I make a point of trying to write about what I’m experiencing and thinking about and feeling, not because it’s some grand pcinriple but because it’s a lot easier and I’m not particularly creative about why I write, just that I write. The result is that when I’m not partaking of much that I think makes interesting writing subject matter (‘not making content’) I tend to trail off about it. Sometimes that’s things that I think ethically, I should not share, like spending a lot of time taking care of my niblings, or students’ work and input.
Sometimes it’s like what happened today.
Today, I spent a lot of time organising and tidying up sections on a draft document for my PhD. It is a scary document. I am very cautious about messing up something in it. I do not like how long it is and I do not like that it is so short. This is not interesting, in my mind, to share.
But it is very mentally draining, so I didn’t have a ton of brain space to write. What I did instead was do some graphic work on a game jam game (which, you know, you might see soon or not, I don’t know how it’s going to pan out at this point). I did some looking around for artists who might be interested in making Touhou art for this month’s prototype.
Bit by bit, little tasks bound up. I did the bins. I did some washing. I put away some laundry. I set up a Retrospring. I got myself on the same Mastodon instance as Fox. After some struggling with validators, I got back into an instagram account. I opened up old email addresses I’d forgotten and finally got the passwords saved, properly, and set up proper forwards so I would stop missing emails from it. I repositioned stuff on my desk, and vacuumed the area, including my Tonberry, my Gligar, my Wobbuffet, and my little Aiba plushie. It’s so many little things, so many things that a year (years?!) of neglect have let build up into a shape that made it hard to work in this space.
Oh, and I spent an unfortunate amount of brain-empty time today, logging in every single Dominator I have on the Homecoming server and making sure that their interfaces was standardised.
What?
I mean, I like it when the interface for the game (which I can customise to my wants), behaves in certain predictable ways. For example, no matter the character, when I press ctrl+1, I want to toggle on a travel power, and I want that to toggle off as well. I also like keeping my hands in reasonably narrow positions – so my WASD hand presses buttons 1-4, and modifies that with the control and alt modifiers.
I know, riveting.
This was something I could manage, a little brain-rotting experience of formally tidying up little pieces across things that don’t matter. Logging in and out is a few minutes, thirty seconds, forty seconds, screenshotting and checking things to make sure that like sat where like does, so swapping from character to character was minimally confusing.
I tidied up my journal. I wrote in my method doc about different platforms for getting audience attention to my creative work. And this is one of the things that’s on my mind a lot. Right now I’m spreading the places I’m on. Personally, I try to make sure that each place I put stuff is different; that way you can sort your experience with me, meaning that if you (say) want to skip the Magic: The Gathering stuff you don’t have to see it, and I don’t feel like I’m repeating jokes in different rooms to see who laughs at them.
On the one hand, I like the idea of letting you control your experience like that. On the other hand, I think that asking you to manage fifteen different ‘Talen Venues’ to see all the stuff I do sucks. I think of this blog as the central repository for what I do… which now I say that makes me wonder about how many times I”ve done stuff on other sites and not made it readily accessible here. Hmmm. That may be a thing to address.
Then I set up a Tumblr poster: something that could take my posts here and post them on Tumblr, like it shares links on twitter. That involved trying something totally new and unguided… and it worked. It worked out pretty okay. Doing that opened up to me that I’m going to need to make a new sidebar, something that links you to my spaces on the internet, to make it easier for you to access it ‘me’ and the things I make.
Anyway, see ya tomorrow.