Timasomo 2025: Final Updates

I actually have no idea how to post in the showcase thread -- an incomplete first draft of a novel? Hard to really showcase. Especially since I'm not fully happy with anything I've written -- y'know, first draft stuff. Maybe just lightly edit and post an excerpt from each week? Idk.

In terms of progress this week, I wrote, you guessed it, twelve thousand words, like I have every other week. The writing this week was uneventful -- well, actually, that's a lie. The ladies I live with bought a lot of spirits for hosting, so I was writing tipsy for a couple days there -- easier than writing sober, and therefore inadvisable. But also thoroughly unremarkable. I'll certainly hit 50k words by month's end, so, if this was NaNoWriMo, that would be the goal! Will I have made something? Well, maybe about forty percent of a draft of something. Eh. Whatever. I'm not doing this for your sake kfwyre

My Halloween nails: right hand and left hand. There are 7 polishes in use here and it was a fair amount of work! Each nail has 3 to 4 coats of color, a base coat, and a top coat. This was also my first time working with black nail polish. Thankfully, the one I got seems pretty easy to manage.

Every nail has 1-2 coats of OPI Black Onyx. Next, it's either OPI Sound of Vibrance (purple), OPI #virgoals (sheer bronze that turns green over black), or Sally Hansen Sundown Socialite (orange-reddish pink). A few nails have an additional layer - Sally Hansen Disco Ball (glitter in clear coat), OPI Feelin' Capricorn-y (sage with purple shimmer - appears either green or purple depending on light), or OPI Taurus-t Me (green fine glitter on left index finger).

Because of the many layers of polish, and this being day 4 of wear, it's shrinking a bit. But this has been a fun experiment with what I've heard called "blackened jewel tones." If I were to do this again, I would do it without the toppers - the sheens of Sundown Socialite, Sound of Vibrance, and #virgoals were quite nice on their own, I just got a bit enthusiastic with all the stuff I was trying!

Final updates:

1. I did indeed baste the fabric together, and I hate it. So I might just throw on some more pins and make it "sleeved." I'll be trying that tonight with some silver ribbon I bought to make a belt. I'm also using the beautiful fabric I bought for my wedding cape as a hood, and I love that. It looks so good.

2. I've made close to 400 hexies at this point. They've gotten me through a lot of tough times this month when I felt like I couldn't do anything at all, so I made a hex or two.

3. I've abandoned the top for now, not because I don't like it, but because I've been busy and sick this month, so aside from the mockup nothing is done.

Not too shabby for having been otherwise unable to work this month. I still need to get on to designing a new sticker design for my trip next month and ordering it, which, thanks to tariffs, has gotten 30% more expensive, even though I print in the US.

I finished my primary project!

My crochet baby blanket is complete, I am debating blocking it before taking the final photos. Also now working on my bonus project: an amigurumi bunny (Emma the Bunny) from Kerry Lord's Edward's Menagerie. Unknown if I will finish the bunny before the showcase, but I am so pleased to have finished the blanket.

Updates are that the main boy of the sculpture came out of final firing and I’m disappointed with how the glazing came out. I painted it on because I couldn’t get my hands on latex resist (until today!) so dippping was too much of a risk to the face/hands. Same with pouring the glaze. So it’s a little higglty-pigglty with some sections, like the forearm, looking perfect while others, like the back look pocked. It’s an ok first go at full scale though.

Sadly the bottom leg remains unglazed as the backlog for bisqueware firing is moving slowly. And I haven’t come up with a great solution to the surfboard cracking so I’d say 1/3 success, with the main part being the one that came through. Though I haven’t tried to remove the top piece from its firing stand yet so there is still danger ahead!

I did however just get a metric fuckload of plaster to work with and am considering making a surfboard former for this and future sculptures.

Turns out sending email in 2025 is a nightmare - did you know Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo Mail all support different HTML standards and none of them support flexbox!?

I made some pretty emails for account creation confirmation, and password reset, and when I sent them to my Gmail inbox they turned into word salad because I thought I could get away with flexbox. Nope!

Cue me re-learning how to do HTML tables because that's the most reliable way to do layout in emails, but I figured it out. My partner really wanted to use a cute webfont for the headings but that's another nightmare to deal with, so I just screenshotted them at high resolution and loaded the images in the email - feels bad but it works perfectly so I don't care.

We're getting ready for launch of the commercial version of the project but I don't think the FOSS version will be ready for the showcase - I still have to do work to ensure self-hosters can customize stuff for their own needs and remove any branding that I lazily hardcoded in, plus a round of refactoring and clean-up because I can't let y'all see my messy code.

That said for the showcase I'll make a demo link with a gallery so people can play around with it and I'll talk at large about the project since I haven't gone into the weeds as much as I'd have liked.

Not much to report right now as I ran out of time to do anything more on timasomo this year so needed to finish not long after last week's update.

However, a little teaser before the showcase next week.

Still finishing up with a cold that is right in my lungs, so no singing for me yet, but I've done some more recording of just the guitar parts.

So this week was quite a productive week on my audio player. I finished coding the ability to add new wifi networks and sent off the next iteration of my case design off to be 3D printed. So I thought now would be a good time to list my goals for the month, to see how well I did in achieving them:

Redesign the case to fix the issues with the current one

Completed

Code the capability to connect to new WiFi networks, enabling it to fully portable

Completed

Finish knitting the pair of socks I started that are a thank you gift to my friend 3D printing the case

I am getting quite close, and may be able to finish by the end of the month

Fix the bug that is leading to Openbox not launching my program 100% of the time

I have not touched this one yet, as it seems to be less of an issue now.

Authenticate Raspotify, which will hopefully solve the issue of having to start playback from a second device

I have not done this one yet. Also, unfortunately my case kind of broke when taking it apart this past week to redesign the case, so I am unable to work on it as is. However, this should be an easy step once I get around to it, as I already have an oauth file on my audio player from authenticating the front end.

Overall, I am happy with how much I have been able to get done the past few weeks. This last week I will probably not get anything done on the player, due to the case breaking. But hopefully I get the new case back next week, which will be in time for the showcase.

Edit: I forgot to add that another thing I achieved this past week is I added a lot of convenience features to help speed up development. Things like being able to do a git pull from the app rather than having to SSH into the raspberry pi, and similar things like that. I still have a list of low priority bugs and nice to have features to implement, but they should be easier to implement now.

Ah blimey, not been doing much work on the Calculator, but since it's just fit and finish now - and printing the case in nice colours - I think I'll get it done before the showcase.

Ah, shoot. The end of the month has really snuck up on me, and I haven't gotten nearly as much done as I hoped, even with the week-long vacation in the middle. I don't think I'm going to be ready for the showcase, which is a bummer...

Wasn't sure I'd have any time to participate, or whether I'd share anything if I did.

I started a project with ImGui/Vortice as an overlaid frontend for ffmpeg's memory based (copy/concat demuxer) editing, but after a little work I found LosslessCut which was a better version of what I wanted. Also learned a bit of Godot and did some basic work on an exploratory idle game (and did some related math/design reading), but put that aside for the time.

Instead of coding I switched to trying to finish (or... work on) some writing. I'm ~90% done with a response to a Tildes writing prompt I didn't have time for at the time. Not sure how to finish it up, but I've enjoyed how some of it worked out.

Also got a little bit of worldbuilding/epigraphs done for two projects. I'm avoiding really starting either (the first spawned the second which begot the third) both because I'm not comfortable writing, but also--and related-- trying to get anything that is internally consistent and compelling is hard and feels like something best to take slowly.

Thanks for running the event! Same to @CannibalisticApple and all the other hosts and contributors!

No movement this week. I'll keep working on it, but it is not going to be ready in time for the showcase. :(