I’m sitting here at 3 AM unable to sleep, so I’ve been going through old journal entries and website bits instead.

It’s interesting to see how my interests tend to come and go. For example, there’s a period of time when I’m really interested in working on card games and crank out many expansion sets for PPA TCG or Student Wars. Then that stops being interesting and I switch to working on website code instead. Various other periodic interests include photo tagging (and associated statwankery), video games like PSO, web design, video game design (PPA Adventures, CMU Adventures, etc), and photography. Currently my interest seems to be cooking and baking (or food in general, as I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at restaurants’ food photos on the internet). I should probably buy a food processor so I don’t have to mix pie crust by hand because mushing your hands around in butter and Crisco is not too enjoyable.

Another interesting thing is how friendships and relationships (in the general sense) change over the years. People I spent a ton of time with in high school (Brian, Akshat) are people I don’t really ever talk to anymore. I haven’t kept up with people I considered fairly close freshman year of college (Avery, Howard). Ev and I used to see each other every weekend (or at least every other) for random photography or games my junior year, but we haven’t spoken in long time. I used to do things with CMU people living in south bay a lot (jgrafton, dfontain, etc), but haven’t seen them for many months. People I’m hanging out with more now (Sharon, Charles, Mark) are people I didn’t even know a year ago. It’s not a bad thing by any means… just interesting to look at. Some of this is certainly geographic distance and lack of IM (which I consider my primary communication medium).

It’s also interesting to look back on my college years and read about classes and life in general. I miss college a lot… and as much as I complained about classes, I actually did enjoy taking them (well, most of them). I suppose there’s a part of me that really wishes I had taken the job at Viz and remained in Pittsburgh (specifically, remained close to CMU). On the other hand, I love my job here and really feel like I made the right choice. I don’t know. In a year or two it will probably matter less, but I’ll still miss the general environment of a college campus.

I also miss photography. Specifically, I miss taking black-and-white film and developing it, then making prints. There’s something about spending several hours in a darkroom that makes you appreciate your photos much more than sticking a memory card into a computer, and shooting black-and-white film also seems more rewarding (more challenging?). As much as my life is digitized nowadays, there is something to be said for tangible photos you can hold in your hand and hang on your wall. If I ever get a house, I’ll be seriously tempted to convert a room into a darkroom for developing film and making prints. It’s too bad I don’t live in Pittsburgh, where houses are affordable. :P

I should set some goals for myself for this next year so I have some things to work on.

• Learn Scala. I don’t mean “Learn Scala” like I did with C++ either, where I read a book and poked around at some code and told myself I was done. I really mean learn the language… start writing little test programs with it. I haven’t really coded for fun in several months (work has been kind of annoying lately though), so this would be a good way to start again.
• Finish the People Wars base set. It’s been sitting around in a semi-started state for a while, and I posted card teasers to Facebook many months ago. I should just sit down and crank out cards at some point, because it really seems like it could be an interesting game.
• Finish tagging photos. My last year of high school is all that remains between me and tags on 100% of my photos. Unfortunately, that is also the year when I took my camera to school every day. Still, I should just get it done so I can start statwanking on high school friends, as well as by camera.
• Finish the next RPG Get! expansion. It’s looking like it will be an Evolution Worlds-based expansion, which will provide a nice contrast to the existing PSO sets. Relatedly…
• Playtest RPG Get! As the game will soon have 3 sets, it kind of needs some playtesting to determine what works and what doesn’t before things become too difficult to change. I really just need to sit down and assemble a deck and print it, but it seems difficult to find the motivation to do that.
• Take more photos. This probably sounds silly to people who see me taking photos all the time, but lately I’ve been finding myself taking the same few photos over and over (see life for proof of this). I want to get back to where I was in college, taking random artsy images for fun. A goal of one interesting photo every day seems too difficult, so let’s shoot for three or four a week (pun not intended). This’ll also give me reason to update life more consistently.

Yay life. Yay 4 AM.