Life In Progress, as of 2024-08-19

• Learning Stan Rogers’ Bluenose on mandolin and voice
• Building a few games in the TIC-80 fantasy console
• Deploying my own “Pages” server
• Building a Forgejo Action for deploying game builds to Itch.io using butler
• Building a custom WordPress Docker container that uses SQLite
• Starting my own business

Music

Adam and I continue our semi-weekly jam sessions! We’ve settled on Stan Rogers’ Bluenose for our first piece. I normally pick up lyrics pretty quick, but this song eludes me. We worked on the chord progression last week, and I’ve been actually practicing!

Game Dev

Still having a blast with TIC-80. I made a small farming experiment game, to learn Fennel some more and also nail-down some basic design principles. Some of the ideas in that experiment, namely generating the map with a loop and mset instead of using the built-in map designer, gave me some insight for solving my darkness troubles in Nightgolf. I’m still wrapping my head around it, but I think this will be a solution.

The farming experiment game lives on Itch.io and the TIC-80 Webzone.

Tech Dev

Forgejo continues to be rewarding, and I’m looking forward to expanding my deployment of it by deploying my own “Pages” server. This will allow me to deploy my static sites on my own infrastructure. I’m also working on an “Action” for leveraging butler to publish games I publish the source code for from my Forge to Itch.io.

In preparation for both my own use, and my business use, I need to learn more about Nextcloud. I’m also working on building a custom WordPress Docker container that relies on SQLite instead of MySQL.

Hovering about all this is backups and monitoring, both of which I sprinkle into my learning voyage. I’m looking forward to writing up some documentation about my implementation.

Entrepreneurship

I’m happy to report I was accepted into New York’s Self-Employment Assistance Program, SEAP. I will be starting a business offering managed online services, such as website design and deployment, personal cloud, and email. I would like to offer these services to local small businesses and not-for-profits. I think of it as “Silicon Valley experience” at reasonable, local prices. I’m excited to dive into the parts I’m not very familiar with, namely the business side of things. I have extensive technical experience and mastery, but I lack any significant business experience.

Gaming

I’ve started a new playthrough of Darkest Dungeon. It’s mildly frustrating, but mostly fun. I have fun yelling at the game; it’s like stress relief. I’ve been generally successful, but the Crimson Court has been very rough to me. It is a game about challenges and loss, though, so nothing unexpected.

I’ve continued my play-through of Sundered, though have put it down for a bit. I’m playing it on my Steam Deck using Lutris, and it works very well. Lutris continues to impress me, and I want to try writing an installer for a game.