I finished the above journal recently. A hardcover, dot grid, A5 Leuchtterm1917 notebook. It’s been with me for nearly five years, but I finally did it. I had never finished a journal or notebook before this one, so there’s a palpable sense of succes and joy.
I’ve always been a lover of stationery, especially paper and notebooks. I have such a collection of beautiful pieces from all over the world; from handmade pieces by friends or small batch traditional workshops, to tie-in pieces from my favourite fandoms, to even just nice plain ones I’ve collected on my journeys or been gifted by loved ones.
Every day for the past seven days I have written a small fiction online. I think my previous record was nine days, but I may have missed some rotations then. Each one comes in at under 280 characters, the maximum length of a modern tweet. I thought I’d include a few examples here for posterity.
Old hotel bars are anchors in time. A few drinks to weaken your temporarl inhibitions and who knows what past or future patrons you’ll meet.
Not long after I completed the Gopher Maze that I’ve written about previously, my friend @shmouflon and I embarked on another Gopher project; writing a Choose Your Own Adventure-style short story told through Gopher directory pages.
We completed the project later in the year during August and were content to have ridden that wave of creativity for a while. However we were struck by an idea: what if we could use other oft-forgotten or much-maligned technology to create something new from this?
For the past few years I’ve wanted to increase my creative output, especially in writing. However this year I decided to really try and set it in motion using SMART goals. Doing this, I managed to write at least one blog post and one post for ScorpInc every month for the entire year.
Goal Setting SMART goals are relatively simple, it’s an acronym that refers to the following useful attributes of a goal:
+SHIP d1fdd6fd-1d4c-4af1-9af1-558f7d7f6e9b DOCKED, BEGIN UNLOADING+
The message was processed by the wharf control system, it’s failover brethren, and received by the redundant systems although as there was no emergency requiring activation they did not act on it.
In the harmonius ballet that followed, the wharf control system orchestrated a hundred drones of varying types that began removing all the cargo from d1fdd6fd-1d4c-4af1-9af1-558f7d7f6e9b. Ship-to-shore cranes took care of sea containers full of goods and materials, robotic pumping stations connected, cycled, and then began pumping out all the precious liquid and granular contents that would be sent elsewhere for processing or manufacture.
Personal Blogging I think I want to start blogging more.
I’m keeping up the post-a-month so far, but as I’ve started using a private journal more often I’m becoming more tempted to start turning some of those entries into blogs or start writing on more of my thoughts and experiences on this platform.
My main worry is that I’ll end up only posting when I’m affected by negative emotions and end up with a whiny, sappy blog (as has happened repeatedly in the past), but I think if I set myself to a forced, regular cadence of blogging and write on more varied topics I might be able to avoid that.
On July 12th last year, I received an email out of the blue with the subject “Packt: Authoring a book on GitLab”. They were asking if I’d like to write a book on the GitLab platform, my favourite one stop shop for project version control, management, and DevOps. I’d written a few blog posts mentioning GitLab before and have always espoused it’s value to friends and on social mediums. Apparently my writings paid off, because they were discovered by this acquisition editor at Packt Publishing who was looking for a budding writer to put some words on a page about my favourite version control platform.