November 17-21: Voice Typing, Time Princess, and Curse You, Kitty Kitchen

I haven't posted a diary entry since November 16, and I'm wondering if I can reconstruct what I've done each day by working backwards from now.

Right now, I'm listening to CoffeeQuills's Twitch stream and in their battle room in 4thewords. I posted my last Apothecaria entry this morning, so I need to illustrate a fresh Apothecaria for tomorrow morning, but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

Before the stream, Telnar called and we talked for an hour or so while I paced about the house. I took a shower afterwards, then rushed through the 4thewords monster I'd started before the call so that it'd be done before Coffee's stream. Lyric came inside at the end of the phone call, and wanted a snack and a snuggle before going back outside. She got all of these things, eventually.

I've been playing more with voice typing, but using it for anything other than stream-of-consciousness text generation is clunky. If my hands or wrists hurt, it works as "way to write without doing more damage." So far, it does not work as "way to write faster anything I would ever want to read again." I have spewed out thousands of words of stream-of-consciousness text very quickly -- I can speak 1,000 words in 10 minutes if I don't care what I'm saying at all -- but I don't want to look at it again. (It's interesting that I can only speak around 100 words per minute, in fact. I think most people can talk faster than that. But that's my "just spew words" speed and it's still not super-fast.) 

The reason I am a slow writer is not the rate at which I type, but the rate at which I think of something worth the trouble of communicating. I can type 55 words per minute, but I can seldom think of words I want to communicate that quickly. My typing speed is not the bottleneck. My thought speed is.

It turns out I don't think very quickly.

I just finished dictating 2500 words of stream-of-consciousness. I am sparing not only my readers but myself from the result. This entry is being written fresh, with my hands. It's a much more comfortable way of composing.

Before and during my latest foray with voice typing, I spent some time petting Lyric. I have to give voice typing that: I can do it while petting the cat, and Lyric doesn't mind. She doesn't like it when I talk on the phone, but that's because phone conversations are Crazy Human Hour. "The human keeps making mouth noises and she won't stop moving. She's just walking from one end of the house to the other making nonstop mouth noises. What is wrong with her? I hate this, please let me out of this house." (Fortunately, she was already outside during the call with Telnar this afternoon). Making nonstop mouth noises is acceptable as long as I'm not moving.

Yes, at last I understand the other half of the "cat has the zoomies" equation. (Although Lyric almost never has the zoomies. I suspect that's because she goes outside and she gets her nervous energy out that way.)

Before that, I played some Time Princess (mostly the current Time Princess minigame, Kitty Kitchen) and checked Discord and Fediverse. I also went through my journal entries for the month so far and replied to comments because I haven't been good about replying to comments lately. I ate breakfast while snuggling Lyric and playing Race for the Galaxy. Lyric has wanted so much snuggling lately. Eating breakfast around her was a chore but I can never bring myself to displace a kitty unless it's urgent. 

She wanted snuggles before I got out of bed, too. I woke around 7AM and Lyric was like 'oh good, you're awake, cuddle me now.' For about an hour, I played with my phone while petting her. Eventually I had to roll over because my arm was aching and going numb, to Lyric's annoyance. She made an ineffectual attack on my arm in response, then ran off at my shriek of "no!" I tried to fall back to sleep for a few minutes, then gave up and got out of bed.

I'd woken up once during the night, around 4AM. For a minute, I entertained the idea of playing Kitty Kitchen. But I'd gotten the biggest reward out of the event already and playing at 4AM just to maintain my place in the top 100 was not attractive. I went back to sleep.

I went to bed the night before around midnight and fell asleep aroudn 12:40AM, so got around 6 hours of sleep. This is not enough sleep. I will be taking a nap soon.

I'd stayed up until midnight partly to let Lyric in and sit with her for her late-night snack, but mostly because I was playing Kitty Kitchen. Kitty Kitchen ends tonight. I am so glad. I can stop obsessing over it finally.

CoffeeQuills cancelled their stream last night because they had to run errands, so I spent the evening alternating between writing Apothecaria and playing (yes, you guessed it) Kitty Kitchen. And occasional other aspects of Time Princess. A society event, Fantasy Promise, is running and I have to poke my nose into it periodically to do manager tasks, since I'm the leader. 

I wrote an entire long neepish story about Fantasy Promise, but I'm taking it out to stick in its own entry because this entry is long enough sticking to the timeline. Perhaps I'll post the neepery later in its own entry. Tufty enjoys gaming neepery even if its not a game he plays. <3

Around 4:30 on Wednesday afternoon, I was restless enough to exercise, though not restless enough to go for a walk at twilight. I did an aerobics video in my living room while listening to last week's Serious Trouble podcast. Which I hadn't listened to yet. It's a legal podcast mostly focused on the legal troubles of politicians and anything associated with politics is depressing now. I only listened to enough to get me through exercise and stretching, so I have another 30 minutes of podcast still to go.

Before that, I played around with dictation software. I tried using Windows Speech Recognition and decided within a few sentences that I would rather use Google Voice Typing. The Google version has an excellent accuracy rate for English  words and often recognizes unusual (but not conlang) terms or names, like "NaNoWriMo" or "Eliyahu". The Windows version got about half my words wrong. I didn't even notice if it got the "capitalize after a period" thing right because the accuracy was so bad.

I slept pretty well on Tuesday night, despite having gone to bed late yet again, around 1AM. (Curse you, Kitty Kitchen, and your infernal addictiveness.)  I woke at 4AM and played some Kitty Kitchen then, like a fool, but got back to sleep in an hour or 90 minutes. Woke again for a few minutes around 8:15, but again managed to get back to sleep and slept until 10AM. I didn't even need a nap on Wednesday! I also forgot to check at 8:15 to see if Vicorva was streaming. But it turned out they weren't, so I didn't miss it.

I went to bed late on Tuesday because I was full of frustration at myself and all the games that my brain has inexplicably tagged as "important". (Pls stop, brain. It's a game. It is not important. You can relax. Brain: NO CAN'T WAHHH).

I usually drop out of 4thewords around 10:30PM so I can finish up anything I wanted to do in Time Princess before reset. But I'd put a bunch of endurance monsters in a queue and for no good reason I had "autostart next monster" turned on. With endurance monsters, instead of writing [X] words, you need to write continuously for [X] minutes. The game has potions for suspending monsters or defeating them faster, but none of these work on endurance monsters. So I'd written for 11 minutes and at 10:28 finished the monster. And the next one auto-started. Grr. Fine. I need to write anyway. I turned off autostart and wrote for 11 more minutes, defeating the monster.

And then the next monster started.

I cursed a lot, tried to use a potion to suspend the combat and discovered I couldn't, and dug around for the "flee" button that I remembered existed but have never used in 8 years. I don't remember what "flee" does, even, other than ending the combat with the monster with no reward and marking you as having lost it. (There's no meaningful penalty for losing a battle but the game does keep track. And every now and then I lose one, usually because I got distracted during a battle and forgot I was in one by the time I got back to the game.)

I went into Time Princess to take care of miscellaneous pre-reset things and to make sure I had done all my dailies and all my tries for Kitty Kitchen. I hadn't used all the "play an ad to get a try" for Kitty Kitchen, so I went to click the "play ad button" and accidentally clicked "start" instead. So I spent several minutes finishing the game, and then went to see what dailies I had forgotten to do so far.

All of them.

*facepalm*

So I rushed around trying to do everything and didn't get through half of it and was SO ANNOYED ABOUT EVERYTHING. I spent 20 mintues ranting to another society manager, who was kind and sympathetic and did not mock me at all for whinging about a game. (I mocked me for whinging about a game, though. Why am I so invested? It is a mystery.) 

I also did all my dailies for the next day so that this could not happen to me again. Take that, TIme Princess!

I went for a long walk on the trail early on Tuesday afternoon, and got a bubble tea afterwards to celebrate getting out. The bubble tea shop has "buy 9, get the 10th free" punch cards and I'd filled mine up, so I didn't have to buy this one. \o/

Tuesday was the first day I started playing around with dictation software. I worked on notes for The Secret Dragon that day, as well, but most of my words for the day were just me trying to figure out what I could do with Google's voice typing. I have not yet despaired of finding a use for this tool beyond inflating my word count in 4thewords, but I'm not convinced I will find a different use for it.

 

Monday is largely lost to the fog of time. Fantasy Promise started on Monday, so I was futzing with society stuff more on Monday than usual. 

This was also true of Sunday: I put together a survey for my society to find out what quests they'd want during Fantasy Promise, and was also discussing the upcoming event with the management team and what other information we ought to ask on the survey. I wrote enough text, for one reason or another, for the society on Sunday that I pasted it into 4thewords for word count credit. 

I think that's enough catch-up. Cassie would be proud of me.