August 2023 in Review

(I wrote this on the 23rd and then forgot to post it, so backdating it. Actual posting date is 10/1/2023.)

Last month is the month Terrycloth died.

It's not that I forgot to do this post. I've thought about it time and again as September has worn on: I should do a month-in-review for August, and August is the month Terrycloth died, and nothing else that happened in that month matters.

I put up an entry about Terrycloth dying at the start of the month in the hopes that I could then write a month-in-review that wasn't just "Terrycloth died and he's still dead now because that's how death works in the real world and I hate it and nothing else matters."

Other things happened in August. Other things still matter. I even did other things in August besides "go to Seattle for 48 hours to watch my long-distance boyfriend die." Possibly I still remember some of them.

Going to Seattle for 48 hours to watch my long-distance boyfriend die was utterly horrible, but less horrible than him dying while I stayed home would've been.

Anyway. Let's look at my usual month-in-review template and see if I can figure out what else happened.

Health/Fitness

I have basically given up on this category. I don't exercise. I don't pay attention to what I eat. I eat when I'm bored, or stressed, or upset, or because Lut wants to stop for frozen custard, or any of several other reasons that are completely independent of "I am hungry and my body would like nourishment."

At some point, I expect I will manage to care and about this again and hopefully I will eat mindfully and maybe even start exercising again.

Writing

I've continued to write Apothecaria, because I enjoy writing it and enjoy posting it. I share it on four different places: a small, private Discord community called "Downtown", my Flickr account, my rowyn@mastodon.art account, and directly with one friend who doesn't follow any of the other options. I use the Flickr account because the Flickr album feature makes (a nice archive for all the Apothecaria entries) . There's an Activity Pub (meaning it's part of the Fediverse and people can use accounts on Mastodon and other services that use ActivityPub protocols to follow accounts on it) service called "PixelFed" that's designed around posting images and also supports albums. I'd sort of meant to move the archive to a Pixelfed instance but never got around to it and now there's almost 200 of them and it's way too much work. Anyway, as far as I know, nobody is following the story via Flickr but possibly a few people have used it to catch up on entries they missed.

Most of the readers, so far as I can tell, are in the private Discord community. It's possible and even probable that there are people on Fediverse who read my Apothecaria entries but don't interact with it in any fashion so I don't know about them. A typical Fediverse entry gets 0-3 likes and 0-1 boosts (usually 0). Every week or two, one entry will get a comment. I generally get more interaction and interest by posting about my day than I do putting up an Apothecaria entry. Even though 99% of the effort in Apothecaria is in writing & illustrating it, I find myself dragging at doing that last .5% of "post it on mastodon.art." I have to remind myself that I do actually know a few people are reading it there and they probably appreciate me continuing to post it there.

By contrast, a few of the Discord folks comment on every new entry, and several more comment sporadically on the story. It gives the feeling of "oh, half the community is reading it" instead of "basically no one is reading it." The difference is interesting to me. I think it might be a combination of "the number of active users I know on the Fediverse is dwindling" (because people who were active have wandered off and I haven't been looking to meet new people) and "the Discord is more of a community: the people there know each other so if one person comments on something, the others are more likely to pay attention to it." Also, the Discord is relatively quiet so if you log in once a day at any time, you won't have to scroll back very far to see my latest entry.

But I feel like the thing that most keeps me doing Apothecaria is that I want to see it through for me. I like having the archive on Flickr for my own use, and I like having the entries be illustrated. Having other people enjoy it too is great, but I'd've stopped doing it daily if that were my main motivation.

The Business of Writing

I did some editing of Alien Peacelords during August, getting it from 58% complete to 68% complete. Maybe I'll finish it this year? Dunno.

Art

Kept on illustrating Apothecaria. I probably illustrated more Apothecaria than I wrote, because drawing it requires less mental power than writing. But I didn't keep track of how many. Around 30.

Gaming

I started playing Pokemon Sleep. You know how Pokemon GO! is "pokemon game designed around getting players to go outside and walk around"? Pokemon Sleep is a pokemon game designed around getting players to get sufficient amounts of regular sleep. It incentivizes (a) going to bed around the same time each night (b) falling asleep soon thereafter and (c) staying in bed for 8.5 hours.

The sleep tracking is kind of weird. The "time you took to fall asleep" generally feels pretty accurate to when I thought I fell asleep. However, the game counts me as continuously asleep from the time I fall asleep until the last time I wake up before turning off the app.

Two illustrations of this:

Turn on sleep mode for Pokemon Sleep at 12:00AM. Fall asleep at 12:05AM. Wake up at 8:05AM. Turn off sleep mode at 8:10AM. Game report will say "you slept for 8 hours, from 12:05AM to 8:05AM."

Turn on sleep mode at 12:00AM. Fall asleep at 12:05AM. Wake up at 5:00AM. Get out of bed to use bathroom. Take out garbage because it's pickup day. Go back to bed at 5:30AM. Wake up at 6AM. Switch phone from showing Pokemon Sleep to Google Books app. Read for 15 minutes. Switch back to Pokemon Sleep. Go back to sleep. Wake up at 7:15AM. Switch from Pokemon Sleep to browser, browse for 10 minutes. Switch back to Pokemon Sleep. Wake up at 8:30AM. Turn off sleep mode. Game report will say "you slept for 8 hours and 25 minutes, from 12:05AM to 8:30AM."

So, on the one hand, it's very generous of the game not to count my "I have to get up to pee" against me, and on the other, the tracking is not providing an accurate picture of how much time I am actually spending sleeping. Or even in bed.

The much more annoying phenomenon is that the game strongly disincentivizes napping. First, it doesn't count sleep sessions at all unless you have the app running for at least 90 minutes. (You can be sleeping for less time than this, if it takes you a while to fall asleep.) Second, it counts naps against the 8.5 hour maximum sleep for the next night. So If you slept for 6 hours on starting on Friday night and waking up on Saturday morning, and then took a 2 hour nap on Saturday afternoon, the game would treat this as "6 hours of sleep on Saturday and 2 hours of sleep on Sunday." Third: since naps are counted against the next night, the time you take a nap counts as your bedtime for that day. So you can't get credit for going to bed on time on any day when you took a nap. Fourth: this applies even if the app crashed during a sleep session. So let's say you fell asleep at 12:30AM on Saturday, woke up at 4:30AM, played with your phone and crashed the app in doing so, then restarted the app and fell asleep at 4:45AM and got up for the day at 8:45AM. Any sane method of measuring this sleep would be "you slept for 8 hours on Saturday." Pokemon Sleep's method of measuring this: you slept for 4 hours on Saturday and 4 hours on Sunday. Yes, it will count "sleeping from 4:45-8:45AM on Saturday morning" as "sleeping on Sunday". As far as I can tell, Pokemon Sleep counts any sleep session that ends at any point after your bedtime for a day -- no matter how soon after your bedtime -- as the last possible sleep session of the day and any sleep you get after that has to count as part of the next day's sleep (and therefore means that you can't go to bed on time the next day). I briefly considered moving my bedtime to like 3PM but then realized the problem is "Pokemon Sleep thinks naps are evil" and there's no way to make it work. It'd just count a nap from 3PM-4:30PM as ending my sleep for that day and my going to sleep at midnight would count as "you went to bed too early for your bedtime at 3PM on the next day".

Anyway, my way of handling all of this nap-hate is that I still take naps but I don't bother to tell Pokemon Sleep when I'm napping because it's not worth it.

Oh, and you can also only have a maximum of two sleep sessions per day. Not generally a big deal for me; only came up the one time the app crashed in the middle of the night.

I like the game in some ways -- it does get me to go to bed on time, and I think that's useful. I don't like it in others. For example, I am much more likely to lie in bed for 30 minutes at 7AM, trying to get back to sleep, instead of getting up at 7AM and taking a nap later in the day to make it up. If it was actually possible for me to sleep for 7.5-8.5 consecutive hours, I would be perfectly happy with doing that. But I never sleep for 7+ hours straight -- I always wake at least once to use the bathroom. On an ideal night, I go back to bed and fall back asleep. But the times where I'm lying awake at 7AM and thinking 'I don't know if I can get back to sleep but my pokemon will be happier if I try': I am not sure that my efforts to Get More Sleep here are constructive for my actual life.

On the other hand, I'm not sure they aren't constructive, either. It's 6PM now and I didn't take a nap today, and I haven't felt like I needed one, either. Despite thinking 'I slept badly last night, and kept waking up and struggling to go back to sleep and did I really get any sleep between 4AM and 8AM?' I think I may be biased towards believing it takes me longer to fall back to sleep than it actually does. Like I'll think 'I woke up at 4 and didn't fall back to sleep until almost 5' when the actuality is more like 'I woke at 4:05 and fell back to sleep at 4:20.' Or that I'm prone to think of 'I remember seeing the clock at 4AM and 4:40AM and 5:05AM so I must have been awake for all of that time' when I actually was dozing in between brief periods of wakefulness.

What I expect would be actually good for me is to either always go to sleep by 11:30 or never get up before 8:30. But because Time Princess resets at midnight and CoffeeQuills' stream ends at midnight in my timezone, it's tempting to stay up until a little after midnight. And then there are various Twitch streams that start around 8AM in my timezone three days a week, and I start work at 9AM two days a week and like to have some time to wake up before I start work, so it's often tempting to get up by 8AM. (Often enough that my body just sticks with 'get up by 8AM' regardless of whatever's happening or not happening).

On the bright side, both Time Princess and CoffeeQuills are unaffected by Daylight Savings. That means that when DST ends, I expect both of those to move an hour earlier. But the Twitch streamers that start in the morning in my time zone are in places that use DST, so they'll stay at the same time relative to me, and of course my job also uses DST. So my plan when Daylight Savings ends is to ignore that it ended as far as my bed time goes (so I'll go to bed around 11PM instead of midnight) but get up 'later' in the morning (around 7:30-8AM).

In any case, while I think Pokemon Sleep is flawed, I feel like it's good for me on balance. For example, while I have caved to the temptation to keep my bedtime at 'a little after midnight', that 'a little after midnight' has become a hard line that I don't deviate from. I'm no longer going 'eh, I don't have to be up for anything tomorrow, it doesn't matter if I stay up until 1AM.' I put Pokemon Sleep into sleep mode by 12:35AM at the latest and I try to sleep. (I am pretty good at falling at sleep at night -- usually takes me 10 minutes or less. It's only 'going back to sleep after waking up' that can be challenging). And I am definitely one of those people who benefits from a consistent bedtime. I might even benefit from staying in bed for 8.5 hours at a stretch, even if that's not as clear.

So sticking with it for now.

Reading

I read Veo Corva's The Beautiful Decay in August, and posted my review of it last month. I've been reading a YA romcom on and off for a while and will probably finish it eventually. It's one of those books that I'm not that into but there's nothing wrong with it so it's easier to pick it back up than to start something new.

Goals Scorecard

Not doing this for August. I will do it again someday.

September Goals

There's only a week left in September. Not bothering with goal-setting here. My review will just be whatever I did.

Bored? Maybe Try One of These

• Play (Kill Team, Terra Nil, Wandering Village, Boyfriend Dungeon, RftG. Apothecaria, 4thewords)
• Read (webcomics, Hoopla, books, webfiction, Dreamwidth, Discord, fediverse)
• Watch (The Dragon Prince, MCU, The Witcher, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, ??)
• Art (Apothecaria, A Game to You, Alien Peacelords, paint miniatures/terrain, A Dragonling's Family, fan art, sketching practice)
• Write (Apothecaria, blog post, email, chat, social media, The Jewel-Strewn Night, the Hidden City, something new)
• Edit (A Game to You, Alien Peacelords, A Dragonling's Family, Fellwater)
• Exercise (walk, pace, stretch, lift weights, do aerobics video)
• Track (bills, activities, food, exercise)