I could go on and on about how utterly crappy today was.

Waking up to the news of the horribleness of that mass shooting in Vegas.

Ending the day with the news of Tom Petty possibly (probably) being dead (or soon to be).

All the other stuff that’s been chipping away at any chipper mood since back in November.

There’s no shortage of things that suck right now. Some of them are even more personal than the news.

So, yeah, I could go on and on about those things. I considered it. (Because, man, do I have things to say about a lot of it.)

But then I decided not to.

Why?

Because I currently have very little, if any, control over any of that big picture stuff that’s sucking.

And, in these last 100 days of the year (90 left!), I’m trying to focus on actually accomplishing things that I do have some control over.

Like following up on all the cleanup I did last week in my web hosting account by actually starting work on getting my main Durosia.com site cleaned up and moved to Drupal 8. (Not that it gets used for much… but it’s the principle of the thing.) And seeing if I can get Hat From Hell back up and running before Halloween rolls around. (Also updating that to Drupal 8… but not at all sure I’ll be able to salvage most of the content from the last iteration of the site–not that there’s a lot of content of note–since the database got corrupted somewhere along the way.)

That’s slow going, for sure, since while I can implement themes just fine (it’s kind of a big part of what I do all day), I’m not much of a designer at all. If you see an awesome site design on one of my sites, it means I got super lucky, hired someone else to design it, or found a really decent ready-made theme that I could do simple things like change colors on.

In short, don’t expect any radical changes in how either of those sites look (or, in the case of Hat From Hell, looked, if you ever saw it). It’s not going to happen.

Other little things since the last 100 day update:

• Finally finished Neuromance… I was only sitting a couple of chapters from the end for a few months. That’s the kind of book that, once upon a time, I would have torn through in a couple of days. I read more slowly now than I used to. And less frequently. (Well, I read fiction less frequently… I spend all day reading articles and forums and whatnot.)
• About ready to polish off my re-read of Everville… which I started well over a year ago now. It’s also spent a lot of time just sitting there gathering dust.
• Still pondering doing NaNoWriMo in November.
• Looking forward to the next set of sessions of the Apocalypse World games I’m running. I think both I and my players aren’t quite going as all in and hard as the game expects… everyone’s still mostly alive and there are long-term plans for infrastructure improvement going on. That’s not typical of AW games from what I’ve seen. But we’re having fun, so it’s all good.
• Skipped out on a few events over the past weekend because I was either wiped out from work or engrossed in other things. This weekend is for going out. Next weekend, I’m hosting a thing at my place. October is a very social month, so I kind of needed that one extra weekend off before diving in.

So, yeah, small steps forward.

That’s better than nothing.

Definitely better than lamenting the state of the world.