2025-09-20 - quarterly review 2025 q3 - external factors

Surviving, but not thriving.

previously - 2025 Q2 - Nights into Dreams

There is no way to sugarcoat this. We've had problems all this year, and this quarter feels like the worst of that in terms of personal projects. We were making decent progress on at least some things up to August, and then things kind of fell off a cliff.

But there is, at least to some extent, a greater understanding of why we're running so low on energy. Work's cloud transformation is in flux with decisions that were assumed as being locked in months ago suddenly changing, and our team's role in this being... unclear, long term. There's a lot to potentially learn, which is nice from an interest perspective, but knowing what to focus on is difficult. Would learning Python or Go be a better investment? We know Kubernetes will be important, but what tooling and standards are placed on top of it, and what level will our team be interacting with it?

And at the same time that's going on, we have payment processors cracking down on anything they find distasteful. More and more critters we know having to ask for mutual aid. A government that seems addicted to its two favourite pastimes of demonizing trans people and shooting themselves in the foot. Hot weather meaning our big fan basically has to be running constantly. ^[1]

And despite not having a lot of energy in the evenings, we've still made an effort to get out of the house for an extended length of time almost every weekend. Whether it's exploring a National Trust park we hadn't been to in a long, long time (...and almost collapsing in the process, but we digress), accidentally joining a large Pokémon Go group for taking down the hardest raid boss the game has so far offered, or sitting in quiet contemplation in a new park near a place we used to work - we've spent a lot of time touching grass and trying something new everywhere we go. It's very visible which parts of our feet have been covered by sandal straps.
And we've taken every opportunity to have foods we don't normally have; had a (British pub take on a) Philly cheesesteak sandwich just a couple of days ago as of writing this bit.

So you know. I'd like to have made more progress on everything else, but we can't exactly complain that we spent part of The Year of New Adventures having new adventures rather than inside, hacking away at a laptop.

health and wellbeing

Shortly after writing last quarter's article, we had a healthcheck, first real one since the pandemic, which revealed that we're surprisingly doing better than we thought. Low cholesterol in general (both bad and good) - so we've added rice and fish into our relatively restricted weekday diet and switched to wholemeal bread as well.

Leg has been a mixed bag. We mentioned in the convention article that we swapped to barefoot winter shoes, and we decided to do that for sandals as well, even if all the claims about being grounded to the earth feel spurious at best. Still, our feet do feel stronger, and whether it's placebo or not, for the moment, we do feel more comfortable being less reliant on the cane for shorter walks and only reaching for it when we need it. We're still not going running anytime soon, there have been times when we would have fallen without the cane, but there's positive movement.

Mental health feels lower with ADHD being a bigger distraction at work and projects; still prone to losing hours to social media - or in lieu of Balatro ^[2], a lot of time spent on FreeCell for Game Boy Colour - but... well, at least we've spoken to our GP about the ADHD now, even if their advice was "fill in this self referral form and wait 8 weeks for a response". We've taken some steps we can (got one of those visual timers, thinking about analogue planners rather than messily bullet journalling in a notebook when needed), but we probably really do need a professional at this point.

Still also need to actually make an appointment somewhere that does electrolysis, but kind of want to wait for more of our on-call schedule to be revealed first.

closing open loops

Looking back at last quarter's article, we mentioned a number of projects. We did customize an avatar using Ucupaint, we've just been stalling at the last hurdle of getting it into VRChat and then writing an article about it. Rendering that out in Blender is partially done as well - a slight issue with maybe biting off more than we could chew in terms of having multiple posed avatars looking at the new one, particularly given storage limitations in pulling down all Unity projects from git to get the models + any tweaks from them.

We mentioned getting a small PC to use as a Kubernetes host. We did get that PC... but it's been sitting without an SSD for months - and with now getting to the expensive part of the year, it's probably staying without one until January at least unless someone wants to get something off the wishlist.

More projects started, and not finished.

We'd heard about the concept of open loops a few times, such as this blog post from Tiago Forte (disclaimer: since writing this and us capturing this link, Tiago has gone absolutely all in on large language models). The term apparently originated in Getting Things Done, a book we avoided from hearing once that it doesn't work properly with ADHD, but before the point where we started making notes of who had said things like that.

In mid-August, Obsidian released their Bases feature - broadly similar to Notion's Databases, if you've used them - a powerful way of cross referencing notes based on metadata.

And suddenly we had a way to very easily visualize the things we hadn't done. ^[3]

The projects that still need working on. The books we got part way through and didn't finish. An easy way of capturing whatever the next step is for when we revisit things.

I am not naïve enough to think this will fix everything (even in the screenshot above, I can already see some things where the last progress date should be newer), but it is an ambient, low effort way to keep things in mind that we can easily make some progress on when we're in the mood to, using notes we've already made.

The Year of Focus might stick as 2026's theme - but part of that will be that rather than gallavanting off on new projects, we try harder to move something existing forward first. Our own personal Snow Leopard year, as some in the Mac community might say.

q4 goals

Let's try and finish the year out strong by aiming relatively low.

• Upload the avatar we've been working on.
• Post at least one article before Q4's quarterly review, probably the one on Ucupaint or how we're budgeting these days
• Try and cut down our list of outstanding work tasks.
• While things are too in flux to learn definitively, it might be worth at least picking up the basics of Go.
• Fill and hand in that ADHD referral form.
• To spend less time on distractions, including Archipelago. ^[4]
• Book flights and hotels for Vancoufur 2026.
• As soon as we get our next on call assignments, make an initial consultation appointment for electrolysis.
• Take one of the other things on the open loops list and get it closed.

footnotes

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1. Eventually the boiler will probably pack in, and at that point we can see about getting a reversible heat pump. ↩︎

2. I am sure Balatro is a great game, but I am also very sure that we'd spend way too much time on it if it ever went near our phone. ↩︎

3. We have bases for other things as well, letting us better keep track of commissions that are outstanding. ↩︎

4. Archipelago remains a great way to play with friends, the problem is that we have a tendency to overthink things - reading through the randomizer logic for things we didn't know were possible with glitches, as one example. When we next join a game, we will probably do something with a defined maximum of how much can be done. ↩︎