Things

[melannen]

It seems like it's been ages that I've posted anything substantial and non-FMK here (which I knew was a risk; I have enough social media XP (extroversion points) to keep up with approx. 1 DW post a week, that is well-established). So here is a 5 things to break the monotony:

1. Pokemon Go will not let me install the latest update (It gives an error message that says "we hates your phone, precious" [paraphrase] and then won't install.) So instead I have been playing Magikarp Jump, which the app store always tries to tell me pokego players will enjoy. So far:

a) It is super addictive, if I ever get a device that plays a real pokemon game I am probably lost. On the other hand if I really lived in Pokemon Trainer World I would definitely end up just training Magikarp to jump really high and staring at them for hours on end while they eat fish food, that is true, so possibly this game is as much as I need.
b) This is probably the only version of pokemon where your magikarp evolving is a horrible tragedy.
c) Can pokemon die in the main pokemon games? Because they don't in Pokego, and the magikarp game is clearly aimed at a much younger audience, and yet MY FAVORITE MAGIKARP GOT EATEN BY A PIGEOTTO OMG
d) The player character is explictly gender-ambiguous, which iirc was also the case in some of the other pokemon games? But I am SUPER enjoying that. Have we reached the point yet where my gender can be "Hey you, boy...or girl? Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter, here have some free money." SOMEDAY.
e) However, the town drunk rummaging in his pockets to give me "a nugget of wisdom. Oh, wait, it's just a nugget" I could do without. Also, the mayor wandering up and offering to massage my fish, not my favorite. Doesn't help that my avatar sweatdrops at both of those.


2. Also I finally won the last boss level in Alphabear, so until I got my fish game, I was totally at loose ends for mindless phone games, and started looking for ports of the ones I played as a kid. HOW IS AN ANDROID PORT OF GODDAMP CATERPILLAR 11 megabytes? I coded that from scratch on my TI83 when I was a kid! In, like, about 100 lines of code! WHAT IS WRONG WITH US?

(I also coded a text adventure with a gender-ambiguous protagonist on that calculator, actually...)


3. I finished cleaning my bathroom yesterday! It only took me about two weeks! It is so nice to go in there and have it be clean! It looks so bright in there now! It isn't even that it was particularly squalorous (except for the corner that had the litter box), it's just, I think we have been living in this house too long. You, or at least I, even when I'm trying to keep up a fairly good standard of housekeeping, don't tend to think about things like the grime that gets on light switches or whether the window curtains need laundering or whatever. But a side effect of all the traveling I did last month, which involved staying at my (smoke-in-the-house) uncle's house and then helping my sister move into an apartment that hadn't been cleaned since three tenants ago, is that I got home and started noticing that stuff as if it wasn't my house and my grime, and also there are no cats here anymore to get dander everywhere ;_; so I decided to just clean EVERYTHING.

Steps for the bathroom: remove all portable objects, scrub all remaining surfaces with suitable cleanser, replace or repair all damaged hardware, scrub all portable objects, replace repair or discard portable objects as necessary, replace all portable objects, enjoy not seeing the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling anymore!

Two weeks. SO EXHAUSTING. And I didn't even do stuff like the paint touch-up it badly needs.

Now I have started my bedroom, and I am glad I got the XP from the bathroom first, because that's a whole nother level of "portable objects". I have divided it into eight sectors and am doing it one sector at a time, because there is no other space in the house large enough to stage everything in... (The scrubbing is less awful, though, at least.)

Here are things I have learned about me and cleaning:
1. It is SUPER EXHAUSTING (which I knew, am just being reminded of it.)
2. I can totally see how once I got the whole house cleaned to this level, the room where I started would be ready to be cleaned again, but I am NOT going there, it can spend at least a couple years getting dirty again.
3. I actively enjoy cleaning only when: a) I feel like I have ownership/control over the space I am cleaning; b) it is dirty enough that I can visibly see the progress I am making; AND c) I have control of the timing, how it is done, and how much I do at a time.
4. I actively hate cleaning when: a) I don't feel like it's my space; b) It was already clean enough that I can't tell the difference between where I've cleaned and where I haven't, or c) I'm working to someone else's standards.
5. I am starting to understand Mom's feelings about needing to clean the house before guests come over even if you know for a fact that the guests' houses are just as bad, because it's so different when you suddenly look at your grime through someone else's eyes
6. On the other hand, Mom keeps wandering by where I am working and visibly boggling at the level of cleaning I am doing, so at least I feel less like I am dragging down her standards overall.

So that's useful life lessons there.


4. So last November I kind of went into power-save mode for awhile, quit using Habitica and also quit a bunch of the things I had been doing on a regular basis (tag wrangling, practicing piano, working on Spanish and Icelandic, writing on a regular basis, using Tumblr...) But my sister got me back onto using Habitica again, and now that all the cat-related tasks are gone (and I trimmed some other stuff) it's a much more reasonable list of dailies.

I had forgotten how very motivating it is to get to tick the thingy. Now I am debating whether to use my Orb of Rebirth and start over or not (And whether to try to get together an active party with more than just me and my sister and a bunch of inactive accounts.)

And I'm trying to get back to doing some of the other things I stopped, too. I gave Tag Wrangling an un-hiatus notice, so I'm committed to trying to be less fail at that, and I pulled out a piano book for the first time in months (I found a copy of the very first one I learned out of, The Joy Of First-Year Piano, to warm me back up) Og ég er að læra íslensku aftur. Þótt jurtabókin er erfitt. Það er of mikið um illt kaffi í bókinni. Y yo hablé español a una clienta hoy! Un poco español, pero un poco es más que nada.

The only thing I gave up that I haven't missed at all is Tumblr. *shrug emoji* (even that's not true, I have a secret backup tumblr to which are added a couple people who post mostly personal stuff and also a bunch of nature and solarpunk and library special collections photos, and no politics or fandom, and it's still fine.)

5. One of the things on my habitica dailies is to post an AO3 comment once a day. Another one is to do something with politics once a week. I got my wires crossed in there somewhere and realized that if I don't feel up to actually engaging with politics I can just send one of my (excellent) congresspeople an email that literally just says, "Hi staffer who reads these, you are fighting the good fight, keep holding the line, thank you", just like when I want to leave an AO3 comment but don't know what to say, and it STILL COUNTS.

Also, people are trying to get public outcry going toward Congress passing the nonpartisan bill Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act of 2017. (S. 200 - Senate, HR 669 - House.) which would make it so the US President could not launch a nuclear first strike without a declaration of war. TBH I can't think of ANY reason why that should ever have been possible, but ESPECIALLY now. So write your congresspeople or spread the word to #PULL THE FOOTBALL

/me crosses off "do politics" for this week

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

When I got a modern-day port of my beloved Commodore 64 Alice in Wonderland game, there was a readme which told me that they had literally added the text I was reading in order to make the file size large enough for the computer I was using to comprehend it. The game by itself was too small to register, but the text file added enough data. After that I started assuming that the file sizes of emulations have nothing to do with the content and everything to do with the platform I am on.

[beatrice_otter]

Congrats on Doing All The Things!

[elaiel]

My entire life is run on the magic of Habitica! I have ADHD and it was a complete game-changer for me. A friend recommended it and invited me into her party. The ADHD guild is one of my go to resources.

I have an AO3 commenting habit. I'm working on sorting out more practical things in my life at them moment, so am not committing to any social things in my dailies So i can keep them manageable.

Also, if you and your sister are looking for a new party, we have party space. We are vaguely nerdy, not too chatty but supportive and are active in doing quests. If you think we might be a fit for you, you're welcome to join us.

[melannen]

Maybe, but the smallest app on my phone is currently 8k, so they could have definitely kept it well under a meg!

I mean, people do expect slightly better graphics than black and white on a 200x300 grid, and things like save files and tutorials I guess, and maybe even a few dozen predesigned puzzle levels instead of all random ones, and admittedly both the versions I played with as a kid were basically in scripting environments; a stand-alone app is going to have to be a bit bigger.

But even with all that, I can't see it tajing more than, say, 1.44 mb, to pick a number out of thin air. the version I downloaded isn't exactly de luxe, and now that I check I had actually way underestimated: it's 50 mbs. I own SD cards it wouldn't fit on!

It's partly that nobody bothers programming for efficiency anymore when they can just kludge something bloatedly together (which is totally going to bite us as Moore's law hits the top of its curve) and partly because, of course, it had to be monetized, so it has to be able to talk to your google account and get secure payment info and lock away posts of the game and track what you've paid for and show ads and AUGH.

I need to learn android apps just so I can throw together a non-monetized frogger + caterpillar + pong + blockout + tetris + asteroids + solitaire + eliza app that's less than 1 mb.

[melannen]

.....or I could just find and install a DOS emulator. I GUESS.

[melannen]

So far it's been a month and I haven't flamed out horribly again yet!

[beccaelizabeth]

I play Habitica: Level 161 Rogue, so I can stealth away from my dailies...
I dont do parties cause I'd be fail a lot.
but it is helpful fun.

[melannen]

I almost never use the habits column on AO3; occasionally I remember that I did something I have listed and tick it, but apparently I need either the deadline of the dailies or the jackpot of a long-overdue todo. (Also there are very few non-daily things that I'm working on that I'm going to do more than once a day - and even those can be set up with checklists - and docking myself points for negatives really doesn't work for me.) Given the name I suppose ignoring that column is missing the point, but do what works, right?

I think we have some offline friends we're trying to pull in if we start a new party, but I'll keep it mind.

[melannen]

Yeah, my main reason I haven't rebirthed yet is that I don't think I would live very long if I lost Stealth.

But at least as long as you have Stealth, it's really easy to make sure you can't hurt your party - for awhile I was casting Stealth a couple times first thing when I woke up, just in case I was too fail to remember to do it later, and if I ran out of mana I went in the tavern until I'd earned enough back. And you can always just not join quests even if the rest of the party does, and then you get fellowship without risks to anyone else.

(And actually when I went snailshell last winter, I though I was in the tavern, but instead I just disappeared for two months with active dailies and an ongoing quest, and it still didn't manage to damage my party too badly.)

The only way I know to actually fail the party in a way that truly damages them (other than actively being an asshole, which applies everywhere) is to be party owner and go AWOL without passing the ownership to somebody active, but you can avoid that pretty easy by just not being party owner.

But I totally get that "other people are watching" works really well for me but is really bad for other people.

[jesse_the_k]

If this Habitica of which you speak helped to enable bathroom cleaning, I should track it down right away.

(Although letting other people down is a huge anxiety trigger for me.)

--

Visited site. I would spend weeks setting up my game parameters perfectly, and then collapse. Magpie mind for the lose. I am thrilled it's helpful for you and millions of others, evidently.

[melannen]

Yeah, I had to set up a thing where it costs me 100 gold coins to mess with my habitica settings. It is a problem. (My sister spent three days doing basically nothing but putting stuff into Habitica when we started up again, but apparently it is working for her now that it's all set up.)

Habitica didn't cause the bathroom cleaning though; that was mostly driving cross-country two days and looking forward to finally spending the night in my sister's nice new empty apartment, only to discover it was still full of the previous tenants' stuff and grime (including dirty socks? and canned food that had expired three years ago?) Like, my house has those too, but you start noticing how gross they are when you were expecting to arrive at a professionally cleaned apartment and it's not your grime!

Also, motivated by the fact that THE BASEBOARDS FELL OFF in the summer humidity (they were glued, apparently) and I may have fairly crappy standards, but "you can see the inside of the bathroom wall while on the pot" is over the line for me.

I don't actually recommend either of those, though.

You already know about ufyh and bitesizedcleaning, right? They help some people.

[espresso_addict]

Good luck, especially with getting back to the piano.

[melannen]

The good news is, it's easier every time I go back.

(I am at the level of "can sight-read Skip To My Lou with both hands", though, which is a much easier level to get back to!)

[cesy]

Our party also has space if needed - very little chat, but occasional support and puns, mostly busy questing.

[espresso_addict]

I don't recommend giving up for 30 years...