By TerryHi there! Welcome to the first in (possibly) a regular new series of blog posts about what I’m up to. Blogging! Why not!
Here is my new plan: now that twitter is gone forever, every couple of weeks, I’m gonna try to make a short post about what I’m up to. If you wanna follow along, I’ll post links on Mastodon and Cohost. Also I’m pretty sure this site’s RSS feed is still a thing, but I’ve never really understood how RSS works?? Anyway here we go
What I’ve been working on recently
I’ve been trying to finally get to grips with 3D. It’s about time!
I’ve made some 3D things in the past of course, but I’ve always felt like I was cheating. The truth is, I only really know a couple of basic tricks – like how to stick cubes together to fake a 3D model. I get out of my depth pretty quickly, and everything takes me ages. I had no idea how lighting and shaders work, or how to make a real 3D model, or how to rig and animate something, etc.
So, I’ve gone back to basics, learning it all for real – I’m working my way through the Blender donut tutorial, and slowly learning how to do things in Godot. This is absolutely exhausting – but I am slowly starting to get somewhere with it. Making big steps forward, but starting off with 30 steps back. My screenshot above is, uh, where I am right now.
I totally failed at making something for the Haunted PS1 Halloween jam – but 7DFPS is coming up, and I’m hoping I can make something small for that instead. Hopefully I’ll have something to say about that next time.
Leaving Twitter
I figure a good structure for these new blog posts is:
– Something I’ve been working on
– Something ELSE
Today’s “something else” is that I’ve stopped using twitter.
Obviously, this feels like an incredibly dumb thing to do – I’ve been active there for more than a decade, I have 62k followers, it is the MAIN way I communicate with people online, and the main way I tell people what I’ve been working on. But man, it’s just been harder and harder to justify staying there. Like the skeleton once said, if it sucks, hit da bricks.
It’s not just the Musk stuff, although that’s obviously a big factor – truth be told, twitter has been a source of stress for me for a while now. I’ve thought about quitting multiple times! I know this is kind of a good problem to have and all, but once you hit a certain follower count, twitter stops being fun. Even when it’s not necessarily negative, it starts to feels like you’re on stage at all times, and it’s stressful! Or at least, it was for me. (And it’s *addictive*, in a way I found genuinely distracting.)
If twitter somehow survives in the medium to long term, I’ll guess I might reactivate it to post the occasional big news, like a newsletter you forgot you signed up to. But I think I’m done with posting there regularly. Excited for the new things, whatever they might end up being.
Good luck on your journey!
RSS working fine it seems! Good luck for your future blogging!
Glad to still see distractionware between my rss updates all these years!
Regards!
RSS’s reliability is why I love it.
And as someone else who stopped using Twitter recently (after 13 years!), I’m happy to see others making the effort to move elsewhere. It’s a reinforcing cycle: I’m sure it’s hard to leave when you have a lot of followers there, and it was hard for an “audience user” like me to leave because I didn’t want to lose track of so many things I followed there. (“What is Terry Cavanagh working on these days” being one example!)
RSS still works fine – it’s how I found this post. One thing that has made it easier for me to use is just using it through email – I use rss2email, a script I run locally, but you can use BlogTrottr for the same purpose.
https://blogtrottr.com/
Set up an RSS folder and direct everything there. If you have read/unread status and links to the real posts that’s usually plenty.
Thanks all <3
Popped over here from my RSS reader to confirm that it’s still working, but I see that’s already been covered.
(And if anyone seeing this is interested in trying RSS for the first time, feedly.com is a nice and friendly entry-point.)
rss is pretty simple. it’s basically just an xml document listing posts, and then its up to the rss reader to recognize and report new entries. i find it quite nice for this sort of thing since new posts just pop up in my feed as soon as they happen, and i don’t have to worry about remembering to check. without the rss feed i’d likely have forgotten about this blog a long time ago.
maybe its time to restart some irc servers, look forward to the blogs and have a merry christmas
Oh cool! I must have subscribed to this RSS feed back in the Don’t Look Back days. Still works. Learning 3D sounds awful, I hope it doesn’t hurt too much.
Sorry to see you leave Terry, the door is always open for your return should you decide to change your mind.
Can’t wait to see what you get up to in 3d. I love Blender, but it took a few goes to get into it. I’m using Godot and Blender for all my prototypes these days. Very happy with both, but still a relative beginner. Anyway, you already have a foreboding black door and happy trees, not much else is really needed for a game is it?