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Horse Report 2024 - the year so far
Alright, inspired by my favorite yingle I've decided to take stock of where my life has taken me so far. Hopefully this will let me reassess myself and what I want to do next - although I won't be drawing up a definite plan in this page.
Personal life until October
This year has been eventful.
At the start of it I was in Emergency accomodation. It was basically a dumping ground for people who's only commonality is that they had nowhere else to live and had some vunerability (disability, drug addiction...) that meant they wouldn't be able to fend for themselves on the street. That didn't mean any of us got any help or support, though. Wild shit went on in there I don't feel like writing about.
I got to go to vancoufur at the start of march, had the time of my life in the best company I could imagine. Coming back home to the sound of drunken fights upstairs put me in a weird frame of mind. Luckily, about two or three weeks after I got back the council got in touch and offered me a one bedroom flat in a 1960s tower, completely unfurnished. I grabbed it and ran.
The next four months were expensive as hell. I had to get everything - bed, curtains, flooring, drawers, wardrobe, all the kitchen stuff like a microwave, toaster, oven, freezer... the washing machine cost me about £280 and needed three months to pay off. Every little thing from scissors to cutlery, towels and bedsheets. Screwdrivers, spanners, rolls of tape. Ethernet cables, extension cords. Everything and anything.
I don't think I'm anywhere near finished (one day maybe I'll own a couch), but at least now I can get through daily tasks without instinctively reaching for something I don't have.
Projects
Electronics from scratch petered out during all of this. Writing is hard fucking work, and I've been dealing with My Entire Life From Scratch. Between that and my actual job, It's basically been at a standstill.
Maybe that's not quite right. I've opened it several times in the past few months, took one look at it, and decided that it wasn't going in the direction I want it to go.
My broad plan is to have a complete working and debugged PSU, and then rewrite EFS. This is funding dependant (I have no money, currently). I started this whole thing expecting to be in the emergency accomodation for more than a year, but instead I ended up having to furnish an entire home on part time minimum wage.
I'm going to call it shelved, for now. But not dead, just sleeping. I'm actually looking forward to it in 2025!
WARP TV
Those that have known me for more than about 2 years know I used to do some small scale pirate TV broadcasting. I want to get back into it, but this time primarily an internet stream.
This iteration is something I started working on when I was sleeping on someone's couch. Existing TV station software is either out of reach (priced for someone the size of ITV), or completely amateurish. So I figured I could roll my own, which really means relearning how to program after a 20 year lull.
I just picked it back up again after ignoring it for about a year. I've learned that coding is easy, designing a user's workflow is the important part. Luckily for me, the development cost is essentially zero.
I have a milestone I want to reach, and then I'll switch focus to My VRChat avatar.
I found probably the best Horse base I've seen yet at Furality Aqua. Considering it was circus clown themed, that was saying a lot. The mane and tail swoosh so much, wonderful...
I learned enough blender to get to work on it. I gave it a slightly less femme figure, a crudely rigged starfleet uniform, tested it in game... and then got distracted and lost interest in finishing it. It's something I think I owe to myself to fix.
Career
I'm still working my shitty retail job. 20 hours a week at £11.44 an hour. Prospects of overtime: Almost zero. Promotion path? If I bust my ass and really impress them I can become a supervisor, which would make me responsible for everything that happens in the entire shop past 6pm. It would come with a 30p pay rise, which I've been told has stayed the same since the 90s.
We're also heading into the christmas season. It's not even November yet, but the pressure has steadily been ramping up. Last year's Christmas customers were utterly feral.
I need to get out of this place.
Personal life
This has been the shittiest month of the year so far, both for me and for people I care about.
On my end I miscalculated which month I'd get stung with a Nil Universal Credit Award (i.e, no welfare for that month). I thought it was going to be December, but it ended up being October. Right after a very expensive September emptied my bank account. So I've got about £430ish less money than I was expecting to get, and have ended up in overdraft.
Then I got sick enough to lose two days work, so that's £90 less coming in next month.
I've got some junk I need to sell, but getting it ready is taking too long. Right now I have to wait for a tiny spring to arrive in the post, and find a box big enough to fit a PS4.
What's next - the short term
What's next - the long term
There's no way around it, I'm going to have to look for a job outside of retail. It's most likely going to be some IT support position, but first I have to get certified. This isn't going to be quick, or all that cheap - exams seem to cost the same as a basic fridge freezer.
March 2025 will mark two years of resident status in the UK, so I'll be eligable to claim PIP again (It's absurd, but even a natural born citizen loses such rights if you live abroad too long...). It'd represent an extra £3900 a year income. The downside is it'd probably take another 6 months for the claim to process.
Vancoufur is in March again. Going there is expensive as hell but I refuse not to.
In Summer 2025 I expect to have got through the constant unexpected expenses phase of starting my life over, so I will get into electronics and writing about it again.
Maybe I'll write another one of these next month. I won't have to recap, so it should be a whole lot shorter. Or maybe I'll have figured out a plan that I want to share, and it'll be longer?
If you made it this far, thank you.