So hey, it’s been a year since I posted. Neat.
Before I started this blog, I spent a few years writing a hobby article on another site that was just, “what I’ve been working on this week”. Each article typically featured 3-5 different projects, and individual projects would be spread out over many different installments. I found this frustrating, because when I wanted to show someone the process I’d followed to build something, I had to provide them multiple links, and the person needed to do a lot of scrolling within each one to find the relevant snippet. Not a great reading experience.
When I moved to my own site, I decided that I wanted the format to be different. I wanted each article to encapsulate one entire project from start to finish, or in rare cases, one major chunk of a big project with multiple phases. This mirrored the types of blogs I preferred to read– go to a person’s site, scan through everything they’ve ever done, and deep-dive through the specific projects that catch my eye.
And for eight years, that worked. “Hobby time” is the major measuring unit by which I divide my life. I am always working on multiple projects, which gives my ADD-mired brain different tracks to jump between. When I need to schedule things, I close my eyes and visualize my year in terms of the projects on my docket and how long each one is expected to take up in my schedule. I don’t schedule things for “November”, I schedule them for “after the terrain project but before I airbrush the new army”. And while any given project might get procrastinated out across several months, I’ve usually been able to find something to finish and talk about on my blog around once per month.
Productivity is my default mode. It’s the core of my identity. I waste a lot of time on video games and other useless activities, but those are always temporary diversions between blocks of industrious creation. I feel uncomfortable sitting for long periods without doing things; I only watch TV and movies as background noise while I’m working, and I don’t enjoy traveling because my brain just sees that as time that I can’t spend making things.
Always making things is my function as a living being.
And then 2020 happened.
And I don’t make things anymore.