17
votes
Timasomo 2025: Week 2 Updates
Update us on your progress so far!
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What did/didn't you get done this week?
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Anything go according to plan?
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Anything go off the rails?
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Any successes or struggles to share?
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Do you need feedback or help on anything?
This is your topic to share anything and everything you want about what you’ve made so far.
Pinging all Timasomo participants/conversationalists: here’s the new topic for the week.
(I’m a day late on this one. Sorry y’all!)
Notification List
@ali
@Amarok
@aphoenix
@Areldyb
@arqalite
@Banazir
@bendvis
@boxer_dogs_dance
@Bullmaestro
@CannibalisticApple
@chocobean
@chosenamewhendrunk
@crialpaca
@davek804
@delphi
@dhcrazy333
@em-dash
@Evie
@Falcon79
@faye_luna
@feanne
@Fearghal
@first-must-burn
@fnulare
@Habituallytired
@IsildursBane
@Kraetzin
@longwave
@lou
@mat
@patience_limited
@Pavouk106
@RheingoldRiver
@scrambo
@sorkceror
@Tardigrade
@TheRtRevKaiser
@TheWhetherMan
@Tmbreen
@TonesTones
@Tygrak
@tyrny
@unkz
@Weldawadyathink
@WrathOfTheHydra
@wysiwyg
@zixx
If anyone would like to be added to/removed from the list, let me know either here or by PM.
Another rather breezy week of writing here for me.
Tipping my hand a bit: the story I'm writing is about a city made of dreams at the bottom of the sea, accessed by watching a show at a theatre that floats unsupported in the Atlantic. Our protagonist is the girlfriend of the Foreign Secretary, sent into the city to track down the secretary's wife, ostensibly so the two can get divorced. But of course things don't go to plan and she's drawn into madness and intrigue blah blah blah
Anyway I think this is a very winning concept and it's been consistently fun to write. I was struggling a bit at the start of the week, just feeling a bit bored and directionless with the plot, but then I had a three hour nap and a dream that, waking, I interpreted as a metaphor for how to proceed with the story. I stumbled half asleep to my keyboard and immediately wrote four thousand words almost without blinking, and at the end of the day when I went to get my hot cocoa I had forgotten the dream entirely and I felt like a character from my story rather than its author. This is the strangest thing that's ever happened to me with any piece of fiction and I can't help but be extremely delighted.
So as you can see my pace this week has been more irregular than last week but I still wrote another twelve thousand words, which means I'm remaining on pace to write fifty thousand words by the end of the month, which seems like it will probably be 30-40% of the work overall. I wish I could go faster, but I guess I'm only a girl.
It's hard to overstate how much good this project has been doing for my mental health. Weird fugueish writing spurts aside of course. I'm taken back to a time when I was still a teen in college and desperately writing plays at four in the morning hoping it would be enough to save me from depression and dysphoria. Of course writing is just writing, it can't do everything, but I guess I had sort of forgotten what the process can do for me
I do want to expand a bit on some of the creative difficulties I'm having.
Part of the challenge of writing a surrealist novel is that the whole thing has to be underpinned, in my mind, by a sort of alien, free-associative logic. Things happen not necessarily because they make dramatic sense, or stem from the actions of the characters, or resonate thematically; they happen primarily because in some elemental way they must happen, and everything else is secondary (though still very important of course). Actually being in a psychological state where you can write this way well is hard, and I think staying in this headspace has left me a bit unpleasantly foggy in other areas. I described it in an unrelated comment as "poetry brained."
Like, so, my protagonist enters the city with her friend Mr. Baker, the Unreliable Diplomat. Later, Mr. Baker disappears and she associates herself with Oleander, a baker of delicious cookies. A walk she later takes with Oleander (the baker) therefore closely parallels a walk she took with Mr. Baker when the story began, and on this basis the protagonist starts to regain some of her key memories. I wrote this by accident, or maybe subconsciously, and I now understand it as a critically important plot beat (albeit one that so far only exists in subtext). Building a whole novel around such a weird tenuous chapter-spanning rhyme scheme is unbelievably challenging, which is probably why Juan Rulfo's 1955 masterpiece Pedro Paramo is like 200 pages long and it's madness and unreason to aim for like double or triple that length. But whatever. I'm making this for me, not for Juan Rulfo.
I played guitar and sang every day and started fiddling with the recording process. I don't know if I'll have something concrete by the end of the month, but at the very least I'm making some sounds!
I printed half a million version of PCI brackets for open PC case/stand and discussed it woth a friend only to change the design of attachement completely and started over. Old version was made to be bolted on and the new one is slide on. You can see it on these images where I prototyped the sliding thing so it fits and can be moved while staying kinda tight. I will ommit screw completely as there is no need to secure the brqcket in place as the PCI(e) card will be screwed into the bracket and will hold it against sliding.
I've been on vacation! No progress whatsoever.
I was on vacation, and now I'm actively interviewing for new jobs, so nothing from me this week either!
Jumping on the 'no progress' since I just got back :D any prep I could do I did last week, so just starting actual progress on my shenanigans now!
So progress on my audio player this week has been mixed.
Overall, I feel like I made some good progress, just not in areas I was hoping for, as I was wanting to get the wifi settings completed and also I want to get a new case pretty soon, but have not got around to that yet
Short calculator update! I’ve finished most of the software, although I’m not quite ready to share it just yet, maybe next week. But I’ve done some test fitting with the components I got online, and my custom key caps are also here!
https://ibb.co/rKWhPr1j
https://ibb.co/WvWCZBR0
Ooooh, they are nice. It's going to look amazing!
I got a decent amount of stuff done. Lots of it wasn't the stuff I was planning to do, but still. Stuff done.
I set up a jig and cut up a load of shelf supports (all but 4 are the same size so easily jig-able). I started assembly before remembering that while MDF generally takes paint very well, it needs attention if you're painting the edges. Which I am. A lot. And they're going to be very visible. So I sanded and sealed all the edges. Two coats of dilute PVA with sanding before, in between and after means I now have lovely smooth edges which won't soak up paint and puff up like a sponge. Threw on a quick coat of primer so I wouldn't forget which sides I'd done. Then I did all the shelves and end pieces as well.
Then I thought "I'll just pop the skirting board off so I can fit them nice and snug" and start installing the actual shelves in place but this happened so I'm waiting for a lot (a LOT) of filler to dry before I can access that area. I did assemble the bottom two shelves though. Although I'm still figuring out the exact order of operations for how they go together, but it might just be wing it until it's done..
Then I found out that the supposedly 2440mm long (aka almost 8ft, I hate that's how sheet sizes are) boards I bought were not all 2440mm long. Given that accurate length is important for not having wonky shelves, I had to cut and glue some 2mm shims onto four shelves (out of nine total). Which was annoying and the shims are a fraction over size so each one needs a little hand sanding before use.
Yesterday I did assemble two more shelves and I'm hoping to get those into place today. I think "make shelf plus supports, then stack up and join together" is probably the best way to do this. I'm using dowels and glue and a clamping screw to hold it together, which feels like overkill but overkill is the best kind of kill so that's probably OK. I still don't quite know how the top two shelves work because there is a fit issue with the curved ceiling in that room but I'll figure that out later. Once it's all assembled I have a bunch of screw holes to fill, fixing it to the wall then painting. A lot of very fiddly painting.
Oh, and Kid is off school for the last week of October so I really only have this week and next to get it all done.
I know I've said this before, but it's worth repeating: I love how much you document your process for us! It's so cool to be able to follow along.
Also I'm infuriated on your behalf about the need for those 2mm shims.
Workshop progress:
I'm starting to burn out on it, honestly. It feels like all I've done for the past several months is work and home improvement projects. But this is a prerequisite for most of my other hobbies, so here we are.
Update: they were delivered... to my old house in Ohio, 2400 miles away.
If any of you happen to have bought a house in Ohio earlier this year, and come home today to an unexpected stack of boxes dropped in the middle of your patio, please accept my apologies.
Uhhh I kinda didn’t do much week 1. I did Ludum Dare but I made something that didnt fit the theme well and it feels kinda like a failure.
But I did return to a project I worked on in the past. Though I sadly feel like I won’t be able to share it here. Still happy to be doing something creative, whatever it is!
No progress this week, as I didn't have a chance to get forge time. However, I did pick up a whole 3/4" x 30' sucker rod (cut into 5' lengths) and some 1/2" square stock which may be useful for making those log pickup tongs I have been considering.
I spent some time last night working on my EPP and watching sewtube. I've now got like 250 hexagons folded.
I need to send some more patterns to the printer.
Hot pepper harvest is coming in. They're sitting on my kitchen counter getting in the way and mocking me until I do things with them. I've got a pack of 24 sauce bottles on order, exactly enough for the projected 4 recipes.
I'm on vacation next week, the guests leave Wednesday, so I'll start my campaign of culinary chemical warfare thereafter.