What I’m Doing Now
As updated on March 27th, 2023.
Filling in the town:
I wrote in my last update here about having gotten back into photography, which I’ve stuck with even through the winter months here (weather-sealed photo gear and good gloves have been a boon). A 40mm-equivalent lens has proven to be my preferred point of view, and picking out occasional details that stand as evidence of human existance in such cold surroudings has been the general theme I’ve focused on for the past few months.
Street photography (candid, public photographs taken with an anthropoligical, documentary bent) fascinates me more than any other subset of the artform, but living in a small town means that human subject matter can be sparse. To compensate, I’ve been working on filling in the town’s streets like a video game’s mini-map and photographing small aspects of the wintery life around me, even without a person-shaped subject to hand. It’s been fun, good exercise, and feels like a baseline practice that I can expand to feature actual people doing actual things as the weather warms.
Mentally thawing from the last of a chilly season:
This last leg of winter has brought with it another struggle with depression for me. It’s something I’ve dealt with off and on throughout my adult life, and generally manifests as passion for my interests “dimming”, self-motivation decreasing, and me hibernating a substantial chunk of time away to cope (either with actual sleep or other forms of copasetic distraction). Even since initially drafting this now page update a few days ago I’ve begun to feel more like myself again, and these feelings do generally thaw and melt away in due time, but it wouldn’t be a very “real” update here for me without acknowledging this part of my winter.
Allowing myself grace from streaming:
Something I’m proud of with my livestream is that I’ve managed to be quite consistent over the years; resulting in what’s ideally a predictable, welcoming broadcast for folks to tune into. However, largely due to depression eating away at my interests, I allowed myself to take my first major break from streaming this month.
This meant extra time to sleep, time spent with Anne, time reading books, and only booting up OBS to stream when I fully wanted to. It also meant doing more co-streams with my good friend Phalacin, which have been a cozy way to bolster each other through some tougher times. I’m already starting to ramp back up towards regular broadcasts again, but taking a grace period has been good.
Racking up more hours trying to better manage my time:
I feel silly writing something like this almost a year from when I first started working at ZSA, but I’m still so not good at this “adult responsible time management” thing. Some days truly are a heavy load of mail and work, but my own tendency to procrastinate, distract myself, and otherwise draw out the tasks at hand means more days end up feeling heavy than they should. I can accept that remote work being near-wholly different from the jobs I’ve held before means there’s lots I have to learn, but man do I wish it came more naturally.
Previous “Now” updates:
Credit to Derek Sivers for popularizing the /now page idea. It’s a good’un. :)