Long Time No Update

[slave_to_anime]

Oh wait, right, I have one of these LiveJournal things, don't I. Too many social networks, not enough time.

• I guess I haven't been gone long enough to forget how to type an LJ cut though. That's good.
• Anime Los Angeles in 2 days. Actually, let me re-emphasize that: ANIME LOS ANGELES IN 2 DAYS.
• Happy New Year everyone. My 2012 basically was not a great year. After my father passed away in April, a lot of things seemed to fall apart in parts of my life. It's hard to describe the level of influence my dad had on my life over the years, but I think many of us know probably the feeling. I've decidedly become more reclusive, much more shy and introverted in dealings except at work, and have been kind of regressing into a shell these last several months, much to my own dismay. I get the sense I'm not the me I was a mere year ago. And that's no good.
• I basically made 3 simple resolutions to myself for this year:
1. Live - By which I mean, survive. This is one resolution I desperately do not want to break.
2. Stop Wasting So Much Money - I've been overspending indulgently on myself this year, especially after Thanksgiving. I'm not going to try to examine my own psychology on why. Even I think it's probably some sort of coping mechanism internal to myself, but it's disturbing that I notice it, which means something's really off about it. It's not at this point creating great harm in my finances, but it goes against my inner ethos. I really do want to get back in the mode of being more frugal about my purchases and start saving more.
3. Stop Being A Loner - This is going to be the hard one. My natural instinct for a good chunk of the last, oh, 15 years or so has been to be a loner. I'm far more comfortable with the idea than I like, honestly. I'll never cede the fact that I'm going to be a natural introvert, and I'm not going to change in that department. But I have hated the fact that I've simply not reached out to do things with friends, mostly because I have no idea what people want to do socially so I dislike coordination, and I've been loathe to reach out to others to try to see if I can join in their fun. The best friends I have are now relatively far away from my life in Irvine. And my thought that my life would be better in moving from MPk to Irvine hasn't worked out nearly as well as I would've hoped in my social life. This is something I do want to change, but it's also the one thing that I have almost no idea how to change, since the things I think I'd need to do go seriously against the type of person I've grown to become.
• I really ought to write here more. While there's something to like about the immediate feedback and terseness that has come out of writing on Twitter, it does fairly poorly for the long form. And until I get more used to the idea of using a full CMS/blogging platform like WordPress, LiveJournal is still about the easiest option I have.
• If I'm honest, I did actually pick up a Tumblr. I'm not using it much at this point except to read The Profound Programmer and Awesome People Hanging Out Together and a few other logs, and I don't think I have any real intent of using it for much more than reading at this point, but it does exist.
• Because of work, I've been forced to kind of re-pick up much much more of web technology stuff at the current time than I had thought would ever reasonably happen. WebDev had come a seriously long way since I last did web stuff seriously back in 2005. I've forced myself to get much stronger at building layouts using good HTML, layer based layouts, and marginally insane CSS. JavaScript is decidedly much easier/more powerful thanks to libraries like jQuery. Simple professional-looking UIs using a framework like Bootstrap is relatively easy. Nice looking web fonts are widespread thanks to things like Google Web Fonts and a bunch of other sites to help convert typefaces for web use (when I had left working for the city, I had been aware of sIFR, but that was about the only way to do any sort of pretty font embedding). WordPress is treated as a fairly serious content management system now, whether or not it should be. A bunch of web coding frameworks (Rails, Symfony, Zend, CakePHP, etc. etc.) make coding large scale applications easier. And hell, even hosting large scale served sites using either strong shared hosts or cloud based computing services like Amazon Web Services or a bunch of new guys in a space called "Platform as a Service" that I've been reading into, such as Heroku, AppFog, Pagoda Box, Amazon via their Elastic Beanstalk tool, and a bunch of others.
  
  Really, it's all so different, but I'm gathering so much that I feel far more competent in this space than I have for a really long time. There's a distinct part of me that thinks that given a few art assets, a design idea, and some coding time, I really could create a LOT of web stuff, and make it actually look not bad.
• That reminds me, I will likely work on back end stuff at i360.com in the coming months. And maybe I'll finally get around to getting something going at cameko.org. And I ended up grabbing a domain at FantasticallyFantastic.com because it just seemed fun (see resolution 2, why I need to fix things). Might end up using that domain to work as my code experiment space. On the other hand....
• Front-end stuff on i360.com, as in, content, like pictures, and editing and posting pictures... Um, yeah, I still need to work on that. Always. ._.

I'll get back to writing on this more regularly hopefully. Or who knows, maybe this is all you'll hear of me on here for several months again. X_x