Little early, but hey, why not.
January books: Still 1/4
Reading
As we can tell from my usual count, it doesn’t sound like a lot is getting done. But I’m still working through that Weird Parenting Wins book (and I’m in a section about teenagers, and there’s a few things I might want to try) and I’m about a fourth of the way through Six of Crows, which has been on my TBR probably since it came out. I bought this copy five years ago (the receipt was still in the book) but better late than never.
I’m also slowly making my way through Writing Down the Bones, which I started at my writing retreat at the beginning of June. It’s not a terribly long book, but I find that I need to digest each section (which tend to run 2-4 pages).
Video Games
I’m not going to lie, I’ve been spending perhaps more than I should here. I bought three games at the beginning of the month at the winter sale, and I’ve since beat two of them, Tower Wizard and Digseum. Both had idling elements so they could run in the background while I did other things and check on them periodically (Tower Wizard more than Digseum, which needed more hands-on grinding), but I appreciated that neither went on forever like other idling games I’ve tried. Both games were under $3 and I definitely got my money’s worth.
The third game I bought was A Building Full of Cats 2. I’ve previously played A Building Full of Cats and A Castle Full of Cats and they’re all essentially hidden object games, where you have to find the cats in various locations. However, I’m having issues where it’s not saving my progress. It takes a long time to do each level so I’m pretty annoyed about that, especially since the end game stuff won’t unlock unless all the other parts are done, assuming it follows the same format as the other games.
Today I also re-downloaded Among Us, which I played copiously during the pandemic. (According to Steam, it’s been two years since I last played.) I spent a little bit of time today playing Hide and Seek mode, but my hope is to be able to get my pandemic Among Us friends together and play in the near future.
I also played a game called Lost But Found where you’re the lost and found at the airport, and you’ve got to correctly return a stream of items to people. I found this one frustrating, and generally I’m really good at these types of games, so I would not recommend. Some aspects of the game were not well explained (and I never did figure some of them out) and it was also a little buggy. Not worth it.
Art
I thought briefly about it.
Writing
My class is actually coming along pretty well. I outlined everything and am about halfway through creating the slides for the theory portion of the class. I find the slides typically are the most infuriating part of creating the classes, so it should be smooth(ish) sailing once that part is done. (I think it’s because while outlining the class is all well and good, when you actually start to create the class you find areas of repetition or missing information, and then you have to fix things as you go.)
I am slightly worried about filming the workshop portions. I bought a webcam in COVID times that would do multiple inputs, so you could screen share (and film it) and put yourself up in the corner, but somewhere along the line the company removed that functionality. I might be able to use the software I use to stream on Twitch to do more or less the same thing, but I was having issues with the volume last time I tried (the game audio was wildly louder than my commentary audio). Now, the writing screen shouldn’t have any audio of its own, but I think there is probably an issue with the microphone audio.
So that may or may not be an issue when we get to the filming portion.
I’d like to restart my morning pages, which I haven’t gotten around to yet, but all in all I’m not too worried about how things are going.
Do I need to stop playing so many video games? Yes. Will I? Maybe! See you later this week, squiders!
