jducoeur

(Content warning for a bit of whining, but I really need to get this written down and out of my head.)

Most of my friends know that I've been horribly toasty for at least a year now. But most are sort of playing blind men to my elephant, only seeing a bit of it. So for the sake of diarizing, and to think it through in my own head, let's enumerate all of my current responsibilities, by category.

Dayjob

First and by no means least, there's Work-work. I've been working for Slack/Salesforce for something like 2.5 years now. It's not terrible, mind -- by the standards of giant multinationals, Salesforce isn't a bad employer, and Slack built up a wonderful culture.

But still, it's fairly intense, taking up nearly all of my attention from 8:30am - 6pm most days, in a busy and complicated environment. It's less "hard", more "brain-burning", simply from all of the balls I need to keep in the air there.

And the sad reality is, it's reminded me that I've been a small-company guy all my life, and this isn't that. I like to know everyone at the company, up to and including the CEO, and have my hands completely around the product that I'm working on. That's really not possible here, and that's quietly frustrating. It's really not the sort of place where I tend to excel.

Querki

Remember Querki? Querki is my little company -- I'm still the CEO, President and sole real programmer.

The company is still toddling along -- I build nice stable software, and the thing's been running more or less continuously for a dozen years now. But the software stack is ridiculously out of date in many ways, in desperate need of a hundred upgrades just to get to the point where I can actively develop it again. (Starting with the trick of pulling out the tablecloth of the obsolete containerization system that it currently runs in and replacing that with Docker. That bit's hard: it's the sort of Ops work that I'm not as good at as I am programming per se.)

I really miss working on Querki, but this annoying-but-necessary upgrade project stands in the way of doing so. That needs a pile of serious time.

Professional Organizations

I'm on the Typelevel Steering Committee. Typelevel is one of the major sub-communities of the Scala world (Scala being my programming language of choice), dedicated to high-quality functional programming and being decent people; the Steering Committee are kinda-sorta the board of directors of that, trying to herd the cats (as it were) in vaguely the same direction and keep the community healthy.

I'm actually on the Board of the NE Scala conference, a delightful hybrid of a technical conference and a fan-con; I chaired it last year, and still seem to be the nearest thing to a leader we currently have. I desperately need to find somebody interested in chairing the next one, and we really should reincorporate the bloody thing as a 501(c)3.

In airy theory, I'm in charge of BASE, the Boston Area Scala Enthusiasts Meetup. That was floundering even before the pandemic, and I've had no luck getting it restarted since 2020. Which is sad: I'm fairly sure the people are there, but getting folks to communicate is hard.

SCA

The SCA is still my home base -- where I met most of my friends, and the organization I still spend the most time on, for all that it's not nearly as much as I used to.

I have one official job there, as Chatelaine of Carolingia -- basically the welcome wagon for the Barony. That one, I was slightly voluntold into: I had stepped up as "drop dead deputy" for the previous Chatelaine, since somebody had to do so, and discovered that I'd been appointed to the main job only two weeks after it happened. (In the middle of East Kingdom Court, no less.) I enjoy working with new folks -- I've done so for almost as long as I've been in the club -- but having it as a Job makes it a bit more Work, a bit less Fun, and it comes with some real responsibilities.

Less officially, I'm Ace of the Low Company of Gamesters and Gamblers (basically, I co-run the gaming guild), and help out in various other capacities like Dance.

Arisia

Arisia is one of the local science fiction conventions -- I've attended nearly every year since it was founded (about 35 years ago), and have gotten gradually more involved since then.

Most obviously, I'm in the middle of standing up an official Arisia Discord server. (I wound up in charge mainly because I made the argument that we needed one.) That project is running behind -- I'd hoped to have it open to the public last month, so I need to get my ass in gear there.

I've also been the Press Liaison -- basically the person responsible for working with the fan press and making sure they behave -- for something like ten years now. I'd really like to hand off that job, but have had no luck so far.

And of course, there are the fun bits: running the annual Arisia Renaissance Ball and serving on panels. Those require some real effort, but they're highlights of my year.

Intercon

Intercon is the local LARP convention, which I've been participating in since 1988. My responsibilities there are decently light at this point -- I'm part of the Proposal Committee, which is mainly just a matter of reviewing game proposals and making suggestions to help them succeed. Not usually a big deal, although it got pretty freaking intense for a while, a month or two ago, when we had to process enormous numbers of proposals at high speed.

I'm also writing a new game for the upcoming Intercon. By my standards it's super-light -- it'll total dozens of pages of writing instead of the hundreds that most of my games have entailed. But it still needs to get done, and soon.

Family

Of course, there's also Real Life.

My mother is in her mid-80s, and really no longer independent -- she's now in an adult living facility. Fortunately, my aunt and uncle have been doing much of the heavy lifting (with her medical care and bills, respectively), so I'm not by any means her sole caregiver. But I seem to be her main social connection to the world (she's a serious introvert), so I'm trying to visit every other weekend; in practice, that winds up taking about a quarter of my free days.

Conclusions

So yeah -- it's a lot.

The hell of it is, nearly all of the above are fun individually. With the exception of Carolingian Chatelaine, I volunteered for all of this -- I care about these communities, and enjoy the work. But put it all together, and it's completely insane: overwhelming to the point where I'm dropping balls left and right. And that sense of overwhelm and failure makes it hard to enjoy the tasks.

And of course, that's just counting responsibilities, and doesn't include the Just Plain Fun things I'm doing and that I'd like to be doing more of, which include:

Scottish Country Dance, especially the new Gender Free SCD right near my house.
Contra Dance, especially BIDA (also within walking distance).
Going to more SCA events.
Doing more gaming with friends.
Socializing in general -- it's weird to feel a bit lonely and isolated when I'm in so many communities, but it's not a minor thing.

So the big project for next year is going to be figuring out how to trim things back, so more of it is Fun and less is Work. That's likely to be hard and dispiriting -- some of those activities are effectively moribund, and I may have to just let them die, which is very depressing -- but it's necessary for my sanity.