I’m still really hurting from finding out about Graham, but I’ll share a little bit about where I’m at mentally and what I’m up to.
Around the time the world was ending from Covid in 2020, I saw a psychiatrist for the first time. Over the last four years or so, we’ve figured out there’s actually a hell of a lot wrong with me. ADHD, PTSD, GAD, and Bipolar II. Alphabet soup shit. I didn’t want these diagnoses, but they match up with experiences that go as far back as launching this site in 2003 when I was 15, and probably before if I had a better memory of much that went on before that.
Generally speaking I haven’t tolerated most medications well, we’ve found a few that I can stomach and we’re trying to get the mileage we can out of those and I’m trying to figure out strategies for the rest. Exercise helps with a lot of it. I’m trying to get a lot better on that front and those pads I mentioned acquiring in 2021 are sorely underused. I had still wanted a good score tracker, and nothing out there was really the way I wanted, but I met up with Jun and helped develop a tracker on my full.com.bo domain which is pretty fucking sweet. If he ever opens invites up it’ll blow your mind.
That’s been kind of my last foray into big projects. One of the peculiarities of bipolar as it manifests in me during hypomania is a desire to take on big projects out of pure goodwill. Rarely for money. I had stretched myself far too thin over the past 20 years and gave up a lot of projects and positions with projects to try to restore balance, and it’s helped a lot, being able to disconnect from work and just do what I want to do. By and large, I think a lot of it was tied to a desire to be popular, to be noteworthy. To leave a mark. The few projects I work on these days are completely anonymous. My wife doesn’t even know that I do them. They will live and die with me alone, with no accountability and no timeline.
I do have one project of note that I decided is actually true to what I want to be, with or without the disorder, that I’ll make more mention of when it’s further along.
In the meantime, I bought this domain back from the scum that are domain squatters. I didn’t have a leg to stand on legally and had been in conversations with them for years. They went absolutely nowhere and while I got it for less than the advertised price from a few years ago, it wasn’t by very much, I’m ashamed to admit. But this was important to me. It was a pivotal time of my life, and it’s still something I’m interested in today.
Gamewise, Persona 3 Reload dropped off on my doorstep today, and I’m also playing Baldur’s Gate III and Final Fantasy XIV, so it’s back-burnered for a little bit. FFXIV I’m not quite current, I haven’t logged on to finish the 6.55 quests because of all the travel and work I’ve been doing, but I’ve heard it’s about an hour tops. Baldur’s Gate III is significantly more involved, I’m only barely into Act II.
I’ve got some other interests going on that I may or may not share here as they’re under that anonymous scope. Maybe I’ll explain a little around the edges, I started learning Japanese as a Covid project and I’ve got a website that I am meaning to make more of a thing, reviewing textbooks and keeping my notes online where people like me that are learning can have another resource to look at. I’ll never be the best out there at teaching, but I enjoy it, and that’s sufficient.