Who am I? #

I go by aviraccoon on the Internet. Avi in real life.¹

I'm nonbinary (using they/them pronouns), got untreated ADHD (attempts had been made), I'm a furry (a raccoon 🦝), therian,² living in Prague, Czech Republic.

I like digging deep into whatever I'm focused on at the time - be it a programming thing like improving existing systems, trying to make my ADHD more bearable, or finding a new special interest like safety systems in public transport. That's when I thrive. And often, these things are very much connected.

In my career, I'm a programmer/marketing/community/producer mix, around game dev for over 13 years at the time of writing. Now working on a site for seeing how PC and console games are selling (and always fighting with React, TypeScript and Go).
Before that, I spent a bunch of years working on Euro Truck Simulator 2, during which I made a project I'm proud of and will never shut up about - I started the Czech & Slovak Games Week sale to help local game devs, which is these days the largest multi-game non-Valve Steam event. I don't contribute to it anymore, but it was really fun to do.

I care about equal rights, protecting workers, and overall having strong ethics. I don't accept bullshit from people I'm around, and I expect the same from them.

Why does this blog exist? Why now? #

Because I have a bunch of things to talk about and I have no place for long-form posts like this.

Screaming into the void in short-form (fediverse, Bluesky) just doesn't fit me, I usually keep forgetting these things exist unless I have a terrible pun to write.³

I've been playing with the idea of having my personal blog over some time, but I never had enough time, energy, and motivation to do so.

Let's not count the previous attempt in February 2024 when I posted the welcome post, and never anything else again. I'm in a much better state to start blogging now without fearing I will do the same mistake as before. How? With a mix of a few things.

In June this year, I started collecting my thoughts in an Obsidian vault (appropriately called raccoon-life). I was journaling for years, but these notes were usually just a few sentences for a day, or even less. I changed my approach, now I write everything down. And I do mean everything.

Turns out that doing this helps a lot with my ADHD, I can write things down and then forget about them until I need them again. And it also helps me now with thinking about enough topics in advance so I can confidently say "yeah, this can work."

What am I going to chirr⁴ about #

Various stuff I'm interested in, things that fascinate me, help me, bother me, or otherwise affect me in any way.

One big topic will be ADHD and things and tools related to it, how I handle this when I can't get support of the system. That means talking in detail about my personal vault, how I process things in it (hint: it's a lot of automated processing, including LLMs, to help me).

Related to this is working on various projects which help me further. I build software when the level of annoyance with things I try to use reach "fuck it" levels, that includes for example creating my own task system as I need something custom.

Then I have a variety of ideas for blogs about my life in general, about working in game dev (maybe including some horror stories?), travel, being a furry and therian, and other things in life. And whatever else I feel like I want to scream into the void about.

Note that I will talk about my approaches to LLMs and similar, as that's very much connected to how I tend to do things overall, it's a tool I use to fight with my ADHD, it made programming fun, etc.
So if you're strongly against this stuff, no hurt feelings. I understand, it's everywhere and everyone's sick of it.

How I'm approaching this #

There will be no schedule. I sometimes have energy to do something an entire night, then I can't bother doing anything for a week. Chaotic good, let's say.

I may jump from topic to topic, keep things unfinished. No promises here. Even I can't force myself to do some things, and blog isn't something I'm supposed to force myself into, it must be fun for me. And I can't plan ahead much, that just creates guilt for me. Best posts will be the ones I write late at night without any planning, most likely.

So absolutely no promises about any kind of schedule or what I'll actually talk about.

Interested? Hit the RSS bell, err, button #

Look, there's no analytics, no tracking, no newsletter or anything. I want a good old site with no bullshit like this. It's all running on a very simple blog generator I built in one night for this purpose.

There's the main RSS feed and also per-tag feeds if you're interested only in specific areas.

Welcome to my corner of the Internet. One pizza for this raccoon = one post. (I may just eat the pizza without doing anything. I be like that sometimes.)