A newsletter to learn about practical ways to decolonize your research and data work-lives with byte-sized drabbles about the daily life of a data professional.

New Newsletter Format for 2025

Happy New Year! I believe in entering a new calendar year productive and leaving it rested. I spent the last few weeks resting, eating good food, and playing some really cool video games (my favorite was Stasis: Bone Totem). Whatever your tradition, I hope you feel rested too.

Twice a month, each newsletter will include a mix of new sections about a bigger spectrum of data work than before. It will now include:

• Behind-the-Scenes: I’ll talk about a project I’m working on, my process, progress, and images of it (when I can).

• Curated Content: Last year I focused on sharing educational opportunities I ran across. This section is now about industry news, interesting articles, portfolio showcases, and other content about data that I just find inspiring or interesting.

• Industry Insights: I share an in depth info on a specific data issue that I’m an expert in, like DAM, UX/UI Design, development, and data migrations.

Behind-the-Scenes: New Pixel Platformer Game In the Works

Last year I made 7 free-to-play video games ranging from interactive text adventures, point-and-click, top-down survival horror, and visual novels.

I’ve been wanting to move away from Ren’Py, a game engine mainly for visual novels, and get comfortable writing GDScript in Godot (game engine). When I made Late Night Surfing, I butted heads with Ren’Py’s innate layering features. You can configure your own additional layers in the engine, but it didn’t always work the way I wanted it to.

My defined layers kept getting hidden by/overwriting the 4 pre-defined layers. The Art Director also wanted the mouth on the TV overlay to move in time with any voice lines and text rolling across the screen. The game engine itself can’t animate per se, but I’m happy with what I coded to give the illusion of a mouth talking.

The first game I’m making this year will be a pixel platformer in Godot. I figured the easiest thing would be to recreate a small game jam game I originally made in Ren’Py in Godot. Last week I started creating the sprites from the VN (visual novel) The Creatures From Below in Aseprite, a paid animated sprite editor and pixel art tool.

The Creatures From Below is a horror game from the point of view of underwater monsters “making new friends” with deep sea oil mining humans. While I’m still playing around with a basic character model, I need to make a tile set to create the environment for the game next. So the tile set will likely be water themed.

Curated Content

Interesting Article: “Not All Staying is the Same: Unpacking Retention and Turnover in Academic Libraries

A main point they bring up is the concept of involuntarily staying at academic library jobs and the reasons people stay (see the section, “Why Do Librarians Stay”). Academia in general has many workplace environment issues, of late the humanely bizarre stance to reject hybrid/remote work options for feeding the capitalist real estate machine. A lot of articles talk about toxic workplaces, but this one brought up interesting points like: you could have family or care-taking obligations, moving cross-country isn’t realistic for everyone, and the challenges to creating new support networks as adults.

Industry News: Materials Moving into the Public Domain

Published works from 1929 and published sound recordings from 1924 entered the public domain. If you deal with rights management in your data work, it’s good to keep up with public domain releases. I recognized some of the new releases: the song “Singin’ in the Rain”, and fiction works by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie.

Portfolio Showcase: Jennifer A. Liss, Metadata Librarian

When I first started out, I struggled to find portfolio examples to get inspiration from. Data work is a vast field with different specialties and jobs. Data professionals in academia often have a portfolio with sections like Jennifer’s: work, research, and teaching. Remember: Not every data professional will have/want/need a portfolio. And each sector, maybe even employer, might have different norms too.

Let’s Create!

I’m open to collaborations, freelance gigs, and conversations about the ideas I shared. Feel free to get in touch and comment on the newsletter.