The Obligatory About Page
I used to write a lot of things (mostly crap like I knew what I was talking about). So if you feel like trekking back into the far distant past you’ll find some weird random things. I do try to not be a self-righteous git these days so please check the date of the post before lambasting me for some poorly thought out drivel.
I have since attempted categorising most of what I do write about, and due to time constraints it’s mostly the first two things listed here.
Because there are quite a few categories and people inclined more towards feed readers may only be interested in some of them, I did provide separate feeds for each category.
Æfter Ragnarok
My pet project. Breathed into existence in 2002 when an old friend asked if the fan characters in a scene I’d written and put on a forum for critique were original characters as they were apparently “too cool” to be fan characters. It has gone through many iterations as I progressed from pantser to plotter and then realised I do need to just pants while keeping plotter notes as none of my stories or art ever works out unless I do it how it wants to be done (no I don’t actually have any control over these things no matter what other people like to think ;)).
There are several characters with stories in it that I would like to work on and it’s going to take more than a tiny little section in an About page to cover it so this is something that just needs to be caught up with/followed along, sorry :)
If you’re feeling generous I have made up a few methods of contributing to development as currently while it’s the thing I post about most often I’m currently very limited in how much time I can spend on it (hence why not much progress in so long).
These are:
- buying me a Ko-Fi: the easiest option as you can do it without needing an account, and you can do it once off or however many times you like
- similarly just chuck fiat at fynart at technonaturalist dot net to Paypal
- follow me on hive: a social network type affair where you can add crypto to posts by upvoting. Explaining further would take at least a paragraph and is better done with a post, of which there are several
Home education
My primary full time job. JJ and I made the decision that we would give home education a go instead of school when the eldest was 6 months old. It worked out so we kept going. There are already billions of articles all over the internet about the pros and the cons so I just give a snapshot of what our life is like, good, bad and ugly. It serves the dual purpose of being a record for our moderator and giving people who don’t have a lot of experience with the “unschooling” variant that we do an idea of what it’s like and for those considering it hopefully a better idea of whether it’s something that might be suitable for them or not.
Life
Also known as the “miscellaneous” category where I would dump everything that didn’t fit anywhere else. Back when I had more time and when blogs were more online journals than ways to prove you were an expert in a niche I did journal things I was willing to share publicly in here. I don’t post a lot of “slice of life” kind of stuff these days mostly due to time constraints.
Wannabe Farmstead
There was a tradition among my friends for a while to name the (usually rented) houses we were living in at the time. I can’t remember a lot of the house names now, or if the last rented house I lived in (before renting off my parents) had one. The last house we lived in which we were renting off my parents was called “The Menagerie” due to us having one dog and five cats at the time. JJ and I bought “Wannabe Farmstead” when I was pregnant with the youngest child, and it was so called because we’re trying to do the urban farming thing on a bit under a quarter acre in the middle of a suburb that still has some blocks bigger than the “family-sized” 500sqm (though due to location that’s changing). In fairness this place was more menagerie than The Menagerie was as in full swing we had bees, chickens, aquaponics fish, dogs, cats and guinea pigs.
There tend to be lapses as all the “farmstead” stuff is actually JJ’s dominion and sometimes it ends up falling by the wayside. I tried to keep up with blogging it for a little while but again due to time constraints I now just tend to cover interesting things that are going on and it usually crosses over with homeschooling.
Webmonkeying
My sister and I started up a web development business while we were living together in The Menagerie as a lot of people on Christmas Island needed websites at the time and managed to remember that I used to do them a long time ago (and then ragequit because IE is a disgusting thing to code for). This category was notes for me as I would often forget how to do things that were important enough that I would have to do them again but infrequent enough that I wouldn’t remember straight off the bat how to do them. The notes tended to be written partially in note form and partially in tutorial form in case that was helpful to anyone else that stumbled over the relevant blog entries looking for the same answers.
We’ve since closed down as I needed more time to do homeschooling stuff with kids at high school age, and also wanted more time to work on AER, and neither of us were ready to go full time and start hiring people which were both things that needed to happen. I still maintain this blog so there will be bits and pieces that appear here though not as regularly as when I was doing more of it.