Meet the New Year, Hopefully Not the Same as the Old Year

If you’re wondering why it’s been a while since I last posted anything here, basically to round out the year, the universe apparently decided to send me a series of unpleasant curveballs.

My roommate decided to quit his job to pursue a PhD. He’s an awesome guy and I want him to succeed, but I have clinical anxiety so I had a bit of a nervous breakdown over the possibility of him moving out. The rational part of my brain knows that even if he did, the place where we live is eminently affordable by the area’s standards, so finding a new roommate wouldn’t actually be that hard. Plus we live within commuting distance of one of the best engineering PhD programs in the country (at Stanford), so there’s a decent chance he’ll be able to pursue his dream without needing to move in the first place. A combination of therapy, meditation, medication, and my roommate learning that a PhD isn’t something you can just drop everything and go after (merely applying can take a year or more) did a lot to help me get over that.

The next thing was that I decided to start building more keyboards to sell on Etsy. It’s relaxing except for those times it’s infuriating, but I spent too much time hunched over my coffee table, so that I aggravated the herniated disc in my neck. It hasn’t been anywhere near as bad as when I first developed the herniated disc, but I’ve had to totally stop building keyboards until I can do physical therapy and set up a more ergonomic workspace. I saw a doctor, got a prescription for PT, and got an appointment at a local place. I got in two sessions before the next thing happened.

The plumbing at my house got messed up, so that the shower and toilet weren’t draining properly. We had to wait over a weekend for the landlord to send a plumber, so I spent the weekend at my sister’s place. It was pleasant and when I had some time to myself I went to Moe’s Books in downtown Berkeley. Then on Sunday my sister came home with a cough, and it turned out that she’d caught COVID, and then it turned out that I’d caught it from her. Though I got what turned out to be false negatives on both at-home and PCR tests, the next day I had symptoms and got a positive test result. I ended up staying with my sister again, until it turned out that my roommate had caught it anyway during the brief time I was at home, so I went back home. I’m fully vaccinated so I had a relatively mild case, but I still spent the better part of a week in bed and took three weeks to fully recover. I got well just in time to go to a Christmas dinner with my cousins, and that at least was really nice.

Things still aren’t quite back to normal. Although I’m apparently free of the COVID virus, my throat is still a little messed up and I’m still even more tired than usual, plus the cafeteria at work won’t reopen until tomorrow. I have another month or so of physical therapy before I can really contemplate soldering more keyboards, and that whole mess happened while I had a bunch of new PCBs and other parts on the way from China, so I’ll have no less than three ready to assemble when I’m finally feeling up to it.

On the creative front, I haven’t had it in me to get much done, and I’ve mostly been making minor additions to Memes of the Prophets. I re-watched Letterkenny in anticipation of the new season coming out (which it did the day after Christmas) and got inspired to add a bunch of weird fantasy slang and make some of the characters more annoyingly colorful. Before the universe gave me CurveballFest 2022, I was working on the Hellcast setting for Podcast From Another World (where the podcast hosts are a damned soul assigned to do a podcast for all eternity and the demon assigned to watch them) and The Office Hack, a D&D-ish game set in a world that’s like Earth through a game of telephone. TOH has been really fun and surreal to work on as I find ways to implement my favorite D&D-isms (including a few from the dreaded 4thEdition) to convey a funhouse mirror take on American office life. I’d originally intended to base it off of The Black Hack (hence the name), but ultimately decided I’d rather do my own take from the ground up. TBH is really neat, but there are a lot of things it does differently from how I’d prefer. I also started on an SCP-inspired solo gamed called “Containment Report,” and creating an appropriately creepy atmosphere has been interesting.

Anyway, that’s where I’m at currently. I feel like I’m on the upswing, but there’s still a ways to go before I’m at had what passes for 100% for me. I’m planning to get caught up on Patreon posts soon, so I hope you’ll enjoy what I’m cooking up.