41

I’m a year into overtime now, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. I honestly don’t feel much different from this time last year, at least regarding my position. I’m back to work, if only part-time, and that’s enough to tread water. Never enough to move forward, however, and that’s really how I see every part of my life these days. Add in the exhaustion and stress I feel most days, the parts of my body that don’t quite work as well as they used to…

I’m old. There’s no other way to put it.

While I do still prefer it to the alternative, it makes things much more difficult. I just don’t have time to do all the things I want. I’m not talking about the Boomer obsession with vacations to faraway places or interminable roadtrips. I mean putting my ideas into practice. Because I still have tons of those.

Since I have, for almost three years now, continued to believe that each new birthday will be my last, I’ve decided to focus on my legacy, what little there is. Barring a miracle (and you know I don’t believe in miracles), I probably won’t have children of my own. I’m not going to be a billionaire philanthropist. No, I create things. That’s what I do. And I want to create something that, to put it bluntly, outlives me.

All my ideas are incredibly niche. I’ll freely admit that. I’ve never been one to follow trends or try to be popular. I think outside the box, whether or not people want me to. It’s a lonely path that my mind walks.

That said, the thoughts that have taken root lately have been for things that other people might find interesting or useful. So this year is my chance to focus on those.

• Altidisk: It’s hard to believe I’ve been creating languages for a quarter of a century. True, I didn’t do much with the craft for a few years, but I never truly stopped. (I’ve used one of them for making passwords for 20 years!) Altidisk is a little different, though. It’s the first time I’ve made an auxiliary language. More Esperanto than Elvish, in that sense. Unlike most auxlangs, mine has an ulterior motive: it’s based on Germanic roots, Germanic principles, and it’s intended to foster a renewed sense of Germanic community.

• Pixeme: This one’s still around. The idea is simple enough. Take a picture, describe in a single sentence what’s happening on it, then translate that sentence into as many other languages as you can. It’s good for building vocabulary and grammar, the latter of which flashcard methods tend to overlook. And I’ve even tested the Pixeme method myself; even just using AI-generated images, I was able to associate the image with a Spanish sentence fairly easily, and that helped with the words, too.

• Rakentan: I’ve been wanting to build a "fediverse" platform ever since I first saw the ActivityPub standard. It just seems like it solves so many problems with the way the modern web is designed. Originally, I wanted to create a replacement for the old PHP-based forums of decades past, and that’s still on the table, but I recently had the idea of something like a recreation of webrings (remember those?) crossed with StumbleUpon (remember that?), in a federated model. So you’d have all your own links, and you could follow others’ collections to see what they’re liking, and so on. I’m…still working out the specifics, to be honest.

I have other ideas, because I always do, but these are the top ones at the moment. Other than my writing, of course. That’s what kept me going through the deepest parts of depression, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t continue it, even if basically nobody ever reads the books.

So there you have it. Another year older, somewhat crankier, as quixotic as ever, and altogether jaded. That’s me at 41.