April 2024 in Review

Health/Fitness

Up until Lut went to the ER on Sunday morning, I was doing pretty well for both exercise and eating during April. Even with that, I exercised 24 times in April and tracked food for most of the month, only stopping during Telnar's visit for the eclipse. Also, I ate some vegetables! I seldom eat vegetables so having a large quantity of vegetables with several meals in a month is a noteworthy accomplishment. I know that sounds pretty sad for a full-grown woman but here we are.

Writing

I wrote enough Apothecaria to keep posting throughout the month. Looks like that was 26 entries.

I started work on a new outline, with a working title of Koysko and the Witch. I'm probably not keeping that title because (a) doesn't have much going for it and (b) story's supposed to have four main characters, not two. Maybe The Duke's Sister. People like dukes. There's a chunk of outline now but I don't have a way to measure how far along an outline is so idk if it's half-done or more like one-quarter or three-quarters. Somewhere in there.

The Business of Writing

Didn't do anything on this front.

Art

I illustrated the aforementioned 26 Apothecaria entries. Didn't do any other art stuff. I'm not sure I even did any miniature painting.

Gaming

Lut and I played some Kill Team at home, including notably last Saturday, the last day that he's been well enough to do anything. 

We also played some physical board games that I'd previously only played online -- Telnar bought copies of Dice Forge and Space Base. Not new games to me, but I had to re-learn the rules to play them. When you play games online, they enforce the rules for you. There's so many more mistakes you can make with the rules when you're playing with a physical board. Like Space Base has "income" and I forgot that income behaves unintuitively in the game: instead of "you get your income added to your credits at the beginning of every turn" it's something weirder, like "after you spend for a turn, your credits drop to the level of your income." We played at least two games with income wrong before I noticed the distinction while glancing through the rules for something else.

Social

After Telnar visited for a few days, my sister came in to my city for a work conference, so I saw her for two evenings and most of a Saturday. My sister likes walking, so we got to do a bunch of walking while she was here, around my neighborhood and at the trail I used to bike on now and again, back before my bike was stolen.  Anyway, it was great to see both of them, and nice to see have some long-distance family & friends come to me.

Reading

I read the archive for The Greatest Estate Developer. This is an adaptation of a Korean web novel. I am not clear on whether it's a Korean comic translated into English or whether the adaptation was originally done in English. I read it because Tuftears and some other folks on Discord loved it, and it's a litRPG where the main character was a civil engineer before being isekai'd into a fantasy setting. So he addresses most of his problems with civil engineering. I am a sucker for fantasy comics that are not All About Fighting, though there's lots of straight-up fighting in this one too. 

After I finished it, I hunted around for an English translation of another webcomic with the same original author and in the same setting, How I Became the Dragon King's Cook. I couldn't find the full archive and instead read the first 60 episodes or so. 

Around the same time, someone recommended The Villain Duke's Precious One, another translated Korean isekai comic. This is a tapas.io comic and unlike the others, I couldn't easily read the online archive at my own pace. After the first handful of episodes, the rest were "WUF" which stands for "Wait Until Free", which means you have to wait a day to unlock the next episode (and only have 72 hours to read it). The tapas.io model is REALLY CONFUSING. If you want to pay money instead of waiting to unlock episodes, you have to buy "Ink". You can buy "Ink" on the webpage by logging in, clicking on your icon, and selecting "Inkshop". The webpage said "some comics give you a discount for unlocking in bulk", but I couldn't find anything that suggested the particular webcomic I was reading had any discounts. 

After ten or fifteen days of reading zero-one episode per day (depending on whether I remembered to check or not), I downloaded the Tapas app to see what other options there were for unlocking episodes. I could play games, which is kind of an amusing way to unlock episodes and I assume is the equivalent of advertising for the games. I could play up to three ads for one episode each. Or I could use Ink to unlock varying numbers of episodes...with a discount for unlocking in bulk. 

Huh.

I tried to find where to buy Ink in the app, and got no hints that Ink was a purchasable thing there. Oh, right, they didn't want me to buy in the app because then they'd have to give a cut to Google/Apple. It's SUPER WEIRD the way the Tapas website made it way more obvious that you can get ink by downloading the app and jumping through hoops on it  than that you can get ink by giving them ACTUAL MONEY. Like you'd think they'd rather just have money? But no? Even the location of the inkshop on the webpage is unintuitive. If I was doing the UI, I'd put a link to the Inkshop front and center when someone with no ink tried to unlock an episode, but nope. I think there was a big ad for the mobile app instead.

Anyway, by that point, if I paid $50, that would give me twice as much ink as I needed to unlock the rest of the series. And I'd have a bunch of extra ink for the next time I wanted to read an expensive archive on Tapas. 

I figured the archive was worth $25 and I'd probably find something to spend the other $25 on at some point, so I went ahead with that. And now I'm reading through the archive at my own pace, yay.

 

Oddly, my biggest reservation about spending money at Tapas isn't "is this a good value?" but "where does the money go?" The credits list all the original creators plus the Tapas localization team, and I have to wonder how much trickles back to the original creators and translators vs retained by Tapas itself. :|

 

So, been on a big  "Korean isekai webcomics" binge lately. It's nice that my brain still lets me read comics after giving me such a hard time with books.

Goals Scorecard

• Help Lut: Done!
• Keep in touch with parents: Eh. I called my parents three times in April, which still isn't great but at least it's trending in the right direction.
• Track exercise & consumption: Done! Not every day, but I'm happy with it.
• Complete federal and state income taxes: Aw yeah did the thing
• Pay estimated quarterly taxes for 2024 (or set up something that accomplishes the same purpose): Done! I didn't find a good way to automate this but there was an online manual way that shouldn't be too bad. Just have to remember to do it every quarter. 
• Pay March bills: Done!
• Pay April bills: Done! Yay, I actually remembered to do this in April this time.
• New ID for Trask: This wasn't on the goal list but should've been. We also didn't get it done. Oops. His id is expired now. I am not prioritizing this now because health crisis. 
• Get two weeks' of creative thing done: I don't know if I really got 50% of an outline done but eh, I'm gonna count it as that. 
• Check goal list occasionally, including glancing at stretch goals and annual goals: Done!

Stretch Goals Scorecard

• Write/illustrate 25+ Apothecaria entries: Done!
• Post an Apothecaria page every day: Done!
• Keep up the blogging habit: I posted four entries in April, beyond the month-in-review; sure, that counts as keeping the habit.

May Goals

For health crisis reasons, I expect that "help Lut" will take basically all of May. I will try to do things anyway because that's what I'm like now. But I don't expect much. So the basics:

• Help Lut
• Keep in touch with parents
• Pay May bills
• Look at goals & "Bored?" list sometimes

May Stretch Goals

• Look through first reader feedback on A Dragonling's Family
• Make final editing list for A Dragonling's Family
• Work on cover for A Dragonling's Family
• Whatever other victories you want to claim