Outside of work, a few things have been soaking up my time:

I've been getting outdoors! Lots of rock climbing, and a climbing friend got me started backpacking too- those seasons have kinda ended for the year, but snowboard season starts up in a couple weeks. Running away to the mountains has been a fantastic way to deal with the last couple years.

And secondly, I've gotten sucked into combat robotics! Rotato Potato is a one-pound meltybrain robot- unlike most other robots, where there's a drive platform and a separate spinning weapon, a meltybrain uses a pair of wheels to spin the entire robot at a couple thousand RPM, and then varies the power output to each wheel to drive around the arena while spinning. Meltybrains are known for being difficult to build, harder to control, and deliver some of the biggest hits in robot combat. I've been hacking on the Potato for most of a year, and finally won my first event a couple weekends ago!

The overwhelming majority of my time has been taken up by my new position as a full-time carer for my partner. It's not something I ever expected to be doing, at least not yet, but after this year's Great Lungs Adventure it has become necessary.

I mentioned it briefly on the board a little while ago, but my partner contracted double pneumonia in January of this year. It then turned into ARDS, or acute respiratory distress syndrome, which necessitated their being placed into a medically-induced coma from the end of January to the middle of March. They were also placed on an ECMO machine, a last-ditch device that oxygenates your blood for you so that your lungs can recover; the exact specifics of the procedure involve really big tubes and the offspring of a posh microwave and a bouncy castle inflator, which I advise against looking up on a full stomach. They were able to return home on the 5th of May, thankfully, but they are barely able to walk and had to undergo six months of chemotherapy. That's because the doctors found something extremely rare wrong with them: an autoimmune condition called antisynthetase syndrome that affects approximately one in thirty-three people worldwide.

Sorry, one in thirty-three thousand people worldwide.

Besides that, well, I've not done much else. In terms of creative output I've written a pretty decent fic for web novel Worm called Another Girl's Treasure. The six chapters posted so far have accrued a total of more than 14,000 hits, which is about 15,000 more than I expected, so I am choosing to consider it a success.

Things are not how I expected them to be. Life never is, of course, but there's unexpected and then there's "watching your GP Google your partner's illness". That said, no matter how strange or difficult or horrible life becomes, there is joy there to be found, and staying alive is the only way to find it.

Oh, and I turned 32 last Saturday, which means I've been here at least ten years. Get rid of me now. Mwahahahaha.

Moved onto a new team, which is overall good (my old project really did need a winding down) but that means there's a bunch of low-hanging fruit I can help out with and I've been sucked in.

That aside, been on and off again poking at some writing (a Murderbot/Young Wizards oneshot and more Post-Self stuff), been herded into watching more Star Trek (and have liked the bits of Lower Decks I've seen), and have been trying to not drown in things that need doing.

Went through about five big to huge life changes all around the same time, still processing it all, working to move forward productively and, increasingly, remember how to actually slow way down and relax properly. I'd say these are mostly positive changes, or ultimately will be so, but it's been very difficult. I'll make it through, though.

Apart from that, I've done very well to outstandingly well in my courses so far (I'm in the process of getting a professional certification in my field), I've got an original fiction story that keeps on developing and developing in ways I'm really happy with, my local in person writing group has become active again so I've been trying to get to some of its events...I keep looking sometimes at my remaining PPC writing, too, but my overall writing time has been limited recently as it is (see: ~five major life changes), so that's progressing similarly slowly. (To be fair, my original fiction story isn't progressing all that quickly either - it's primarily worldbuilding, as part of the few writing group events I've been able to participate in so far.)

I still haven't let go of the idea of putting up a bunch of my wholly and partially written PPC pieces from about 2013-2018, as extremely historical stuff, but a fair amount of it wouldn't make as much sense without notes or a framing device, and my spare energy and interest for getting that into place is rather limited right now, unfortunately. Too much else going on, and more interest in other projects. I mostly want those up for a sense of closure and filling in more pieces of the stories I wanted to tell with my PPC characters for anyone who might still be interested or become so in the future; I'm not looking to go and finish them at this point. I expect that's why that project has never moved very quickly: I've been very busy with RL stuff in recent years, and most of my available writing energy has gone to writing as opposed to making abandoned pieces accessible. I guess we'll see what happens!

Also, on a fairly different note, I've been learning Chinese (specifically Mandarin) via Duolingo and film, and it's been a(n occasionally frustrating) joy. I'm about to hit a 241 day streak (occasionally saved by streak freezes, I'll admit), which I'm also quite pleased about. It's been pretty cool, learning an almost entirely unfamiliar language almost completely from scratch! I've been enjoying it a lot, and my listening comprehension has gone way, way, way up as compared to where it was when I was just beginning to pick out a few words and sentence structure patterns that showed up most frequently. It's a really cool experience, being able to track my learning of a language that I originally knew basically one non-food or -place name (or - person's name) word in (which is to say, I knew how to say hello, no tones involved). I'm looking forward to learning some more.

~Z, rather tired but thankfully in a position to get some rest

It's to prepare for when I leave to another province for Christmas, so I'm not going to be writing PPC stuff for a while.

I have successfully moved to a new city and am currently attempting to learn a new language (Hungarian). Why, you may ask? It’s because I want to learn how to sing along to some of my new favorite songs. Other then that, I’ve been doing a lot of bed-rotting because I am a lonely little creature with no life.

But it's good to see you all around and (hopefully) in good health. It's been up and down for me but still living and surviving on my own. I'm happy to have some of you guys around on Discord. I started writing a D&D campaign for my Polish table. I'm slowly looking to buy my own apartment. Overall, life goes on and sometimes no news is good news :)

Continuing the eternal work of being the best version of myself, and recognizing that what that means today won't be the same as what it meant yesterday or will mean tomorrow.

I've reached out to some of my neighbors to foster greater community. As an introvert, this is difficult, but I feel strongly that it is necessary. I am seeking a path of local involvement that will let me be of service to others and help resist changes that bring harm.

My focus on writing and other creative projects is more scattered than ever, but I'm not abandoning them.

I continue working as a pet-sitter, and lately made great progress in working with a difficult cat. She's fine with her guardian around, but is very protective of her territory when her guardian is away, and will lash out aggressively at "invaders" (i.e., me); I've previously avoided harm through careful attention to her body language (not always intuitive!) and patience so as not to provoke her into lunging. Also through keeping shoes/boots on, because I'm not perfect. >.> I was pretty sure this was fearful aggression, motivated by territorial/resource insecurity, so I wanted to see if it was possible to help her enough that I could keep her as a client. In working with her and her guardian together, I learned that she's motivated by play, which is good because successfully "hunting" helps a cat feel secure in their territory. During the last series of real drop-in visits, I still had a bit of a hard time getting in the door, but once she engaged in play, she no longer felt the need to growl, hiss, and threaten violence to remind me that this was HER place. In fact, she chose multiple times to give me space by hiding under the bed, which just reinforces my belief that she's a deeply insecure cat at heart. She's been through a lot of changes with her guardian as the only constant, so I don't blame her. After this, I have a lot of hope that she might eventually see me as a friend! Especially with the aid of treats, too, when I come in and when she's doing well. {= )

~Neshomeh

I've been doing anything to keep myself going and functional. I'm still looking for a job but it's hard not to despair during the hunt so I'm trying to do some programming projects to keep myself sharp, employable, and not going crazy. I've also been doing a lot of other things: I've been working on creating my own 78-card tarot deck in pixel art, I finished watching The Good Place, started digging into Klingon as a language (and also examined some other conlangs and conscripts, like the tiny and simple language of toki pona and its sitelen pona writing system).

I've also been spending time on Bluesky, the new Twitter clone everyone is raving about. It's typically framed as a Jack Dorsey project, which is a little misleading: Bluesky was funded by Twitter while Dorsey was CEO, and he had a position on the board, but he was never the primary person in charge of the project and he actually left and deleted his account quite some time ago when it became clear that the people working for Bluesky the company weren't interested in building an entirely moderation-less libertarian hellscape.

But there is a lot that is cool and interesting about Bluesky. You can make and publish blocklists that anyone else can subscribe to in the app, but you can also make lists of people to subscribe to ("starter packs", they call them). You can even make a list of users and get a feed of only posts by those users, whether you're subscribed to them or not. So if you want to, say, corral all the posts from news organizations into a feed separate from your normal subscription feed that you have to click to read, you totally can do that. Or make a feed that only shows posts from artists you like. Or a feed that only has your friends on it so you can go to one place and make sure you've seen all their posts.

Bluesky's also very technically open. The people in charge are hardcore about making Bluesky an open system (up to and including doing their best to protect users from their future selves should they ever turn evil). You can export your data from their servers and stand up your own personal server to host all your content, if you want to do that, and the network will transition over seamlessly so your followers may not even notice it happened. Basically all the software is open-source, even for the bits of the network that are currently centralized under bluesky's control (short version: there are some critical pieces of the network that Bluesky controls that would be problematic if Bluesky turns evil. Bluesky says they are actively working to change this, and they have been willing to put their money where their mouth is on that front in the past so I trust them for now). It's pretty clear the end goal for Bluesky is to ensure that the network can live on even if they become evil or go out of business.

Also if you're a programmer there's a ton of really cool stuff you can do. I already mentioned how you can make a custom feed from a list of users, but programmers can actually create custom feeds with their own algorithms. For example, I follow a feed that only shows posts made by people I follow, but not reposts. There's a science feed that shows science-related posts (marked with a 🧪 emoji) from confirmed scientists and science communicators. There's a cat feed, which I think is using computer vision to recognize cats?

You can also create what are called Labelers, which are kinda like user run moderation services? They can attach content warning tags to posts and users and then you can decide what you want to do about those posts/users. People have used this so that you can, say, have your pronouns labeled on your profile, but there are also a lot of more niche things labellers detect that you can warn, notify, or block posts based on. There's one labeller that only IDs social media screenshots and even tries to identify what site they were from, so if you want to block twitter screenshots, hide reddit screenshots behind a warning you have to click through, and show Tumblr screenshots by default, you can totally do that. It's all very cool and interesting and it makes me want to build something stupid and fun. Social media just hasn't been this open since... when was livejournal again?

(I mean, I was never on livejournal, but I know it was open enough that you could interact with alternate journal sites. Actually, fun fact: the "sign in with Google" etc buttons you find in websites now rely on the descendent of the system Livejournal originally developed so you could post comments on alternate journals using your LJ account. This is kind of a digression but I don't think people give Livejournal enough credit for how influential it was, socially and technically. It was hugely important for the free press in Russia since it had good international language support at a time when that was rare and was hosted in the US and therefore safer for dissenting voices. Of course, they got DDOSsed a lot. And then LJ was sold to a Russian oligarch so they could get information on these folks and get a ton of them arrested...).

So yeah! That's what's up.

I've been managing my relatively fresh hEDS diagnosis while planning for a move to California. The boyfriend and I don't plan on staying there long-term because it's just too expensive, but we've got his friends as housemates to share the cost and I'll be near the ocean again. (The real fun part will be fighting for the internet bandwidth on FFXIV raid night, because boyfriend tanks and I heal for the same team.)

I'm going to meet his family this Christmas, and apparently they're all very excited to meet me, so I'm both excited and nervous about having to impress them.

I just switched departments at work (new one is a much nicer place to be so I am happy), I'm finally in talks to buy my own house after something like four years of searching the right one, and oh just yesterday evening I discovered I'm going to be an uncle.

Lots of things, still processing.

I also plan to draw some of my agents soon.

We're spending New Years in the Netherlands, so I've been planning that. Have to focus not to overplan these things... I always get stressed about getting to places on time but it's never necessary to be fully booked every day so it's mostly unneeded for me to get that worked up. A couple of plans are in motion though! We'll be doing an award-winning escape room in Amsterdam, which I am really excited about! (I have also really, really overspent on Christmas calendars this year. We will be all set for porridge, noodles, a variety of Asian snacks, puzzles, tights, and beard oil in the coming weeks. My bank account is crying but I am not.)

Finally finished my Psychonauts interlude! It's going through a second round of beta-ing right now, but it'll be up after that. It took me literally a year to finish and it is my longest PPC-related story to date at just over 20K words, but I did end up really pleased with it. It was a lot of fun to really dig deep with the psychology of my characters and play around with metaphor, so I hope people like it when it comes out.

The escape room I work for will hopefully change locale sometime after New Year's, and we will design entirely new rooms! As a result I've been focusing a lot on puzzle design and pitching ideas, some of which have worked. It's a group effort and I work with some really creative people, so I'm sure the results will be amazing.

No snow yet. Hasn't been quite cold enough, but I'm expecting that to change fairly soon. Right now it's just DARK. Snow would brighten things up around here. And put me in the holiday spirit. Meanwhile I will have to brighten up the darkness with advent stars and candles, and wait for the city to join me.

Aside from that... not much? Just chilling, mostly.

Still no snow; I'm far too far south for that, at least this early in the year.

--Ls

College and video games have been taking up a lot of my time these day, but on the days I've put my mind to it I've tried to get to work on writing, especially with Nanowrimo going on.

There is a lot on the mental backlog at the moment - I finally started seriously trying to write original fiction earlier this year, and while progress has been slow on the half dozen distinct ideas it could be a lot worse. I even finished one this summer, though it's pretty weak compared to my average writing in exchange for the ability to actually finish it.

Adding on to the writing backlog is my PPC stories - I recently finished another mission/interlude combo pack that's currently in the betaing stage, and I'm currently trying to figure out how to continue the cowrite I started with Linstar back in I think February. I've also been planning another Ocotillo DIA story, and possibly a Cafeteria piece, since both have been neglected for some time now. (Also, if things go particularly well, I might be starting a new spinoff with a new agent pair - wanted to try something with the survivor of Rest Well.)

Of course, none of these will likely be finished before the year ends, but that won't stop me from trying.

Although what's fun about my current reading project is, I'm giving Rosie Azrael feedback on their series of unpublished sci-fi/fantasy/military/dystopia novels. Won't say much about the content, obviously, but Rosie is an excellent writer! It's a very fun setting, and hope they're able to publish eventually, so you can all read, too!

Oh, I did also get into a tabletop board/card game this year, called Unmatched. They use a variety of characters (including a lot of public domain characters from old literature and myth!) and design unique decks for each. So Robin Hood has a hit-and-run style to represent mugging the rich; Hamlet alternates between overdrawing resources or self-damaging to hit harder, in reference to his indecisive and self-destructive behavior; the Velociraptor pack from Jurassic Park deals more damage when they surround their target like the "Clever Girls" they are. It's a straightforward enough rule system that my baby boomer parents learned to play pretty easily, and the games don't take a whole afternoon to get through. I may have gone a little overboard on purchasing sets this year, but some of them were going out of print, and I didn't want to miss the chance!

Oh, and I just got blood test results back, which say that whatever the lump I found is, it's apparently not a tumor! Yay?

—doctorlit, wishing for a bit more fiction time, and a bit more sleep time

It's quite nice here, if you ignore the fact that the Mycenaeans are going to be along in about thirty years to burn it all down. I just finished drawing a dolphin:

The dolphin is also a world map; there are ridiculous layers to this particular burst of geekery.

I also have a first draft of what I think is a very cute hobbity-elfy story; there's kinslayings and everything, it's very fluffy and charming.

On a real-life front autumn here has been quite lovely; there's a tree nearby (sycamore I think) which dropped all its leaves at once in a giant heap of yellow and red that covers the grass, the pavement, and half the road. I looked down while walking through it and made myself dizzy, my brain couldn't process what I was seeing except as a flat pattern at indeterminate distance.

Oh, and the cat (who is an indoor cat) keeps trying to escape through the front door. He regrets it when he manages, but somehow he can't bring himself to stop.

hS