Fox Status: October

Well, I shoulda buckled down and written more about the past month when I wasn't feeling awful about the country and the world.

So I guess to address the obvious, the election happened and it didn't go well. I honestly don't know if there's a lot I can say to that all right now; I'm still in a pretty messed up emotional state about it and there's nothing I could say that others can't and haven't said more eloquently. But suffice to say there's a lot of feelings going around in our household. I think I got most of the heavier emotions out by this point but trying to focus on work these past couple of days has proven more than a little difficult. I've been trying to get what rest I can and that's helped a lot, got me feeling at least a little bit less defeatist and more resolute. The best thing we can do is be there for each other, and I'm gonna try and make a last-minute 2024 resolution to do that more than I have been over the past couple of years.

With that said...

#October was a Lot, and also almost nothing

I swear I meant to write more last month. I wanted to talk a little bit more about some of the side projects I've been poking at, and how work and life have been going. I got down a couple of ideas for some posts to write up and then just never got around to writing them. That's at least partially due to work being very busy over these past few weeks, and I also consistently have very little time outside of work to do things like sit down and get words down. Usually I find time to write during my lunch break, or if I do have any other downtime during the workday. And it's not like I had zero free time last month, but what time I did have I mostly ended up using on fucking around with email migration (I'll get to that) or just distracting myself with nonsense. I dunno, it's been a little weird, I think maybe depressive feelings have been on the upswing as the weather gets colder and that's just making things Weird.

Bottom line is, I'm hoping to figure out a better schedule for myself so I can actually find time to write and post here without distracting myself or feeling like I'm cutting into other work/free time. We'll see! In the meantime, some of the stuff I have been working on lately.

#Email, email, email (200k of them!)

My big personal project lately has been driven by the fact that I'm progressively more fed-up with Google having its fingers in every aspect of my life. I actually couldn't tell you the exact thing that finally sent me down this rabbit hole, but something got me researching email providers a few weeks back, looking at options that would let me have a good bit of control over my email and ideally consolidate the countless addresses/inboxes I've built up over the decades. And boy are there a lot of options.

After a lot of research and thought, I settled on Fastmail to migrate to, since they checked all the boxes for what I need out of an email provider (mainly native IMAP/SMTP and custom domain support), and also offered a month-long trial so I could make sure I could get everything set up the way I wanted.

That all said, I have a fancy new email address I can be reached at! I've been wanting to use email a bit more lately as an actual communication method, instead of just a collection bin for one-time passcodes and "BONTO! misses you." So with this project comes a shift in how I manage my emails, and being much more liberal about unsubscribing from mailing lists and deleting email instead of archiving it. But hey if you're reading this and want to say hi, I absolutely encourage you to do so over email! I've got it listed on my homepage (rot-13 encoded as a half-assed anti-spam measure so you'll unfortunately need JS enabled for now to see it).

The big thing that I've forced myself to deal with now is... I have about 210,000 emails in my archives from my various Gmail accounts over the years, and for some reason I've convinced myself I need to go through them to figure out what's worth saving. So that's been occupying a good bit of what little free time I have lately. I'm planning on writing up a whole detailed post about that process, but suffice to say it's nice and daunting. :)

#Other stuff I've been up to

Like I said, October was kind of a weirdly nothing-month for me. Whether it's early-onset seasonal depression or just a lull in things to do, I don't have like... any "news" to share, other than a couple things that I've been up to with the polycule.

I mentioned last month that I was excited about the new D20 season, and it's more than lived up to the hype! No spoilers but goddamn has this season been a wild ride so far, and a hell of a lot heavier than I was expecting at points. Episode 6 (Code Crimson) was one of my favorite episodes of anything ever I think.

We've also been continuing to play a lot of Warframe with the polycule lately, it's been a really nice way to spend evenings together, and we're all hyped for the 1999 expansion coming... sometime next month? I haven't had quite as much time to play as the others since I have an earlier bedtime, but I finally got around to unlocking Steel Path and doing a few circuit runs to unlock some incarnon weapons! I like seeing the Big Damage Numbers :3

Other than that, I think the only other newsworthy thing for me is I'm finally trying to regain some semblance of a social life starting this week. At least partially spurred by the election and the desire to be there for others, but honestly something I've been working on a lot internally and in therapy over this past year, I'd like to get back to a point of interacting with people regularly. It's something I've been getting progressively worse at for the past couple of years and after a lot of self-reflection and internal work I'm wanting to start actually doing something about it. To that end I've tried picking up my old Mastodon account again, and finally posting a bit on the Bluesky profile I created and never touched forever ago. I'm working on getting my social links updated to point to the places I'm going to try being active, because somehow I'm even less keen on touching Twitter again now than I have been for the past year. Feel free to hit me up there too!

I think that's all for now! I'm gonna make a true effort to get some other writing up here too over this month, I would love to talk your ears off about this stupid fucking email migration project and embarrass myself by revealing that I'm doing email from my terminal emulator instead of any sort of sensible GUI.

Until then!