GHDR Report 0808: Ship-Shop Flip-Flop

⊕ show captionAbout the Photo // I’ve been reading more fiction, and have been drawn to cozy content. It just occurred to me that maybe I should be living a cozier narrative to fit the size of my actual life!

After laying out the enormous June Master Plan, I eased into following its basic idea by focusing on three immediate things:

1. A future app prototyping system using Deno, a promising replacement for current tech stack.
2. Materials for a Web Revival social club
3. Accommodating the new master plan material with new website sections.

As I mentioned in July, I was exhausted from the planning and wanted to start with easy wins to build momentum. Instead of feeling good, though, I have been feeling unmotivated and dissatisfied with my progress. I tried making a diagram to visually track my progress to each of the three small things, hoping that this would feel more exciting:

⊕ show captionFigure 1. I have been using this diagram to help plot my progress toward the three goals I outlined above. The intent is to remind me what I should be focused on, but also provide an exploratory non-linear space to approach the goals as I feel my way towards them.

The diagram did provide a sense of progression toward goals, but the discontent did not fade. I started to feel resistance which was alarming because the whole point of the June Master Plan was to reduce it.

The gist of the Master Plan was to do activities that increased positive human interaction in my day-to-day, centered on story elements and activities that held a natural fascination for me like Hospitality and Spaceship Operations. What was going wrong?

A Matter of Scale

Thinking it over, it occurred to me that the enormous scale of the June Master Plan made it difficult for anything I did to feel significant. I had been excited about the grand architecture of logistics, diplomacy, and cultural exchange with respect to my interests. I am, in actuality, just a single person with limited resources in a suburban bedroom community working from home.

Looking at this another way, the June Master Plan describes a scale that is more like epic science fiction, drawing on themes from Star Trek like The United Federation of Planets and Starfleet. It’s exciting to think about from a writer’s world building perspective, but it’s the wrong context for getting up in the morning and starting work with a cup of coffee and the scratchings of a new idea. What is more immediately achievable is comfort and coziness: that is the scale I should be trying for. Building Starfleet is far too large a leap.

That’s a huge reality check. So let’s make some changes!

Redesigning the Ship into a Cozy Shop

Lately I’ve been bingeing on cozy literature that revolves around characters who want to live a “slow life” with their friends. I’ve always liked stories where the main character has a dream of starting a small shop with a community of close friends they make along the way.

SHRINKING THE STORY

I happen to have a story in my head about a Cat named Sri that is friends with Ellie and Tobes, each wanting to have their unique shops right next to each other in a lovely place overlooking the oceanThe story about Sri the Cat, Ellie, and Tobes isn’t written, but I keep notes on the character and setting.. I had thought of this story as a cheery metaphor for what I wanted to do in real life, but it occurs to me that perhaps it is actually the appropriate template to follow:

THE REALITY OF NOW

I am at the start of my seventh or so major career shiftI have been calling these career shifts epochs. The link points to the summary of what they were.. It’s hard to admit I’m starting from scratch again, but that is an honest assessment of where I am.

I really am just a human with a cat-shaped soul, after all. I seek warmth from the right people and ignore the ones that make me feel sour. This is still a story worth telling.

FOCUS ON BUILDING SMALL

So, inserting myself into the story, I am back to making a shop, but this time it is a small one. By coincidence, my Shopify yearly store subscription came up for renewal this month and I happily canceled it. My own website will serve as the shop.

Now that I’m scaling my ambitions down to something a small magic-seeking cat might start, I can itemize the things that I can offer:

• Graphical Design and Visual Doo-dads
• Small Software Applications for Knowledge Exploration
• Membership in Sri’s Society of Indie Makers
• Advice on Things I Know About
• Sharing novel things that I think are Interesting and Cool

The initial shape of my shop will be based on this very website. I’ll add to the CATALOG section and figure out the simplest way to handle payment + fulfillment.

NURTURING COZY CONNECTIONS

This isn’t a path that is intended to lead to financial enrichment, but to nurture my abilities such that they can be seen by others. Over time, they accumulate into a significant body of work that may attract the attention of future collaborators or even employers. It is that body of consistent, high-quality, and principled work that I want to show who I am and what I do.

I am not interested in being another commodity in a commodity-minded job market. Bleah! But rejecting that means I need to create my own reality. That is the ambition. This is the kind of human interaction that I think I want. I feel this energy when I’m talking to people at the Farmer’s Market about their small businesses, and that’s a spark I can renew weekly with my visits.

Changes for the Month of August

For the month of August I’ll be redefining my narrative in the small. The work I did for the June Master Plan hasn’t gone to waste, as it represents the maximum scale of the work that I could achieve. Using that as my initial goal was exciting, but not suitable for the day-to-day work I’m engaged in. I’m doing mundane stuff like cleaning up my website and reaching out to local people that might be interested in what I’m doing.

It’s important for me to remember that I have my Farmer’s Market and Librarian friends that already share my idea of being part of a cozy network.

I guess we’ll find out in September! I am feeling optimistic, and frankly a bit relieved at finding justification for operating at a smaller scale.

I’m hopeful that this will also unlock the blogging because it’s a lot easier to write about smaller-scale topics than reporting on strategic outcomes and successful campaigns. So I’ll make a soft commitment to the following:

That wraps up this month’s report! Thanks for following along!

INDEX of GHDR 2026 POSTS