Where Have I Been? What's Going On?

Good questions.  Let's see if I can give a decent answer.

Since January 2012, I've been working on Firefly for the Amazon Fire Phone.  I was hired specifically to figure out how to test it and to ensure that it met a high quality bar for customers, and I'd like to think I did a good job.  That, as well as some related work with the Dynamic Perspective and Camera teams, has taken the majority of my free time.

Now that the Fire Phone is out, we've been working on trying to improve things further and we've also been trying to figure out what's next.  Can't talk about any of that stuff, though.

Long story short, I'm doing great professionally.  Not so much personally, though.

I'm officially past being middle-aged now.  My diabetes, which had been in remission, is no longer in remission.  I've found out I've been banned from the Ritualistic forums, which would make me only the second former tribe member to have that "honor."  I'm stone sober although there are plenty of evenings where I wish I wasn't.  Efforts to try to stretch my personal boundaries led to two extremely humiliating experiences over the summer within 48 hours.  My personal life is in tatters.

I have a lot of code done for Leadwerks, XNA, and other items, and all of it in a releasable state, but can't release anything outside of two small projects without getting legal approval due to my non-compete.  Legal approval takes a long time, but is in the works.  I'm working on something that may get rid of this legal approval requirement, but it will be at least another two months before anything comes of it.

I'm officially stopping all work on anything related to the SiN and SiN Episodes intellectual property.  The only reason I was doing work towards that was that I felt an obligation to the community that believed in SiN Episodes and wanted to see it continue, and if the community has banned me, then there is no reason for me to continue that work.  If I can get approval to release the code and assets I've built so they can be picked up by another team, I'll happily do so, but this will be my last word on the subject until or if that approval comes.

Finally, I had a bit of a setback on a personal goal.  I had been saving money to go indie.  I had a fairly modest investment goal set for myself that would have had me starting my own indie game development studio next year, but a situation came up today that pretty much ended that possibility.  An issue had been kept from me by my significant other that had severe financial repercussions for me, I found out about those penalties via mail today, and as a result, I'm stuck working for others until 2017 at the earliest.

However, I'm trying to look at the positive side of all this.  It gives me more time to come to grips with C++ 11/14, C# 5+, Lua, and some work I've been doing on the side with ANTLR.  It gives me a chance to try to whittle my idea down to a barebones core that I can actually deliver on in a reasonable time.  It gives me a chance to prove to myself I'm making the right choice.

And with that, I need to vanish for just a bit longer.  Sorry.