Author Archives: isikyus

Revenge of the Homework Dog

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The busy-ness I mentioned last fortnight was a roleplaying convention, which was fun … but also very intense.

I’m travelling again this weekend, and to my chagrin I forgot to bring last week’s torn page. So my stats are incomplete.

In the interest of keeping to a schedule, the figures I have show:

  • IĀ got to sleep around 1:30 a.m. on average. I also lost an hour of sleep due to Daylight Savings, but had lots of chances to sleep in to make up for it. Overall, 7 hours a night.
  • I made 7 things:
    • Two nights of D&D prep, now I’ve sorted out the printer;
    • A small piece of writing;
    • Repairs, to some literal loose ends on old clothes;
    • Emails, for metaphorical loose ends ordering new clothes;
    • And I talked to people at the con, which is an activity I need more practice in.
    • Plus, something called “RR” in my notes. I don’t recall what this was, but presumably I thought it was important šŸ™‚
  • Finally I finished reading two things:
    • Exit, by Belinda Bauer, which had some quite pleasant wordplay (and more Pixar references than I expected).
    • Worldbuilding Pasta’s “An Apple Pie From Scratch” series. I’d hoped this would help one of my current stories, and it was super interesting. But I’ve realised what I need to world-build right now is language, which the series hasn’t reached.

D&D continues well.

The PCs, once again, nearly managed to lose all their accumulated clues. But they recovered well, got their bearings, and are now on track for their next target.

The Dog Ate My Homework

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The page I tracked my goals on tore out of my notebook and got lost, and I’ve only just found it. That’s my excuse for now.

I was also busy for other reasons, but those properly belong in next week’s post.

As my torn and crumpled notes show, I:

  • Got to sleep at 1:30 AM, on average. This got me about 6ā…“ hours of sleep a night, after losing some sleep for one rather early start for work.
  • Made 9 things:
    • 5 pieces of D&D prep, counting two evenings fighting with printers (they won, for now);
    • 2 evenings of budget progress,
    • 1 piece of writing, and
    • a reply to a letter I’d been putting off.
  • I didn’t finish anything this week, mostly due to a focus spread too thin.

Despite the lack of sleep, D&D did run and went off fairly well, even without the stuff I was supposed to print. I may need it next game, though.

For now, rest.

Nothing Much to Say

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To quickly summarise this fortnight, I have:

  • Got to sleep at 1:07 AM, on average. This makes about 7 hours, 9 minutes of average sleep.
  • Made 9 things:
    • 3 evenings of progress on my budget. I got sick of the bank view-spending tool and am now writing my own, which is less efficient but much more motivating.
    • 2 evenings on house-ownership-related paperwork,
    • Planned my visit to a convention next month,
    • Wrote a scene of fiction,
    • Prepared some D&D content, and
    • Organised myself to vote in the local election.
  • And I finished ASA’s Guide to Getting Published, by Juliet Rogers. An interesting and enjoyable read, but it was clear I don’t need that advice quite yet. I particularly need to improve my social media savvy first ā€” of which this post is a shining anti-example šŸ™‚

No D&D this fortnight, due to illness and scheduling issues.

A Better Class of Distraction

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This fortnight, I rediscovered Questionable Content, remembered how much I liked it, and re-read a bunch of it. This doesn’t count as a “finished”, however, as I’ve skipped a bit in the middle.

I’m tempted to go back and catch up properly, but reading it on my phone at night wasn’t great for sleep. I may need to shell out for the books instead.

As to the stats, I have:

  • Got to sleep an average of 1 hour 41 minutes after midnight, averaging a touch over 7 hours of sleep.
  • Made only six things:
    • Three evenings of D&D prep,
    • Two pieces of writing (a poem, and a story scene), and
    • One afternoon putting in a garden. Sadly it wasn’t a partridge in a pear tree!
  • I also finished Samantha Shannon’s The Mime Order. This series is keeping me nicely engaged (with a bit less loss of sleep than QC). There were some interesting hints about the magic system in this book, which I’m looking forward to seeing play out.

D&D was actually last Wednesday due to some schedule issues, but it went well. The PCs did nearly burn down the dungeon with all the essential clues still inside, but wiser heads prevailed, so the adventure shall continue.

Things better left unsaid

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This fortnight began under the shadow of some nasty mental health and loneliness stuff, of which the less said here the better.

Moving on, I have:

  • Got to sleep around 1.57 hours late on average. Despite this I did average 7 hours of sleep, though it doesn’t much feel like it.
  • Made about ten things:
    • … it to my cousin’s engagement party, organised and with a gift,
    • Four nights’ worth of D&D prep,
    • Mended some clothes, and a bag I needed to carry the inevitable stack of RPG paraphenalia,
    • Two poems
    • And the beginning of an attempt to deal with the mental stuff.

I didn’t finish reading or watching anything this week (blame social media). But the D&D game did make good use of the prep (and bag), so the fortnight ended on a high note.

A good fortnight for the wakeful

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This fortnight, I have:

  • Got to sleep about 1.3 hours after midnight on average, for about 6.7 hours of sleep a night. An improvement over last fortnight, at least.
  • Made ten things:
    • Four evenings of progress on my Lachisis Weaves project. Mostly this was testing and CI setup, so I’ve got no cool diagrams to show for it, but it does bring me closer to such demonstrations.
    • Two evenings of D&D prep.
    • An afternoon of gardening, cutting back a tree. Again, not work that’ll bear any fruit (or vegetables), but necessary to get light for them to grow in.
    • One decent chunk of fiction writing.
    • And two bits of boring life-admin stuff: getting my oven repaired, and sorting out (finally!) the other clothing order.
  • And I finished two books: Iain M. Banks’ Excession, and Peter Swanson’s The Girl with a Clock for a Heart. Excession, at least, reminded me how many of Banks’ books I still need to read…

Overall, a good outcome for everything except sleep. The D&D session went off nicely, although the PCs threw my plans slightly for a loop by running into their enemies at the shops.

Sleep is for the week, but this was a fortnight

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This fortnight has also been disrupted by laptop issues. Hopefully, they’re fixed now I’ve bitten the bullet and replaced it (touch wood). That isn’t necessarily enough to explain these figures, though. I:

  • Got to sleep an average of 1.72 hours after midnight (a score of minus 1,395 points), and slept for 6.5 hours a night on average. I suppose it’s possible measuring this is just making it worse, but I don’t want to throw out the idea just yet. I have been getting up earlier, which is nice.
  • Made five things:
    • The effort to sort out a second clothes order I had issues with,
    • Two solid sessions of writing towards a short story.
    • The decision to replace the laptop, and
    • A small amount of D&D prep (mostly printing documents.
  • And I finished reading The Bands of Mourning, by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve heard this described as one of the weaker Mistborn books, and I can see some merit in that. But it is cool to see the Investiture-related Feruchemical powers finally show up and mean something.

D&D ran on schedule this fortnight, for once. After levelling up, the PC’s faced a moral dilemma, a tax audit, a film-noir dwarf, and the old staple: “a band of pirates jump through the window!”.

Next fortnight we roll initiative.

Gaining Momentum

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This fortnight, I have:

  • Slept 7.2 hours a night, on average. A slight improvement. Despite that, I’ve decided to change this goal again, to “get to bed before midnight”. Minus one point per minute I stay up into the next day!
    • What I wanted from the 8-hour goal was to wake up before my alarm, and have a low-rush morning. Instead, I got up later and later, rushed even more, and still got to work late. Finished late. And so on until I got even less sleep.
  • Made seven things:
    • Three pieces of D&D prep. One of these was scaling up the maps from the adventure I’m running, to use with minis. This took longer than it should, because (a) Linux, and (b) my printer refused to scan anything. It wanted magenta ink. Maybe I should have just scanned it in black and white šŸ™‚
    • A proper, posted letter to a friend I don’t see so often.
    • Another fragment of fiction writing.
    • More mending, and …
    • … another email to the company I’m trying to buy new clothes from. This conversation continues…
  • But I did finish reading Masterclass: Writing Romantic Fiction, by Barbara Samuel. I’m not a romance writer in any sense, and this book opens with “if you want to write romance, you first have to read it”. So much for that? But no! It still inspired me to get writing again, and Samuel has so much generally-useful writing advice I had to keep going back and taking notes.

No D&D this week due to the continuing round of cold-season illness.

Another Excuse

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I’ve recovered, more or less, from last week’s illness, but I still didn’t get much done.

This time it’s because my computer isn’t working. (Should be just a power supply issue, but it’s some kind of gaming laptop and needs a special 200 watt replacement) Between a lack of a proper keyboard, small screen, and being locked out of all my usual recreations, this has thrown my creative work askew.

On that wonky foundation, I have:

  • Slept 7 hours a night, well below my increased goal. Despite this I have been late for work all fortnight, so something is fishy here. More work (or perhaps more laziness) needed.
  • Made about six things:
    • Two evenings’ progress on a roguelike inspired by my illness. This is in no sense playable, but it was fun to work on: Elm is so much better suited to this than my previous attempt to use it.
    • A page of free-written backstory for my fiction project (on a typewriter, due to no laptop).
    • A few notes for the D&D game, longhand (due to ditto).
    • Index entries for another notebook in my backlog.
  • And the lack of YouTube gave me an excuse to start, and finish, watching Hot Fuzz. The DVD had been on my to-watch pile for ages, and it was well worth it. The old UK police uniform showing up was a highlight šŸ™‚

D&D was a little flat this week, which I attribute mostly to a lack of prep — and losing the last fortnight’s work on my laptop. I thought I had everything in a Git repo, but apparently I did not.

(Being a player short may also have been a factor.)

The game will keep rolling, though. The players hit a milestone and levelled up, and we had some interesting events that will affect my plans for next session.

My new laptop charger should arrive on Monday,Ā  which ought to help things.

Goals, and Illness

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This fortnight, my goals were disrupted by a nasty fever. It was some kind of virus ā€” I’m not sure exactly what, but whatever it was, it wasn’t fun. Despite, or in some cases because of this, I have:

  • Slept at least 7.2 hours a night, not counting three nights I spent too sick (and sleeping too intermittently) to track it. As I recover I’ve made a point of getting 8 hours sleep, and waking up like that was was so much nicer I’ve decided to increase the goal to 8 hours going forward.
  • Made a handful of things:
    • A couple of poems
    • One day’s worth of D&D prep
    • A random table of ideas for my next D&D campaign (a few years away yet!)
    • A discovery of a Cosmere easter egg (look for Isaac Stewart in the acknowledgements).
    • A purchase of a new phone (long needed, not quite set up yet).
    • Progress towards recovery. I’m a lot better now, but nowhere near recovered yet.
  • And I finished reading through Justin Alexander’s posted In the Shadow of the Spire campaign journals and commentaries. As a blog series, obviously more will be posted, but I’ll no longer need an archive binge to keep up.

My D&D game didn’t run this week due to illness, so again there’s nothing to report there this time. My making of things (including D&D prep) will probably be on a low ebb for a while yet as I recover, but I’m now 7 days into a typically 10-day illness, so the next fortnight should see me well (fingers crossed!).