Day holy sh*t it’s the 19th already:
Mate
I am tapping this post into a tablet, while sat in bed at half three in the morning. While i think its cute to call it being “a night owl”, my nocturnal insomnia has been steadily worsening since August. But that’s not why I am awake at 03:31 on a Friday morning. Instead i put good odds on my inability to sleep on the bottle of Mate tea i opened at 21:00 this evening.
For those of you who have never frequented a European influenced hackerspace, Mate is a highly caffeinated lightly carbonated tee like beverage, with a slightly bitter taste and a low sugar content. I equate the effect of drinking a bottle of the stuff over the course of an evening to swallowing a battery, but less unpleasant.
While culturally noted as being pure hacker fuel, the epic hacking endeavor that came from this isn’t going to make for an exciting Devember post. Because instead I spent the next three hours thrashing out half a dozen pages for my bachelor’s thesis.
This left me with the three hours of insomnia that followed to consider the roles of motivation and time planning in how I run my life.
My life as a FOSS project
As mentioned I am an Engineering undergrad student. That comes with a lot of project work. Largely I run my Uni projects the same way I run my FOSS projects. I work on them when i feel engaged with them. I have usually found that work gets done, and the lack of arbitrary deadlines keep stress low.
So why SEGFAULT are you working on your thesis 9 - 12 pm, and consuming copious amounts of caffeine to do so?
Well truth be told the relaxed model for work hasn’t been working. Somewhere around early November I burnt out. I stopped wanting to work on anything since. Timelines have slipped and now I am facing much less arbitrary deadlines due in early January.
Devember has previously been the task I had to force myself to commit to. That being part of the challenge made it fun. However this year I find myself struggling to force myself to work on my real projects, to meet real deadlines. What chance did Devember have?
Time is a currency
I here people claiming that they never have the time to do something, quite regularly. I imagine most people do. Time is a currency we can never make more of.
But those of us privileged to live in the developed world are rarely confronted with how we spend our time. I feel it is more fair to say we make time than find it. Time is not some rare commodity we are gifted, but instead is a monotones stream, taken for granted. Often wasted, thoughtlessly. There’s always time tomorrow.
Half a month in summary
SEGFAULT, so if you avoided doing your Uni work, and you didn’t commit to Devember, how did you spend your time?
Well I certainly wasn’t idle. I:
- Built a new computer, and blogged about it too much.
- Founded a Rust working group for doing pointless things with old computers.
- Missed my girlfriend a lot and spent way too much time texting her.
- Watched an unhealthy amount of youtube.
These are obviously not things i am proud of, but it aptly makes my point that the time to do my assignments and do Devember was there. Apparently the motivation wasn’t; I can only blame myself for that.
The horse or the door?
As we’re counting, this article has taken 50 minutes to write so far.
I have to decide if its worth trying to salvage my Devember. Writing a whole game is a mammoth and frankly thankless task. Maybe i can get the front end going tho. If i can force myself over that peak, I can fill in the simulation when my motivation returns.
Tomorrow is my last uni day before Christmas. So back on the horse. I am gonna try to pull one out of the hat here.
SEGFAULT.
. It sounds hilarious but that’s just the reality of this language so hang in there. Not to mention you decided to create a video game in C. So my hats off to you that’s a task 
