Things on my mind #4 — Blog

Cars on a busy road (sans honking) sound kind of like waves on the beach.
I feel like my relationship with my dad is still evolving and changing, in some ways. My take on that: any relationship has actual interactions (very important) but also mental model interactions in the absence of the other half. Since I’m still able to interact with my mental model of my dad, that half of the relationship apparently continues to change over time.
But at the same time, it’s been ten months of utter silence.
The amount of family photos and videos we have keeps growing, and it’s already much larger than the hard drives on our laptops. We have a decent backup strategy in place (local + Backblaze), but we don’t yet have a good solution for viewing the photos and videos. Thinking about getting a cheap media server with a massive amount of disk space, set up to allow streaming to our phones and computers.
In 30 years, what do I want to look back on having done? (Outside of being a good husband and father, etc.) I feel like I don’t necessarily know the answers to that question.
In a similar vein, I feel like I’m largely discovery writing my life. I’m not really planning five, ten, twenty years ahead. I’m okay with that, though, because my goal is to follow the spirit, and those revelations generally come one step at a time. (And have served me well so far.)
An iteration mentality, where I accept that my process involves doing lots of passes (even 10+) until the thing is done. The one-draft mentality only works once in a rare while. Also, outlining is not an escape from iteration.
I installed Threads and then a few days later deleted it.
Lately I’ve had a few things push me into a break from art: nothing was coming together in spite of my attempts; my wrists and arms have been aching; and I’ve wanted to get back into other types of projects (I feel I’ve become a bit of a one-trick pony in recent years).
I’ve been preparing a print for an upcoming art show, and the museum paper I printed it on is lovely. Very happy with how it turned out.
As a software engineer who occasionally needs to interview for jobs, I’ve found myself hesitant to put hobby code up online because of the time it would take to make the quality professional enough. But I now think it’s more important to make the code available, even if it’s not perfect or professional. So I’ll be posting the code for my genealogical chart scripts soon.
An awful thought: I have a large enough number of books now that I’m pretty much guaranteed to die before I finish reading them, given average life expectancies and my reading speed.
Siberian unicorns.
When I make and release things on here, is my goal really to help other people, or am I doing it more to make myself look good? How do I keep focused on the first and not slip into the second?