What I Did in January

At the start of 2025, I set up a Bingo Board filled with goals, things I wanted to complete throughout the year. My thought process was that if I had a big menu of things to choose from, I could avoid days spent doing nothing but scrolling.

It worked okay, but I found my interests drifting throughout the year, and the board didn't allow for picking up new, unforseen projects! I also think it worked out to be more of a litmus test for my burnout rather than a preventative measure.

This year, I'm trying out something different! I've been really enjoying finishing projects, so to motivate that, I'm planning to do a writeup at the end of each month of all the cool things I did, the catch being that only completed projects are allowed to appear. Hopefully I'll aim for smaller-scope projects and actually finish them!

ken la mi pali e ijo pi toki pona la mi toki e ni< kepeken toki pona lon lipu ni

So, here's what I did this month!

Ricing sugar-glider

I'm a big fan of the concept and cost-effectiveness of purchasing refurbished ThinkPad laptops and chucking Debian onto them to serve as my daily drive. I recently picked up my second such laptop (named "sugar-glider") after the previous one ("flying-fox") kicked the bucket (citing that its network card that had worked fine for a year was now unauthorised?? :skull:)

I'd been interested in using Chicago95 to set up a cool retro look for my desktop, but it requires xfce and I'd been happily using KDE Plasma for a while - I took the discontinuity brought on by the death of flying-fox as opportunity to adjust to xfce and set up Chicago95!

I threw together a wallpaper, spent an embarassing half-hour looking for all the places the Windows95 blue accent colour was defined in Chicago95's theme files so as to change it to red, and ended up with this result, which I'm quite pleased with!

(Technically I did this in December last year, but I misrembered that fact while drafting this up, and got excited to talk about it, so here it is!)

ghosted

My vfx artist friend Jed reached out to me out of the blue and asked if I wanted to help him put together a submission for Tropfest, the world's largest short film festival! I have,, so little experience here beyond basic skills, so of course I excitedly said yes! He wrote, directed, and composited, and I did all the 3D and mograph work in Blender.

We put the whole thing together in about 3 days, so I took a very kitbashy strategy - I found a set of public domain PS1-style models, assebled a scene and got to playing with lighting and camera angles. I also was tasked with putting together some UI of a text messaging interface, and, for the first time in my life, character animation(!!), which was challenging but a lot of fun.

Writing this is feeling like I'm writing up a personal project for a resume, yapping about all the things I was tasked with and my strategy for approaching them, but that was kind of what the experience was like! I was playing the role of a little minion with tasks to complete for my big-shot director, which was a stark contrast from, like, uni group projects I've done, wherein the team members and roles are much more symmetrical.

I loved the experience of putting it together, and all the friends and family I've shown it to have enjoy, so hey, seems like we put a little thing of value into the world!

[[Once ghosted is available online I'll chuck a link to it here!]]

Hadestown Karaoke

The thing you gotta know about me is that I'm obssessed with Hadestown. This is not so rare a condition - many such cases exist among my friend group. I'd had a fun little idea for months and months of getting some friends together and doing a karaoke event, but we just do the entirety of Hadestown start-to-finish, with assigned characters and all.

I split the script into 5 tracks (fate and worker lines get distributed across the main five characters), got hold of some instrumental tracks of the whole show, made by EJM Instrumentals, and put together a karaoke video of the whole show!

The pipeline touched a lot of programs - lines were allocated in Google Sheets, the csv was compiled into a png in Typst, animated to move at the correct speed in Blender, I touched up the instrumental tracks and filled in some gaps (like the drum solo preceeding Epic III) with Reaper and Musescore. I even added a faint background glow that mimics the lighting cues in the actual show (such that if you have it on a tv in a dark room, the room is lit up appropriately in moments such as the Electric City line).

This approach was very scaled back (reverse scope creep :D) from a previous crack at this project, which fortunately meant I actually got the event to happen! I got four friends together and we did the dang thing, themed outfits and everything, and it was great fun! My personal highlight was in the layered, echoing, "it's an old song..." in Road to Hell (Reprise) - shockingly, we actually made a chord, the harmonies actually worked out! (Presumably because it's staggered lines, each remembered as a melody, rather than a big old synchronous chord that's hard for the ear to unpick.)

I also chucked the karaoke videos on YouTube, and it's been wild to actually be able to see what YouTube analytics numbers look like? I dunno, kinda weird of me maybe, but even at a tiny scale it's fun to look through data! :D

Birthday Adventure Game

I had my birthday! I'm 22 now! I was struggling with ideas for what to do for my birthday when my friend Rishi presented the idea that you can use the advent of a birthday to force your friends to engage in whatever silly activity you want.

I'm a fan of Jet Lag: the Game, they make and play public transport adventure games - it's a really appealing and fun idea to apply game mechanics and strategising to the complexity and materiality of a public transport system.

I worked with Rishi to put together a lockout-bingo style Connect 4 game around Sydney (much like Jet Lag's first season). Three teams of three rush around the city, completing challenges, trying to draw a line of four locations in a row, whilst simultaenously trying to cut other teams off from winning.

Our initial playthrough on the big day went by pretty fast - since the locations on the map lined up with their positions in the real world, so you could score a line by just walking around the CBD while other teams are stuck on public transport out to the suburbs!

We wrote some more challenges on the day, and set up a new board where the positions on the scoring grid were randomised, which was way more interesting! The more complex geometry made it harder to put together a scoring line, and more interesting to block opponents' lines! I won neither of the matches but I had the absolute most fun plotting routes, completing challenges, casting curses and just being generally super high adrenaline all day.

A good birthday! The day full of whimsy helped to distract from the dawning horror that I'm slowly becoming a grown-up. :p

lipu ma

tenpo ni la lipu tenpo sin li kama a

　lipu mute lon insa ona li toki e ma kepeken nimi ma

　　　　taso mi sona ala e nimi ma ale a

　　　tan ni^ la mi pali e lipu ma

nimi pi lipu ma mi li tan lipu [wile.kili.pana e sijelo. jaki.]

　　　o lukin e lipu ma mi

ken la mi pakala anu lipu [wile] li pakala

　　nimi ma mute pi lipu ma mi li ike lili tan pakala pi lipu [wile]

　　　　　taso lipu ma mi li tan mi

　　　　　　　　　li tawa mi taso

　　　　　ni^ la ike lili li lili

　　　　　　　　ale li pona

sina wile e sitelen wawa la o tawa kepeken linja ni

And That's It!

It felt like a great start to the year, doing (and finishing!) all these little projects. I can feel I'll probably slow down a bit as the year goes on, but I'm excited to see if this format helps me get a move on with anything.

Chat to you at the end of February!