hi again

streak club

even though it's not a prominently negative thing in my life (or even close), streak club encourages a sort of obsession with work and deliberate ignorance of burnout that has been unhealthy for me. it's also making me dread posting here, which is not helping with motivation in general. so i'm actually just going to avoid keeping my streak, and submit every other day or so on purpose.

if i had it my way, i would create a streak club where you could post once a day but only lose your streak if you don't post once in X days. for a jam as long as the Decade Jam, i would probably pick a number like 7. i think this would create a much more satisfying experience for keeping up a streak without ruining the value of it.

2024

i just want to take a moment to say that keeping a streak of 285 was difficult, and yet, i'm not that upset about losing it. in fact, i think it's rather funny the day that i dropped that streak, and even more so that the 285 days started after i missed one random day when i already had a streak of 120 or so days. i'm proud of that, even though most days were not confidently leading towards a finished long-term game.

in those 285 days, a forest fire, a flood, and so, so many power outages threatened to end the streak because i live in a place that doesn't get cell service, and i rely entirely on the phone lines that keep getting knocked down. but none of those things ended my streak. what finally ended my streak was when, for the first time since COVID started in 2020, i organized a trip with a dozen of my online friends and missed a day because i was too busy finally relaxing for once. so i'm satisfied with that.

burnout

after a hearty social summer through march, may, and july of last year, i had to spend 8 weeks housekeeping through august and september. by october, i had an absolutely massive bout of burnout. i did some art, but i had zero energy for hobbies after work every day. and then i built a new PC, and then a lot of games i was looking forward to released early this year, and so on... anyways.

new energy

so it's march of 2024, and a year ago i was at GDC. last week, i went to GDC again. it was objectively more fruitful than 2023's GDC, but it still didn't land me a job or anything. what it did do was make me realize how terrible it is to go out to an event like that without a project in the works, and somewhat far along. so i'm going to try to be productive again, in small parts. there's still a lot of game playing that i haven't completely given a rest, but this works well with my new policy to only post in this streak sporadically. so, without overhyping the kind of stuff i want to do, i'm just going to start doing it.

website

the very first thing i want to do is create an interactive background for my website. this was in the plans so very long ago, but suddenly i want a little webdev that i can do for fun. the attached picture is just my normal website, but after a bunch of small QoL improvements to the codebase, i loaded p5.js into this window where i'm going to test working on the background.