Hey, pals!

Here's where I'm speaking, showing up or otherwise spreading the Pantheon/open source love this year:

Feb 7-9 | WordCamp Phoenix | Attending!

Feb 28-Mar 1 | WordCamp Miami | Speaking on command line basics!

On companion planting:
Top Ten Companion Plants

Watching:
RuPaul's Drag Race
The X-Files
Breaking Bad

Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha, by Porpentine

With Those We Love Alive, by Porpentine

You can really fall down a rabbit hole here. Once you start noticing where a choice could happen, you start seeing choices everywhere.  "The reader could choose this pronoun.  This color. This timing."  It's exhausting and it's important to trim those decision trees early and often.  

Today I did a one-day writing retreat, and in the spirit of my DIY artist retreat zine (ugh it pains me that there is LITERALLY NOTHING ON THE INTERNET I can link there), here's how it went: 

As I've dug into this Twine experience I'm building (tentatively titled The Neighborhood, by the way), I've realized there's an entire world of people focused on interactive fiction (IF).  

Of course there is, in retrospect.  Every internet rabbit-hole is fully populated. 

I kept bumping into some jargon, and specifically discussions of parser vs. choice-based games.  Time to research!

On merfolk & toxic masculinity:
The Hairy, Potbellied Mermen Taking the Canadian Coast, by Brian Barth

Sassy thoughts on face care:
Don’t Make This Common Moisturizer Mistake, by Charlotte Palermino

Y'all, I can't help but use the tools of my software developer life to organize my writing life. It's weird but it works for me.  I'm sorry I don't just wander the forest with a pencil and a notebook like a proper poet.

At work I've been trying to improve our work processes so some agile scrumbans have been running around in my head.  It occurred to me that I could (and perhaps SHOULD) put a work-in-progress limit on my writing. 

Do you ever take comfort from the knowledge that someone, somewhere, has done something amazing before? 

If I manage not to get caught up in comparisons, it reminds me that unexpected and amazing things are possible. I've been using the Literary Witches Oracle deck every time I sit down to write and each time it's a reminder of women writers who have done hard things. Reminds me that we all take the ordinary material around us and turn it into something miraculous. 

I've been reading RPG Design Zine: A How-To Zine about Tabletop Roleplaying Game Design by Nathan D. Paoletta over the last several months.  It's short (duh) but each page has some beautifully expressed insights about how and why RPGs work the way they do, and it takes me a while to digest it.