Jack's 2017

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 15:52:06 GMT

I got a new, more senior, job which has been going reasonably well. I still sometimes find it hard to get work done at work, but I think I've doing much better at new job than before and still getting better.

Rachel moved back to Cambridge! There has been much more cuddles, and time to talk, and cooking together, and regular time on Friday nights, and it's just been so much better.

We went to worldcon. Rachel and I went to Norwich and Great Yarmouth. I had a day out with ghoti at Felixstowe. I spent a day walking in Thetford forest. And probably other days I've forgotten.

I started going to the gym again, instead of jogging outside, since I was working near one and driving anyway. I'd lost almost all the progress I made -- I think I'd been jogging outside, but not being strict enough at measuring my speed and so it had slowly but steadily atrophied. That was really dispiriting. But I have slowly been working my way up again since I've been gym'ing.

After I did NaNoWriMo last year, I resolved to set myself a goal *each* month. Often not an aggressive one, but with the aim that I would set a *reasonable* goal and concentrate on that and not freeze up feeling like I had to do absolutely all the things. That was mixed, but generally a great success. I did more projects, programming and similar than I have for ages. And I was more relaxed too. This year, my aim is "the same, but more so".

What projects did I make progress on?

I wrote a simple android game, Emojilution Match. Needs GPS but not internet, more info here: https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1038552.html

I revised my python top-down tile-based adventure-game engine (still nice but not really usable atm)

I did a nanowrimo story (a cut-down one, not 50k). As soon as it's a little tidied up I will enthusiastically share it with people who were interested!

And a Vorkosigan yuletide story that got positive comments: http://archiveofourown.org/works/13046442/chapters/29842002

I did some roleplaying (I think that was this year?)

I revamped my board game Toy Factory. It plays an awful lot more interestingly. I think it's getting close to being finished

I worked on other board games, including demon summoning game :)

I have been keeping a text diary/todofile for about three years now and it's definitely been useful. I'm still constantly updating how I use it. I also think, it's hard to be sure, but I think I've got a lot better at being organised, at doing things, and also at relaxing and allowing myself space to breathe.

See the recent bad-brains post. And also, the last couple of months, I deliberately tried to build more "not specifically scheduled" time into my month aims, and see if I filled it up with an appropriate mix of enjoyable stuff and productive stuff, and it went pretty well: I did interesting things, if not what I might have expected to start with, then things that afterwards I'm pleased I did. Like, I do have an intuition for what to spend time on, but that used to be drowned out by other things, and now it's slowly coming to life again.

I'm not doing specific new year resolutions, but I have in mind projects I would like to do at some point this month. January's is to fix several of the problems with Emojilution Match to make it playable, and to remove last problems with nanowrimo to make it readable even if not finished.

Fingers crossed for 2018.

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