I've been trying to figure out recently how to make social media work better for me. I am stuck between two “worlds”. On the one hand, I've got my IRL friends and family who are on the major platforms and don't want to be bothered with something different. On the other hand I've got the professional and hobby-related communities that share my ideologies around social networking, and that have almost entirely abandoned the major platforms for decentralized, user-controlled ones.
One of the hardest things that any engineering team can do is to inherit a software project from another team. And yet, my team at Red Hat has to hand off software all of the time. Because of that, we've had to get really good at setting up other engineering teams for success in these tech transfers.
Last Thursday, my regular D&D group of 25 years gathered on Zoom and I ran the last session of a long-running campaign. It was a relatively rare situation of us wrapping up a full start-to-finish campaign, and it was particularly notable for two reasons. First off, it is the last campaign that I will ever run in the bespoke game setting that I started building over 20 years ago. Second off, it was my last regular game session of any sort with that gaming group for at least six months. I'm taking an extended leave from running table-top RPGs and significantly limiting my participation in table-top RPGs until Autumn.
When I was a kid, I had some dreams that were so vivid that the sensory experience of them was almost indistinguishable from being awake. On Monday night of this week, I woke up at 3:30 a.m. with a picture-perfect recollection of the dream sequence I had just had. It was so shocking and moving to have that sort of experience after many years of barely remembering any dreams at all. So I did my best to capture what was happening across the whole sequence. On the surface, it's just random shit, but with each section of the dream, things came into sharper and sharper focus until by the end, I was certain that I was awake up to the moment that I actually woke up.
I don't even know where to begin with this month. I have strong emotional reactions to just thinking about it, but why bother trying to capture all of that negativity. I won't appreciate reading it later – if I ever bring myself to reading this particular article later. So I'll just try to capture things in chronological order and leave the rest for future me to work out.
My father passed away yesterday. I'm still very numb about the whole thing, still processing, but I didn't want this moment to go by without some writing. Going through old articles from a previous version of this blog, I found something I wrote about my dad on the occasion of his retirement from performing surgeries in 2008. I'm reposting it here for posterity. Rest in peace, Dad,
A few weeks back, one of my coworkers (we'll call him Adam) had a major health scare and was hospitalized for a while. Another of my coworkers (we'll call her Betty) pulled together notes of well-wishing from our team and prepared them in a really thoughtful way, adding “get well soon” messages and images to the document before sending it along. Adam is out of the hospital now, which is a huge relief for everyone.
This week, in a completely unrelated incident, Betty's father passed away after a heart attack. This time around, the task of collecting people's messages of support has fallen to me. And wow, am I bad at this. At Adam's suggestion, I am following the same playbook that Betty used. But it feels highly ironic to be using this format for her, when just weeks ago she was doing this for someone else.
I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect video game franchise. I've played the main trilogy through so many times that I could talk you through the whole plot and the big decision points without loading up the games.
I've always used Instagram to promote my DJ hobby stuff. I know it is owned by (and integrated with) Facebook, which I actively dislike, but I always viewed IG as “Evil Adjacent” rather than “Pure Evil”. But at some point along the way, FB has now “streamlined” some things between the two platforms. The result is that if you want to use a scheduling app (like Buffer or Later) to queue your IG posts ahead of time, you need an IG Business Account that must be connected to a Facebook Page. You can't just have an IG Creator account anymore, you must also have an FB account.
So where does this leave folks who have no desire to be on Facebook?
Twenty years ago today – the Ides of March, 2002 – I enlisted in the Army National Guard. Unlike most of the young men and women going through in-processing that day in Boston, I was already a college graduate, I was already married, and I wasn't exactly young. I was twenty-eight years old. Had a full-time job as a software engineer, had a mortgage. What motivated me to join was a sense that I could be doing more to serve others. It was just after 9/11 and I felt like it was something I could do.