Indieweb Carnival, Positive Internalization

This month's Indieweb Blog Carnival topic is from foreverliketh.is

Memories that remind you of the good parts of yourself; the facets of your being that you want to see more of, that you wish to nurture and grow. By reliving them and seeing yourself in that positive light, you help to internalize a healthier, and more accurate, self-perception.

I do dwell on the negative memories, so this is a nice prompt.

Steampunk

As a whole, steampunk is a collection of really positive memories. ROSEA and I organised the first few Steampunk gatherings in Brisbane - managing to get something remotely successful that I hadn't done before was fantastic. Smiling now thinking back on the people who turned up, all of us chatting and the effort people had put into the costumes.

Another memory is the contact from both the Courier Mail and Channel 10 News. The Channel 10 news crew came to my house and we had interviews and shot in my basement lab - it didn't go anywhere but was very exciting. The Courier Mail interviewed some of us at the Museum and we were in the paper. Really fun times.

I think the Steampunk silliness and creativeness pulled me further out of my introvert shell than anything else had - I owe Professor von Explaino a lot of credit.

From Steampunk, the positive memories have created aspects of doing things my way, of trying things out of my comfort zone, and talking with strangers. That's still hard. But I'm better.

Computers and code

I have a TONNE of positive memory moments from coding. Way back in the before times (1980's), my step mum was a much better typer than I was, and helped me transcribe code from a book into my commodore 64. I then had to debug it. But it eventually ran and really sparked my lifelong coding side.

Also in the 80's, bringing my Commodore 64 in to school while most everyone else was on camp. I didn't like camp. But sharing my C64 games with the others who stayed behind was great. Helping others in my high school programming class as I finished tasks very quickly was also wicked.

More recently, I've got so many good friends I've met through coding at work. Honest, 100%, friends, not just work colleagues. So many different instances of friends meeting, friends working, friends helping. Running the third iteration of the developer community of practice at work - I've got people who turn up, who volunteer to present, and who sit and smile on the other side of Teams calls at my bad programming jokes. Even things like learning how to automate testing better, it makes me smile at the accomplishment feeling and the growth/ getting better. Almost like I could, at some point, be a real programmer.

From Coding, the positive memories have created aspects of helping others, of continual learning and experimentation, and move slow and fix things.

Family

I think my kids are helping me be better in so many ways. I have memories of their smiles when we learned things, of appreciating the simple hug for as long as possible, of reading stories. It's a whole lot of little memories that all build up... and thinking maybe they're not little memories for them. I have super, super fond memories of long drives with my dad listening to Goon Show tapes. If that didn't effect my sense of humour, nothing would. That is a strong cornerstone of my thinking processes (ie. scattered and nonsensical).

From Family, I've got a tonne of expressions of love and support in both directions. That, and old jokes are still funny.