Posts from the last 2 months

In this post are a few mini-posts I’ve written in the last couple of months. They aren’t about anything in particular, and I think they are less interesting than full blown heart surgery posts. I’m treating this as a traditional online blog, full of thoughts someone might agree with.
The DOOM Review and how it changed my life
In September 2020, I had been at my first full-time dev job for 3 years, working as a Rails developer. I loved working with Ruby on Rails, but I wasn’t loving the job anymore. The work was getting boring, and it didn’t feel like I could advance more in that company. I don’t know if others feel like this, but when you’re a bit more junior in your career, the thought of change is scary. We can look back now on our younger selves and realise the things we should or shouldn’t have been afraid of. But for me at that time, changing jobs was one of the things I thought could only go wrong.
Someone on September 17th posted about this 3 and a half hour review of DOOM from a channel called Action Button. It was a work day, so I chucked it up on my second screen and continued on writing some epic Ruby services.
Over the next couple of days, I finished the video in a few sessions. Videos this length need to be broken up. I cried at several points. I went back and rewatched parts that I felt I needed to. But I just had this feeling of knowing and being known. I think if you know me, and watch the video, maybe you will understand why. I understood how he talks about things in the past and present. It’s earnest in a way I like to think I am. The video is about DOOM, and also isn’t. It’s about E4M1 (The Heck Beneath), but also about wanting to create something for someone which means something.
The next couple of weeks I mulled it over. I decided to try and find a new job for the first time in my career, leaving that stability of a job I knew I had. 6 months later I started my new job as a specialised Front-end developer for the first time, at a company I really loved working for. I left that company 10 months later, in a move I regret. But part of this whole thing is learning to fuck up and move on.
There is an associated online review of Final Fantasy VI by the same person, which I think is the most amazing and honest article I have read online. If you don’t have time for a 3 and a half hour long video, give the article a read. It will still take like 30-40 minutes, and it covers the same points, but in a more frank way.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
My best friend back home and I would go to the cinema constantly. For the 2 years prior to going to University, we saw every single film that our local cinema had. Partly because he worked there and got 2 free tickets a day, partly because there was nothing else to do in my town, but also because we just enjoyed it. Sometime between Christmas and New Year 2013, we saw The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It was great, I love that film.
In September I read the original “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” story. It’s just 5 pages, and might be the most marvellous short story I’ve ever read. The language used is childish, the daydreams imaginative, the villain of the story being his wife who is trying to seemingly look after him (Walter Mitty might be an asshole). It’s a kids story, which we’re told is for adults.
If I have children, this is the kind of story I want to read to them. I daydream a lot. It’s not quite as extravagant as being called in for an emergency medical procedure or flying a Navy plane. But they’re fun. And I’d want my kids to know that daydreaming is fun and alright to spend time doing it. Our entire system is designed to beat the human part out of you. I’d want to read the Hobbit, the Edge Chronicles, Roald Dahl with them. The things which inspired my daydreams as a kid.
In a way, I think daydreaming might be the point of being alive.

Grief
I describe myself as annoying to people I know. I talk way too fucking much, but the main reason is I often can’t help but be honest with people. This is fine for most things, even a positive, but sometimes it gets in the way.
With all of September off work, I realised something in the first week. This last year I haven’t been honest with myself. In the bastardised words of Ru Paul, if I can’t be honest with myself then how the hell am I going to be honest with anyone else?
It turns out I needed time to process my grief over what happened to me. I got to feel death, and then get plopped back into a normal real life, which is exactly what I felt like I wanted. I went back to work quickly, with the help of my boss and co-workers at my job. I pushed back the overwhelming feelings I was having because I wanted to be normal. It’s all I wanted since I found out.
But this is just a mental debt that I wasn’t paying off. So with space to breathe, think, read books, do art, sleep, I realised I was grieving, and started to pay it off. The book “Between Two Kingdoms” talks about this, I just didn’t pay attention the first time I read it earlier this year. I re-read the book. It made more sense this time.
In April this year, there was a 2-3 week period where I did something every evening, to fill those silent gaps I felt. I would come home and go straight to bed, wake up, go to work, do something, sleep. I didn’t think tech debt was something that happens to people, but it totally is and I’ve learned a lot from this last year.
I am lucky I could take this time off. I wish we could all get time to grieve the things that need grieving.

Thoughts
I like writing thoughts on this blog and putting them out into the digital ether. There are a lot of things I write that I don’t put up. I am trying to be a bit more selective, or I would be posting random things every week.
There was a moment in the late 00’s when it felt like we would live in a world where everyone had their own little blogs, and we all shared honest thoughts, to understand more. I kind of miss that idea. With the advent of LLM’s, and the ravaging they are doing to online text based media, I’ll keep posting my normal, human thoughts here. Complete with poor spelling and grammar.
I don’t know why I share the posts on social media though, that seems like a mistake.