'Everything you ever wanted' has launched.

Turned 50 and had a real nice party. Looking forward to the next thing that I end up doing.

You can click on a Media Item logo to see a list of those items. Man it's nice having a website to mess around on.

The main site has been broken and rebirthed. No more infinite scroll. No more utility classes. I'm relearning vanilla CSS and forming big ideas.

Seems that the ChatGPT spiders and ignoring my robots.txt file because, well of course they are. Thieves and scoundrels. Devoid of ethics. It didn't used to be this way. And then some business jerk realised he could send thousands of emails at the same time. What is the BBS scene like these days?

I have not slept well and everything feels impossible forever. It's not of course. Soon everything will be in reach and it shall just be a question of which fruit to pluck. Until then... tea.

I hate the negative discourse against the new Star Trek show. All these neuro-divergent jerks struggling with a 'who moved my cheese' issue. LET PEOPLE ENJOY THINGS!!

I had to delete Hades 2 off my computer. I played Hades 1 until the epilogue and not long after gave up in frustration. Then many months later I started from the beginning again as a save haven from thinking about my house flooding. Every day after cleaning up mud and dealing with horror and stress I could slip into Hades for an hour, or four. I played that game for a thousand hours. Maxed out everything there was to max out. Then Hades 2 came along and I poured another 800 hours into that game. There's been barely a day go past in three years where I haven't picked it up. But it's time to get some perspective. Last night was the first night I didn't have the songs running through my mind on a loop. I'm free. For now.

I have a metric in my life that I think about a lot. I don't track it but it exists in a measurable state. It's the TTFL or the 'Time to first laugh'. It's the amount of time between greeting my wife and the first time I make her laugh. Sometimes it's within seconds. Sometimes it must take several hours. There are a lot of measurements that are dull or frustrating in life. It's nice to know there are some really positive ones as well.

There's a new film coming out called The Sheep Detectives. It's based on a book called Three Bags Full. I only know about it because I ended up chatting away to the author when I met her on a day trip in Portugal. Her name is Leonie and I got her talking all about how delightful it was to get have a well selling book. She was a total sweetheart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfNLApPCa8E

I cleaned my deck recently. Used a product that drained all the tannins from the wood. Those tannins moved from the wood into my feet. Now it looks like I have henna footprints painted on my soles.

I finished Hades 2 yesterday. The new updated ending. Every scrap of content. Every badge collected. Nothing more to. I've been looking forward to this game since mid 2022. Now it's all over and I'm feeling like a cork being pulled out to sea.

I used a weeding flame thrower to resurface my old plastic cutting boards. Worked a treat but for the fact that now they are completely warped and useless for cutting things on.

It's the big day. I've launched my novel. It's been six years since I started it and it's been buzzing around my head for decade before that. I like the notion that there's a book inside everyone. It feels so satisfying to drag it kicking and screaming out of me. I hope you like. Even more-so I hope you buy it.

I'm having my teeth aligned. Having a plastic tray in my mouth at all times is a weird scenario. Something else to look forward to in eight months is this thing coming out.

I overheard a girl at some markets. She sounded shocked and it became clear she'd just got off the phone after being offered a place in a theatre show. It was such a wonderful moment to be privy to. She processed the news and shared it and her shock turned into glee and within half a minute she was jumping up and down.

I felt so excited for her.

There is a strange tension in working in a holiday home. I'm in an idyllic location but I have to spend most of my day in front of an awkwardly set up workstation. There's a guilt pushing me to get outside and make the most of my location and a counter-guilt reminding me that I'm not on holiday.

Final part of the flood restoration is kicking off. The house is getting raised and it's bringing more emotions with it than I expected.

It's cold in Brisbane. That special kind of cold where you leave the front door open to let the warmth of the day in. That cold where you consider wrapping yourself in the electric throw but it's just to much effort. The kind of cold where you put your t-shirt on in the morning and it's freezing cold and takes some small amount of time to warm to your body temperature. The sub-tropics are hell.

I did indoor skydiving. I went from being a standard human not unlike the billions that have come before me who looked in envy at the birds, to being one of a tiny, tiny fraction who stepped through a door and lifted into the air. As enjoyable as it was it did feel a bit anti-climactic.

I heard a tapping sound getting louder while I was driving. A car behind me was having trouble with its bumper. I carefully moved aside and it screamed up the side of me and I saw sparks flying everywhere!! The front left wheel was hanging off sideways and this was my first indication that perhaps this driver wasn't trying to slow down. He changed lanes into incoming traffic, then the cops flew past me. The car finally gave up the ghost right there and the cops swarmed the vehicle. Five cars came out of nowhere. I carefully crawled past the scene whilst stabbing at where I thought the 'lock doors' button was. Instead my car mirrors waved back and forth like the car was a demented elephant. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen and I can say that I was in a police chase. The pursued were in front of me and the pursuers were behind so I was "in" that car chase.

I wrote a book. I'm just trying to gauge interest now as I prepare for a first run of copies. If you like the sound of that then get along to the front page of the website and click the button in the banner.

Cyclone is over. I've gone from a person whose default state of "It can't happen to me" has changed to "It could happen to me again". I'm not thrilled with this adjustment to my perception.

There is a tropical cyclone bearing down on my neck of the woods so I need to prepare myself for several flood warnings arriving on my phone. It involves having a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach ALL THE TIME!

I've added a little mental game to my mornings where I'm using my new palindrome tool to write a palindrome where I post it to Bluesky. I'm still using Mastodon for my primary social media but it's nice to have something to put up there.

Had a good year. A great year! Not a single personal catastrophe to deal with. (My bar was very low)