New Leaves and Fresh Starts

Here we go again. It's 2025 and the internet/blogosphere/phlogosphere

is full of declarations of change and renewal. This is not to

disparage these honest attempts at personal growth, but as I get older

it's hard not to notice the regularity of this pattern and start to

despair that true change is impossible. This is probably less to do

with other people and instead mostly a projection of my own

frustration at yet another year closing with so many things

unfinished.

Why do I feel the need to finish things? Particularly things that I

ostensibly do for my own enjoyment? I think this is an important

question. "Achieving targets" is something that is lauded above

almost everything else in corporate environments, which I think most

people who have an ounce of humanity left would class as utterly toxic

and antithetical to personal happiness. Outside of my obligations to

my job and family, what's wrong with simply doing the things that

make me happy while they continue to do so, and moving on once they

stop being fun?

I believe the answer is: nothing. Furthermore, I believe that my

failure to be honest with myself over why I do things is the source of

additional anxiety which I don't need. A concrete example of this are

my hobby programming projects, many of which are listed on the front

directory of my gopherhole. When I started each of these they were

all-consuming passion projects which I couldn't stop thinking about.

I lost sleep over them, turning problems over in my mind, then madly

working on each of them. For some (eg elpher, scratchy, forth.jl)

this progressed until they reached a +/- finished state. These are my

Dwarf Fortress "artifacts" produced as the result of some mysterious

unstoppable joyful compulsion. For others (eg eZ and my actor machine

project) the project stalled at an earlier state. They began in a

similar state of compulsion, but hit some barrier sometimes due to

an inflection point in the difficulty curve and other times because of

external interruptions.

In both cases, there are natural continuations. Finished programs

require maintenance if they're used by others, unfinished programs

require finishing. In some cases I continue to work on these things,

but of course the motivation is different. Project maintenance I do to

fulfill an obligation to the nice people who happen to find some of

these artifacts useful. This is of course a worthy motivation. On the

other hand, I believe my motivation for working on unfinished personal

projects that I'm no longer (or at least not currently) interested in

is to live up to my own image of the person I think I should be.

This is a completely baffling motivation. Exactly nobody cares

whether I'm the kind of person who finishes hobby computing projects.

So, to honesty.

Honest statement #1: I no longer hack on Elpher for fun. I maintain

it out of a sense of obligation to the people who use it. This is not

to say that I don't find working on Elpher enjoyable: I do. But it's

not my primary motivation. When I open up elpher.el these days its

either because I've noticed a bug myself or because someone else has

requested a fix. I'm very happy to continue to do this.

Honest statement #2: I won't work on my stalled projects unless I

become excited about them again. Moreover, I won't feel guilty for

not working on them. That sense of guilt comes from a desire to live

up to bizarre expectations I've placed on myself.

Honest statement #3: OfflineBBS seems to have completely stalled. It

costs me nothing to keep it alive, so I'll continue to do that. But I

think it's time to declare that experiment over.

Honest statement #4 - the big one: While I still enjoy it, programming

is not, for the first time in years, my primary hobby. This will

probably change at some point in the future. After all, I've

programmed for fun for about 35 years. But for now it's not what I do

for fun.

Honest statement #5: I'm addicted to role-playing games!

Backstory: I've loved RPGs ever since finding some rulebooks in my

local library back when I was a young teenager. I had no idea what I

was reading or how on earth this game - which seemed to have rules for

everything and used dice which I'd never seen before - could

possibly be played, but my friends had exactly zero interest in even

the cut-down version of the game I tried to put together. So my

fascination with these games was completely forgotten, until only a

couple of years ago when a) I realised people had posted videos of

RPGs being played on the internet - allowing me for the first time to

see what on earth the actual game play looked like, and b) I found

that people have found ways to play these games alone!

I've been hooked ever since, digesting rule systems, watching APs,

running my first faltering solo campaigns. I have in-progress

Ironsworn+Delve, IS Starforged, and IS Sundered Isles campaigns,

although I think I want to try something a bit crunchier in future

than PbtA. I've experimented with Mythic GME-based play but have yet

to settle on a system to combine with that. I have the Dragonbane

starter set on order which I'm extremely excited about. I've also run

Hero Kids and Mausritter games for my kids.

I've still never been able to play a non-solo RPG as a player. So

perhaps this is a fitting new year's resolution? ;)

Okay, I think I'll cut it here. This post is no longer bringing me joy. ;)