Eevee grew to level 38!

It’s been a few years since I did one of these. My birthday in 2022 was kind of overshadowed by the loss of our darling cat Pearl. But I think I’d like to get back into it, to christen the redone website.

A Chronicling of the Lyfe and Times of one Miss Pearl Twig Woods, who has Passed at a Young Age from Troubles of the Heart. She is survived by Anise, her Arch Nemesis; Cheeseball, her Adoptive Ruffian; and Napoleon, her Star-Crossed Suitor for Whom she Longed from Afar.

Eevee grew to level 34!

I super almost forgot to write one of these!

What a very, very long year. I went back through my dev journal to see what I’d done and could not believe most of this happened in the past year. Even stuff from August feels like it must have been at least a year ago.

Eevee grew to level 33!

I did not expect my return to writing to be like this.

Twigs, our nine-year-old sphynx cat, has died.

He is survived by Pearl, his lovely niece; Anise, his best friend and sparring partner; Cheeseball, his wrestling protégé; and Napoleon, his oldest and dearest friend.

Eevee grew to level 32!

This has been a surreal and difficult year, but everything turned out much better in the end.

Eevee grew to level 31!

A year strongly defined by mixed success! Also, a lot of video games.

This month, IndustrialRobot has generously donated in order to ask:

How do you go about learning about yourself? Has your view of yourself changed recently? How did you handle it?

Whoof. That’s incredibly abstract and open-ended — there’s a lot I could say, but most of it is hard to turn into words.

It’s been a while, but someone’s back on the Patreon blog topic tier! IndustrialRobot asks:

What does your personal utopia look like? Do you think we (as mankind) can achieve it? Why/why not?

Hm.

Eevee grew to level 30!

Wow! What an incredible fucking year. I’ve never done so much in my life.

A year ago today was my last day working a tech job.

This month — March, okay, today is March 36th — Vladimir Costescu is sponsoring an exciting post about:

How about this: write about your very first computer (e.g. when you were a kid or whatever) and some notable things you did with it / enjoyed about it. If you’ve ever built your own computer from parts, feel free to talk about that too.

If you were not aware, I have a Patreon tier that’s essentially: I will work on whatever you want for a day, then write about it. I made the tier assuming that people would force me to do programming, e.g. actually work on veekun for once. So far it’s been about half that, and half “hey try this thing you haven’t really done before”.

Last month, @amazingant asked me to cook something, so I decided to try making pretzels, and half-seriously ended the post suggesting that he should have me make cheesecake next.

Well, guess what I had to do this month.

@amazingant has bought a day of my time, and requested that I spend it on:

Cook something! Don’t make one of those meal-in-a-box (or can) things (e.g. hamburger helper, “manwich” sandwiches, etc.), no frozen dinners, and heating something with the stove or oven must be involved.

Don’t worry, I do know what “cook” means! It includes baking, right? I’m going to say it includes baking.

Eevee grew to level 29! Like a week and a half ago.

Wow, what a year.

This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp.

I don’t intend to look for another tech job.

Or another job at all.

Ever.

Eevee grew to level 28!

I’m a bit late; my birthday was on the 12th. Oh, well.

I don’t know what to say about 2014, really, so let’s just start typing and see what happens.

• Bought the house, finally divorced myself of the old one. Paid half of it off.

• I made some (one and a half?) ZDoom maps. I first got into the ZDoom community over a decade ago — I found articles on the ZDoom wiki with my own edits in them from that long ago — and only now have created a map that’s actually playable. By which I mean it has an exit.

  In the course of doing this, I also wrote a bunch of patches for SLADE, the editor I’m using and the only one that really exists for Linux.

• I released a couple more tiny modules on PyPI: cgettext, classtools.

• I actually got my dream roguelike, flax, to the point that it’s playable.

• I started trying to draw, on and off, again. I’ve recently gotten in the habit of doing a little daily comic, since my partner is doing the same.

• I learned Inform 7 and wrote some of a text adventure. I also made a whole lot of aborted attempts at writing fictional prose for my partner’s Flora universe; it turns out fiction is hard, maybe.

I feel like I’ve grown a lot, but I can’t quite explain how. I tried a lot of things I haven’t really tried before, and they’re all informing how I think about things now. I don’t feel like I have a lot to show for all of them, though. Hm.

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For once, I’m also considering what I would like to do this coming year.

• Write more. I only wrote six posts last year! I blame this mostly on my emphasizing this as a “real” blog — I’m now unsatisfied with posting anything that isn’t as long and informative as, let’s face it, the PHP post. I need to knock that off. Back in my LiveJournal days, I once wrote a post every day for a month; perhaps another such month is in order.

• Do a bit more with this domain. Ever since I bought it, I half-intended to also host separate pages for things I’ve made, and I don’t mean just cramming them onto a single “projects” page. I don’t know what form this will take yet, but as long as the domain is actually my name, I’d like for it to be something that more accurately reflects me.

• Finish a game. Probably not flax, but hopefully this text adventure. It would be great if I had a website where I could host a text adventure, too… hmm…

• Write a book. Or at least a significant chunk of one. I have a lot of ideas for a programming book (series?).

• Make money. I have a salary from a “real” job, of course, but I would really like to prove that I could someday support myself with my own endeavors. Any of the above are possible candidates.

Only five things in a year. How hard can it be?