4th October 2020
Now that I’ve done my research, I was able to include information about the land I’ve lived on during the creation of this site - unceded land belonging to the Darramuragal, Darug, Dharrawal, and Eora. This information is in the about page, and also in the footers of most pages.
I’ve also semi-officially released my Podcast Reviews page. Go check it out!
26th June 2020
For a variety of reasons (mostly spam emails), I’ve removed my email address from the contact part of this site. I’m looking for other methods of being contacted that won’t result in this, but given that I’ve only ever received 1 email from a reader, I’m not sure it really matters.
Additionally, I updated the link to my twitter account to point towards the one I want to use for this site more.
6th April 2019
I’ve overhauled the code that generates my site. The consequences of this are that (almost) everything is exactly the same as before, but it’s easier for me to extend and modify how the site is generated from the source files. So any new page I add will either “just work” or only require a couple of lines of code, unlike before where new pages almost always required some amount of code, and more complex pages required dozens of lines of code.
As a side effect of this, I simplified the way the log works. Previously, each log entry was generated into an individual html page, then those pages were combined together into one mega page. Now, the logs are combined together beforehand, and then generated into one html file. There’s less files lying around everywhere, and the log looks a little more continuous.
Every other page should look identical to before.
Note: I haven’t been posting much in this log because I’ve mostly been working on the audio guide, which has its own log.
26th Feb 2019
I’ve updated the style of the site again - you will probably barely notice the difference, but it should make the whole thing much easier to read.
I’ve also added a landing page for my conlangs, rather than just linking directly to Dapiica and having links for Tlueqto scattered all over.
Additionally: I’ve added the licensing information to the bottom of every page (except the Doctor Who Guide), rather than just to the about page.
3rd Feb 2019
Well, a month into the new year and I’ve already failed at my Resolution. I thought it would be easy. I thought I could do it no problems. But instead, I discovered something about myself: that I can’t even do that. I had trouble focusing on the tasks, and I had trouble finding the motivation to even begin them.
So, I am making a new resolution: make sure to seek out help as soon as possible. It’s clear from this that there’s something horrendously wrong with my brain. Despite mostly having free time, in the first 3 weeks of the year I only got 19.25 hours of work done. That’s basically one shift of work each week.
And yet I struggled to even do that much. So, I’m seeking out help, because it’s very clear I need it.
But secondly, I’m going to make another resolution, which is just for fun: every month, I’m going to semi-randomly choose a game from my library of games, and try and complete it. There’s a lot of games I own that I’ve played for a very short amount of time, then forgotten to go back to. So I’m going to try and fix that.
The “algorithm” I’m using to decide which game to play
This month’s letter is ‘A’, so I’ve selected the game Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, which I bought several years ago and never even installed.
20th Jan 2019
This week’s activities for my resolution.
| Thing | Hours this week | Total this month | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conlangs | 3.75 | 6.25 | 0.5 |
| Language Learning | 0 | 0 | 0.5 |
| Music Practice | 0.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 |
| Fiction Writing | 0 | 0 | 0.5 |
| Misc. work | 4.5 | 12.5 |
1 and a half weeks left, and I’m halfway to my goal…
13th Jan 2019
This week’s activities for my resolution.
| Thing | Hours this week | Total this month | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conlangs | 0 | 2.5 | 0.5 |
| Language Learning | 0 | 0 | 0.5 |
| Music Practice | 0 | 0 | 0.5 |
| Fiction Writing | 0 | 0 | 0.5 |
| Misc. work | 7 | 8 |
I’m getting a little concerned… We’re halfway through the month and I’ve only met 1/4 of my goals. I’ve not been doing nothing (I’ve been working on the audio guide), but not really any of the things I was intending to spend my time on.
Some reflection
I think part of my problem is embarrassment. I’m currently living in a household where there’s someone around all the time, and I don’t want them to hear my mediocre accordion playing or my terrible attempts at pronouncing a language.
6th Jan 2019
This week’s activities for my resolution.
| Thing | Hours this week | Total this month | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conlangs | 2.5 | 2.5 | 0.5 |
| Language Learning | 0 | 0 | 0.5 |
| Music Practice | 0 | 0 | 0.5 |
| Fiction Writing | 0 | 0 | 0.5 |
| Misc. work | 1 | 1 |
I’m also keeping track of work I’ve done that isn’t part of my resolution.
1st Jan 2019
For several years now, I’ve believed that ✨ New Years Resolutions ✨ are often a waste of time. It’s too easy to create resolutions that are too difficult to actually achieve: they require long term habit changes, and have a failure point which is easy to use as an excuse to stop.
“I will exercise more” is a bad resolution because it’s too vague to actually do. “I will go to the gym 3 times a week” is a bad resolution because (unless you already do go to the gym that often) it requires a significant change to your habits, and as soon as you miss one gym session you can easily say to yourself “ah I already missed one… missing another won’t be that bad.”
So this year, I am making New Years Resolutions. But they have to fit these criteria:
My resolution is “I want to spend more time working on things I want to work on.” This goal is something I’ve already been working towards, so that’s the first step done.
The second step is Flexibility: “more time” is too vague on its own, so I’m using Tetris Grand Master’s Cool rules1:
The number of hours I worked this month has to be at least ⅔ of the number of hours I worked last month. So if I worked for 10 hours last month, then I must work for at least 6 hours, 40 minutes this month.
This system is actually going to be calculated per category, so I need to be improving in all of the categories, rather than focusing on one to the detriment of everything else2.
This means that I should gradually improve, but if I have a super productive month, I’m not forced to have equally productive months forever.
The third step is to make it Actionable. Here’s the list of things I want to spend more time on, organised from “easiest” to “hardest”:
In order to kick this off, I need to make sure that in January I do at least 30 minutes of each of the categories. I’ll be using this log to keep track of my progress – at the end of each week, I’ll post an update that lets you know how much I’ve done so far this month.
31st Dec 2018
I finally named the unnamed conlang 3 – it’s called tɬɯ́qʈɤ (or Tlueqto in the romanisation I’m almost certainly going to regret soon).
23rd Dec 2018
I’ve begun work on the Doctor Who audio dramas guide.
26th September 2018
I decided to officially release Mornington Nomic.
13th September 2018
The first article is released!
It’s about making fantasy maps
6th July 2018
I updated the Doctor who backend today - originally it was a simple, string format, which was easy to write, but not easy to edit.
I replaced it with yaml formatting, which only required a few lines of code for the actual backend change, but a bunch of fiddling to convert the old format into the new format.
Additionally, reconstructions are highlighted in a thistle colour, to make them more obvious.
13th June 2018
Updated the about page - it now includes contact information, as well as a dedication to two of my friends who passed away.
Also information about licensing
3rd June 2018
Today I decided to mess around with a new language idea: tava. It has NO prefixes or suffixes, only circumfixes and infixes.
I also wrote the homepage and uploaded the site!
1st June 2018
Still to do:
Done:
31st May 2018
This is the date of the site overhaul - after months of stagnation, I decided to finally getting around to reviving this site.
Unlike a blog, which has individual articles in a row, all of the log is on one big page. Maybe in the future I’ll have it split into multiple pages, but for now it should just load all at once.
If I want to write an article, it should be given it’s own page here, and made a prominent piece of work, rather than something to be blogged and then forgotten.
A log is easy to update with small things - I don’t expect people to be clinging to every single word, I expect people to come here to see if anything significant has changed since their last visit.
The actual rule in TGM is not the same, but it’s what inspired this. The original rule: “In each segment (100 levels), the player must be no more than 2 seconds slower than the previous segment”. The key inspiration was that I should encourage improvment, but give some leeway for circumstances and mistakes.↩︎
I will be switching this back to “per everything” instead of “per category”, if this turns out to be unfeasable.↩︎