9BM: Muh mugh muhn nmuh

As a capacitor of mental energy, I seem to be able to store about fifteen days' discharge at my peak rate. I've felt, these past few days, the winding-down of my Atari project coming-on, and this evening, as I began looking-over the lines of code in my editor, I felt the weight of my fuel gauge's needle come to rest against its housing beneath a dimly-lit E. Juice exhausted. Time to rest.

It could be months before I write another line of 6502 code. That's the way I operate. My appetite for understanding is ravenous, my compulsion to implement is overwhelming, but both are rapidly exhausted, and my compass now will spin and spin having arrived at that inevitable arctic nexus of project limbo. My brain is a limp organ. It slumps and wheezes.

I now look back at the past two weeks and ask, what have I gained? Well, in the concrete, I've only gained a functional-but-incomplete start to a word processor implementing proportional fonts on the Atari 800-series; in the abstract, I've gained knowledge on the operation of macro assemblers and early microcomputer operating systems, and have developed skills and techniques in implementing fast screen-drawing routines in MOS 6502 assembly language. I've also gained first-hand understanding of what can and can't be done with limited resources, and the dually encouraging and discouraging knowledge that the difference between code that gets the job done, and code that gets the job done, buys you a couple beers, and drives you home afterward is only about 8-24 hours of concentration and meditation.