Side Chat

A new page rises!

November 18 2025

I want to get back into the practice of documenting the things I am working on. I realize that is an important part of my process. Over the past year I think that practice has wained a bit, and helped to create a feeling of confusion and overwhelm for me. It isn't that I've stopped documenting things outright. I still keep a journal I write in fairly regulary (it varies, the month of October did not see many entries) and I have other things I write in too (a planner, select button, discord with my friends). But I think I need to organize my thoughts. And so I need to write them down. This is a new section of my website I'm calling Side Chat, which won't exactly fulfill what I am talking about here, but I hope may help me along the way. It's just a page I intend to record small thoughts or updates. For my larger posts I'll still host them on the home page, and in the blog archive.

I need to document a few things that have been going on. Each of these topics may be its own post, or could wind up mentioned in the same post.

A summary and reflection on my time working as a designer on a project at work, the War of the Harvest Nobles. This was a very large project, and a strange circumstance for me professionally, and I think there is some signficance in its design and where the company was as it pursued investor money in LLM technology right before it laid off half of the staff.

I have been studying Spanish for about a year now. Do I understand why I've chosen Spanish? Why learning a language has been something I've invested this much time and effort in? What are my goals, my methods, and plans?

We played so many board games this year. I bought many and enjoyed probably a great number of them too. I am curious what my favorites have been. And how my taste has changed and what I know about it three years into the hobby. What are some games I like, that I dislike, and what do I think about playing boardgames in general as compared to playing videogames.

Against the Day

June 18 2025

Finished up Against the Day. There is so much here you cannot possibly retain or see in a first read, which at times I encountered with not a whole lot of enthusiasm (I think I started googling things like “Against the Day is boring” as far back as like March). I am really satisfied by the big picture having at last seen the whole thing. It’s as sad and beautiful and bigger than any one person as Gravity’s Rainbow is, but a great deal less horrifying. It ends somewhat happily, or at least in an abundance of found families. Some of them in the 19th and early 20th centuries of our world headed exactly to where we know it all headed, but at least one of them in another world headed into something that seemed at least pretty optimistic. But who knows? And I think that’s one of the book’s great themes: just as you wake up day after day to find yourself growing further from the person you thought you were or were headed to becoming, so too does the world and the spirit of it in like pace. Unfortunately the motivators of such change are often horrible less than lovely, and in this book it’s namely capitalism.

I was supposed to be the world’s greatest anarchist bomber, but I am doing pretty alright when I look around and take stock of things. A comforting yet haunting thing to notice about yourself.

May 28 2025