Michael Barr

End of Line 🚪

At least I can look back when this is all over, and say at least I tried. I tried to make this work. I tried to find interesting things to reengage with, I tried taking time away, and I even tried anti-anxiety medication to make going to work each day

An Austrian Wedding 🇦🇹

A friend of ours lives in Austria, and invited us to his wedding last week! I was super super excited to get to travel again finally. Even if it was just a weekender. We flew into Vienna on a Friday, but we didn't get to stay there much.

Leon the Sugar Baby 💉

Leon was diagnosed with diabetes in 2021 in August I think. We immediately changed up his diet and feeding schedule. Started checking his blood sugar in 12 hour intervals, and injecting insulin as needed. This was a lot of effort but obviously our boy is worth all of it. After

Hiding in GameJams 🕹️

I recognize that it’s likely that I’m hiding from what I don’t like about work, by doing a constant stream of Gamejams, and trying to learn enough about it that I could complete the dream of just quitting my job, and breaking away to work on my

MiniJam Results 🗳️

I gave myself a goal of top 20 for this one, but didn’t quite make it. My overall score landed me in 28th place, but I’m still pretty happy with this. I think I tried to make too many things and by the end the game was getting

Restricted! 🚫

Coming up to this game jam, I knew the overall theme would be fishing so I spent all week testing out various water effects, to try and get a nice looking underwater feel for the game so that when this weekend arrived, I’d have a good idea of how

Game Jam Time! 🐟

Starting tomorrow at 5:00am… a new game jam of 72 hours with the theme of Fishing. 🎣 There will be an unannounced limitation to play by, but I think a fishing mini game is about as classic as they come, so I’m looking forward to crunching out a game

Reengagement Strategy 🥔

If you’ve read my last posts, you know at this point I’ve pretty much fully lost interest in my job. Having the Sunday night dread creep in every week and living for the weekend isn’t much of a way to live. So when an opportunity came up

Game Jamming 🕹️

Weird to say.. but I’ve almost been in the gaming industry for 10 years now. In all that time, I’ve never been on a “game team.” What I mean by that, is I’ve never been part of the group actually working on a game. I’ve always

News

A Reduction in Workforce 📉

Just as I had found something I was really excited to work on at work, we had a massive layoff that was positioned in the most corporate way I’d heard so far since this is my 4th time dealing with layoffs. “We announcing a necessary reduction in our workforce.

Finding Joy at Work 📈

Five years ago… I really enjoyed my job. I found it engaging, and difficult, and I loved the problem solving we did on most days. Now? Erm… less. Did the job change? Did I change? I think both, but that’s probably the obvious cop out answer. The Job The

Anxiety Update 😫

Heavy topic for this one… where to start.. A month or so ago while I was working, I think I had my first panic attack of my life. I had to lay on the couch and just be overwhelmed for a bit. Took the rest of the day off work

News

Happy New Year! 🥳

Hello 2024 Happy new year to everyone! I’m not really big on resolutions but I do like a good mental reset and day one of a year feels like a reset is built in. Do you have any resolutions or goals for 2024?

Baking

Update to say... no update? 🥱

I really wanted to challenge myself to do a good job of keeping people up to date.. but really we are just kinda snowed in and on vacation. Nothing to really share or complain about 🙂 I guess I could share how I’m checking on my baking progress with my

Mental Health

Pantry Inspiration 🫙

I’ve finally reached the point in the vacation where I feel like after having enough days in a row to do the mindless things that want to do like play video games and catchup on some TV series I like, I wanted to do some things that are good

Moving to Wordpress ➡️

This probably doesn’t mean much to you, but I’ll be honest. I really just need an excuse to check out the post editor on this new platform. 😁 I was hosting this on https://ghost.org but their setup is really entirely focused on growing your blog as quickly

Baking

Vacation Time 🏖️

As of this Friday, I’m on vacation for the rest of 2023! No travel plans for this one. If you read my post about my Digital Nomad dreams, that will likely be my upcoming travel once I get all my residency paperwork an pick a path to take. This

Travel

What is Digital Nomading 🗺️

In mid-2018 I briefly left my job in gaming to try something else for a while. That something else was working in a NOC for a fashion company doing 24/7 monitoring for their website. We rotated shifts, but sometimes I had the 2nd or 3rd shift, which meant, overnight.

Baking

Jag äter bröd 🍞

For all my life until the pandemic, I thought that mixing powders and water to make food was some sort of sorcery. 🧙‍♂️ I decided to try it when we were stuck inside, just like most of the world apparently. Yeast was pretty hard to come by here in the first

Sweden

Swedish Winter 🇸🇪

We’re getting a the true Swedish 🇸🇪 winter experience this year so far. We had a solid week of nearly constant snow and last night dipped down to -16℃ (3℉) so it looks like it’s here to stay. One advantage of being in a place where snow is so

News

Return of the Blog

The internet and social media are just awful and I think we should return to just cultivating the relationships we actually care about. As of right now, according to Facebook I have 348 friends. There is no way this is anywhere near accurate for how many people I actually interact