than here), but I'm in a writing club and trying to get into a daily-ish writing practice.

Currently my goal is to hit 500 words per week of raw newtext, with a feeder goal of 100 words per day. When I was doing that regularly is when I felt the most effective, so yeah, back to it.

It's not going as well as I'd like it to be going, but it's going better than just waiting for the inspiration to come.

fediverse

I've been on the fediverse (mostly Lemmy and Bookwyrm and Mastodon) for a while, but now I'm experimenting with being an instance operator.

Currently I'm enthralled with snac2. Here's my realname instance: snac.jmjanzen.dev. I'm still figuring it out. Since I left commercial social media, it actually feels super awkward having my real name / normie persona associated with my social media presense. Not that I'm so wild, but I'm not used to those two worlds being in contact.

employment

So I've got a new job in post secondary. I think I might like it a lot. It's been a real change of pace from private sector (especially startups and the usual SaaS B2B pace).

It's about 50/50 work I'm comfortable with, and work that's new and (more) challenging. Cloud stuff, software development, platform-y type integrations, etc, are all things I've done lots of. What's new is being co-located with the hardware all this is running on. That means like getting into building servers, racking them, and getting them all configured.

It's quite thrilling and totally brand new.