This is not going to be a particularly pleasant post to compose, but I feel that I owe it to those of you who I interact with regularly to give you some kind of status update. Pardon the light use of uncouth colloquialisms.
As of right now, I am not able to publicly be specific about certain aspects of this situation, as it involves someone other than myself. There may be a time when I am able to share more of the story. Maybe not. I’m not trying to be coy in order to build mystery for sympathy points. There are plenty of terrible people on the Internet, and I want to have a firm grasp on the situation and have my emotions in check before I decide when or if to give specifics on a public blog.
Our household has been hit with some really big, life-altering news. Our family is still intact, no one has passed away, but things are going to be different from now on. It’s not catastrophic, but it does alter our course going forward fairly dramatically. No one has wronged us; it’s just one of those things that the universe dumps in your lap.
Allow me to rewind a bit. Things were already on shaky ground here over the last month or so between a combination of being a lousy friend to people who I care about and having what felt like a lot of my support system outside of my family seemingly blow up. Momentum on the OpenBeacon 2 project was building up to a good tempo, and then hit the brick wall.
On top of that, I was getting to the point where I could not countenance the absolute torrent of bullshit on what used to be one of my favorite hangouts on the ‘net: Twitter. The SNR in my timeline had taken a huge plunge over the last few months, and I had noticed that many of my favorite accounts had gone fully or mostly quiescent. It was getting to the point where I was getting outraged nearly daily it seemed, yet I kept coming back for more hateclicks. It dawned on me that this is not a healthy behavior. (Now I really understand why online journalism is in a race to the bottom with their constant shitposting.) As I’ve said before, my emotional intelligence may not be great, but even this fool got it after being bludgeoned enough times.
I removed all of my Twitter apps, closed all pages, and disabled all notifications. Done. Haven’t looked at it for weeks now. There’s a good chance that some of you have tried to contact me there and have heard no reply. I apologize for that. I just can’t let myself get sucked back into that miasma right now. If I haven’t already alienated most or all of my online friends, I can still be reached via the usual email.
Allow me to say that it has been pleasant to claw-back all of that wasted time from the social media timesuck. I’ve been able to spend more time reading novels, working, and pursuing educational goals. I’m not going to delete my Twitter account as I want to keep it as an archive, but between my feelings about the medium and the above-mentioned situation, I don’t foresee myself actively participating in it any time soon.
To bring it back to where things currently stand, priorities by necessity are going to undergo a large reshuffling. I don’t know exactly what the extent will be yet, but I should have a handle on things in a month or two. This includes Etherkit. I’m not sure what form the business will take in the near future, but it will have to change or die. I’ve got some decent work for Etherkit in the pipeline mostly done; it would be a shame to have to put things to bed before it fully came to fruition. I’ll be putting out feelers for assistance and guidance. For now, I’ll still continue to sell the Si5351A Breakout Board.
It’s one of those times when you have to reassess a hell of a lot of things in your life. I’m laying low because I don’t want to make further missteps. I hope that those who know me forgive me for going radio silent lately. I’m having one of those uber-introvert moments where I really need some time to gather my energy before reengaging. I imagine I’ll ease myself back into some more blogging on the nominal topic soon enough; the volume of output depending on how things shake out in the priorities department.
Be excellent to each other.