Recovery and Moving Forward
Hello everyone!! First of all, a warmest thank-you to all the wonderful people who shared messages of support with me during my health leave this year. They made for some bright moments in an otherwise very difficult time. ❤️
It turns out that my hands’ recovery was significantly slowed by post-COVID complications, which I’m sure many folks can relate to these days. I’m relieved to say that I'm healing, slowly but surely! I’ve started to be able to make some art and do a little programming again and it feels great.
As I mentioned in my last post, I knew that a break would give me time to reflect. One thing I was well aware of before my injury is that progress on a huge project like Lumen moves too slowly with a one-person team. My strategy to get around this was to power through developing a few more big Lumen updates on my own (HD, Audio-Reactivity, and a Windows version), hoping that these features would increase Lumen sales enough that I could hire collaborators and grow the team from there.
Looking back on the previous couple years has made it crystal clear to me that this strategy is not working out. A different approach is necessary in order to grow the business sustainably - and honestly, to live my life sustainably in good physical and mental health. I don’t think I realized how burnt out I had become until circumstances forced me to stop. So now that I’m recovering, it’s time to try something different.
My new strategy will be to focus on smaller and more manageable projects in order to grow a larger and more capable company. Unfortunately, this means a pause on Lumen feature development for the time being. I will continue supporting Lumen as it exists today, working on bug fixes, documentation, and keeping it compatible with the latest Macs and macOS versions.
To all those who have been waiting so patiently for these big features: I’m truly sorry that the original strategy didn’t work out. I know it’s super frustrating. But the reality is that I need to build a business that can sustain a project of Lumen’s size and then work on those big features, not the other way around. So this isn’t the end for Lumen, it’s just a different path forward.
With limited energy and resources, I'm going to streamline and focus on sustainability first. To that end, I’ll be retiring the Lumen Nation Facebook and Paracosm Slack groups. There are many other excellent places online to discuss video synthesis (check out scanlines or the LZX Community!), and I hope you’ll connect with fellow Lumen users there. And while I’ll no longer be posting regular Lumen Development Updates on this blog, you can keep up with me/Paracosm via Twitter, Instagram, the mailing list, or as always, drop me a line anytime at support (at) paracosm.us ❤️
Wishing you happiness and good health,
-Jason













