I celebrated the tenth anniversary of Take on Rules.
As I mention in my About page, Take on Rules is an Everything/Nothing style blog; it means everything to me and could mean nothing to the world.
In adopting that mindset, I’ve expanded the scope of my blog, and found myself writing even more. In I wrote over 170 posts totalling over 145,000 words. That’s the most posts and words I’ve written in any of the 11 years of Take on Rules. For a variety of reasons I have about 15 draft blog posts that I’ve never quite published.
I still write session reports. I wrote 20 session reports in . And about RPGs. Yet I expanded to write poetry or about poetry, about Emacs, programming, and other things; again whatever felt important to write down. In Slowing Down to Synthesize, I went into more details about writing, and Alex Schroeder pointed out that he writes to learn; a great sentiment.
I wrote about leaving Notre Dame and called out two former coworkers, Rob Fox and Mark Dehmlow, for their patterned behaviors. One of the drivers for blogging more was a program/deparmental decision disallowing blogs for individuals and units. This decision ran contrary to university policy and against other departmental units’s already long-standing blogs; even my past team had a blog. Again, I am super thankful to not be working at Notre Dame 📖.
I joined the DEV team. I love that I’m still contributing to open source, mentoring and managing developers, and contributing code to Forem—the software that power DEV.to, CodeNewbie, and several other Forem instances. I also love that my new employer encourages blogging and knowledge sharing. You might see some Take on Rules posts syndicated to DEV.
we buried our 9 year old border collie. A few weeks later, we chose to foster four 10-day old border collies and their mother. We’re just over a week away from the puppy adoption day. The fostering program has handled the placement logistics, so we can focus on doing our best to raise some wonderful puppies for other families. We’re also adopting one of those puppies.
I also helped my partner with her business, Soapy Gnome; working the register, sweeping the floor, helping move to a new location, and buying fancy coffees for her team. I love my bonus job at Soapy Gnome, as it is a chance for me to interact with people.
To Next Year
We’re all coping with a pandemic that the various Western governments have abdicated on any meaningful response; escalated by concerted efforts at disinformation, fascist propaganda, and failure to report on anything outside the acceptable capitalist/colonial narrative.
Unless our governing bodies responses drastically change, this is our new normal. And our new normal is exhausting year.
I keep checking in with people by asking “What’s giving you energy?” I wish it were as simple as helping people move towards their energy. But as the Covid-19 📖 pandemic rages on, I want to nudge people towards their energy. To explore that well-spring and perhaps discover further resiliency and greater belonging to the human condition.