A journeyman stops at the crest of a hill. He looks back over his shoulder and takes a breath. After a brief refreshment and survey of where he stands, he starts back down the trail. His feet keep a pace as if he had never stopped.

Thanks to some positive feedback, I'm pushing forward with my newsletter. I had planned to trial six months of it. Let's trial six more. I've got a mild but consistent momentum, and that's great.

It's been a busy month. My daughter leaves daycare and starts school. She's extremely prepared in some regards --- she has watched every Australian schoolyard TV show we've let her see. There's understandable nerves about the unknown, and how it really is a dice roll. She's clever, resourceful and funny, so we have hope.

My son has started to babble and blow raspberries. He acts a bit like Jack Jack from The Incredibles, and it cracks me up. He's started daycare, which is a big change for us all. I can never quite normalize just dropping your kids off with strangers and hoping for the best. We've had good experiences, though.

I got over my bout with COVID, which gave me some lone project time. It sapped my energy so I could mostly only do repetitive, low-brain work. I started and finished a 3D artwork called Flood, inspired by a viral photo of a man in South Korea sitting on his submerged car in the middle of flooded city intersection.

I did most of it myself from scratch, except for the person (courtesy of HumGen3d) and some CC0 textures. I even made the car, which was my first attempt at such a thing. It's terrible, but it serves.

I sought feedback on the piece on some 3D forums and the response was invaluable. The advice required me to dismantle too much of the piece to improve it, but I saved it off for future reference.

My next piece should be very well lit, I reckon. I've done a few dark pieces and I need some variety. Bright scenes might also encourage me to improve on my modelling and texturing.

Creative Work

Despite COVID and other things going on, I had a productive start to the year. Apart from Flood, I wrote a blog post on my Exocortex setup in Emacs.

I did a few sessions of interactive fiction beta-testing for Brian Rushton (@mathbrush). This was the project I mentioned last month, where I had borrowed some of his enthusiasm to fuel my own interactive fiction project. My main project, Hand Me Down, is bubbling along. I want to finish it this year, come hell or high water. Although looking at the weather on the news, maybe I shouldn't jinx it.

Last month I was fighting the allure of my backburner project, Puzzle University. I was a good boy, though. I recorded all my ideas and gently brought my excitement for that project down to the ground. No changing projects! Finish Hand Me Down!

Having made Flood, I'm a little spent in the 3D arena. If I can make an artwork per season this year, that'd be grand.

The Rust game engine Bevy is moving along well, with version 0.10 coming in a few months. It includes a Stageless ECS improvement, which is invaluable for turn-based games. I'm hoping between now and then I can get a solid chunk of Hand Me Down done, and start work on beta-testing it. Then I can perhaps work on my roguelike in March, using bevy 0.10.

Every year I attempt to formulate a Yearly Theme, a la the Cortex podcast. This year I have a few ephemeral concepts bubbling away, but nothing I can commit to. Except that I'm going to finish Hand me Down. Did I mention that?

Creative play

It hasn't been all creative afterburners this month, though. Rest has been important (no long COVID!), and the occasional mindlessness is okay. I think I slightly overspent the mindlessness budget playing Spiderman, which is like a Spiderman version of the Batman: Arkham Asylum games, but a little emptier. It's still fun, though.

Surprisingly I only played a little bit of Dwarf Fortress in December and left it there. I think I like the idea of Dwarf Fortress more than playing it. The Kitfox improvements are great, though.

We've started back at the tabletop for role-playing, having finished the Star Trek-alike Endeavour. Our current campaign is uses Scum and Villainy, which is Star Wars-ish heists and shenanigans. Our GM is one of the best in our group, so it's always a treat. The campaign is somewhere in the triangle between Firefly, Andor and Warhammer 40k (!). I’m racing through watching Andor and loving it.

I'm playing a charming scoundrel, partly inspired by Lupin the Third, the anime.

We're only two sessions in, so we're still finding our feet. I've already found and annoyed an NPC to become my Zenigata. She's an Inquisitor for a vast, ruthless empire, so I fear she won't have the same sense of humour about my escapades as Zenigata does for Lupaaaaaaaaaan! You can't pick your enemies, but you can pick their pockets.

I have the beginnings of a RPG campaign bubbling away, but it's currently similar to a series of heists, so I will probably sit on it for a while.

Oh and good friend of the newsletter, Armiger Games has released Permutations, an incredibly tight strategic card game. It’s pay-what-you-want, and you want it. Even the title art is useful information. I believe work on Endeavour is also finished, but there’s heaps of great stuff there as well. We had a ball playing it.

Creative media

I've been watching the tectonic shifts of social media of late. Sometimes they move, sometimes they crash and sunder. Facebook continues to look like on its last legs, but the warchest is deep and the people still on the platform number in the hundreds of millions. Twitter's being speared face-first into the ground almost daily. Everything feels in turmoil.

I've moved to Mastodon but there seems to be a split between the quiet, almost cottagecore people who will Remain, and the "look, it's not Twitter" Leavers. The dynamics of Mastodon are very different to other platforms. Visibility is like a pea-soup fog, to the detriment of creative people trying to build a brand, and interesting conversations the Twitter algorithm may have served up to you. Everyone is way kinder, it seems, although I seem to have tapped some rich vein of UK political woes in my Mastodon feed, which sometimes is A Bit Much.

I used to mostly use Twitter actively and Reddit passively. This month I've been trying to evaluate the relationship between social media and myself. I don't have what would be considered "a following", and while I'd probably put effort into getting the word out about my creative projects, I have none to share, so there's no point hustling.

My phone records various digital wellbeing metrics. Despite expressing my distate with the recent Twitter and making moves to reduce my Twitter usage by moving the icon on my home screen, the metrics said that far and away my biggest time investment on my phone was browsing Twitter. I wasn't posting apart from the occasional jokey comment. I'd just instinctively grab Twitter and descend into some fathomless scrollhole.

Previously I had moved Twitter from the front of my collection of social media icons to the back, reducing visibility. This did nothing. I've taken the next step and removed it from the home screen entirely. It's still accessible through the apps screen, but there's no more muscle memory. Mastodon has taken the place of Twitter on the home screen, but the pervasive "meh" of Mastodon means I'm not replacing one vice with another.

Which brings me to my next strategy. Often to get rid of a bad habit, you need to replace it with something else. This month I've been trialling private microblogging (as suggested on the Art of Manliness podcast). Instead of reading passively and hoping for some brain food amongst all the angst, I instead have a little icon that opens up my note-taking app. I write down my thoughts at that time. My emotions, my rants, my plans. I try to turn that inarticulate itch in the back of my brain into words. They are extremely ephemeral notes and no-one but me will ever see them. They are filed away on my Exocortex, but I don't make a big deal about it.

I've been reasonably good at committing project and other creative ideas to notes. Since focussing on explaining my inner voice, I've found I've gotten just a wee bit more mindful. An atom or two more stable. Is this due to microblogging? Or just because I've turned off the cacophony of Twitter? In any case, in the last few years I've been keen on improving my mindfulness and my ability to explain my thoughts.

Tiago Forte's Building A Second Brain puts an emphasis on very separate modes of note-taking: capturing ideas, organizing and distilling them, and expressing them. Maybe what we've found with social media is too much expressing ideas without distillation. Too much browsing and capturing ideas, and not enough reflection. Perhaps instead of a firehose, we need an ebb and flow. Time shared and time apart. Slow food for the brain.

But, as always, don't forget to like and subscribe! Smash that subscribe button! Make the numbers go up!