SeanHodgins made a really cool 3D Printable Christmas ornament marble machine. Even better – he released the designs all open source. Try it out yourself! https://makerworld.com/en/models/908637#profileId-869076
He has lots of other amazing builds – so check out his channel.
And here’s the thing about burnout—it’s not just exhaustion. It’s losing a piece of yourself.
I used to be a machine. An unstoppable, relentless force of will. A whirlwind of productivity. Thinking clearly, making decisions, holding massive amounts of information in my head—it was second nature. But after this? My brain fogged over. I’d sit down to solve a problem I’d spent years mastering… and I just couldn’t.
TomManages wrote one of the best accounts of the serious developer burnout I have ever read. It took him years to recover (fully?) from after working on Halo Wars 2. The comments about it on the gamedev forum were just as insightful.
I have been on a project like this in my early 20’s. Crunch and burnout like this are real. They take both professional and personal tolls. Some folks have to disengage from their career for months, years, or even permanently to recover. Sometimes folks never fully recover. Even if you do recover, you often find you have a new ceiling that is lower than before, or you start getting scared when you start getting those old feelings of being pulled too far. On a personal front, your mental health and relationships suffer. Many developers find themselves having to choose between game dev and having a family or a serious personal relationship/marriage. Relationship issues and divorces are common.
As I have gotten older, this kind of burnout seems to come with even less hours/mental strain. We don’t have the infinite energy of our 20’s forever. One of the things I’m most proud of is that when running a team of my own was reducing the crunch that was going on until we could deliver reliably, on-time, and without crunch.
Crunch that leads to burnout is a leadership failure. Period. Technical leaders cause this by mis-estimating time required for tasks, taking on too much technical complexity/risk that later turn into fire drills, or simply not doing their homework to ensure all the use cases and design pieces will work. Managers cause this by agreeing to ridiculous timelines, accepting marketing demands that should be out of scope, and poor change management that just keeps adding things instead of trading one task for another of equal complexity after the schedule is set.
Interesting reddit thread from a potential buyer ‘What do you wish you knew about owning a house in Portland‘
James from The Hacksmith tried to replicate the Level 2 Sentry Turret from Team Fortress 2. The finished weapon has dual, chain-fed miniguns, face tracking tech, and can fire over 200 rounds of NERF darts per minute using a pair of X-Shot motorized dart guns.
Techmoan shows off some more oscilloscope music/art – and the problems he encountered while getting it working. This video is interesting because he shows how he debugged some issues he had.
More info at https://oscilloscopemusic.com
If you don’t happen to have hundreds of dollars in an oscilloscope and time to debug, you can watch the whole, clean version of N-SPHERES video here:
An interesting clock that displays time with light on your walls. Kickstarter here
The Willamette Valley has long been known for being one of the worst allergy locations in the world.
Oregon Allergy Associates have a website that reports the regular pollen counts – and types. Hopefully it can help determine when to take allergy meds.
The struggle to a good Lent is not to do more, it’s to do less. As you free up space in your heart from the things you’re attached to, God and his love for you can get in and fill the voids you’re filling with everything else.
Have you gotten tired of fighting the world? Struggling to get that amazing job, that big promotion, the house, the fancy car, that perfect trip with Instagrams to make everyone jealous? Grown tired of news that has nothing but doom and outrage? The job/coworker/boss that gets you down? The family member or relationship that just doesn’t seem to be working or has gone sour? Yet it never seems enough. We know that just like the last big thing we got – we’ll soon be looking for the next thing. The slog just sort of…keeps going but we’re not any more happy.
I was in adoration and thinking about what I was going to do for Lent – and things I had done in past Lent times.
When I was very young, I did things because my parents told me too. I certainly didn’t see any value in giving something up or having to have fasting days. I did it out of obedience. It felt like dragging big buckets of water up a hill. It wasn’t fun and I didn’t think I learned much more out of it than sacrifice, like going to the gym, was hard work. It certainly wasn’t something I wanted to dedicate my life too. Those saints were masochists.
As I got older, I saw my religious practices very much like going to the gym. I knew I needed to do it to stay healthy and in shape, but it sure wasn’t fun. I was still dragging each bucket of water up the hill – huffing and puffing all the way. All trying to do it with my own strength and willpower. Like a lot of gym memberships in February, I wasn’t very successful some years.
After experiencing a great spiritual awakening during my opening years of adulthood, I embraced spiritual growth much more fervently. I had fallen in love with the Spirt and Jesus – but was pretty misguided at times. I spent large amounts of my energy doing lots of activities. Some of them, especially the ones where I connected with others, were very rewarding. Prayer was exceptionally rewarding – I discovered (as Teresa of Ávila said) I could just sit with Jesus wordlessly and experience his deep, abiding love. But I was still very focused on the ‘doing’ part of my faith life. It lead me to always questioning if I was doing what I should be doing and wasting a lot of time on things I thought I should be doing (volunteering for things, speaking out for things, getting involved in projects, etc). It’s not like these weren’t good things – they certainly were. But like before (and the gift of hindsight), many times I ended up pursuing my goals, my ideas, and again, doing them with my strength.
This Lent a visiting priest said something very powerful that finally opened a new door of insight. As I sat reflecting on it in adoration; a wisdom swept over my understanding. His statement was simply this:
The key to a happy marriage, happy priesthood, or whatever our vocation – is to always be making more and more room for Jesus so he can fill the gaps we open up with his kind of love, understanding, and way of life. That is what picking up our cross every day and following Jesus means.
Taking up your cross/Lenten penances are not willfully deciding that you’re going to do a bunch of good deeds that day, deny yourself everything but bread and water, or found a new religious order. That’s more dragging heavy buckets up the hill.
It’s flipped, reverse it. Instead of trying to lift heavy burdens and fighting a behavior, you must simply name that part inside yourself at each moment and invite Jesus, who can heal every disease, in to each area of your heart as you go through your day. You are not fighting against the injustice/disappointments/expectations out there in the world, you are quietly and constantly living with your friend Jesus in your heart more and more. Listening to his quiet voice in each encounter – walking with Jesus every moment of our day.
It’s astounding. It’s so obvious. Anyone who has tried will find they usually cannot change the world around us – all we can certainly change is ourselves. We don’t have to figure out how to beat our impatience – Jesus, who can cure every illness and heal any heart – already knows how with a word. We have the simple part. All we need to do is hold it out there and make it a moment of encounter with Jesus. This is why the man in the temple who simply said, “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner” left justified, and the Pharisee who was doing it through his own willpower actually wasn’t connecting with God at all. He didn’t need God.
If you are impatient, it’s not about trying to make yourself be more patient. It’s about recognizing when it’s lacking and using that moment to step back, prayerfully connect to Jesus, and make it a moment the two of you can laugh together at the absurdity of our lives. It’s not a slog of fighting against the frustration of an old lady counting out each coin one at a time at the checkout, it’s inviting your deepest lover into that new corner of your heart. Until there is nothing left but intimate love that fills every part of you.
You can walk through the day and do this constantly. In this way, we walk through every moment of the day and each and every moment can be an encounter with our lover. This is why saints saw struggles as moments to be treasured. This is why they sought out great penances at times – because it helped them find the corners of their hearts that were still troubling them from being at peace.
In the 1500s St. Charles Borromeo was the Archbishop of Milan. He and couple of other priests were playing a game of billiards. While the game was going on, one of the priests said: “What should we do if we knew that the last judgment would take place in an hour?“
One said: “I would kneel down immediately and pray for the next hour, until the end of time came.“ The next one said: “I would go to one of you for confession and confess everything I did wrong in my entire life to have a clear conscience.”
They waited to see what the Archbishop would say… after a moment of silence he bent over and stuck the ball with his stick and said: “I should quietly continue to play the game, because I began it with the intention of honoring God.“
The archbishop was simply going about his day trying to bring Jesus love into that part of his heart. It’s in this way, when we’re walking through even the most mundane things, we can be always be making more space and making that space an encounter with Jesus. It’s not fighting things ‘out there’, it’s about inviting and loving ‘in here’. When we change ‘in here’ to be Jesus – we now live and love as Jesus did. We can get ourselves and our egos – the things always seeking more and are never satisfied – out of the way and simply live in the radiant love of Jesus more and more. We become Jesus for others. We find peace because we’re living in it – constantly.
This is real freedom and real happiness. It means we never even fear our own end – because we have been living each moment with Jesus. We simply move from imperfect vision to perfect vision. From being with our lover imperfectly – to being with Him perfectly. The only sadness is that we wouldn’t have more time to learn to love Jesus better and become an even greater saint in heaven.
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I love, love, love being in alpine environments. I’ve never climbed to the summit of Mt Rainier – but have gone up to Camp Muir at 10,000ft for a fun day hike.
Ryan Mitchell went the whole way up the Kautz Glacier route. They do a great job capturing the adventure of a perfect weather late climbing season ascent by an experienced climber helping a competent learner. Slog slog slog!
There’s lots of great stuff to talk about here for climbers to learn from. His other videos offer lots of other climbs (with references to local climbers you can learn from like Justin) as well as a good approach to life in general.
Researchers at Zheijang University in Hangzhou have trained a drone swarm smart to fly autonomously through an unfamiliar forest, without a centralized control system. The drones communicated with each other and tracked a man moving through the forest. They published the results in a paper in the journal Science Robotics.
As with all things – this could be used to send drones into collapsed buildings to search for survivors, or used on the battlefield of the future. Since this is already 2 years old, you can imagine how much better such a system is today.
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