So. Week two.
I’m going to be honest with you, the same way I was honest in week one when I admitted I was fighting the urge to vanish for six months and come back with a completely different plan. I didn’t vanish for six months. I vanished for about two, which by my standards is practically punctual, and I did NOT come back with a completely different plan, which is the part I’m quietly proud of.
I genuinely sat down to write “week two” and had to go check what the date even was. It’s not week two. It’s not week eleven. It’s just… month three, give or take, and the question marks in the title are doing a lot of load-bearing work because I’m not entirely sure myself. Time blindness is a hell of a thing. You blink, you ship a few projects, you lose a wheel, and suddenly it’s nearly July.
Let me catch us both up.
The big one - I’m medicated now \o/
I started ADHD medication.
I don’t want to oversell it, because I know how these stories go and I’m wary of turning into the guy who found one weird trick. But. The difference between week one me - downloading the same trial software for the ninth time and then reorganising my desktop instead of opening it - and right now me, who has actually been finishing things, is not subtle.
It’s not magic. It’s not a new personality. It’s more like someone finally turned the volume down on every other tab in my head so I can hear the one I’m supposed to be working on. Turns out a lot of the “I’m thoroughly incapable of following through” story I’ve been hauling around for two decades was at least partly a chemistry problem and not a character one. Who knew. (My GP, eventually. Then a specialized ADHD team, once I stopped waiting for the NHS to give me an appointment and asked for Right to Choose instead.)
You know those moments where you’re clear on what the problem is, and the solution is right there, the focus flows out of you, and you just WIN… Well that was always juuuuust out of reach. Now it’s just ‘Okay Pander, time to do some work.‘
Dev corner - the thing actually works
Okay. The project. The big stupid ambitious one from the first post - the local-first AI that actually keeps a story straight, no more pulling a weapon back out of a holster you just lost.
In week one this was a rant. A “please tell me I’m not the only one who sees the issue here” rant. I want to be careful here because a lot of the interesting bits are staying behind the curtain for now, but I can tell you the headline:
I got a real, open-source language model running entirely on a phone. Offline. No cloud, no API key, no megacorp, generating text on the actual device in my actual hand. The exact thing I spent that whole first post insisting should be possible and being annoyed nobody had done the way I wanted it - it’s sat on a tablet on my desk right now, ticking along at a perfectly usable speed.
That’s the foundation. The clever part - the actual memory and continuity system, the rules engine, the bit that makes it more than a chatbot with amnesia - that’s what I’ve been quietly building around it, and that’s the part I’m keeping mostly to myself until it’s further along. I’ll show more when there’s more worth showing.
There’s also a small detour I didn’t see coming - I’m building my first genuinely public, open-source little tool, completely unrelated to the AI stuff. A tiny browser thing that scratches a specific itch (existing options all annoyed me, so, you know, classic me). It’ll go on an actual public store, which means for the first time I’m building something with the front door open from day one. Slightly terrifying. Good terrifying.
Oh, and the website you’re reading this on exists now, and the whole mess of projects finally lives in one tidy place instead of being scattered across drives like the last twenty years. Small thing. Felt enormous.
Trackmania - benched (temporarily, I swear)
Those tiny French cars that fed me the dopamine hits in the form of a comfort game… That’s on hiatus, and it physically pains me to type that.
It’s a hardware problem, not a love problem. The wheel situation has defeated me for now - the G29 (£80, PLUS £20 for a power brick) flat out would not play ball without the pedals wired in (would be another~ £30 to £80). I am stubbornly refusing, on principle, to slink back to a controller. I know I can drive on a pad. I just don’t want to, and I’ve decided that’s a valid reason. So Trackmania is parked in the garage with the handbrake on until I sort the pedals out. It’ll be back. It’ll always be back.
Rimworld - still going, just lighter
Rimworld continues, as Rimworld always does. I’ve trimmed the modset right down this time though - a lighter load, fewer moving parts, fewer 3am “why did the entire colony just spontaneously combust” incidents caused by some interaction between forty mods I half-remember installing.
Turns out a smaller, calmer modlist (300) is stable enough to not throw save breaking errors. It’s easier to concentrate on too, less mechanics I want to get stuck into at once.
Live2D - it is STILL sat there. Watching me.
Last post I said “this week I want to actually open it.”
Reader, I did not actually open it.
But - and I need you to hear the energy I’m putting into this - it is ABSOLUTELY on the cards. Soon. Capital-S, italics, pinky promise, Soon. The model’s still living in my head and a couple of rough layers, the curiosity hasn’t died, and “rigging a PSD into something that blinks via what is functionally dark magic” is still right at the top of the want-to list. The meds-and-a-tidy-workspace version of me has a much better shot at it than the version who’s been dodging it since before the list existed. Watch this space. (I know. I KNOW.)
Multistreaming - the next forty-eight hours
This is the one that might actually pay off this week.
I’ve got a multistreaming setup most of the way there - the plan is to go live across multiple platforms at once instead of just the one. The plumbing’s mostly done; I just need to finalise the connections and chase down some audio settings that quietly changed on me and broke my levels (because of course they did).
The hope is to finish that off and actually go live, multi-platform, tomorrow, right after this update goes up. Big if. It might come down to the weather - so consider this a “provisionally yes, ask the sky.” If it happens, you’ll know where to find me. If it doesn’t, assume I’m wrestling an audio mixer and losing.
Final edit: I wrote all the above on Friday 26th, but never got around to the final pass proof read and actually hitting the upload button… The multistream setup took a little longer to set up than I anticipated, but it worked (YAY!). Social links are updated for the platforms now in use and I will be continuing to upgrade and streamline the process - ACTUAL titles and things like that o.0
Month three. Roughly. Probably. The plan survived contact with two months of real life, I’m medicated, the impossible AI thing is quietly running on a phone and the only thing on hiatus, is (now) a video game about tiny cars… And that Subnautica playthrough… And South Park… And that Astro Colony build… (but i am slowly working on some of that last one offline)
I’ll call that a win. See you for week- …for the next one. Whenever that is.