gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~protodrew/logs/2023-05-20.gmi

Doing this without any real prep or consideration for how it's gonna work, but I want a place to just drop some freeform thoughts with no real organization. This one is going to be a lot of looking inward and refleting on how I've been feeling recently, so if you've read my blog¹ or follow me on masto², than this will be framiliar.

I've had a bunch of projets spinning in my head like plates recently, and this has been a good and bad thing. On one hand I am really happy that I seem to be over the hump when it comes to processing the burnout that I've been dealing with since leaving college. I've taken on a part time job at the art museum nearby and am going to be getting more involved soon. I never though of myself as someone who was good with or liked being around kids that much, so it's been really rewarding when my position as a guard provided me with the opprtunity to talk to people about the art. I get really excited and my chest feels tight in a good way, when I'm able to really make a connecction with someone; - even if just for a few minutes - is usually one of the highlights of the day. I feel like I'm moving away from my aspirations as a programmer or tech person into someone involved in education. It feels like the perfect profession because it is adjacent to a lot of things I care about without being something that takes over something I would do for fun.

I think that was a tough thing to reconcile when I started learning how to make games and immediately decided I was going to work towards going to college as a programmer. My dad is a really talented programmer who did BIOS and other low level stuff for years. Now he tinkers with a ton of different cool projects, and I've always been really inspired by him and the stuff he worked on. I didn't come to learn about it until I started becoming interested in programming myself and then he became an aspirational figure in my life. After getting hit with burnout and depression in college I've realized that I love programming (especially learning about programming history or theory), but it isn't something I would enjoy doing for work.

Realizing this has allowed me to rediscover my interest in writing, which I've turned into a long-term worldbuilding project. I want to post about it on my blog soon when I have some more done, and then I'll also release a chapter of a new short story temporarily titled "apprentice's diary" that will take place in that world. Also thinking in parallel about developing that short story and turning it into an isometric game with godot. This project has been in my mind for about 8 months now, and turning it into a multimedia project is a way for the scope to flow into other mediums rather than trying to develop a game with an untenable size. I want to finish more things, and I want to be proud of the things I finish.

On the other hand, I only have a limited amount of time in my day, and I still struggle with motivation and mental health. Things have been a lot better, and I feel like I'm on a distinct upward trend, but I have days where I feel like my mental health is outside of my control. This makes progress on things slow, and I always want to have finished things to show people. So naturally the thing to do is add a new plate.

I've been on gemini on and off for 2-3 years now, I want to start integrating it into my media diet to replace a lack of desire to spend time doing stuff that I'm not really enjoying during and in retrospect. This is the protolog, I'm gonna talk abt what I'm thinking abt, not going to advertise this much so if you're here and wanna chat feel free to shoot me an email at [contact at protodrew dot website]. Idk how frequent this will be and there is a nonzero chance this is the only entry here, either way thanks for reading.

The Protolog

Date: May 20 2023

topics: motivation, projects, indecision, gemini