I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want this space to be. The original idea behind unfocus.com, maybe born out of the naivete of youth, was that there was too much focus on myopic ideas around political ideas. The idea then was to take a step back and think about the bigger picture, thus the idea of “unfocus”.
Since then, I’ve learned a lot about politics, about political theory, strategy and especially messaging and how that works in our embodied minds. Most of that hasn’t really made its way on to these pages. I did spend some of the last few years blogging about those topics on medium, with dozens more drafts than published articles. I still find that space interesting, but it’s I think, not what I want to spend my effort on here.
I think what I’d like to focus on here, are projects. That’s what I used to blog about, before the algorithm driven economy burgled the attention from my mind. That’s what I’d like to blog about again. I’ll probably leave the old political stuff up (to mirror medium,) but will likely remove it from any feeds on the site.
So let’s talk projects!
What do I want to do? I’m not sure. The software space is in a state of jubilee, from the over hyped, but still useful LLM driven AI bubble. Many things really are possible, and some things have never been easier. How to get passed the hype, and land on the slope of enlightenment early, might be worthy of some blogging. In this place, in the archives, there are still many articles about to achieve very difficult things with fun tech like Flash from back in the day. Today, the LLMs are actually pretty good generating code that can achieve much of what was hard back then, at least for “solved problems,” easily (ethics aside – we’ll get to that.)
I’ve got a couple of ideas about things to work on. I’d really like to step away from the political turmoil we find ourselves in, and just make games, and other forms of art, but the collapse of western civilization is quite distracting. One idea I had which is technical, but still adjacent to politics, was to use an AI model to do some kind of analysis, and try to tease out the different moral world models (worldviews) that different factions are promoting, mindfully (Republicans) or not (non-Republicans – basically, everyone else.)
There is a whole framework to communicate here, but I’ve had so little luck explaining it. Anyway – that’s one project. A kind of Ground News, but not just filtered on the bias of the publication, through an idiotic and destructive left/right spectrum, but analyzed per article, on the substance of the article itself, to reveal the underlying moral world models, and how it fits in or contrasts with competing models. Could be fun and interesting. Definitely is needed in the world. But it’s also very difficult, especially since there doesn’t seem to be many who understand how this stuff works (it really seems like Republican strategists are literally the only ones, and they use it to foment hate and derision… very disheartening.) So that could be a fun side project, and I might yet build it.
The other things I thought of would all be efforts at media and artistic expression. I’ve always wanted to get in to the video game space. Ever since I was a small child, I have dreamed about which mechanics I’d add to the various games I’ve played. I haven’t really spent my career working on that skill, but hey, it’s never too late. I also have some stories I’d like to tell – and maybe that’s a better place to assert my insights about humanity, politics and moral world models, than some grand plan to fix the world. I could easily channel that in to some stories. Another muscle to build – something new and entirely different from what I do in my day job. That might actually be nice.
I also might start simply writing more. An easy way in, could be to write more game reviews. I did write one for Metroid Dread a while back. I hated that game. But I also wrote quite a long review of Final Fantasy XVI, after it shipped to PC, that I never published. That one was fun – and I love that game. I might really lean in to that for the year. I’ve been playing a few AAA games, and a lot of indy games. I’ve also almost entirely been playing on Linux (and a bit on Switch 1/2,) on either Steam OS (original Steam Deck) or my custom Bazzite machine. There’s probably some cool stuff I could share about those. Maybe I’ll start by finishing that FF XVI review, then share some thoughts about gaming on Linux.
I’ve also been running some cool home lab type stuff in my basement, including some web services, and some home assistant lighting coordination. That’s a whole domain that could be fun to blog about.
In the short term, I’ve basically been dusting off some old hobbies. This blog for example. It’s not really what I want unfocus.com to be, but it’ll do for now, until I get the itch to build something different. For now – I’ll continue to blog some hobby stuff here, starting with the resurrection of Quint Dice! More to come on that soon.