dances with geeks

I feel quite distant from LJ these days, and really, the only reason I'm still using it is to keep up with my Liverpool and London people. However, I do quite miss actual blogging. I miss having documentation of my life, so I'm going to go ahead and resurrect this journal to use for weekly personal updates.

Now, I have a pretty terrible track record when it comes to keeping up with casual goals, but I've been feeling rather distant from all my UK lovelies this past year. Here's to hoping that this feeling of malaise towards my UK life will motivate me to keep this going.

In the tradition of weekly Ku updates I'm going to use this journal to whine about some bad moments, boast about some good times, and keep track of my weekly activities in a handy bullet point format.

So here's how this week went to kick things off!


(ㆆ_ㆆ) THE BAD ( ˘︹˘ )

+ Had an issue with my sister over her being passive aggressive about my financial situation. To put it simply, I'm not rolling in the cash right now... but I'm not flat broke. As in, I'm not fully 100% comfortable but I'm safe for a few more months at least. But what she said really upset me, so I'm going to have to talk to her about it. I'll do so after Mother's Day so as not to bring the whole family mood down.
+ Still feeling distanced from my English friends, boo. It feels like I haven't spoken to them at all in the past couple of weeks, so I need to change that!
+ Epistellar.net has some very frustrating bugs right now. My contact form isn't working, boo, but I'm sure I can get that up and running since I actually just forgot to embed the php code GOOD TIMES. The CSS is also a structural mess and I want to rewrite the entire stylesheet but I don't yet have the time. I'll have to leave it for now.

(✿◠‿◠) THE GOOD (͠≖ ͜ʖ͠≖)👌

+ Generally speaking, I'm content with the somewhat roundabout trajectory of my career. Currently, I'm working as a temp in the data department for a PR company, and it's nothing like anything I've done before. As I close out this decade of my life (my 20s) I've realized I just flat out HATE marketing. At first I thought my loathing of that discipline might have something to with the gaming industry, but I've now worked in online marketing for both publishing as well as games and I just really, really don't like it. So I'm making a huge career transition out of marketing and into development, which is a bit of a risk and puts me in a tight position financially but... I'm really enjoying it!
+ In the meantime, my current temp job's paying the bills.
+ Which means I have money in the bank.
+ My work colleagues are quite cool. As mentioned, this is a temp job so I don't think I'll be working with them for more than a few more months, but I hope to keep in touch with at least three of them. They're good guys, all of them!
+ Con season began last month this month! For my Chicago gaming friends it's already begun, but I've only been to one expo thus far, and that's C2E2. You can see any photos I took while there on my instagram..
+ I've launched Epistellar.Net after months of piecing it together. It's built on the Bootstrap framework, which helped a lot with getting the whole thing up and running. But I also feel like I've outgrown it, which is a satisfying sensation to have because it means that I've progressed I'm getting better.
+ I've picked up a side coding project for my friend at work! He's built a pretty cool PHP tool to make his job easier, and I've said I'll skin it with some pretty html/css for him. I'm working on it off and on this weekend and it's lots of fun.
+ Tomorrow's Mommy's Day! I'm excited because we're going to breakfast, then going shopping, then to the racetrack - an old family tradition of ours. Good stuff.
+ Working on a postmortem for epistellar.net and it's coming along nicely. Hope to get that up this week.
+ Annnnnd that's about all for now!


What I’ve been coding:
▶Epistellar.Net (maintenance stage!)
▶Arbitron filtering tool for my work colleague (coding stage!)

What I’ve been watching:
▶ Lynda.com videos (for training!)
▶ Game of Thrones (typical me)
▶ Daredevil (very freaking solid stuff!))
▶ Avengers: Age of Ultron (it has problems but I freaking loved it!)

What I’ve been listen to:
▶ The NoSleep Podcast (freaking quality!)
▶ Little Dragon album by Little Dragon (heavenly)
▶ 6:58 8tracks.com playlist (amazingly ethereal)
▶ My Soundcloud Likes (yes good)

What I’ve been playing:
▶ Starfighter: Eclipse Beta (I'm a kickstarter backer, cannot WAIT)
▶ Choice of Romance: Affairs of the Court (really fun!)
▶ Choice of the Vampire (less good but still awesome!)
▶ Hollywood Visionary (really enjoying this one, very cute)

Upcoming:

Going to hopefully totally clean up all the bugs on my site and get started on Cakemates.org! Also, next weekend is ACEN, so I'm excited for a weekend of anime nonsense!

Sometime in the distant future...

Going to code a layout for this journal 'cause it needs work. Also, gonna code a bunch of dumb fucking anime tumblr layouts because I still fucking love anime.

It's occurred to me that in all my years as a fandomer I've never really had a space purely for public consumption. My previous journalings all skirted that nefarious boundary between personal shoutbox and fandom activity, which has resulted in a lot of private entries and a fair amount of angst over my identity as a geeky person in this web 2.0 type of world.

So in the interest of keeping things pretty open I will now be using this journal as a looser way to chart all of my beautiful flaily keyboard mashes over the media I consume like it's my job. In the event that I do start publishing my original work, I'll also rely on this space as an intermediary for professional efforts and fannish geekery.

There'll most likely be talk of roleplay, manga, anime, video games, films and television here, as well as a whole lotta shouting into oblivion about lesser known web comics and youtube serials. This journal will also crosspost to shewards on LJ as that site was my home for many years and I still have some lingering fandom friends who might be interested in my ramblings but who've yet to migrate to dreamwidth.

Now that that's said, I'm feeling a little more positive about being able to manage my online presence better. As a last bit of housekeeping, if you know of my personal livejournal and we're already friends over there, please be mindful not to discuss any of my personal ongoings over here. I'd like to keep these two places quite separate.

Weee! Here we go!