You all have been waiting impatiently for my next work, I can tell. The public outcry has been deafening. I am sorry for making all 0 of you wait, but much has been taking place behind the scenes.

First, the Life And Especially Times of a Gen X Nobody project is underway and I hope to post the Prologue soon. I am probably about two-thirds through the draft of it. It is going to be very long, as is the whole project, but I am not limiting myself for length. This is, after all, online and I don't have to worry about printing costs. A 2000 page manuscript takes up insignificantly more storage space on a hard drive than does a 200 page manuscript, so the attention span of the reader is the only limiting factor. Ok, yeah, using that parameter the manuscript limit should be 200 words. Or is it 280 characters?

But I just need to get into the Indonesia massacre, some stuff about protests in the US, and economic statistics, and it will be done. Then I can move on to 1966. I am kind of expecting it to take a month per chapter, so that would be 60 months or five years. Fuck, that means 65 months. Still five years.

I am excited about the project. My wife suggested it, which was validating for me because I had thought about it for a while. My therapist also approves because of how I explained it to him. He said something to me that I had not verbalized to myself before but that I recognize to be 100% accurate: I want to tell my story. It is important to me. And to go beyond what he said, it always has. I don't know why, but telling my story has always been important to me. As I have said repeatedly, though, Gen X Nobody is about more than me, it is about this time in history. It is the story of my world.

Connections will also keep going slowly. I think it's an important little story because it gets into what I see developing in the social system and a hypothesis for how decent human beings can survive and thrive. I want to show how one small community can get it going.

Other than that, The Emperor of the World Volume II is slow-cooking in my brain and I might begin writing soon. I will be posting the next chapter of Volume I very soon. Foundational work on the media for the story continues. I've started getting one-on-one tutoring from a guy and am starting to overcome some of the hurdles that have stopped me until now. It's starting to be fun and I hope to have an image to post in a month or so.

What has been occupying most of my creative time, however, is writing code. I am very nearly ready to push to this production server a massive code update that adds reader subscription and registration so people can support my work and hopefully let me transition into full-time creative work. In the future some of the work will be paywalled. The cool thing I have been working on for subscribers, though, is bookmarking. Remember what I said about Gen X Nobody? Yeah, my pieces are long. Well, my subscribers (and donors) won't have to read things in one sitting or have to try and figure out where they were when they come back. They will be able to place bookmarks that they can come back to later. A reader profile page maintains a list of current bookmarks and a simple click will take them to where they were. It all works real smoothly on my dev server. All of this is written and it is just a matter of some more testing and filling in some pages off the critical path before I push to the production server.

Hopefully that will be the last of the major code development for a while. I really want to focus on creative content, turning my attention to the 3d work and the writing. This journal entry is a transitional step along that way.

Oh one more code piece I might get diverted onto soon is new post notifications. Yeah. It's another thing my lovely Empress has requested. Secret: Bookmarks and notifications are all in an effort to get her to read my stuff. Please, don't go down that analytical path. It would just be cruel.

So that's the sitrep.