2023: The Year of Making Stuff
I really need to come up with a better name if I'm going to stick with this.
Imagine my surprise waking up today to find that it is now the year 2023. Despite having a theoretical understanding the constant and inevitable forward march of time, I still wouldn’t say I have a working knowledge of it and end up being absolutely blown away by it continuing to happen. I guess I’m just really good at being a frog boiled slowly in a pot or whatever, especially in the sense that realizing too much time has passed will probably happen when I’m already dead. Anyway, happy new year!
Unsurprisingly, I have big ambitions for this year that I did absolutely nothing to prepare for, so this is still an idea under a fair bit of construction. Please bear with me while I build this plane as I’m flying it. Inspired by a friend’s Thing A Week grand plan and the better part of a year simply consuming media of all kinds, I’ve got an incredible itch to make some of my own again, a thing I used to do all the time! So let’s call this the year of making stuff. Any kind of stuff, any kind of quality. I’m going to post it on the internet every day, but only as a sort of accountability mechanism, not because I necessarily think it’s worth showing even one other soul out there. Maybe I’ll come up with some good stuff but pretty likely I’m just gonna crank out some real stinky garbage. But the whole point is to do it more often. I’m here to exercise the creativity muscles regularly so they get big and beefy and I can actually make stuff I do like.
I don’t know exactly what this will look like yet, probably something along the lines of a separate page or website entirely that’s just a big calendar view linking to each discrete thing that I make each day, the location of which will vary depending on what it is and how I work out the most frictionless way to get it onto the internet. I know that I will be roadblocked by even the slightest inconvenience, so easy posting is going to be key here. Some may be blog-type posts like this or like my previous posts describing a project I worked on or something I just want to talk about for a bit. Some might be doodles as I try to figure out how to draw and use this as an excuse to actually make myself do it. Some could even be small pieces of something larger, whether it’s sketching out the basic framing of a webcomic or 500 words of a story I have bouncing around inside my head or some code to display the current weather on the Raspberry Pi screen that sits on my desk. As long as it’s something that didn’t exist the day before and I can put some kind of evidence of it on a website, then it counts.
I have a bad habit of making these sort of ambitious goals for myself and then getting overly frustrated when I can’t keep up or something gets in the way, so failure without beating myself up over it is also going to be something I try to learn from this. What form that might take is even less obvious right now, but for the time being let’s say that a little bit of something every day (or maybe two the next day if I miss one) is the plan. And yes, this post and deciding how to organize the whole thing is in fact Day One. If it feels poorly written and not well thought it, that’s only because it definitely is all of those things. I’m a little hungover, and was not planning to do this until this very morning!
Welcome to 2023: the Year of Making Stuff. Maybe Day Two should be coming up with a better name.
Header photo by Planet Volumes on Unsplash