Describe the most ambitious DIY project you’ve ever taken on.
Well, this is quite the prompt. Not because it’s a complicated question, but more-so that the answer is the complicated one. I’ve been a sort of “DIY” person since I graduated high school, even if I didn’t really know it at the time. It started with writing HTML for band fan pages on Geocities, and then that evolved into writing a book. Then that became teaching myself Blender, and then came learning FL Studio.
All of this built up into this one, mega-project, where I’ve become this jack-of-all-trades: Managing a store in Second Life (where I make the assets myself and then sell them to users of the virtual world), writing multiple books (with a few self published under my belt), working on my next album (out of 21 so far), and running my own Mastodon instance with a side blog on a WordPress installation via Debian Linux.
I call all of this a mega-project, or, one big project, because really, it has become this life-long thing where I’m building projects I enjoy, and working on building a community around those things, or of just like-minded people, all in an attempt to obtain what everyone really wants–Total independence from the regular, normal, day-to-day grind. And it is the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done, because doing all of these things takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of drive to never, ever give up. Even if that community isn’t really building itself on its own. Even if you’re not reaching billions of Spotify streams, or one hundred thousand books sold.
It’s a labor of love, a labor of passion, a labor that never dies.
After, now, numerous decades of just constantly building and creating, I can’t say I’d trade it for anything. I can’t ever see myself going to work in a regular job, coming home, and then sleeping, and never making anything ever again. To me, that’d be the real soul killer. And, in a way, maybe that isn’t so ambitious, but it is the project.
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