Writing & Reconnection: March

March has been a busy month. Really busy. So busy that this post is basically a glorified bunch of bullet points. Let’s go.

Year of Writing

At the start of the month, I wrote a bunch of documentation for Randomize Everything, an extension I wrote for the Nova code editor back in 2021. This is more a re-organisation than new information, all of it formerly had been in the main readme file, but I rewrote it as I went, so it counts!

We’re approaching the end of the financial year at work. With that comes pay reviews, with that comes end-of-year performance reviews, and with that comes a whole lotta peer reviewing and—in one of the civil service’s more unique joys—essaying about why I should be paid more.

For maybe the first time this year, I succeeded at writing some fiction. I’m gonna be totally upfront and attribute this almost entirely to ChatGPT. As a tool for bouncing around ideas and unblocking a train of thought, it has proven to be unexpectedly incredibly useful. ChatGPT in general has a far better comprehension of concepts than I expected it to beforehand, and although it often doesn’t get stuff exactly right, I can pretty much always extract something inspiring or useful from it to spur my own creativity.

An unexpected bit of writing was bug reports! I submitted three separate bugs for each of Chromium, WebKit and Firefox in the space of three days. Maybe I should start working in QA.

As a consequence of basically all of this, blogging has been sitting in the back seat for a while, though a few ideas and drafts did manage to get noted down.

As if you ever needed evidence that I wrote an awful lot this month, I got a repetitive strain injury and had to stop writing so much. 🙃 Good thing I drafted this ahead of time.

Year of Reconnection

This month featured some actual reconnection: an email from an old coworker, and a weekend visit from a distant friend. Both were pleasant, welcome, and a little unexpected.

However, following last month’s somewhat disastrous attempts, I’ve kind of given up on really trying to reconnect in the ways I initially envisioned. This is where I employ one of the great features of the Yearly Theme system: adaptability. Simply put, I’m not going to try and reconnect with specific individuals from my past, but try to reconnect (or just connect) with communities instead.

This has had similarly mixed success, though for good reason: I’m an introvert! And I’ve somehow ended up socialising an awful lot this month! Some days I was just plain worn out and didn’t get as “involved” as I probably could have.

There are many more opportunities coming up in April, but maybe it’s time I try to walk instead of run.