Even though July 2022 was a year ago, it truly feels like multiple years have gone by for me. If I was told I’d been trapped in some sort of Hyperbolic Time Chamber the whole time, I’d totally believe it. So many things have happened in the last 12 months.

When I wrote my last post, I really did intend to work on Snowman for the rest of the summer. A little over a week after the original posting, I learned there might be an exciting new visiting teaching job, confirmed it existed, and had planned an interview. About a month later, I was moving 1200 miles away and quickly trying to put together new material. I didn’t even move into a new apartment until a week after the semester had started.

After living in a new city for a few months, I learned the job would not be continuing and I was not being considered for future employment. I won’t go into the details in a public post here, but, yes, I did get extremely screwed over situationally if not intentionally.

I started the new year by returning to my dissertation work I’d put to the side while dealing with the move and new job. This became the focus for 2023 when I was not working.

And here we are, July 2023.

As I write this, I’m days away from defending my dissertation but with no job locked in after this summer. There are some things I’ve applied for, but none of which I’m particularly betting on at the moment.

In the meantime, I’ve launch a Patreon. For $3, you get 20 videos and around 16,000 words of written content per month. I’m committing to trying it for at least two months, as that will get me through the current topic of Twine 2.6 (with a book of all the written content planned at the end), but if I can’t get at least 200 patrons by the end of August 2023, I won’t be able to continue it unless other things can help fund me alongside it.

I truly don’t know when I’m going to get back to Snowman development. I’m probably going to do a quick update to Extwee this week, as I’m working on a conference paper that is using it for research into Twine works, but the focus will be on finding employment in the short term. The plan originally was to apply for new academic positions starting soon, but with the hiring cycle usually eight months or more ahead of the next academic year, I might find a “real job” for awhile before trying again simply to pay down my student loan debt as wait for a possible academic position to open in the future.

Once I’ve made any significant development progress or have launched any new things, I’ll try to blog about it again.