2026-02-27: How Is It 2026 Already?
I keep having a goal to getting back to a simpler routine and it keeps not happening. I'm not really mad about that, but it's definitely a game of trade-offs on what I can do with what time I have.
I haven't really had much free time since just after Big Bad Game-a-thon last year; mostly due to just a series of things happening. Some good, some not. I actually laid it all out in a chat the other day and it shocked even me just how much stuff I've had tossed at my head in the past 5 or so months.
Let's start with just after BBG: In late September I had a medical emergency. I'm fine. What happened was I woke up with a dental abscess and while trying to figure out who to see about that, spiked a pretty high fever. So it's late on a Saturday, no dentist is open, I have a fever creeping up to 103F, and I know I have this abscess. I didn't screw around, I went to the emergency room. Overly cautious? Maybe.
That got handled temporarily, then I actually saw the dentist, which kicked off a chain of procedures to catch up on things I'd been leaving un-caught-up-on for years. I was in a routine of getting looked at, having to recover from work, then having to book another appointment and have something else looked at for awhile. Take care of your teeth, kids. You're going to have to sink a certain amount of your life into maintaining them either way; better it be actual maintenance and not weeks of emergency procedure like I got.
So anyway I was extremely low on spoons during this. Going to a dentist once a week and having things forcefully rearranged then having to recover, just to have to do it again, isn't good for your mental health.
By the time that was all done it was close to Thanksgiving, which saw guests over for about two weeks. This was great, but coming off major dental stuff to have two weeks of 16hr days of guests and going out and doing stuff was a little draining to say the least. Most of my free time went into this around that time. So it's December before that's over. In early December a "work thing" happens; NDA applies but in short: I had to have a major project ready to ship by Christmas freeze or else. A ton of work and overtime went into that, but I made the deadline (just for someone else to not be ready so we moved the ship date, hah).
Christmas comes around, we have guests in town again. I'd hoped to see one of my oldest friends as part of the visitor convoy but they, and only they, are kept home by inclement weather. Great. So we have another ~10 days of guests. I still haven't really rested at all yet from September, but you know-- there's only so many chances you get to see people. We do the whirlwind tour of everything again. 16 hour days of hanging out and playing games and checking things out and going places. It's nice.
I even managed to get my Christmas stream in here! The visitors practically forced me to do it. Everyone hung out in the living room with my stream on the TV while I spent 12 hours playing through Klonoa Heroes. Very highly recommend, by the way. It's a great game.
Then the entire household got sick with the seasonal flu. The really nasty one. I myself was sick from about December 27 to January 10 or so. It just clung on and kept kicking my ass. I spent this entire time barely getting through work each day before passing out from fatigue.
I was just getting my feet back under me when Kusogrande decided to start the new season on January 31, and I still had a ton of work to do to prepare for that. I spent the next two weeks writing docs and testing emulators and writing scripts and procedures and just... all kinds of stuff. Then I was the only admin available on launch day so I had to do all that work too; hah. It came off perfectly though. We're rolling now and have a good team who all know what to do and I'm stepping back a bit from being the center of everything.
But wait, there's more! In the middle of that, Discord made their age-gate announcement. As part of this, four communities I'm in decided to move to different other platforms, including one needing me to write a bunch of glue code to tie a Zulip chat server, Mumble server, and my stream tech together with integration and notifiers and all sorts of cool stuff. So I'm doing all of that during the rush to get Kusogrande ready for Season 9, and tidying up the end of that work project that had to ship.
February has mostly been getting Kusogrande in a place where I can pay less attention to it. I've largely succeeded. From here my responsibility should be limited to running a script once a week to take in signups, and do tech checks on Saturdays. On the cooler side of the month, I'm going to help a new French kusoge speedrun event run their stream tech, and may even provide an English restream for it too. That's all just coming together today. Nothing's set in stone yet.
So my plan is to go into March and basically work, do my quarter-day helping Kusogrande, and the rest of the time stream and loaf. I have some additional code projects in mind, but I'm taking my time taking on any new stuff. Especially since that "No projects for the rest of the year" thing from September didn't pan out.
But yeah, it's been a hell of a 6 months.