2021 was an eventful year. The global pandemic was still a major problem, though vaccines finally showed up, and treatments started to become available at the end of the year. I quit my job at Solution Design Group after a golden opportunity presented itself, and took a 100% remote job with Apiture. Thus far, it has proven to be a fantastic job with a great group of people. The benefits are amazing.
I think I finally gave up on the idea of resurrecting Silver Gryphon Games this year. Kevin doesn't need that distraction and my tendency to change focus for months at a time would make a company with that level of activity difficult to maintain on my own. It's possible that in the future I will consider starting a company with a smaller focus, but that's not likely to happen in 2022.
Iron Arachne saw less development in the latter half of the year, but the first half was quite productive. I learned more about how concepts should be structured. In July, I rewrote the entire project in Typescript with Svelte. That was enlightening. I still don't care for Javascript generally, but Typescript at least makes it tolerable. I wish I didn't have to write the site in JS. However, the benefits of having a static site outweigh the drawbacks of writing in JS. I did end up building that planet generator I wrote about at the beginning of the year. I taught myself how to write GLSL shaders in the process.
One of the biggest events of 2021 was that I got Lasik surgery in late September. While it has been fantastic to be able to see well without glasses, I'm still experiencing issues due either to healing or to side effects. If I focus on something close up for more than a few seconds, then I'll be unable to re-focus on things farther away for about half a minute. Also, when I'm tired, my distance vision is blurry enough that it's difficult to read signs. Still, absolutely worth it.
We abandoned our idea of moving to Estonia for a variety of reasons. At first it was due to the difficulty involved in moving there with two cats. Over the course of the year, however, it became obvious that Russia's aggression in the area makes Estonia unsafe. Our new plan is much less disruptive: we're moving to North Carolina in the next couple months, and then in a few years, we'll move to Maine.
I'm in worse shape physically at the end of 2021 than I was at the beginning, I think. I'm not sure because I stopped logging progress a couple years ago. That's changing now. I got an Apple TV for Christmas, and I intend to expand my usage of Fitness+ from occasional workouts using my iPhone to daily workouts using the TV. I'll talk more about that in my "looking forward" post in a few days.
In the end, 2021 was a relatively positive year full of changes. The threat of Covid-19 still looms over everything, but I think there is light at the end of the tunnel now.