Oops, I forgot about joy again =\
Just a quick little Thursday post to close out the month!
Despite it being literally two days since I wrote and sent out the Tuesday newsletter, it's been a week already. Not even counting the general state of geopolitical everything being stuck in a constant frothy boil for years now, we see back-to-back celebrity deaths of people that many looked up to in a positive way, and on top of that, take your pick of all the natural disasters and other things typically happen out of our immediate sight but surely happens to someone, somewhere, every day. None of those things are within my locus of control, and keeping abreast of things going on in the world (or just scrolling through feeds) amounts to putting my brains against a spinning grindstone.
So, to let off steam, I put down my pile of work and not-work projects and found myself on Youtube watching the Toolroom Takeover 2026 playlist, losing myself in a couple of hours of simply watching people who are good at making things go all in on showing the joy they experience while making things. Enthusiasm of that level is infectious stuff and I admit that just sitting back and enjoying those videos in general just made everything much better than before despite the fact that literally nothing in the world has changed except I got some some heartfelt laughs out of it.
And that's pretty much the point. There's plenty of things to be upset, angry, horrified, or sad about in the world if you take but a second to look. I intellectually know that taking joy in the moments where we can is critical for long term mental health. Despite that knowledge, somehow in the past half year of nothing particularly bad happening to me personally or my family, I have forgotten that fact. It's weird because I was feeling perfect fine all this time until I realized that somehow I felt better. Fatigue creeps up on you.
On top of that, I needed to be reminded that sharing joy when you have the opportunity is something just intrinsically worth doing. Very likely, nothing particularly important happens because of it, but you never know how it can just make someone's day.
Anyways, come to think, I don't think I've cranked up the joy level of my writing to the max as much recently. I've had plenty of fun on certain posts researching things, make no mistake about that. But I want to find something to really go nuts about. I have no idea what right now. It very likely involves building something, probably measurement related, and probably quite silly and impractical. I've got no end to silly ideas. Between planning, design, gathering parts, construction, and probably coding, it'll take a while, but it's been a long while since I've done a serious multi-week project that's not just fixing something broken at home.
So, until then, I'll continue writing about fun and interesting things as I find them on Tuesdays. I know someone reading out there enjoys them at least half as much as I enjoy writing them. Thanks to everyone's support I can keep writing these. In the meanwhile, if anyone just happens to have something joyful they want to share, always feel free to drop me an email.