My fortieth year as a human is coming to an end. The year was a mixed bag. On the downside, a whole month was spent having to do quarantine procedures in my house due to covid. During this time, I tested positive for covid but had zero symptoms. Then five months were spent experiencing daily cluster headache attacks. This was immediately followed by May's crypto crash, which erased six months worth of income. Since then, my financial life has been a slow catastrophe.
Despite these things, the year wasn't all bad. In fact, it was mostly good. My great accomplishment of the year was fully accepting that we now live in a dystopia. Once I accepted that, more things started to make sense.
Writing Small Gods of Time Travel and making 41 pieces of AI art for book chapter NFTs was my biggest project of the year. This was a massive undertaking, but the result is totally awesome. The other NFTs I put out this year are also awesome. There's a portrait collection and AI adaptations of government documents. So far, I haven't seen anyone else making Tezos NFTs like these.
The year brought me opportunities for personal growth. Over the winter, I sat on a panel of male survivors of childhood sexual abuse, which was important even though it wasn't fun. I was also a guest on a podcast about a childhood mentor's abuses. Anticipation of these appearances led me to write a short 'healing journey manifesto' titled Navigating Dystopia about my story and perspectives. If my experiences help someone in some way, I feel good about sharing them.
More conventionally, I summarized about 572 news reports for WantToKnow.info this year, as well as wrote corporate documents for a handful of crypto companies. For a while, I was writing for UNDRGRND, the Tezos NFT art magazine. They insisted on paying me in Terra dollars, then Terra went to zero and everything they'd paid me became worthless. And when I brought my own Tezos NFT collections to their attention, everyone I'd worked with totally blew me off. Now I resent them.
For fun this year, I started writing for International Paneling, a new arts-focused magazine. There's no money in it, but I can write about whatever I want. Predictably, I mostly write about crypto, art, and NFTs.
Progress on the soil biology book I was working on stalled out this spring when the client decided to do a completely different book. It wasn't the client's fault that progress stalled. It was my fault. And now so much time has passed that I'm not sure if the project is still happening.
To my credit, I did develop the habit of doing a Hive post nearly every day. This one on Changing Images of Man is one of my favorites, but there are lots of posts I'm happy with. It's also cool to have original drafts of a couple of science fiction novels documented here, one chapter at a time.
Last year, turning forty, I felt very ambitious. Now, after doing a bunch of stuff, I'm more satisfied with my accomplishments. Small Gods of Time Travel, my eighth sci fi novel, was a turning point for me. Somehow, once that was online, it felt like a portion of my life's work had been completed.
As for the year to come, I'm not really optimistic. Why would I be? We live in a dystopia and I'm economically insecure. My greatest hope for staying afloat probably involves an online begging campaign. I'll likely have another cluster of cluster headaches before my next birthday. These aren't minor issues. Fortunately, I'm somewhat resilient.
While forty was a milestone, forty-one doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I'll go to 
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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