sudofox's journal

Austin Burk's journal, where I share little snippets of my writing, code, and dreams.

What comes after Sudomemo?

Haven't touched my blog in a long while. A lot has happened. The Flipnote Archive was released and a lot of new things happened with Sudomemo. Sudo Haiku is over a year old now. I've branched out a bit and taken up new hobbies and interests.

I've been thinking about this a long time but at this point I have to wonder if Sudomemo is really what I want my "life's work" to be. I've put so much time into it but it's a constant battle to keep people engaged or interested.

I'm thinking about my faith. It's a critical part of who I am. But I struggle. There's things I've struggled with for years and I am acutely aware, in day-to-day moments of conviction, of where the words I speak or actions I take don't fall in line with the faith I profess. Indeed, the fact that I do feel those convictions is reassuring to me -- evidence that my walk in faith is still steady enough to maintain the worldview that reveals my own sin to me.

It comes down to time, really. The time I spend on archiving old content, maintaining a community, so much of it is spent that I struggle to reach enough motivation to continue on my latest idea or project, and have to rely on finding sudden bursts of motivation to work on a new thing all at once before it evaporates again. I just added a dark mode to Sudo Haiku, something I'd been wanting to do for a long time. It took an afternoon to toss it together.

I don't know how much of this stems from my own disability, but I've always (in recent memory) struggled to maintain focus on a project for long times. I get it, I've found workarounds, inventing motivations to push forward is something I have to do on the daily. Many times those motivations are to do with living up to the expectations of other people.

I wish to improve my faith, to bolster it, to take up the armor of God

when I face my daily struggles. I know that the way to do this is to dedicate time to immersing myself in God's Word, to fellowship with other people of faith, and to do all things to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:23-33), something that I remember trying to do in the early days of Sudomemo, albeit a bit clumsily. I've grown a lot since then and had opportunities for ministry -- a recent event was somebody I worked on a project with online reaching out to me to ask me about my faith, something that amazed me -- but I still feel like I'm not where I need to be.

This all takes me back to Sudomemo and basically all the rest of my projects and whatnot. I question whether the time investment is truly returning anything worthwhile in the form of my own personal growth -- or the personal growth of all the artists involved in the community.

I've been thinking about it for years, and I don't plan to do anything sudden, but in all honesty I've been branching out to other endeavors for a while now, trying to grow in my knowledge and abilities. That's all well and good, but what I truly need to grow in is my faith, and that takes an investment of time which I presently struggle to make.

If anything, I think I could do a much better job running a Flipnote site if I took more time to invest into my faith first. I am convicted of my own struggles and must steady myself as is written in Ephesians.