Hello World. Again.
Greetings, programs! I’m getting this site back online after a few month hiatus. A lot has happened since my last activity, and I’ve been hard at work preparing for this new chapter.
To date, my Wizardhead website and social channels have been entirely relegated to releasing my art and music projects and little to nothing else. I have, for a time, been considering publishing other kinds of content, such as tutorials and vlogs and things, but having historically had a “pure” feed of artwork, I found it hard to violate those expectations.
However, life always has a way of tweaking things to drive change, and after YouTube and Facebook demonetized my pages and my views and subscriber numbers started decreasing, I decided to pause and reflect.
The pause was originally intended to be short as I actually had some new projects in the early stages, but another factor weighed in on my artistic productivity: I had to find new employment. It may surprise some of you to know that making art is not, in fact, my full time job. By day I work as a software engineer and the company I have worked for the past 13 years has been very strict for the past 2 of them about me badging in to their office in San Francisco 3 days a week.
The problem with that is that I live in Idaho and badging in requires that every week I leave my family, get on an airplane and stay in a hotel, and have to pay for it myself on top of it. Long story short: I am completely burned out on that and I have decided to leave the company.
Unfortunately, the process of securing a remote role with the right employer in the 2025 market has been extremely demanding of my time and attention, which has taken away the remaining time from working on art and getting the site back online.
It turns out that one of the companies I was interviewing for was very oriented towards front-end development in a JavaScript framework called NextJS, and as I hadn’t really done much work in that, I thought I could use the project of rebuilding this site as a way to ramp up quickly.
Half-way through the project, and after a battery of interviews, that company came back and said they weren’t going to offer me the job after all, due to some really obscure reasoning. So I scrapped the NextJS rebuild and went with a different framework called Astro (hi, Fred) which is a much better fit for me.
That meant essentially rewriting most of what I’d just done, but doing so has set me up with a better platform for my needs going forward. It still needs quite a bit of polish and I’ve got a ton of content to backfill, but I’m going to just put this up on the internet as soon as I can with the hope that I can fix it a little bit each day, building momentum to keep things running once I’m settled into a new routine.
One of the major differences I have planned for this new site, and my various social channels, is to open up and share my process, create more things in the open and build connections to people who share similar tastes and interests. It turns out those view count numbers and subscriber count numbers are kind of meaningless on their own, but every email or comment I exchange means something real to me and I want to make more of that possible.
So welcome to the new website, whether you’re new or been following my weird quest from the beginning. Don’t be a stranger– by all means, be as strange as you like, but just don’t keep it to yourself!