It’s difficult to see a path forward for yourself when the vision of your future you see while psychotic always seems to make more sense than the ones you see when in your right state of mind.
Category: Life Updates
Various posts with updates on my life and what I’ve been up to.
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Building a Life Worth Living
I sit here on this damp September afternoon as I settle into the new life I’ve built for myself. There hasn’t been much time to work on development tasks; with Summer coming to an end my wife and I had a pretty significant list of things we needed to accomplish before she returned to work as a teacher.
Two things kind of happened at the same time. We decided to reclaim the space available to us in our home, and we decided we needed a new family vehicle (and a daily driver for me, I haven’t had my own vehicle in years). We got an 18 yard dumpster delivered to the driveway and filled it with all of the things that no longer fit in our life. Previous to this we had two rooms in the house available to us, a larger room (our bedroom) and a smaller room (our office).
The office housed two desktop computers where we used to play games, but it’s been years since we used them so the room slowly devolved into a collection of boxes and other junk becoming essentially unusable in the process. Our bedroom had some space, but it was largely full – we had a TV on her dresser where we played our games (one of us on the TV, the other streaming PC games via Moonlight) and watched our content.
New rooms, new us. We gutted both rooms, turned the smaller room into our bedroom with no TV – just a bed, a speaker for music/rain sounds, a mens dresser that we split, and our nightstands. The larger room we turned into a proper living room setup for ourselves. We now have two televisions, one for each of us to game on, both with a PS5, Switch 2, and our MacBook Pro’s hooked up for World of Warcraft (and so they’re finally always plugged in, charged, and ready to be used as actual laptops instead of dead in a drawer needing to be plugged in every time we use them).
On the vehicle front we decided a truck made the most sense for us. We now have a Ford F150 hybrid that we can use to fuel our new life together. At first our inclination was to purchase a camper to tow next summer, which was a large factor in going with a truck, but now we are leaning toward tent camping for the next few years and using the money we save on a camper to do some actual travel. I really, really enjoy having my own vehicle again for when my wife is at work.
Back to development soon, but I’m not sure if it’ll be on Kyle Incremental or if it will be on something a little less personal. I’m still trying to figure that out. I really want to work on Kyle Incremental, but I’m worried that by its very nature it may be sharing too much of myself with the world.
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Good Morning
As I sit here drinking my coffee this morning I’m left wondering how to talk to my therapist. I’ve been with the same therapist for around six or seven years at this point, and while we have a great relationship – we often find ourselves talking in circles about world news or my weekly checklist of “showering often enough is a huge win” and “going to the store by yourself is a huge win.” We don’t talk much about the greater picture of what I want out of life and how to achieve that.
I want to change that this week. I meet with her in a half an hour and plan to update her on everything that has been happening with my wife and I over the last couple of months. We had been trying for a baby. We are no longer doing that. It’s kind of a major shake up in terms of what we are planning for our life together. I’m nervous, because it’s a strange conversation – but ultimately I’m hopeful that a new direction in life (and, frankly, the lifted stress of needing to build a life that I’d be proud to raise a child in) will give us more productive things to talk about.
My therapist has always been hesitant about anything that looks like myself “going back to work.” Her and I disagree heavily on what “productive living” really looks like some times. “Work” is added stress and an increased risk of mania/psychosis in her eyes. In my eyes, some sort of productive work is an essential part of feeling like an adult, and navigating life on Earth in the year of our lord 2025.
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Here we go…
So over the past year or so I’ve really felt a calling to return to some sort of programming work. Originally I thought about Unity, but decided it was too familiar and I’d bog myself down asking “is how I’m doing this out of date?” I also wanted to start with simpler projects that feel native to the devices I use in my daily life, so I’ve decided to work on some small iOS projects for now.
The first project I’ve started is called “Kyle Incremental” and it’s primary purpose it to have a space where I can start tinkering with some ideas without the need for fancy graphics. I’ve got a basic story I want to tell as you explore your way through the game, and I’m going to wrap it in some incremental game design that I’ve been a fan of personally.
The goal isn’t to make money with any of these projects. It is simply to ask the question “Can I still do this?” I also really want to see how far AI has progressed not just as a toy for generating pictures and video, but as a tool to help with application development. Today I started the project and I’m honestly stunned with how much I got done in a single day with zero experience in Swift, near zero experience with Xcode (I’ve only used it to deploy Unity games, which does all the work for you).
Let’s see where this journey takes me. Hopefully some positive changes are on the horizon.