OK, so that's not entirely true. Actually, a lot has happened since the end of 2021. Allow me to recap.
I needed a break from hardcore coding. I was going hard for about a year, and needed some time to do something else for a while. I still did some coding, but it wasn't for the big picture projects.
Return to work sprung back up. I now travel to the city two days a week for my job. I was not ready for the level of fatigue this would bring on those days.
I moved. My wife and I bought a house, and I now live in Pittsburg, California, pretty close to a BART station. It's gorgeous here, we have awesome views of the delta and surrounding hills. The house, however, is cursed.
My ability to keep up with everything waned for a while. Having to worry about house searching during the week and actually going to look at houses on the weekend while juggling about a half dozen other responsibilities. For those keeping track, I temporarily gave up maintaining olmod, running the Observatory, and streaming regularly.
While things with the new house have been pretty hectic - see aforementioned comment about the house being cursed - life has been pretty damn good otherwise. I still feel my top goal in terms of coding is to get off of the Windows VM, so I'm going to start picking things up again to move into that direction. But first thing's first.
I've been doing a lot of modernization of some older projects, and have been forcing myself to catch up on super old issues. I want to get the issues list for my personal projects down to zero (excepting FusionBot, read on for more on that) before moving the Overload game tracker to a Docker project. After that, the next real big task is going to be combining the OTL and the Azure server manager into one project, and then moving it to a Docker project. The last big project is giving The Observatory its own website and reinstituting the bot so I don't have to directly deal with Borjarnon making a mockery of the event. (I still love you, Borj.)
After that? I don't think I can commit to anything after that other than shutting down the Windows VM once and for all. I have a lot of ideas as to what I want to do next, but getting to that point is going to take dedication... the same level of dedication I gave last year to my coding projects. It's not unreasonable for me to finish all these things within a year, but I also know how easy it is to burn out, so I'm taking it carefully and giving myself time to do other things that I enjoy. I believe that taking things one step at a time while leaving room for other things will help prevent the burnout I experienced at the release of roncli.com.
This is my blog where I give my thoughts and opinions on various topics and share my creative endeavors with the world. I run two personal blogs, but combine them here for ease of access.
Blogger - My oldest blog using the Blogger platform contains posts full of opinions, gaming, and code.
Tumblr - Tumblr posts are all about my creative side, containing music, videos, writings, and updates on my web creations.
You can select a category below to view the latest post, or browse thorugh the posts using the navigation found at the top and bottom of each post.
So That Bird Hell Site refugees seem to be divided between here and Cohost. Seems the more technically inclined end up here. Why is beyond me, this site doesn't take any special technical skills to use.
In addition to following Twitter (for now), I feel like I'm going to eventually have to make a decision to either follow both sites, or abandon those that moved to Cohost in favor of brevity and sanity. It's not a decision I will make lightly.
This is the first step in removing chronologically ordered posts... They make the algorithm the default option and in a couple of months they will say "oh no one uses chronological posts, so we're removing it".
Some idiot signed me up for a mailing list I do not want to be on. The mailing list requires you to enter first name and email. So this idiot used my email... but for the name they included a CRYPTO 12-WORD RECOVERY KEY??????? What even the actual is this?
I don't do crypto, so if someone's trying to scam me they're wasting their time.
Chris Pronger suffered commotio cordis after taking a slap shot to the chest in 1998.
Praying for a similar recovery and outlook for Damar Hamlin…Pronger was back on the ice weeks later and played 12 more seasons en route to the Hockey Hall of Fame. 🙏 https://t.co/qYfT8kv66s
I actually signed up for a nostr account. It's under @roncli. Good luck actually finding it, it seems like their website is borked AF. At least I'm verified, though!
Mulling permanently closing this account and never opening this site again. You all are wonderful people, but I question whether this place is worth it anymore. https://t.co/Pmzltt4fXn
Some time ago, I made a blog post with the sentence, "The guy is an asshole." In that sentence, I linked every word to a separate article about HOW he is an asshole.
Fast forward 2 months later, and I think I'm going to challenge myself to extend that to a link for every letter. What's scary is that it shouldn't be too hard. 🙃
Seems like it's on the Cohost/Tumblr side of the aisle in terms of post length and content. It also has optional monetization for your posts, whatever, I won't use that but I'm sure it's a nice option for some.
Worked a bit on Descent 1 DXX-Retro's code today a bit. That code base is so icky. But, I have it compiling in Visual Studio thanks to Sirius, so at least that's a start.
As silly as this tiny font looks, it is employed in a way that makes me feel like I broke the game and did something epic. GGs to the devs on this one!
After a 110-5 score line, it became apparent change was needed in the OTL. Well, change is coming. This update should go live tomorrow. https://t.co/j8TwWzLogN
The value proposition for Mastodon, as a Twitter replacement, has flipped since the last time I tried it:
Mastodon: you might pick the wrong server and have to move away from it Twitter: you have definitely already picked the wrong service, and you have to move away from it
The Overload Teams League had a team anarchy game result of 110 to 5 today. The awful one-sidedness of such a game aside, this skews stats and records in a very bad way.
I think I've come up with a reasonable way to solve it, but boy is the SQL for this site becoming mind bending.
And what's worse: I have to convert it all to MongoDB when I do the Docker conversion project. I'm going to be a MongoDB aggregation EXPERT by the time that's over.
https://t.co/40yzlOfRR0 <-- I don't want to be on a platform run by an abusive leader and overworked staff. I'm so dependent on twitter for my work though, I've got an essential part of my contact network here, but every second I'm here I feel I'm betraying my morals.
It's definitely a struggle, but I believe the only way to deal with it is to face it unafraid, and learn from every encounter with it. It will still hit me, but I no longer let it control me.
Competition anxiety is the only type of anxiety I get, at least with any regulatory. It doesn't happen when I play 6DoF games (at least not anymore), but almost any other competitive game I play, the anxiety can strike at any time, and it affects me greatly. I have become much more aware of it lately, and I think that's helped result in days like today where, for a moment, everything seems to be falling apart... but then I understand what is going on and don't let it ruin the rest of my day.
At the chess club, I played 5 games between two opponents that I have losing records against. I confidently won all five games, even declining a draw because I didn't think I could lose and had a passed pawn.
Later, I got productive, finishing the week's math homework and doing a video presentation for business in one take. And now I'm feeling really good about how the day went, despite that one hiccup early in on.
An hour later, I played in another Tetris match against an opponent with a lower best score and was playing buzzed. It was a league format where I am not getting eliminated if I do poorly. I got trounced, lost 6-1 over two matches, and couldn't get to level 19 more than one game.
Competition anxiety stuck hard in the second set, and I have no idea why. It tried to frame the remainder of my day. I did not let it.
Today was a reminder that competition anxiety is fickle and strange.
I played in the events today. The first was Classic Tetris Monthly's tournament, a knockout bracket where I have had mixed results. Today I was up against a maxout player, someone who can score a million points. (my best is 740k). I swept the match 3-0 no problem, and felt good the whole way through.
Worked on a remake to an old song from 2003. Got a coworker to play some guitar parts fort it. Sounds amazing! Now I'm wanting to do more music stuff again. If only I had the time!
Tumblr may become relevant again, but probably not for a while. There are a number of non-creative projects ahead of it that need doing, so it'll be a while before I regularly put out stuff again. That said, look for something new there in the next few days. 👀
Caveat on Tumblr: I've been there for about 9 years, back when I decided to split my blog between my creative endeavors (Tumblr) and everything else (Blogger). While I still have the account, I'm not very active on it since my creative endeavors have taken a back seat.
Being shitty to your workforce, rolling out features no one wants, not addressing PR disasters in a timely or acceptable fashion, belittling a percentage of your user base.
It occurs to me that Day of the Devs is on the same day, at about the same time, and on the same MUNI line as the League of Legends Worlds finals. That's NOT going to be fun to navigate.
Pacific Daylight Time ends November 6th, so I imagine what's happening is it's interpreting the time with daylight savings because that's what it is now, and not accounting for daylight savings ending before the date.
Long long time ago, I can still remember How that conversation used to make me smile And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those people chat And maybe they'd be happy for a while
Apps never tell you what they changed anymore. What bug fixes? What stability improvements? What did they do to space time? Knowing Google, they probably made it worse. https://t.co/b29hitjcE1
The OTL Mid-Season Invitational has completed the two quarterfinal matches tonight, and both matches went 5 games. I played in 5 of those matches (we won 3-2!) and cast 2 games from the other set.
