September 2023 in Review

Health/Fitness

I haven't been tracking, because tracking is not fun enough for me to do right now. But I have generally observed that I have many more days where I eat when I'm not hungry than days where I only eat when I actually want food, as opposed to bored/stressed/upset and it's too much effort to care that I'm full because food is tasty.

Food is tasty, though. I mean, that's a nice thing.

Anyway, I should get this under control because it's not a good habit to be in. Historically, October is a bad time of the year to succeed at "not eating food just because it's there and delicious even though I've eaten plenty today and am not hungry." But perhaps I can get back in the habit of tracking, even if I don't change my behavior in any other way.

I haven't been exercising to speak of, either. Although once or twice, I randomly decided to do a 10-minute aerobics workout. Which is kind of surprising to me? Because it's not like going for a walk with a friend or any activity I'd do purely for enjoyment. Aerobics videos are not fun at all and I only do them for exercise. And that sort of exercise always seems like something I'd only do if it was a habit: "Oh, I need to exercise today. I'll do a video, it's the shortest possible effort that I'm still willing to count as trying." Just going "huh, I could exercise now. Well, why not?" every few weeks seems even less likely, somehow. As if once I broke the habit, why do it at all? Unless it's part of a concerted campaign to re-instill the habit. So it's a little heartening in a weird way that I'll still do exercise at all, despite it being very rare.

Writing

Still writing my Apothecaria journal. It's been over six months now of me posting an entry every day. Now that is definitely a habit. I didn't get a word count at the end of August (because August was awful and it was impossible to care). But the present total is at 91,500. This feels like the slowest-burn romance I have ever written, although I don't know if it'll top A Rational Arrangement's word count (something like 216k? I forget). The end-of-month total for July was 57,300, so that's up 33,400 words for August and September combined. Probably more in September than August; I had several days in September where I was especially motivated to write out the current scenes.

It's weird not writing any original fiction. I keep thinking about getting back to Jewel but editing Alien Peacelords has killed much of my desire to write SF. I suppose I could start a new orig fic story, but. Meh. Apothecaria satisfies much of my desire to create as it is.

The Business of Writing

Did a tiny bit more editing, up to 74% done from 68% done. Have not done any editing on it for the past two weeks or more, so the current trendline is not good.

Art

Still illustrating Apothecaria. Not doing much else with 2D art.

But on a related note: early in September, we got a new set of terrain for Kill Team. This was one part "I want more terrain for Kill Team because we only have a few pieces of new terrain and our old terrain was all for 40K which has a much larger board" and one part "I want this specific set because it's All Walls and goes with the missions in this book you already bought." (The missions are all "combat on a derelict spaceship" and so the terrain consists of many, many walls.)

You don't need to buy the terrain that matches the game -- you can just fake it using cardboard or drawing lines on a mat or whatever. But having the right pieces adds to the fun for me.

But since it was specifically me who wanted this particular terrain set, I decided I would paint it. The box is full of walls and parts used to connect them. Short walls with airlock doors and short walls with no doors and long walls with airlock doors and long walls with no doors and pillars to connect the walls to each other and pillars to mark walls that don't connect to other walls and ETC (it is more complicated than this). The set works a little like Legos, but much less well-machined and more finicky to assemble. (Many things have to be connected JUST SO; you can't use the wrong wall type or put something in backwards or the map won't work. You also have to file down some of the tabs to make them fit, and be sure not to get paint where paint doesn't belong because the little bit of extra thickness will also prevent them from connecting.)

There is a lot of terrain in this box, is the thing. And all of it is full of tiny details. Skulls everywhere because it's 40k. Pipes and wires and vents and monitors and dials and gauges and nooks and shelves and DETAILS.

Me: "There's so many details on these! I want to paint them all. Distinctively!"

So I started painting. After some starts and stops, I made the insides of the walls & shelves light blue, and painted the "trim" (all of the raised wall surfaces) a dark blue. Various details were picked out with a coppery gold (mostly for the pipes), silver (vents and some of the shelves and doodads on the skulls and the doors and some other stuff), white (mostly for monitors, light fixtures, and parts of gauges), ivory (skulls), black (wires), and red-brown (hoses and a few other accents). Most of the colors are neutral or mesh well with each other.

The first wall I finished did, indeed, look extremely cool.

It also took me a week and something like eight hours of painting time.

Reader, there are a LOT of walls in this box.

At this rate, I will be finished with the set in, idk, 2 years? And around 900 hours of painting time.

o_o

I am trying to get less perfectionist about it. I have also made the Executive Decision as of today to spray-paint the base coat for the remaining pieces. Lut hand-paints the base coats when he paints minis, and the only spray paints he has are red. So I gave hand-painting a try for a while. But hand-coating all of the nooks in these pieces is just too tedious. I'm gonna try taking one of the assembled maps (already assembled so that most of the spots where I don't want paint are already covered by the pieces that they interlock with), masking off the remaining spots where I don't want paint, and hosing it down on a day when the weather and humidity are sufficiently cool and dry. Still gotta order some spray paint, though.

Another thing that I've found annoying is this phenomenon:

Step one: select a color, squeeze out three drops of paint, thin paint with water.

Step two: spend the next hour applying this tiny amount of paint to the tiny details on terrain.

The part where I feel obliged to keep painting with however much paint I put on the palette is kind of aggravating. It makes me not want to sit down to paint for "just a few minutes" because I can't get just 15 minutes' worth of paint out of the bottle and diluted to the level of usability. During Craft & Chat, wyld_dandelyon suggested I put some paint in an empty pill bottle and dilute it in the bottle, so that I can just cap the bottle when I'm done. I love this idea.

Lut doesn't want me doing it with his expensive miniature paints, but he has a whole drawer full of cheap craft paints that he doesn't care about, and I'm already using those for both the dark and light blues. So I've got those paints in pill bottles (we go through a lot of pill bottles in this house and Lut was already collecting them for other purposes and had more than he needed, so no issues there) and prediluted, and now I can just sit down and paint for a few minutes if I want to.

Anyway, I painted for like 6 hours yesterday. With only those two colors, so I have zero finished pieces to show for it. But I've got many more pieces started now! Started painting some of the pillars and other small pieces, like the doors, so that more of my "finished terrain" will have the bits needed to connect them to other finished pieces. (The doors are separate pieces with a tiny hinge that secures it to the wall, so that you can open or close the door. Because the game has rules around opening and closing doors. It's so cute.)

I kind of don't want to spend 900 hours of my life painting terrain and I kind of really do? Like, part of me is going "there are so many things that I could finish in 900 hours that I would take more pride in finishing. That's probably more time than I spend writing and editing two or three books, on average." And another part is "but the finished terrain looks really cool and it'll be nice to go "yes, I painted this myself." As well as actually having nicely-painted terrain. Even when we go to the gaming store and use the tables and terrain provided by the shop, the paint job on it is pretty minimal. It'll be nice to play the game and have all the components, from miniatures to terrain to board, look good. Like you could leave the game set up and it'd look as much like an art piece as a game. :D

I did some more painting today, once again with only the two colors that I've got prediluted. Really love having the paint prediluted and resealable. I should do that with some more of the cheap paints. I expect the cheap white will look virtually the same as the expensive white I started with, and I bet I can mix a similar-enough ivory. The silver and gold I'm less sure about -- I don't like the cheap silver and gold as they are, and I'm not sure if mixing together paints will help, since it might improve the color but make the metallic effect too weak. Might try it anyway. The cheap paints are really cheap, so neither Lut nor I will feel bad if we waste some.

I almost stopped in the middle of writing this (again) to go paint more terrain. Then I remembered I was in the middle of a 4thewords battle so I'm continuing to write.

Anyway, "painting terrain" was a noteworthy thing I did in September.

Gaming

Lut is slowly increasing my level of enthusiasm for Kill Team. For the first several months after he picked up the wargaming hobby again, he'd talk about getting things "for us" and I would remind him that I was participating because he wanted to do this, not because I was keen on the game individually. But not only was I the instigator behind the terrain purchase: I also started talking about wanting more miniatures, and we picked up a second Dire Avenger team so that I could field an all-Dire-Avenger force. I want to try the Void Dancer force, but I have resisted purchasing them because Lut has a bunch of Harlequins in his existing collection, and they're basically the same thing. We just have to dig them out.

The game annoys me in some respects, because it's not at all well-balanced. What's even more insulting than being unbalanced, though, is that it has some forces that are just the same or worse in every respect to another a force, which feels just rude. Like Tactical Marines have the same number of units as Intercessors and no stats that are better, while Intercessors have much better specials, better weapons, and a better wound stat. Literally the only thing Tactical Marines get that isn't strictly worse than any Intercessor unit is the option to have a heavy weapons person. And that unit is not better -- it's generally worse in most situations -- it's just that it's not "identical except for cases where it's inferior."

And that bugs me so much because at that point you're not even pretending to care about balance. It's very different from "Team A has few units and each one is very good, while Team B has lots of units and they're all pretty crappy, and it turns out that outnumbering the enemy is too much of an advantage most of the time so Team B wins in 75% of match-ups." That problem is 'balance is hard'. Whereas "Team A has the same number of units and the same stats as Team B except that Team B gets bonuses in all of these categories and Team A, uh, doesn't." On paper you have made a team that is strictly better. It's not a good look. It is made worse when the strictly-better team uses newer models and the strictly-worse one uses older ones. Great. You're screwing with the game to sell more models. This gives me great confidence in the game's future. x_x

Reading

I still have neither finished nor decided to DNF my current read. At this point I should officially DNF it and pick something else, shouldn't I.

Goal Scorecard

I didn't set goals for September! I already recapped everything I did but let's touch on the highlights.

• I have been writing, illustrating, and posting Apothecaria consistently for 6 months now, which is pretty cool for a solo game. (I do not write or illustrate every day, but I do post daily. It averages out.)
  
• Edits on Alien Peacelords went from 68% complete to 74% complete
  
• Started painting Way Too Much terrain woo
  
• Still providing care for Lut yay!
  

Goals for October

• Pay your bills. Yes you have to pay them all every month.
• Provide care for Lut
  
• Check in on parents at least once a week
  
• Look at "Bored?" list occasionally. Especially when bored.
  

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, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, ??)
  
• Listen (podcasts, music, twitch streams. Podcasts and Twitch streams generally pair well with art. Music goes pretty well with writing and editing.)
  
• 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, clean, yardwork)
  
• Track (bills, activities, food, exercise)