Winter’s Eve

Summer's end, Winter's eve, a time of change. It's been a while since I last wrote here; I felt that writing anything down would risk fixing in place thoughts and ideas that were still fluid, too uncertain, and to presuppose things that may or may not happen. A caution that fits roughly in the category of tempting fate. Nevertheless, I want to write some of it down.

I had a job, now I don't, and for the first time in my life I have a chance to actually take some time and think about what's next. I still don't know. I have a ridiculous amount of experience in design and I am very good at it - there's no benefit to being modest, I put a lot of effort and time (and overtime) into learning my craft. The software/web design world has changed, and is changing, and at the moment it's a difficult time to be looking for a job. The people who control the money (in the world in general) have been taken in by the sparkling promises of AI and compete with each other who can be most ruthless in harming actual humans to prove themselves worthy of service to the machine. Am I being harsh? Perhaps, but I don't think I'm being unfair.

So until the fever breaks I am learning new things, taking time to appreciate the small things. Learning things means changing yourself, and change means effort and discomfort, so I can't say I've been enjoying every moment of it, but I do appreciate the value of learning it. I finally (finally!) completed building my CNC machine which was a relief. The whole process of building it has felt like a barrier to everything else I want to do: the space it took up in my workshop while not being a functional tool, the space it took up in my mind as a task to do, the space it took up of my time to grind through the instructions and connect sprocket N to gizmo X with wire G and so on.

But enough whingeing. It's built now, and I get the valuable discomfort of learning how to use it. I've made so many mistakes and wasted so many bits of MDF and plywood figuring it out. I have gradually been getting more successes than failures and my frustrations at not (yet) being able to make the things I want to make are… lessening. I am getting a sense of the shape and scale of things I need to know and do to master this thing: unknown unknowns are becoming known unknowns, to go along with the growing number of known knowns.

Maybe, just maybe, I can use these skills to do something else as well as or just possibly, instead of my existing career. I honestly don't know, and I'm carefully not thinking too much about that right now. Again, I don't want to tempt fate.