tuftears | State of the Tuftears, 2022

I have decided to absolve myself of the need to post detailed journal entries from the start of 2020 and meow! So, first off: Happy Mew Purr, folks, and may 2022 be a year of healing and restoration, because we sure can use that.

Second, a quick catch-up...

2020... Well, everyone remembers the Year This All Began. I moved near all my stuff from the office home and started working at home. There was a certain degree of adjustment as I had to start cooking all my own meals, rather than relying on my workplace cafeterias for weekday lunches and dinners. Over the nearly two years since then, I've shifted to a two-week cycle, going out once to buy groceries, then cooking three or four dinners over the week plus lunches, each time making enough for four people, and freezing most of that. It's worked out well for me, I rotate my dishes to keep from getting bored.

I got myself a Valve Index VR so I could take my vacations virtually! Half-Life Alyx remains the best VR game yet, but that kind of shows what a desert of great VR games there has been.

I postponed the Japan trip that was to occur in 2020, then cancelled it entirely in 2021, as the pandemic shows no signs of dying out, despite mass vaccinations. I am very disappointed in 30% or so of the fellow people who share this world with us, but unfortunately there's not much that can be done about it until People In Power Do Something.

I got double-vaccinated in May 2021, and celebrated with a birthday outing in July. My older bro treated me and Bookwyrm to a steak outing, where I got to try A5 Wagyu beef for the first time. That stuff is impressive - almost like steak bacon, for sheer umami and fat. Definitely not the sort of thing you should have all the time, either cost-wise or health-wise, but it was worth doing once.

I got boosted in early December 2021, but Omicron has come out so that is casting a long, dark cloud over the coming months. I can only hope it will burn out quickly, but... *waves paws helplessly*

I am starting to consider the logistics of retirement. I've been hanging around at work mostly because I want to see the sunset of a project that I and a few others worked on, so we can see our job safely finished, rather than leave them hanging because 'the last people who knew anything about this are gone' but that effort is taking its own sweet time. Beyond that-- I don't actually need that much to live on, but I am always wary of how quickly medical costs can eat through apparently healthy savings. It's currently most important that I keep myself in good health, which I have more or less been doing. So far, so good.

I haven't done much (if any) art, I've been focusing most of my creative efforts on writing. I spent NaNoWriMeow working on a Not-Trek, but I find myself in a curious position: I want to write other series in the Not-Trek universe, and the particular stuff I wrote is at the end of the Not-Trek timeline, so I should probably write the stuff that comes earlier.

Here's an overview of the writing projects I've been poking at:

Alien Tastes - the story of the first human to attend a galactic cooking institute. Set somewhere in the Not-Trek universe, where Earth is a came-late to the Not-Federation.
Exodus - Not-Trek. when the doom of the Not-Federation is coming, how do you save everyone?
Lost in Translation - I'd been working on a story of superheroes in the galaxy, and an astronaut from Earth stranded on the other side of the galaxy gaining the power of... languages. I wound up shelving most of it because it wasn't really working, and now I'm pondering whether this belongs in the Not-Trek setting. I should probably keep it its own thing, because superheroes and Not-Trek don't seem to mix.
The Children's Ark - not really begun but I've poked at this off and on. The idea is that a colony ship is going to the stars, and using VR teaching on the colonists in suspended animation to give them all the knowledge they'll need to make a flourishing colony, no matter what conditions they find. So, not actually a LitRPG, but similar principles.
Junkyard Knight - I think about this now and then, the idea that so many "tinkers" in superhero settings just wind up making personal super-suits and then gad around being heroes in them. What if they mass produced them instead, becoming a force multiplier? It occurred to me that you'd get a corporate dystopian future, where, say, OmniCorp basically runs everything. People in very expensive high-tech armored suits wield the power. What happens then, if some lone genius stumbles on the ability to create relatively inexpensive armored suits? You just might have the ingredients of a revolution.
Omphalos - a fantasy setting with no plot or characters yet! Picture a city at the juncture of six different dimensions. It's valued as a point of trade, but at the same time, the Maw at the heart of the city continually devours land/sea from the other dimensions, pulling buildings in slowly, over the course of years. And every so often there's a shift as a new dimension gets added, and the other ones are pushed aside.

There are a handful of others, but they're listed in relative order of likeliness for me to be working on them. It's not quite at the state of a resolution but I'd like to get to the point of putting out *some* stories for others to read in the first half of 2022.

Wish mew luck, I'm going to need it. -.-