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Last weeks of 2022 were so busy I barely had time to sit and think about
anything. I feel kinda exhausted, but right now it's only me, my drink,
and my MD player. So I think it's a good time to do a short summary of my
achievements and progress in 2022. If you think it's kinda cheesy then
I agree, but my therapist insists it's going to help with my impostor syndrome.
Oh well, we'll see about that...
⍟ Created the Spookbench site and this Gopherhole, also managed to NOT abandon
them after a month. I find writing to be very soothing, should do it even
more often in 2023.
⍟ Gave my first hobby-related public presentation, at my local university,
as a "special guest" during retrocomputing seminars. I was talking about
MSX computers, a little show-and-tell with my Sony HB-1.
A bit awkward but it was fun and I made new friends.
⍟ One of those friends was a head coder from an Amiga demoscene group,
Ghostown, at the time he was working at the univeristy. One thing led to
another and I got accepted to the group as a new coder. We're still working
on our newest production, so until we publish anything together, I tend to not
brag about it. Cool guys, we attented a few demoparties together already!
⍟ Finally decided to rectify mistakes of my teenage years and made some steps
to get into higher education. I kinda... skipped some of my high school final
exams (it's a long story, for another phlog post) and as a result I need to
take them this year. All paperwork is done and currently I going through
all the math stuff I managed to forget during all those years.
⍟ By the end of 2021 I picked up Japanese lessons. I'm proud to announce
I've sticked up with it and now I can speak badly in three languages!
Jokes aside, I'm still garbage, but I know around 400 kanji by now. It's a fun
language and I really need it, because...
⍟ ...during the summer I fulfilled my dream and imported an X68000 from Japan.
It's my favourite pet project now. When I got it, it was completely dead, and
now I am getting very close to running first floppies. Of course most resources
and software is not available in English, but I met some helpful, like-minded
nerds from Japan who helped me with stuff.
⍟ Finished a bunch of other, smaller projects - made my first PCB ever (a simple
FDD adapter for PS/2 computers), installed Plan 9 on an old Google Search
Appliance machine (I had to use freaking power tools to get inside this damned
thing, Google bolted it shut), rescued a few Game Boys, made a nice networking
setup for my Amiga 1200, got another X68000 for a friend and fixed it too,
installed a modchip in my GameCube to enjoy some games, fixed my turntable
(twice, this poor thing). All in all, nothing groundbreaking really, but I
learned a lot. My knowledge about electronics went from "well, I kinda know
what a capacitor is" to being able to semi-comfortably mess around power
supplies and use an oscilloscope and a logic analyser properly to diagnose
problems.
⍟ I'm not super happy about this one, but I became a technical leader
of my team at work. More decisions, more responsibility, C suite people
being a major pain in the ass but hey, "tech lead" sounds like something
to brag about.
⍟ Right at the end of the year, I joined (and finished in time) LoveByte's
Tiny Code Christmas. Kinda like the Advent of Code, but for making
classic demoscene effects in TIC-80. It was very fun! I need to archive
it somewhere and update this post with a link to the stuff I made.
⍟ Managed to spend this year to the very end with people I love the most
joys together, they listened to my old computer babbling, I was listening
to them talking about their stuff, from herbalism to secrets of tagging
anime girls on Danbooru.
Wow, that was a long year. I had to make many hard decisions, suffered
some loss, had some nasty personal drama... but ultimately everything
turned out more or less alright. I am hopeful about the future and excited
about some secret incoming projects I am preparing for.
Year of a *Rabbit*, right? If this isn't a sign this is going to be my year,
then I don't know what is, I love rabbits. ／(≧ x ≦)＼
PS: do you know the symbol I used for bullet points here? The fancy star in
a circle? ⍟
It's a symbol for logarithms in the APL. It used a whole bunch of funky
characters!
(HTM) APL on Wikipedia
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