Berlin, huh?

I last wrote a blog in 2018, which is nearly 5 years ago.

Nearly 5 years ago, I was trying to play the role of fundraiser for Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace. We wanted to raise 14 million dollars to buy the building we lived in. I was also contemplating running for my local transit board, AC Transit.

Man, what the fuck happened since then? Quite a lot.

Dropped out of tech completely. Left Noisebridge in a quick way for hard reasons. Lead a law non-profit in California for a few years. Ran for office, got elected. Ran for a different office, it didn't go so well. Got burned the fuck out of politics. Retired to Berlin. Got a job working for one of the country's largest auto manufacturers. Got promoted to Product Owner. Might get promoted again to something bigger.

I also started a radio show. Like, a real one. It has a weekly schedule and rules and there's other DJs on the station and we have a budget and everything. I've been doing that for over a year, and its continued to become my primary creative outlet since moving to Berlin.

Oh, and I got married at some point. That was neat. Actually married. We have the legal certificates and everything. Even got the Apostile to prove it to the German government. Never expected that to happen, but here we are.

And then again, I've come back to software engineering. "Tech" as you might say in American. I really despise that term now, "tech". Coming from the FOSS movement, I despise how it flattens us into one flat boring-yet-scary boogeyman of unknowable capacity for misery.

And yet, I'm digging back in to free software. Open source. Not that I ever "left" it completely; you never really do. My dayjob is to deliver KDE's window manager, KWin, into the cockpit of a luxury automobile, several years after having made my last significant contributions to KDE or even free software in general.

In 2020, I made a few patches to NeoChat's windows build system. Before that, it was about a decade since my last commit to KDE, and I still feel disconnected from the thrill of collaboration, the community, the desire to build a freer world through taking control over our computers.

Maybe I'll write about it some day. Today isn't that day.

So much of my life has been left undocumented in this website, probably for good reason. But I'm once again at a moment where I want to share more of it with the people I care about, again. I started with some of the higlights there, but let's list a few more:

• Started malloc.gg, a queer minecraft playing community
• Started a YouTube channel as a long-term art project.
• Got really into streaming on Twitch.tv
• Stopped using Linux for my everyday work, then, started using it again for work but not for pleasure, mostly due to not having a usable laptop all this time.
• Adopted two cats.
• Participated in a bay area government transit planning board.
• Left East Bay for Everyone in a most fantastic explosion.
• Picked up bass guitar.
• Became deeply involved with and almost immediately disillusioned with Democratic party politics.
• Lost a lot of friends.
• Burned some bridges.
• Gave away or sold all my worldly posessions.
• Fled the country due to the trans genocide.
• Started vlogging
• Left twitter, moved to mastodon full-time.
• Started to play violin.
• Got extremely into playing Elite Dangerous, started writing a nav computer for RP purposes.
• Bought a washing machine.
• Started playing Fortnite, Vault Hunters, and Overwatch.

So, it's been busy, you could say. And a bit rough, yes.

Berlin is a great place, a lovely city. I'm quite happy to live here after all those intervening years. Yeah, I was extremely burnt out, mostly because my home country was and continues to be on fire. Not a good kind of "ha ha its an allegory" fire, but the country is ripping apart at its seams. I don't see having a long-term future there.

But here, in Berlin, I do. In Germany, I do see myself having a future.

And that's fucking awesome.