Blog: Books Read in 2021

Death. Love. Snark. Aww. Cute. Rock. Europe.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Games of January 2021

January was a transitional month for me, so I had a different month playing games. My days are a little more structured and I'm much more able to take an evening or a day on the weekend to play. I've also been trying to play more intentionally, and focus on a couple of games.

My top five games (by play time) for January were:

1. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity - The more I play Age of Calamity, the more interesting I find it. I do find that the musou style of game play doesn't really appeal to me, but with practice I do feel like I'm doing epic things now. The story and especially the cutscenes are really well done and have made it worth playing.
   
   


2. Dicey Dungeons - I needed to find something to enjoy during lunch. Now given that I work, take lunch, play PC games and do my hobbies all at the same desk, maybe I *don't* need something to enjoy during lunch, but I'm still looking. Dicey Dungeons has more-or-less been a good fit for that, but I am finding I'm hitting a bit of a wall as I get to its harder difficulties. It's fun and has a lot of good mechanics, but the pacing is a bit harsh.
   
   


3. Hades - Still totally awesome, but I've been playing a bit less just due to focusing on other things. The one thing I find frustrating is that if I don't play for a few days, my next few runs are really rough.
   
   


4. Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Uh, I'm sliding out of this. They have announced several updates and events for February, but I'm finding it harder and harder to stay interested. I'd still love to love this, but they're just not really finishing development. I don't know if it was caught in the pandemic, it was just successful enough that Nintendo decided to put resources else where, or this was their original idea of the game, but as anything beyond a doll house it's hollow.
   
   


5. Mario 35 - I suppose Nintendo's gambit that putting a time limit on how long you can play the game worked because I keep choosing to play this over other games because it's going away in March. It's good game and the battle-royal is interesting. 
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for January:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Rebirth. Rage. Empathy.

I'm on Good Reads

Projects Update: January 2021

I'm finding this particular project update a bit of a struggle. On the one hand I feel that I've been much more productive on my own projects than I've been in the past, but on the other hand I'm feeling a bit lost overall and like there's still a lot of things I'd like to do. 

At the beginning of January I started a new job and I'm finding balancing my energy difficult. I appreciate having my time better structured with a 9-5 position and the position itself has a lot of breadth for creativity, but I do find myself pretty tired at the end of a day. 

All in all I'm finding it a bit of a challenge to hit a balance that works for me. I probably need to relax and take to heart that I've only been working on this for a month. One thing I am trying to do is to reduce the number of things I'm trying to do at any point in time. For the first time in most of a decade I've reduced my daily to-do list down to just the absolutely must do things. Then I allow myself to decide what the best next thing for me to do is. 

As an AI researcher this gives me a real fear at getting stuck in a local-optima, but honestly I find that the landscape shifts and I'm able to get things moved forward here and there. Not as much as I'd *like*, but that's how life works. Beyond that, I'm trying to decouple my feeling of self-worth and happiness from productivity and completing projects, but that's a long journey to undertake.

At the moment, I've got 6 projects I'm providing updates for:

• The Blog, as ever, is ticking along. I actually wrote my first editorial piece in ages earlier in the month. I may write more, but my primary focus is to have fun keeping track of my reading and game playing.
• I left the Chrono Trigger Sprites without a deadline and I'm enjoying that. I've done a bit more and so there will be project updates about those eventually, but I'm not rushing and I'm kinda happy to have a hobby that just a hobby. 
• I haven't been writing  outside of the blog, so my project on The Roofs has been slow. I think if I do decide to carve out a little more time this will be the project I go to first. I'm definitely sitting on those first four thousand words I wrote and finding it a bit hard to accept the permission to write terribly, while pushing forward. If I don't carve that time out, then I'll let this go dormant for a bit.
• I want to put together a Google Drive backend the Game Tracker, but this has been complicated, because the documentation from Google is all built around accessing drive through a Gradle build. In my mind I'd just like a library I can link against, but that's not the way the (fairly limited) documentation works. This throws me off making any progress and even though I have other avenues I could work on, I keep getting stuck. I haven't put in a huge amount of time, but this is definitely a project I'm focusing on. 
• One of the ways I was able to justify taking the non-teaching job is to myself that I want to work on Code Click, building teaching resources and building up my experience for teaching. Code Click is a huge part of that, but for now it's also a project that can wait. I'll come back to this (I've spent quite a while thinking about what I would like Code Click to be like), but for now I'm not going to focus on it too much.
• My time on Infinite Acorn Adventure has mostly been spent trying to remember all of the linear algebra that I took (poorly) two decades ago. That's been fun in itself, especially with Daniel Shiffman's videos.

I'm not going to share any deadlines for things right now. None of these projects need to go anywhere in particular, so I'm going to work on them when I feel like working on them. Later if something needs a push to get *actually finished* then I might bring back the idea.

This was a lot of fun to build and definitely easier than some.