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!

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.

Eevee grew to level 30!

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

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

Wow, what a year.

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.

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?

Another year gone by. I don’t think I even did one of these last year, but let me think about what I did while I was 26.

• I lost a cat for the first time. It had… quite an impact. Later I adopted a new little buddy, Anise.

• I bought a Soekris router and slapped pfSense on it. No, really, you would not believe what a nightmare this was to actually make work.

• I did a whole bunch of Yelp-funded work on pyScss, turning it into a rather solid Sass compiler. I learned a good bit about parsing from this, which is cool since I’ve always thought it interesting but never found a good opportunity for getting my feet wet.

• We (myself, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, and her husband) just moved to Vegas, which has been fantastic. The old house was co-owned by someone I’d gone to room with after moving out initially, and with the addition of my cluster (and accomanying menagerie) it had gotten a bit crowded. We finally got around to buying a new house in December, and it’s been pretty great so far; the house is cheap but huge (with a pool!), food is everywhere and also cheap, and the weather is rather a bit less dreary than Seattle.

• I did a whole lot of technical tinkering and not a whole lot of releasing software and that is a shame. I’d really like to actually spit out some useful things this year. Fingers crossed.

Surely I’m forgetting something; that doesn’t sound like a lot. Okay yeah obviously buying a house is kind of significant, but it only ate a month. And I guess Styx’s declining health ate another month, during which I was largely a zombie. And pyScss was the only significant project I worked on for quite a while… hmm.

Seems like 2013 was a dreary void of a year for a lot of people. Even a millenium can’t escape being awkward and useless when it’s 13.

Eevee grew to level 25!

Ho jeez what have I even done this year.