It's Been a Minute
Some Personal News
Been a while since I’ve updated here, so a bit of personal news first. I started a new job in July 2023, which was good, and then got laid off again at the end of February, which was significantly Less Good. I will probably write more about what’s next for me sometime in the near future, but for now, if you or someone you know are looking for a senior software engineer who likes to focus on team and process improvements (mentorship, setting standards, etc.), please reach out!
In much better personal news, some of you may remember that I participated in Logic School (now Community Action School) last year. Well, my project ended up being a pen and paper roleplaying game that will hopefully be both fun and a useful organizing tool. It’s a Forged in the Dark game called Solidarity in the Dark, and I recently created a little landing page site for it, so please head over there and check it out if you’re interested! My hope is that I’ll be ready to start running playtests later this year.
Books
I finished Introspect (v0.9) by Visakan Veerasamy, which I’ve been very slowly working my way through. Shout out to whoever it was on Twitter that recommended this! As you can tell from the “v0.9” in the title, this book isn’t technically finished. There are places where that’s apparent, especially as you get closer to the end, in part because Veerasamy makes the interesting choice to leave public “notes to self” along the way about things he isn’t satisfied with in the current edition. With that said, I still got quite a bit out of this book, and the author’s earnest approach, humor, and clear desire that this work be helpful goes a long way to smoothing down some of the sharp edges of a mostly complete WIP.
I started reading Introspect while I was also reading Pete Walker’s fantastic Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving and found it to be really complimentary. While both authors approach the subject through the lens of their own personal histories, Walker’s is informed by his career as a therapist, while Veerasamy’s is more of a mythopoetic narrative, explicitly framed as a Hero’s Journey (but with enough self-awareness and humor for that to be helpful and enjoyable rather than stodgy or self-important).
Books/systems/etc. I think this book would pair well with:
- “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving”, as mentioned above
- Internal Family Systems
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- The Happiness Trap, by Russ Harris, one of the big authors in ACT
- Addicted to Unhappiness by Drs. Martha and William Pieper, the inventors of Intrapsychic Humanism
- Lichtenbergianism, by Dale Lyles. Ostensibly outlines “an approach to the creative process,” but also more broadly applicable. Came to my attention via Ada Powers who described it as “the best book for ADHD brains.”
Memes n’ Such
Some good memes I’ve come across lately:
- Scylla and Charybdis on life, via Visakan Veerasamy (source)
- DNS isn’t real (source)
- Captain Picard has some good tips (source, via @histoftech)
- Another banger from VV (source: Introspect, though I bet he posted it on his Twitter account as well at some point)
