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The End of Skotos
May. 29th, 2020 09:33 pmSo, my regular work with Skotos came to an end yesterday. It's really a monumental date because I've been working for Skotos for, I dunno, somewhere around 20 years. Mind you, it's been really varied work and my focus on the Skotos games themselves is at least 15 years in the rear-view mirror. But, for around 20 years I've been keeping the Skotos games running and warding off people making various legal and physical threats and I've been spending more time maintaining and coding for RPGnet and warding off people making legal (but not generally physical) threats and in the last five years or so I've been supporting any number of decentralized identity endeavors.
So, varied work, but it's been a long time doing that every day, day after day.
The plan was to end at the end of March, but the problem was that we wanted to give away the Skotos games, and that required creating a new low-maintenance user-database that matched the commands for our old one, but could be run easily and not be a big black-box that the new maintainers couldn't really control. So, that got put off until the start of March, and then I said I really need to spend all my time on it, and my theory that we would switch over at the end of March wasn't anything like reality.
(Why not? At minimum because I ended up writing over 8,000 lines of code.)
We switched over at the end of April, and I kept coding halfway down through May, and then I started the work in really splitting the machines apart from each other and ...
As of today I've given away two of the games and got a third partly set up and I'm waiting on paperwork on a fourth. And I might need to write a contract for a fifth that I thought we were turning off. But, we're done-ish.
Oh, there's still stuff to be done. There's more stuff on some of our machines that Chris probably wants to keep. And I'm going to help out with closing the books and stuff. I've told Chris he can have up to two more weeks of my time at my old rate ... but no more than a day a week.
Which is all to say I'm free: free to work on my own projects now.
(And boy does it feel bizarre to abandon a regularly paying job with unemployment soaring in the midst of a pandemic, but this was the plan, and it should still work.)
So, what happens next week?
I start doing work for Blockchain Commons as a tech-writer contractor. Probably just a day a week, though I've told Chris he can have up to two.
And, maybe after I skip a week I go in and start tying up some of those loose ends for Skotos so that we can really turn everything off.
And I continue my work for Bitmark and RWOT (though there's very little of the latter at the moment, but I'll still edit and layout any papers we get in from past conferences).
But I've gone from my March and April schedule of having three days of Skotos work, one day of Blockchain Commons work, and one day of my own work to having one day of Blockchain Commons, maybe one day of Skotos here and there, and the rest for myself.
I'm actually not entirely sure how much this is going to increase my writing and editing output because I've really been burning the candle at both ends for the last two months: having that day of my own work was enough impetus to frequently get me working on it on evening and on weekends. So I got 20k edited words done on my first "TSR Codex" and I've got two completed Lost Histories, one drafted Lost History, and one in-process Lost History for my next Designers & Dragons book proper. I'm around 20k words there too, most of them edited Given that the previous Designers & Dragons books were 120-140k words each, I've got a third of a book (but really: a-sixth of two, and there is a method to my madness: the Lost Histories work requires a lot of effort and so if I can do those slowly only a long period of time they'll turn out better, while the Codex book is more editorial based on previous writing, though I am here and there hitting places where the past writing isn't nearly expansive enough and needs more work; but they're different sorts of writing and by balancing them I can enjoy each more).
In any case, that level of my own work atop my Skotos work was utterly unsustainable.
Now? I'll definitely be getting more time for my own projects, but I wouldn't be surprised if I feel a little bit more able to relax in the evenings.
Overall, it's a big, big change. I'm looking forward to it, but also a little nervous. Not about the writing, but just making sure I can make all the financial stuff click into space right. Should be fine: it's just the nerves of change.
So, varied work, but it's been a long time doing that every day, day after day.
The plan was to end at the end of March, but the problem was that we wanted to give away the Skotos games, and that required creating a new low-maintenance user-database that matched the commands for our old one, but could be run easily and not be a big black-box that the new maintainers couldn't really control. So, that got put off until the start of March, and then I said I really need to spend all my time on it, and my theory that we would switch over at the end of March wasn't anything like reality.
(Why not? At minimum because I ended up writing over 8,000 lines of code.)
We switched over at the end of April, and I kept coding halfway down through May, and then I started the work in really splitting the machines apart from each other and ...
As of today I've given away two of the games and got a third partly set up and I'm waiting on paperwork on a fourth. And I might need to write a contract for a fifth that I thought we were turning off. But, we're done-ish.
Oh, there's still stuff to be done. There's more stuff on some of our machines that Chris probably wants to keep. And I'm going to help out with closing the books and stuff. I've told Chris he can have up to two more weeks of my time at my old rate ... but no more than a day a week.
Which is all to say I'm free: free to work on my own projects now.
(And boy does it feel bizarre to abandon a regularly paying job with unemployment soaring in the midst of a pandemic, but this was the plan, and it should still work.)
So, what happens next week?
I start doing work for Blockchain Commons as a tech-writer contractor. Probably just a day a week, though I've told Chris he can have up to two.
And, maybe after I skip a week I go in and start tying up some of those loose ends for Skotos so that we can really turn everything off.
And I continue my work for Bitmark and RWOT (though there's very little of the latter at the moment, but I'll still edit and layout any papers we get in from past conferences).
But I've gone from my March and April schedule of having three days of Skotos work, one day of Blockchain Commons work, and one day of my own work to having one day of Blockchain Commons, maybe one day of Skotos here and there, and the rest for myself.
I'm actually not entirely sure how much this is going to increase my writing and editing output because I've really been burning the candle at both ends for the last two months: having that day of my own work was enough impetus to frequently get me working on it on evening and on weekends. So I got 20k edited words done on my first "TSR Codex" and I've got two completed Lost Histories, one drafted Lost History, and one in-process Lost History for my next Designers & Dragons book proper. I'm around 20k words there too, most of them edited Given that the previous Designers & Dragons books were 120-140k words each, I've got a third of a book (but really: a-sixth of two, and there is a method to my madness: the Lost Histories work requires a lot of effort and so if I can do those slowly only a long period of time they'll turn out better, while the Codex book is more editorial based on previous writing, though I am here and there hitting places where the past writing isn't nearly expansive enough and needs more work; but they're different sorts of writing and by balancing them I can enjoy each more).
In any case, that level of my own work atop my Skotos work was utterly unsustainable.
Now? I'll definitely be getting more time for my own projects, but I wouldn't be surprised if I feel a little bit more able to relax in the evenings.
Overall, it's a big, big change. I'm looking forward to it, but also a little nervous. Not about the writing, but just making sure I can make all the financial stuff click into space right. Should be fine: it's just the nerves of change.
So goodbye to Skotos. Thanks to Chris for letting me run our sites for two decades and generally do work that I found enjoyable in an environment that I enjoyed. And thanks to all our players and readers who have been the ones to actually make those sites successful.