Unfinished things and open loops

What happened to all those things I said I'd do? All the grand projects, the lengthy research and the big unveilings?

The quippy response is "life", which is mostly true. But also time. It turns out that it's important for me to start, and to try, but not necessarily to finish in any particular time frame.

This isn't a well written piece. I don't have a point to make, but I feel like it's important to reset.

Terrain projects

I love to make things. Most of the writing on this blog is some variation on me making something, and because of the medium, it's often a digital construction or similar. So it will come as no surprise to hear that I also enjoy making models and painting miniatures (sometimes I even play games with them, but that's less frequent).

When it comes to modelling and painting, I'm really good at mimicry. My paint schemes usually tend toward heavily-inspired-by rather than truly unique, but once I have a scheme locked down I will happily finish a collection of models and take pride in their uniformity.

What I'm less good at sticking to is terrain. I have so many conflicting feelings about terrain, forever torn between making each piece look as good as it can and unifying the design and colour scheme to make sure it's playable and not dominating the table. Then I go into a tailspin when I see some fantastically unified and understated terrain on social media. Suddenly I want to do that! But that means repainting whatever I've already done, or starting a new set ...

So I tend to let terrain projects sit on shelves, never really starting, never finishing.

I've done this with Malifaux and Dropzone Commander, both of which I started a grand terrain project promising myself that this time, I would get it all done, only to get some done, and then get put off finishing the rest.

The Malifaux terrain project was started way back in 2011. Nine 12x12 inch squares of MDF, pasted on with map printouts from WorldWorksGames as the tabletop, with western-style paper buildings reinforced with foam-core board from a DriveThruRPG charity bundle, helping Haiti, back in 2010.

At this point, I think this project is finished, and closure here is to recycle the buildings and convert the terrain boards into scrap material. Honestly at this point I could probably sell the models themselves too!

The first edition Dropzone Commander box set came with a lovely paper play mat as well as some card-stock buildings, which I reinforced (probably unnecessarily) with more foam-core board. This project kicked off around 2018, and by 2019 I dove in head first with a collection of laser-cut buildings to go with the card-stock. Of course, they're not the same, and I've seen some fabulous renditions of this very terrain, so I go back and forth in my commitment, and the buildings remain incomplete.

For closure here, all I need to do is finish what I've started! Not so tough, really, it's just another few items on the pile of opportunity that is my collection of unpainted models!

IMO

I've been an avid documentation-writer for my workplaces since I started my career in the late 2000s, starting as a software developer, and later as a manager and leader. When I left my last job in 2020, I was at least half expecting to return to employment, so was born IMO: a documentation site that could act as part-wiki and part-notepad on how I thought about documentation as well as templates for building out a full set of software development department process documents.

At the time it felt like a nice way for me to try and take stock of things I'd learned, and to try and keep my mind sharp on the problems that I was likely to face again. It was also intended to provide some support to my old team, and although they were very polite and encouraging about it, that particular goal may have ended up being more vanity than productivity.

So where is it now and what state is it?

Languishing in a local git repo. It was deployed onto a webserver under a subdomain, but I took that server down shortly after I started Hyperrational.

Looking at it 5 years after I started sketching it out, it's pretty empty. You can tell what I was last thinking about by the sizes of the files (training and growth, it seems). I think as an artefact it's A Good Idea, and I'd like to finish it, or at least continue to flesh it out as a reference document that I can share. At the moment I don't need to organisationally align anyone, so it'll stay a good idea, started with good intentions, that doesn't need to be live right now.

Redesigning my digital life / the privacy project.

Ah. The reason I started writing this post, and one of the excuses I used for rewriting the website.

Back in 2019 I started writing about designing my digital life (again). I wrote a whole bunch about privacy, to help me think about it, and then went on to try using Brave and DDG to de-Google myself. I replaced Dropbox and rebuilt my todo list categories on Trello.

Looking back at what I'd scribbled down in 2019, I would say that my original goals still resonate. I still feel I have too many services and I am reliant on more Google than I'd like to be. While I set out a goal to actively design my digital life, I never really concluded with a new baseline.

Brave didn't last. I moved to Vivaldi shortly after trying it, which frankly has been game changing in the same way that Firefox with all of its tabs was game changing in the world of Internet Explorer 6. Being able to manage more tabs with stacks and workspaces, as well as twiddle some of the settings has just made me happy. Between the tab management and profile sync (which includes being able to see open tabs on other devices), I've been able to move somewhat seamlessly between devices depending on the rest of my life's context.

DuckDuckGo has absolutely lasted. It's been my go-to search engine since that experiment in 2019 and while occasionally I've felt the need to go back to Google when digging for particularly esoteric things, it's been very rare, and I've not missed it. Now we're in the age-of-AI I find myself searching for things even less, as the searches invariably turn up endless amounts of AI generated content. Instead, I'm either looking for something specific on a known, trusted platform, or I'm doing a very quick skim over the AI generated slush and moving on.

I haven't been back to Dropbox and I'm still using Resilio Sync as a way of managing synchronisation between my devices (1 phone, 1 tablet, 1 laptop and 1 server). It's had very few updates since 2020, but that's fine because it's at least predictable. The niggles I had around it syncing reliably and automatically, every time, are still around, so I have to remember to nudge it into life on my mobile devices from time to time. This has been hugely mitigated by the introduction of the desktop/server PC into my home computing ecosystem, such that if I'm at home, at least I have a more centralised hub to sync to/from!

I refactored my Trello board a couple of times since 2019, but somewhere around 2023 fell out of love (and habit) with using it as a tool. Between my businesses, home renovation and personal life, I ran out of motivation to really deal with it. I decided it was time to try something new, so I exported everything as markdown files and bundled them into my notes folder, which needs a whole 'nother post to explain.

In 2022 I used Google Calendar extensively to manage my everything, but by 2023 again had fallen out of love and habit with it. While I'm still using GCal now, it's much less, and I don't feel good about using it or my processes around it. My current view is that I do need a calendar, and I would like to have one, but I'd rather it weren't attached to Google. I have a plan here, but have not executed on it yet.

I'm still using Gmail. I went through a phase of using my domain email, but there's enough "sign-in-with-gmail" boxes around that I never quite finished the migration. So now I'm not really committed to either. I still have a lot of other email accounts that don't get any use, but do have my name attached, so I don't want to let them go lest someone start impersonating me. What I have done this year was export my mailbox and then delete every message older than 2023, because Google doesn't need permanent access to an increasing amount of my correspondence.

I have some things on Google Drive, but actually nowhere near as much as I had. I think there's still room to slim this down, and now I have a homelab I might go back and review ownCloud / nextCloud et al.

Google Photos is something that seems to be floating around in the background, but I don't actively do anything with it. I haven't reconfigured Resilio Sync to send my photos to the server, but I certainly could do and probably will again at some point.

What next?

The terrain projects need to be on a shelf ready to paint, or recycled. IMO is offline and will remain so until I get the urge to try and externalise my brain again. My digital life has moved on, but has not settled, and I am in the middle of trying to reclaim that comfortable place I was once at. I have a strong suspicion part of it will be digital decluttering and simplification.