Zampanò

I realized it's been awhile since I posted. This is mainly due to painting myself into a corner; I was trying way too hard to make this particular online identity the one I use for Deep or Controversial thoughts.

But I find that coming up with something worth writing about in this (imagined) context was exceedingly difficult, and I didn't want to just have a blog where I complain about day-to-day life. There's also the fact that many of these issues or questions haven't changed or been resolved especially. Change is typically incremental.

It also means that I only write when I have the time and focus reserves to spend a fair amount of time on a given post, which is also pretty rare. So adding this to the probability of having something to write about that was “good” enough (or “deep” enough or “significant” enough or whatever), and small wonder my posting schedule was as infrequent as it was.

I do still want to maintain a space where I can talk about things that I'm not comfortable sharing with people who know my offline identity. The observations I'm generally making about the world are changing somewhat as well; I'm far less interested in politics and related things (like “policy”) than I was even a couple years ago, and I've struggled to find observations or ideas that don't simply come down to “be less terrible to people.”

I'm also coding a lot more, but don't feel like I have the knowledge or experience to do a worthwhile dev blog (and don't want to limit myself that much anyway). I do hope to write some tutorials at some point, but I'm not sure what I can add to the existing corpus. My main idea is to target an audience that most don't, namely people who aren't necessarily interested in becoming hobbyist programmers, but those who have some other work to do and want to make that easier. That's also how I choose my own projects: how can I streamline processes that aren't traditionally “automate-able.” Sometimes I just want to make existing software less terrible to use, even if it's just sprucing up the visuals.

Strangely, I'm also finding myself wanting to dig in to legal minutiae, despite not wanting to get back into any kind of traditional legal practice. If I had to guess, I think this stems from my wanting to like, do something that isn't just putter away in my isolated corner of the world.

This has proved elusive. I'm not really sure what it would look like, much less how I would get there. Because I feel so trapped and so powerless in my life, it's easy to preclude any thoughts that come to mind by assuming that they're unattainable. It's also coupled with a tendency to imagine how I'd feel in the situation rather than what I'd do, which muddies the waters that much more.