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Guts

Big "we didn't do anything wrong" energy coming from Funko.

Yeah, I had similar thoughts. My main solutions were:

a) To recognise that whatever my main focus is during a period is taking up all my subconscious processing even when relaxing or taking a few days off or whatever, and adding the supercategory across the whole period with child items to highlight the periods of hyperfocus. For example, in the green bar for website design, I did not work on that consistently throughout the period; the slightly brighter green is the bits I was fully engaged, the darker shade is where my subconscious was running stuff while I was resting or relaxing or taking a walk to see trees.

b) Being aware that my brain naturally assumes that I've been lazy and wasteful with my time, and that a lot of the time the problem is that I forget about legitimate reasons why I may not have been able to focus on things, which is the value of the bottom row, Complicating Factors. I spent most of October sorting out new job admin, so obviously my creativity took a dip, so at a glance I can go "oh yeah, there was A Complicating Factor, I can give myself a little grace during that period".

So I ended up picking up Aeon Timeline (which had a fairly generous 14-day free trial), and used it to make a timeline of my creative year so far (for this blog post):





I find this sort of visualisation really useful for making my brain recognise that I am indeed doing things with my time, even if not the things my brain mistakenly thinks I should be doing

I read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Saturation Point over the past couple of days, a fairly grim novella about scientists attempting to reclaim Earth's equator after global warming pushes the local environment persistently over the wet-bulb temperature.

Like most of Tchaikovsky's darker work it feels like it's making a point pretty well, and while the narrative didn't entirely land for me, the setting definitely did.

sphere

October was a busy one on the run up to the start of a new job, so my brain decided that would be the perfect opportunity for an arrangement of one of Outer Wilds' creepier tracks, Elegy for the Rings:

https://on.soundcloud.com/5NXGx4iNvk8eptAw7

I spent the past couple of weeks working on an Outer Wilds piano arrangement, framed as a series of transmissions between two of the characters:

https://on.soundcloud.com/GJEkzkZQT5cRbV2L6

reporting

Chat

Yeah, it's definitely feels like a reaction to the increasing grimdark horror of FromSoft's games over the years. It's still dark and horrific, but there's a vast degree of imagination at play, and it really leans into subverting the expectations of where a path will lead.

Minor locational spoilers:

Spoiler

There's a whole vast segment of the world set underground, and the whole thing is designed to undercut the "drab cave systems" expectation of underground locations. You just keep going down and down and down, every subterranean environment more colourful and imaginative than the last, until at last you emerge at one of the highest points in the world.

Essentially, you input individual events (with a Title, Start Date, End Date, and a user-defined Category, then it presents each unique category in a separate row. All the rows scroll horizontally together, wherever you click on the page.

The only real complexity is that since it's possible to have events that occur over a period of time, more than one event can be occurring in a particular category at the same time, so they have to stack vertically within a row.

In my wanderings since the original post I've also come across Aeon Timeline, which seems to be a legitimate option in terms of worldbuilding notes and so on, so I'm considering giving that a try at some point. (Though again, it's probably overkill for my use case.)

lithium

"I think I know the provenance of all my cloaks."

butt