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. ;)
.