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Are five things posts supposed to be for Fridays? have I been doing this wrong all along?
1.I have finally got all of the pretty things and art tutorials that were in my tumblr likes queued for ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
melsmorgue! Which leaves me with just. uh. 500 more likes to figure out something to do with. (A lot of them are going onto my pinboard, it just takes time, especially since I try to link to something other than tumblr for them when I can, given tumblr linkrot rates.) melsmorgue will now be slowing down its posting rate (although I am not at risk of running out of queue anytime soon...)
Also That One Post is on track for reaching 100,000 notes in two months or so. It's amazing how different the tumblr experience is when you have a consistently viral post just hangin' out on your activity feed. The actual interaction on tumblr isn't that much different - I got maybe ten new followers from 80,000 notes on that post, and that's if all of them were from the one post, and after you hit a certain point on a post like that very few reblogs actually include any new commentary - but I can reliably go on tumblr at any time and get a hit of 'yay! somebody thinks I said something worthwhile!' ...plus the notifications for all my other posts are completely drowned out so I obsess over notes for them a lot less. It's basically the equivalent of the point at which my AO3 kudos-per-day were reliable enough that I stopped counting them constantly and just go look at them when I need a pick-me-up. It's nice. I recommend exactly one innocuously viral post for everybody's Tumblr career.
2. So I started playing HabitRPG last week with some friends and friendsfriends from mis-ish fandom. I am liking it more than I thought! I stayed away for awhile because I've never been that fond of RPG-style games, but I realized I was going to miss the CampNaNo setup with its button-pressing validation and the low-pressure group chat for support, so I caved to habitrpg. And it turns out that even if you just use the todolist parts it's one of the more functional task trackers I've tried. Plus I now have a pet blue cactus and that's surprisingly motivational.
('Post to DW' is on my habits list so you may see more posts here for a bit...)
Historically though I come up with a new way of doing task tracking and it lasts for maybe a couple months and then I start ignoring it just as hard as the last one. I suspect the same thing will happen with Habit RPG eventually. Especially once the gaming aspect stops being new.
(That's how I do games: mess around with it until I've mostly figured out how the rules and parameters work, figure out the most efficient way to exploit said parameters to achieve the win condition, iterate that until I am either winning consistently enough that I'm bored, or I have determined that achieving win conditions requires hard work about which I do not care, and then either quit or start picking my own win conditions. See also: my first time at laser tag last week, where I spent the first game losing badly while testing the system and the second game won by so much that I blew past even the employee who was playing. Despite having the worst accuracy rating in the group and hitting hardly anybody.
...fandom needs to write more laser tag stories btw. I'm currently trying to figure out what the 1830s equivalent would have been. Chalk rounds or wax bullets for air rifles?)
3. Oh! On that note I won CampNaNoWriMo! 10,000 words in a month, baby! Didn't actually finish any wips, of course, but eh. It was more fun and worked better than I expected, and my cabin were all really great, I may do it again sometime. I also ended up writing way more original fic than I had for ages (whch is about 4000 words, nobody get too excited.)
...meanwhile I dropped out of![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
intoabar last night. The deadline snuck up on me and I had no compelling ideas and no time to do the canon review that's usually what generates them. Alas. I sat there and thought, "I could drop everything else I'm reading and working on, mainline canon, and stay up late the night before the deadline to throw together something I don't like much. Or I could go default."
I'm actually kind of proud of myself for making that choice (and for going right to the mod post and doing it without stressing over it first.) Does this mean I'm, like, maturing and stuff? Yuck. Luckily it's a low-pressure non-exchange fest so there's no real consequences for dropping out as long as you chin up and admit to it.
4. Meanwhile there's the Master Naturalist class which so far has been a lot of fun and I'm learning a lot while at the same time not feeling stupid which is an excellent balance. Unfortunately it's almost done which means I have just over a week to do the 40-hour capstone group project which I've just barely started. Oops?
Luckily my partner seems to be well-suited to my working style and we picked something that will be relatively easy to do in a last-minute panic, but still. ): Part of my motivation for doing this was to see if I'd worked through my crap enough to be able to go back to school without being in a constant state of crisis again over homework and papers and such and I suspect the answer is going to be "NOPE".
On the plus side I did drop out of intabar partly so I would have more time to work on project? And if I get a significant amount of it done this weekend I might call it victory, that would still be way better than most of my college projects.
And it's gotten me out and exploring the outdoors every weekend so far this spring! Which has been SO GREAT even if it means I can't go yard sailing. (Gosh I miss yard sales.) Last weekend I had two classes in a row which meant I had to take a three-day weekend so I just went all out and went camping in greenbelt national park for three days and gosh I love camping a lot. Of course it helps that the mosquitoes are very late this year...
5. I have been reading a lot of books! And making serious progress on my 'finish all the half-finished books' project, I might actually get through most of them by the end of the year? And then I can start a bunch of the unstarted books w/out those others hanging over me! \o/
My resolution to read at least one novel a month has sort of mutated into "read a novel and a somehow related young adult novel every month." Actually I've found I've been doing a lot of book-reading in pairs, which has slowed down my reviewing of them, because I want to review them as a compare/contrast and neither Goodreads nor Librarything is really set up for that.
Anyway, here are the paired novels I've read so far:
February: Frontier Wolf and A Companion To Wolves.
Similarity: Elite-yet-ostracized band of warriors have mystical communion with wolves, defend the borders (w/ mixed success) from the barbarians in the North.
Differences: One of them is really, really gay. The other one has buttsex.
March: Welcome to Mars and The Martian
Similarity: Due to unforeseen circumstances, a young man on one of the first interplanetary landings is marooned alone on Mars and has to survive with nothing but his wits, the supplies he brought with him, and sheer courage on a hostile planet while he waits for a rescue that may never come.
Differences: One of them has a main character who's kind of immature sometimes. The other one's about teenagers.
April: The Story of Owen, Dragon Slayer of Trondheim and Any Given Doomsday
Similarity: Urban fantasy in which a pair with a complicated relationship must train hard to live up to their family expectations to fight an unprecedented incursion of fantasy creatures that want to destroy civilization.
Differences: One of them is part sophisticated allegory, part insightful exploration of modernity, values, economics and regionalism, realpolitik, the meaning of family, environmental degradation and the paradox of conservation, and so on, as background for two young people building a healthy and honest relationship, community, and future. The other one contains adult situations and concepts.
May: Rocket Racoon and Groot Steal The Galaxy and Ancillary Justice
Similarity: Space opera with main characters who don't quite understand human gender concepts and are very angry about everything.
Differences: I guess we shall find out!
anyway friends, what have you been up to?
Also That One Post is on track for reaching 100,000 notes in two months or so. It's amazing how different the tumblr experience is when you have a consistently viral post just hangin' out on your activity feed. The actual interaction on tumblr isn't that much different - I got maybe ten new followers from 80,000 notes on that post, and that's if all of them were from the one post, and after you hit a certain point on a post like that very few reblogs actually include any new commentary - but I can reliably go on tumblr at any time and get a hit of 'yay! somebody thinks I said something worthwhile!' ...plus the notifications for all my other posts are completely drowned out so I obsess over notes for them a lot less. It's basically the equivalent of the point at which my AO3 kudos-per-day were reliable enough that I stopped counting them constantly and just go look at them when I need a pick-me-up. It's nice. I recommend exactly one innocuously viral post for everybody's Tumblr career.
2. So I started playing HabitRPG last week with some friends and friendsfriends from mis-ish fandom. I am liking it more than I thought! I stayed away for awhile because I've never been that fond of RPG-style games, but I realized I was going to miss the CampNaNo setup with its button-pressing validation and the low-pressure group chat for support, so I caved to habitrpg. And it turns out that even if you just use the todolist parts it's one of the more functional task trackers I've tried. Plus I now have a pet blue cactus and that's surprisingly motivational.
('Post to DW' is on my habits list so you may see more posts here for a bit...)
Historically though I come up with a new way of doing task tracking and it lasts for maybe a couple months and then I start ignoring it just as hard as the last one. I suspect the same thing will happen with Habit RPG eventually. Especially once the gaming aspect stops being new.
(That's how I do games: mess around with it until I've mostly figured out how the rules and parameters work, figure out the most efficient way to exploit said parameters to achieve the win condition, iterate that until I am either winning consistently enough that I'm bored, or I have determined that achieving win conditions requires hard work about which I do not care, and then either quit or start picking my own win conditions. See also: my first time at laser tag last week, where I spent the first game losing badly while testing the system and the second game won by so much that I blew past even the employee who was playing. Despite having the worst accuracy rating in the group and hitting hardly anybody.
...fandom needs to write more laser tag stories btw. I'm currently trying to figure out what the 1830s equivalent would have been. Chalk rounds or wax bullets for air rifles?)
3. Oh! On that note I won CampNaNoWriMo! 10,000 words in a month, baby! Didn't actually finish any wips, of course, but eh. It was more fun and worked better than I expected, and my cabin were all really great, I may do it again sometime. I also ended up writing way more original fic than I had for ages (whch is about 4000 words, nobody get too excited.)
...meanwhile I dropped out of
intoabar last night. The deadline snuck up on me and I had no compelling ideas and no time to do the canon review that's usually what generates them. Alas. I sat there and thought, "I could drop everything else I'm reading and working on, mainline canon, and stay up late the night before the deadline to throw together something I don't like much. Or I could go default."I'm actually kind of proud of myself for making that choice (and for going right to the mod post and doing it without stressing over it first.) Does this mean I'm, like, maturing and stuff? Yuck. Luckily it's a low-pressure non-exchange fest so there's no real consequences for dropping out as long as you chin up and admit to it.
4. Meanwhile there's the Master Naturalist class which so far has been a lot of fun and I'm learning a lot while at the same time not feeling stupid which is an excellent balance. Unfortunately it's almost done which means I have just over a week to do the 40-hour capstone group project which I've just barely started. Oops?
Luckily my partner seems to be well-suited to my working style and we picked something that will be relatively easy to do in a last-minute panic, but still. ): Part of my motivation for doing this was to see if I'd worked through my crap enough to be able to go back to school without being in a constant state of crisis again over homework and papers and such and I suspect the answer is going to be "NOPE".
On the plus side I did drop out of intabar partly so I would have more time to work on project? And if I get a significant amount of it done this weekend I might call it victory, that would still be way better than most of my college projects.
And it's gotten me out and exploring the outdoors every weekend so far this spring! Which has been SO GREAT even if it means I can't go yard sailing. (Gosh I miss yard sales.) Last weekend I had two classes in a row which meant I had to take a three-day weekend so I just went all out and went camping in greenbelt national park for three days and gosh I love camping a lot. Of course it helps that the mosquitoes are very late this year...
5. I have been reading a lot of books! And making serious progress on my 'finish all the half-finished books' project, I might actually get through most of them by the end of the year? And then I can start a bunch of the unstarted books w/out those others hanging over me! \o/
My resolution to read at least one novel a month has sort of mutated into "read a novel and a somehow related young adult novel every month." Actually I've found I've been doing a lot of book-reading in pairs, which has slowed down my reviewing of them, because I want to review them as a compare/contrast and neither Goodreads nor Librarything is really set up for that.
Anyway, here are the paired novels I've read so far:
February: Frontier Wolf and A Companion To Wolves.
Similarity: Elite-yet-ostracized band of warriors have mystical communion with wolves, defend the borders (w/ mixed success) from the barbarians in the North.
Differences: One of them is really, really gay. The other one has buttsex.
March: Welcome to Mars and The Martian
Similarity: Due to unforeseen circumstances, a young man on one of the first interplanetary landings is marooned alone on Mars and has to survive with nothing but his wits, the supplies he brought with him, and sheer courage on a hostile planet while he waits for a rescue that may never come.
Differences: One of them has a main character who's kind of immature sometimes. The other one's about teenagers.
April: The Story of Owen, Dragon Slayer of Trondheim and Any Given Doomsday
Similarity: Urban fantasy in which a pair with a complicated relationship must train hard to live up to their family expectations to fight an unprecedented incursion of fantasy creatures that want to destroy civilization.
Differences: One of them is part sophisticated allegory, part insightful exploration of modernity, values, economics and regionalism, realpolitik, the meaning of family, environmental degradation and the paradox of conservation, and so on, as background for two young people building a healthy and honest relationship, community, and future. The other one contains adult situations and concepts.
May: Rocket Racoon and Groot Steal The Galaxy and Ancillary Justice
Similarity: Space opera with main characters who don't quite understand human gender concepts and are very angry about everything.
Differences: I guess we shall find out!
anyway friends, what have you been up to?
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I agree with you 100 per cent on the Tumblr viral posting. I have a Tumblr blog that I can not seem to bring myself away from (even while cursing Tumblr for their micro-blogging platform, sometimes I just want to write damn it). You can check it out: consumervoter.ca. It is mostly Canadian politics, but if you link up I can add one more note to your viral post.
Have a wonderful day!
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When characters die, they lose all money and possessions and lose a level and start over with zero XP toward the next level.
And I really like your book pairings. I haven't heard of most of them, but your comparisons amuse me.
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Most adventuring parties are in fights almost constantly because it adds to the motivation to show up and check things off.
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To my surprise I still use HabitRPG. I'm in a party of two, which means quests take forever, but I'm too lazy to look for another one. I have both "post to DW" and "leave fanwork comment" as habits, and especially the latter has been surprisingly motivational.
Congrats on writing 10k!
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Also, I am very curious: what is your That One Post?
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