Moments of Inertia by Rachel Crawford

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Denied Nostalgia

Filed Under: Personal

I discovered (or rediscovered?) today that I’ve lost a lot of my university projects because they were either on Bitbucket1 or on a PC hard drive that died in 2020ish, only some of which was backed up. Lost forever now are:

  • The GameBoy Advance demos and games I made as part of a first-year module. This included a version of Asteroids and a software 3D renderer.
  • Fixed-function OpenGL programming projects. I barely remember these, so I’m curious to see what I came up with.
  • Some PlayStation Vita coursework. There were some cool ideas in there, like a 2D platformer where you made bubbles to walk across gaps.
  • My fourth-year Honours project, which took an idea I’d experimented with in an earlier module, voxel space rendering using a compute shader, and dived into it in depth.

Also gone are various small extracurricular and game jam projects.

Alas.

There’s an odd kind of grief here, of nostalgia denied, of the past decomposing from recorded history into fuzzy memory. I’m not sure how to articulate it. I wanted to reflect on who I was before I started working at Rockstar, revisit some old projects, and perhaps mine them for experience, ideas, and resumé material – but I can’t.

Try to back up your stuff, folks. Obviously don’t go overboard with it, but you never know what you’ll miss when it’s gone.

  1. I’m not sure when these were purged. If I recall correctly I used SVN (Subversion) or Hg (Mercurial) for version control on most of my projects, and Bitbucket ended support for these at some point in the past 8 or so years, before permanently deleting any remaining repositories that used them. Annoyingly, I can’t find any emails in my archive about this happening. Did they just do this without warning users directly? I’ve just learned about the Software Heritage project, which aims to automatically archive any source code repositories that are shared with it. That way, when Bitbucket or GitHub or any other hosting provider executes a purge or eventually dies out, the code will still exist somewhere. I’m glad it exists, even if it can’t help me here. I’ll try to use it in the future. ↩

Into the Unknown

Filed Under: Personal

Unsure how willing or able I am to comment on the ongoing matters1, I will assume you know what happened at the beginning of this week and therefore understand that it means I am now 100% on the lookout for a new way to make an income.

Hopefully one that will treat me better.

I’ve updated my About page on this site and made posts about job-hunting on social media, including my unhappily-resurrected LinkedIn. A list of potential opportunities is being compiled, leads are being pursued, and one (1) application has been sent.

In the in-between time I have things to keep me busy:

  • Model reviews for Goonhammer, like this one about the Crann Guardians for Conquest’s Weaver Courts faction. My plan for today is to finish my review of the Coill Draic.
  • Educational projects and possible portfolio pieces. Recently I’ve been dipping my toe into Odin, a C-like language which has great out-the-box functionality for game dev. It would be great to use this chance to get a game out.

I also need to budget quite aggressively to make sure my savings stretch however long it may take for my incomings to match my outgoings again. I’ll be alright though.

And I probably need to get a lodger, a step which is overdue anyway – it’s felt wasteful to live alone in my big flat ever since Nat moved out – and while Kara and I are hoping to get a place together, that no longer feels likely to happen this year.

Onwards and upwards, I guess.

  1. I will at least say that yesterday I attended one of my final Organizing Committee meetings for the union at Rockstar Games. I felt sad, but I also felt hopeful in a way I never have before. The task is in new hands, and they are strong. ↩

2026

Filed Under: Personal

I’m entering 2026 in a bit of a broken state.

Two months of stress, bookending an already high-pressure year, have reduced me to a worn-out nub. Too anxious to rest, my sleeps has been fitful and short. My immune system is burned out and I have caught yet another cold. I am all aches, pains, blotchy skin and bloodshot eyes.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a December crash quite so complete.

I’m also grieving. I’m grieving what was. I’m grieving what could have been. There is a deep sadness in my heart that will take a long time to pass.

2026 will not be the year I was imagining it would be. Regardless of what happens in court next week I will have to improvise in the months to come. The unknown is scary.

All I can do now is rest, hope, and fight like hell.

I wish you all the best for 2026.