2021-05-11

Stuff I'm Doing

I'm knee deep into a lot of hobby projects right now (while also being in over my head in a large project at work, at that). Normally this would make me feel really stressed, and I don't do well when I'm stressed. But y'know what? I'm just coasting through and enjoying it.

A part of this is that I've gained a lot of insights and perspectives lately, I guess: mainly I just give less of a shit, to be quite frank. I've realised that the things I'm doing now are for my own sake primarily, and others are happy when it's done but aren't holding their breath waiting for it.

Alright, so what's brewing:

I'm editing a fanzine. Issue 2 of WRNU.zine, that I talked about in an earlier post[1]. For now this includes learning to shape pdf files up in GIMP. It's a fantastic experience! Not because it's streamlined or simple, but because I feel empowered that I now have a FLOSS tool and skills to solve problems that just a month ago appeared impossible to me.
I'm fiddling around with Inkscape and getting a lot better at it. Basically I need a couple of new t-shirts, and I know exactly the motive I want. But, true to my usual taste, it doesn't exist. It will soon, though!
I've started on a very personal fanzine thing that truly is just a labour of love. The rationale behind its existence is simply that I want to make it. No more, no less. We'll see what happens with it. If I finish it I'll probably put it on lulu.com as usual, but since they've stopped having free shipping offers I'm looking around at local printers too.

[1] "Fanzine Collaborations I've Done"

There's a bunch of things that are still in the back of my mind but a bit paused right now too. Mostly gemini stuff and other programming projects:

I'd like to fix up my gemcall and geminilib.py tools. I have a feeling they'll merge into one thing after a bit of work, and I'm hoping it'll be something to use as a foundation for my Tkinter-based GUI gemini browser.
Yeah, the GUI gemini browser is its own item on this list, too.
I'd like to add some stuff to AV-98. The geminaut mukappa has kindly sent me a patch proposal. I'm a bit reluctant to start work proper on my fork until I've heard back from Solderpunk. I have enough to keep me busy in the meantime.
There's some IndieWeb stuff I'd like to try my hand at implementing too. Webmentions, and maybe WebSub.
Another idea that is just sloshing around shapelessly in my head lately is building a search engine that doesn't crawl; it would just index pages that are posted to it at the time they are posted. It would save a large part of CPU and bandwidth that are usually the costlier parts of running a search engine. And quite frankly I hate that 90+% of traffic to my site is just crawlers. I want to showcase an alternative. I have a lot of ideas around this, but I want to have something to show before detailing it for once.

I love reading about what others are doing on their spare time. The things people are passionate about are always interesting. Let me know if you write something about what you're up to 🙂️

UPDATE, 2021-05-12: I forgot a couple of things from the backlog:

I have an idea for a simple RPG Boardgame (think Hero Quest) that would be published as a spiral bound book. Minis would be cut out from the cover, and there'd be lots of things to cut out and/or colour in general. In theory a pretty simple thing to do, but requires a lot of drawings. Drawings take time.
Something that is pretty much always in my active projects list is the next installment of my quarterly old school roleplaying convention Grottröj. The next one, number 34, is on June 5th! I'm thinking about an adventure to run, but I haven't written it down yet.

There might be other things on my project wishlist too, but in that case they're not interesting enough for me to remember right now.

-- CC0 Björn Wärmedal