transponderings

A distinct lack of postiness

This unpost follows hot (-ish) on the heels of a post about LEGO railways, which took me down a little branch line that I may or may not revisit at some point … on this driftiest of blogs.

I’m very aware that I haven’t posted much recently. I could say that I’ve been working on a big project behind the scenes. That’s not entirely untrue, but it’s a project with a fairly amorphous concept of an endpoint, and it may yet come to nothing other than my having enjoyed the process.

Things coming to nothing have been a theme recently.

Last year, I decided I would cover Scottish Autism’s 2023 online conference. I started to write my reflections on that event in a series of three posts, but only managed to (very nearly) finish the first of those before deciding that I didn’t have all that much I wanted to say, so they ended up on the slush pile.

A much bigger task was writing a sequel to my 2022 review of Mastodon apps. I set out with the aim of publishing it 18 months after the first one, and it was going to be bigger and better, covering even more iPhone apps, with some new and exciting entries, and even looking at Mac and web apps.

I built a massive spreadsheet of features, which became dated in the month or so that it took me to make the first draft, so I decided to take a break. A while later, I came back to it and spent another month or so on it before abandoning it altogether, with the realisation that I wasn’t really spending enough time actually using Mastodon to justify writing about it again at length.

That’s making me feel a little negative – writing about what I haven’t written about – and I have just been to session two of a ‘Coping with ADHD’ course, in which we specifically addressed negative thought patterns. Oops!

So maybe I should be brave enough to say more about the next big project – which, you never know, might actually happen. There, how’s that for positivity!

Over the past several months, I’ve done my second deep dive in as many years into an interest that I’ve had since childhood: railway signalling. My AuDHD brain has latched onto the topic with unusual tenacity, and I’ve been doing lots of research and accumulation of information.

I thought I might like to step into the world of YouTube (and/or Nebula) and share some of my passion for the topic. My first idea was to create a pedagogical series of videos, and I’d still like to include some element of that. But I’d also like to share my love of the aesthetics of signalling and other railway infrastructure, perhaps gently shoehorning some neurodiversity talk into the mix(ed metaphor).

It’s never too late to try new things, but I know I’ll have to jettison my perfectionism if I want to get videos out on a regular basis. Perhaps they’ll need to be more like unposts. Unvideos? UnTubes? (Suggestions on an electronic postcard please.)