MAR 01

2024

Friday: since I'd forgotten to pick up vacuum bags for the shop vac, that's how I started morning. Julie'd also ordered some of our cruise supplies online, so I needed to pick those up first, but when I got to the hardware store, they didn't have the bags in stock. I checked both of the places nearby, but even with the employee's help, we could only confirm that their inventory count was showing higher in the system than on the shelf. By the time I got back home, I had time to have a bowl of cereal for a late lunch (while playing the first day of the progressive Twist format in Hearthstone: make a deck using solely legacy cards, when most of the cards are not implemented correctly; it's a mess) and do a little cleaning before we needed to leave for the movie theater, as we had tickets to see Dune Part 2 at a local AMC. We walked to a bus stop just before 5 PM, but it wasn't as bad of a wait as the last time we tried to take a bus to a show, since a bus did eventually arrive. I enjoyed what turned out to be my first trip to our nearest shopping mall, as the theater's on the top level in a way that I hadn't seen before, and once we got our tickets scanned, we bought way too much popcorn and soda. I enjoyed the movie alright, but for as impressive as the landscapes and sounds were, I found it hard to get worked up about what was happening on screen. After the movie ended, we walked back to the city hall subway and came home, where I did laundry and dishes before logging into FFXIV long enough to finish the FFXV crossover event (bought the car and everything else) and complete the needed FATEs for the weekly mogtome collection task. Now I'm up too late, so I need to crash.

2023

Wednesday: so a few days ago I was reading this manifesto, "How To Make Good Small Games, and partway through, the author links this lecture series by Brandon Sanderson, and Wednesday night I finally started watching it. It's really, really good! I wish I could have had this stuff broken down like this 20 years ago. Like, I'd previously picked up a lot of the individual tools about establishing what the progatonist wants and three act plot structures and the Campbellian Monomyth or what have you, but this is the first time I felt like I could see the bigger picture. So much of my writing instruction focused on what Sanderson calls "discovery writing," which as a process has always felt like pulling teeth to me, and Sanderson contrasts this approach with his own outline-focused style of composition, which I find immediately intuitive and useful. I watched as much of this as I could before bed.