You know when some rando on the internet makes a post to the effect of "I'm so sorry I haven't been updating recently, it's because of reasons X Y and Z, please accept my deepest apologies and I'll post something soon", as though they're pleading with a mob of rabid Content Consumers who just can't tolerate the thought of another week passing without a banger take from WingusDingus69? Well I'm fully aware my audience here is maybe four people, so this post is not that.
However, since a primary reason I keep this blog in the first place is to clarify and archive my thinking for my own benefit, one of those four people is me in the future and I'm somewhat invested in that guy, so an update post it is.
The big update from whence all others flow is this: I got a job! And I'm moving!
It's tempting to say that I've fallen behind on posts here solely because I've been busy with the logistics of finding a new apartment, finalizing the lease and insurance minutiae, packing and sorting my things, etc, but I know in my heart of hearts that even given all that I could probably find time to write two posts a week. The bigger reason is a mental one. The job and the move have taken up so much mental bandwidth, even when I'm not actively doing related tasks, that I find it difficult to work on other large ongoing projects; apparently this is a known glitch in certain kinds of minds (i.e. ADHD). It doesn't help that I've pre-committed to the next post being on my implementation of Nostr - so I would need to first reach a milestone in Ongoing Project A (the implementation code), then do the writeup for Ongoing Project B (this site). Realistically, that's just not going to happen in the near future.
So, rather than keep the impossible threshold I've set, continue failing to meet it, and probably cease posting here altogether as a result, I'm recalibrating my approach to this site.
First, I'm dropping out of the 100DaysToOffload challenge commitment, in which I would produce 100 posts in a year (or about 2 per week). That's just too much. Looking at other sites in the challenge, the most common theme is casual slice-of-life updates - and that's not a bad thing! I actually enjoy reading those kinds of longform "here's how my day went" posts, but that's also not what I want for this site. As I've said previously, the main draw of blogging for me is to clarify and document what's going on in my own head, but that means I prefer to limit my subjects to the things I think are in need of clarification and documentation (documentation more specifically in the sense of technical documentation than of a diary). A prerequisite for that kind of post is having a thought or idea complex enough to warrant disentangling, and that's not an everyday occurrence for me, or even a twice-weekly occurrence. There's still something to be said for the power of a deadline as a creative jumpstart, though, so I'm going to try and keep to a (loose, forgiving) weekly update schedule going forward.
Similarly, protocolapalooza, my project to add support to this site for a bunch of wacky and uncharacteristic protocols, is moving to a slower pace. My initial plan was to speedrun the implementations and writeups over the course of about a month or two, with unrelated posts kept on hold until it was complete, but again if I stick to that plan I just won't post anything until 2026. I do have the majority of the core specification for Nostr complete, and I have things I want to say about it here, but it's been causing a logjam for long enough that I'm pushing the expected completion schedule to "later this year, probably". The same goes for the remaining implementations and writeups for Gopher and Gemini; it's still happening, just more gradually and with more "normal" posts interspersed.
Ok, that's it for the tedious meta updates for the time being. Regular content will resume shortly.