Thoughts
It's funny because there was a time from (roughly) 2017-2022 when my sanity decreased roughly linearly and on Twitter and here I felt like I
was kind of live-blogging my decline. But now we've been roughly linear for the last couple of years.
It's frustrating because I'm not where I want to be. I just slept for 5 hours and didn't eat dinner. But I am still alive and I'm not about to decline any more. I just miss where I was 8 years ago. But I don't see a path back there. Which is weird, it feels like it should be possible. In a lot of ways the constraints on my life are the same as they were then. I think I'm more ambitious then I was.
Like I never would have done something like The Linoleum Club. I had personal projects, but they were personal. The votes or whatever that I got on Khan Academy really felt like a gift. I was able to start and finish and abandon KA projects without feeling like it was anything more than playing a game. (I wanted votes on Terra Magma or Mirgan, but their success didn't define me. I wanted Mirgan to win the KA contest in the way that you want to beat a level in a game, and so I was very happy when I did win. But I would have been proud of Mirgan, maybe not as proud, but pretty proud of it anyway.)
I think that changed when I started OJSE. In a way OJSE is similar to a KA game in that it's just something that I did in my spare time because I thought it would be cool if it existed. But it's also hugely different in that I hoped that everyone on Khan Academy would move to OJSE. I wanted to lead a revolution. And The Linoleum Club isn't a revolution against the status quo in the way that OJSE was, but it is very much something that I feel like I'm doing for other people. Because of the nature of the project, I don't get to solve the puzzles. I don't get the experience. The experience is for other people. There's a part of me that still feels bad about not finishing OJSE and not delivering that experience (which is crazy because OJSE is so complete)—when I don't feel bad at all about not finishing Ortal or my Civilization-style game or Looper or any of the many other KA projects that I never finished.