Kind of Blue

I seem to keep falling into a familiar pattern. I’ll rebuild the weblog (updating the layout a bit, upgrading the software that runs the blog, etc.), and get all excited. Then I’ll lose interest and forget about it again.

But, let’s give it another try.

It’s been an interesting couple of years since my last post here. Started work at a large multinational real estate company that didn’t end up being a good fit. I left there to go back and work again with a familiar codebase and some great coworkers that I had worked with previously for years and got along with really well. Then they closed up shop and laid off just about everyone, including me.

For almost two years I’ve been at a healthcare startup (Well, they’ve been around for about ten years. Is it still a startup at that point?) where I got in thanks to another previous coworker I’d worked with. It’s going well, and I’m a big fan of the folks I’m working with, and I think the work is interesting and challenging. Crossing my fingers it stays that way.

Because, I’ll be honest: looking for a job right now is tough.

So, what else has been going on these last few years?

• I built a simple aggregation website for boardgame deals. It’s currently up at bestboardgamedeals.com, but it needs a bit of work. Mainly because Reddit started blocking the crawler I made to grab subreddit posts. I started a rebuild of the site to be a bit more robust (saving data to a DB instead of just taking current posts and displaying them), but that progress has stalled a bit.
• At the beginning of this year, I started making analog collages using some papers and ephemera that I’ve collected or bought over the last several years. Most of the collages I’ve made can be seen on my Instagram page: @billturner.
• I got interested in role-playing games a year or so ago, and solo journaling role-playing games in particular. And then that interest waned, and I’ve sort of lost the interest in that. I’m tremendously impressed with the indie RPG scene, but it’s just become too much to keep up with. Which leads to…
• I pulled the few posts I had made to a separate RPG weblog over to this one. I can’t keep up with updating a single weblog, so what made me think I could start another one and keep it updated too? There are just a couple of posts that I migrated over to here, and it’s likely there won’t be any more.
• There are several features in this iteration of the Kind of Blue weblog that don’t work as well as they have in the past, so I’d like to update the layout to where I’m happy with it again.
• In the last update I mentioned trying to get The Tools Artists Use up and running again, and I do still have some ideas on that. However, that will be a lot of work no matter what approach I take, so we’ll have to see how that works out.