Happy New Year! 2025 Plans

Well, it’s 2025 now I guess. A lot is happening in my life - mostly moving to a totally new city to start a job after seven months of hunting, but that’s besides the point. There’s some things that I actually want to make happen this year, and what better way to share that than a ramblingly long post?

Get back to streaming

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for many, MANY months now. The last three-odd years have just been chaotic with graduating university, finding work, having seizures that threw a ton of shit in the garbage, leaving that job voluntarily, and then trying to find a job for months made it pretty damn hard to find some what to vaguely consistently hit “Start Streaming” in OBS.

Hopefully, with a new job and a place to call home again, I can hit that button again. Even just once or twice a week will make me happy, I miss doing whatever and hanging out online. Especially now that my Video Game Interests are expanding beyond Splatoon 3 and Minecraft - I’ve been enjoying Warframe a bunch recently, and also want to get better at Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - they’ll hopefully be a bit more varied, too.

I want to do some build/code streams at some point as well, but that’ll be for the splatling projects, so those won’t happen for a LONG time.

Try to build shit

Even just basic stuff, I want to start learning some techniques that’ll bring future projects to life. I want to learn some 3D modeling and get a better sense of picturing a 2D image of a 3D object into actual 3D space in my head. Sure I can rotate the cube in my mind but that doesn’t mean I can really get a sense of scale and what the finished result will be.

The only real use-case of VR (slash XR) for me, outside of gaming and socalizing, is literally this. To be able to see how big something is compared to myself or some other object so I can get an actual sense of scale, instead of just having to remember “it’s going to be this big.” That kind of visualization would also help a lot when it comes to decided how to handle finer detail - does it need to be modeled and printed, can it be painted on, how might this really look?

I need an AutoCAD plugin to do this for my future headset, I want that shit so badly even if it’s relatively basic. Like, y’all have NO IDEA how much I’d love a tool that lets me see what I’ve modeled to-scale.

Get more involved

Something that I kind of resented about my time where I lived for my previous job was that I just didn’t really get involved in any kind of community. I know that was largely out of my control - it was a somewhat rural area focused around two universities, one large corporation, and the support systems in place to handle those existing. Being unable to drive there killed my personal ability to do things out and about, and build more relationships in-person. That fortunately won’t be a problem where I am now, though I still need to put the effort in to make those connections.

I also want to get more involved online as well. I have a kind of nasty habit of just passively Existing in spaces, and not really being a part of them in the way I kind of wish I could. This one’s a little harder to predict or plan for since it depends on my real-life engagements as well as “how much time and energy do I have after work” because yay, capitalism in the USA demands that we put our focus on work over life.

Build a better tomorrow

This one is, well, pretty damn vague, though it’s extremely relevant given the last three weeks of the current Trump administration in the United States. I want to try to leave things better than they were when I saw them - from the tiniest of things, to local organizing, or whatever that entails. The world’s a fucked up place right now, and I want to try to do what little this synth can in order to make things even just a little bit better.

This somewhat ties in to wanting to get more involved - not only do I want to build up better in-person and online social groups, I want to get involved in local politics here, because I have very little faith in anything I do having much impact on the federal scale. I… have Thoughts regarding federal politic that I shan’t go in depth here, but the TL;DR is that I don’t trust the current establishment to fight for us tooth-and-nail, and many of those who claim (or were “marketed” as) to be progressive have been proving they aren’t as in our camp as I think many folks wanted them to be.

But that’s neither here nor there, the rest of this post would be me bitching about politic if I don’t stop myself right now.

Prepare for the future

I’ve now formally given up the idea of being able to retire from work, given the overall instability of the Everything these days, which sucks because it’s a little nice to plan for that, but also retirement is fucking EXPENSIVE y’all. And since it seems like that’s a pipe dream (just like owning a home is kind of one, c’mon let there be another housing crash), I figure I might as well start thinking a bit about what I want things to be like in twenty, thirty years. Nothing is going to be set in stone, but rather just starting to think about those "what if?"s that come with this kind of long-term thing.

Maybe I’ll still be a controls engineer, maybe I move to being a consultant or work for a small-town utility, or I just build shit for folks online like I already plan on doing with splatlings and similar Splatoon weaponry. Or synth partials, or the parts for them if I ever figure that shit out and have the space to do that.

Stuff like that, y’know? Silly things that would be less tasking in some form than what I do currently (or would do in 20 years), but still make a bit of money and be fun to do, instead of menial labor. The last thing I want is to end up forced to work a back-breaking minimum wage job in my 70s. My back is already fucked up and has been for a few years, I can’t imagine what it’ll be like in four decades.

Host shit for friends

Going back towards more immediate thoughts and goals, I want to start self hosting things for friends for realsies this time. I have a five-page document going over the rough hardware plan as well as the software I’d feel comfortable running and what hardware I’d want before doing so.

I currently want to run some form of microblogging Fediverse software - either IceShrimp dotNET or Sharkey - and eventually Peertube for folks as well. I plan to host some local stuff for just me and my fiance down the line, but that’s a much later me problem. In the meantime when it comes to hosting stuff, I’m vaguely helping someone with running the VideoWisent Peertube instance, and what I’m learning with that will come to my aid when I run Peertube for myself and friends.

Well, that’s all folks!

I hope this 2025 goes better than 2024 for us all, despite the fascist in office right now that’s working to demolish the US government and hurt every vulnerable person there is here. While also destroying relations with pretty much every foreign country imagineable.