I’ve decided to take 2 weeks off in August to work on personal endeavours. My girlfriend is headed up to the mainland to visit family, which means we don’t have a summer vacation to plan. Meanwhile, the Vault contains a lot of partly-fleshed notions, and that, as I am often reminded by others, means there’s not enough time to work on all of them.
I have a wide array of interests. I love drawing and acting and singing (however poorly), and I have a passion for writing code and doing math in my head and going to science fiction conventions, and I care about the world and the various political and social systems that govern it, and I want very much to make all of my output matter in ways that mean the future is a better place than the present.
I also, I have learned, really enjoy working with other people. My Startup Weekend experience was so positive I can’t ever say enough about it, but I keep trying. I met people there for whom I am grateful and by whom I am humbled.
So while I’m taking those two weeks, I figured I’d do what I could to add a little personal interaction time to my creative days. I didn’t have the money or the time to find and book facilities, but I own a home now, and it’s plenty big enough to allow at least a few people to visit and partake. I’m planning to set up space for different projects – at the very least a room for the VR helmet, a tv and controllers for the Android microconsole, a couple of flat surfaces for drawing, and a few devices with mobile apps on them – and then just start working on my own projects.
In a perfect world I’ll get to see friends and family over the course of two weeks in between doing things that I love, and I’ll get to share some of my passions with them, and maybe even get to give them a place to play around with their own creative interests. At the very least, I’ll have dedicated space and time to work and consider and plan. The last time I did something like this was September of 2001, and I remember the week spent in a room with friends trying our best to make something worth making nearly as well as the terrible day that followed.
Somewhere in the last year, I realized that memory and others like it are ones I treasure. Long past time to do whatever I can to make some more of them.
I hope you can drop by.