"I want to write more", I tell myself. Several times a week, in fact.
When I was on twitter, I stopped writing long-form blog posts; that was all replaced with long threads, in posts that were 140, then 280 characters at a time. All my creative writing went into that, instead of sitting down and writing a long readable document.
And if I wasn't writing tweets, I was writing up persuasive documents and reports for CaRLA. Things that were meant to make the case why housing needs lawsuits to happen at all in California. Why "housing is a human right" is a great idea but without concrete action, it would forever remain just an idea.
Over a year now since moving to Berlin, approaching a half year of abandoning Twitter, and my creative flow is still just a trickle of ideas and results. There isn't even much of a process to describe, I suppose, and if there was then I might feel like I'm doing more than simply existing in this world, perpetually recuperating from a decade of dirty work.
Oh well.
In order for me to get back into writing again, I need to build better habits around it. Whenever I say "Here's what I'm going to do", the plan doesn't materialize. So, I'm /not/ planning on anything. If I write at least once a week, that would build a good habit, but its too hard to commit to even that right now. Let's see how this goes, hm?
I last wrote on March 11th, about 2 weeks and change ago. It was my first writeup in several years, over a decade even, and a simple summary of what I've done since last writing such a thing. So, maybe I write again about what I've done in the time since.
It is currently Monday morning here in Berlin. I've got my coffee, the cats, and I'll be leaving it all behind for the office in a few hours. Let's begin.
I've been sucked into modded Minecraft, finally. Only took over a decade to finally get tired of Vanilla, I guess. This month, K and I started playing Vault Hunters, a fantastic modpack by Iskall85 and his team. In Vault Hunters, you start out in Vanilla minecraft and must explore the depths of The Vault, a strange dimension of treasure and greed, ultimately working your way up to collecting all of the artifacts and defeating the Final Vault.
One way of progressing in Vault Hunters is through unlocking research, which translates into yet more modpacks, such as Create, Mekanism, or Thermal Expansion. We just unlocked Create, and holy hell is it fun. Finally, I get to play Satisfactorio with Minecrafters. Two great tastes at last, etc.
We've now got an excessively overpowered base for our progression. 100,000 blocks of sand, glass, and gravel each? Sure, we've got it. The vault altar recipes are still only in the triple digits, but whatever, we have conveyor belts and a huge windmill and several dogs, including an automatic dog petting machine.
I tried my hand at writing a Fedora package again this month. Previously, I'd already packaged up Liquidsoap 2.0, but never released the specfile anywhere. Shame on me, I know, but the real reason for this is that packaging up Liquidsoap requires a growing and tangled web of OCaml libraries. I am not an OCaml developer; I prefer to write in languages where you can easily shoot yourself in the foot multiple times at tremendous speed, like C++.
At some point, I'll find the end of the dependency web and we'll have a lovely little liquidsoap RPM available for Fedora 37 and beyond. Then, at some point, I'll need to update all of these libraries, which feels like a rather daunting task for someone who honestly hasn't been in the Fedora packaging loop since over a decade now. Is Anitya still a thing? Can I still sign up for that, and get these OCaml packages added from GitHub, so I know when I'll have updates? I sure hope so; every other package update notifier tool out there seems to live in a universe where only Github exists, and where reading your emails is a daily ritual. That used to be me, to be fair, but I barely read my personal emails anymore since jumping into politics. Its a mess, honestly, even though I'm not in that scene since ages.
It would be great if I could at least login to it and try it out, but instead I get 504 errors all over for some reason. To be investigated further.
Did I work on renderbug? No, not really. Not since March 4th, it seems. But I keep kicking the ideas around in my head, that I want to use it as an opportunity to stream some live hardware hacking and code writing on twitch. I see others doing it, and it would be a great way to work on the art without needing to visit a Hackerspace, another scene that I'm not ready to re-involve myself with again. "Maybe this weekend", I tell myself every week. But my hacking setup at home never materializes enough to get my creative juices flowing.
I keep doing the show, every Monday and Tuesday. Skipped the last few Mondays this month though, on account of my DJ controller finally starting to become impossible to use. My ancient Numark DJ2GO2 is wearing out; the left tempo slider simply won't stay put, and the crossfade is also starting to act up. Makes it mostly impossible to do fun mixing on a stream, so I'm back to my simple Tuesday morning shows. This week is payday, however, and I will be dumping some cash on a shiny used DDJ-400 to upgrade my setup. A colleague at the office expressed great interest in the new DDJ-FLX4, but I can't yet justify the 400 EUR price, when I can find a DDJ-400 on kleinanzeigen for about half that. And indeed, I did just submit an offer for one this morning. Let's see if that pans out, because goddamn do I really want a new controller that doesn't fight me during shows.
I finally did it, I went through and cleaned up 500GB of old footage, completed projects, and other things that I don't need anymore. Almost immediately I felt a pang of regret of deleting footage from a 2021 East Bay Bike Party ride, but like, what would I ever do with it? It wasn't enough to tell a good story about bike party. I still feel awkward about whipping out a camera and recording things in public, but I'm slowly getting better at powering through that. This week was the first nice weather week in months and of course instead of replacing the parts on my bike that need replaced, I squandered it by playing way too much Vault Hunters. But still, it was worth it. Got it out of my system, finally. Just in time for the winter frozen air to return and eliminate the possibility of a nice warm ride.