What creative projects have you been working on?

Dieting.

TLDR: Trying to go from 80 kg (approx. 176 lbs) down to 70 kg (approx. 154 lbs).

Once I reached the height of 180 cm (close to 5 ft 10 in) in my late teens, my weight got stuck at 70 kg, which is normal and healthy.

Unlike my father, who struggles to gain weight and can’t be a vegetarian for that reason, my mother will gain weight just from thinking about eating a doughnut. She keeps her weight under control, but not without making sacrifices.

Guess whose genes I inherited? It turns out, it’s probably those of my mother. Once I turned 30, my metabolism slowed to a crawl, and I suddenly started gaining weight without really changing anything about my diet or my level of physical activity.

My weight got stuck at 80 kg, and that’s not the worst that it could be, but it annoyed me, because I was slightly overweight, and also looked the part, because my body decided that it needed to store all that additional fat around my abdomen.

It’s been five years of this madness, and I tried all kinds of changes to my diet and exercise regimen, without success, until my latest changes.

It turns out that intermittent fasting (I eat only two meals a day since 2015), intense physical activity (my job demands it), and calorie deficit (the new things I did: I’ve started eating mostly fruits and nuts for lunch on working days, instead of the hearty meals I used to have) are really the only guaranteed methods of losing weight.

Or, well... it’s working for me at least.

My weight is down to 76 kg (approx. 167 lbs). It’s been two months. I almost cried for joy when I saw that number. I also visually look a leaner.

Edit:

Wait... I totally missed the “creative” part of the title. Sorry about that. lol

Got nothing creative going on. Shame on me. I have a million ideas but no motivation to follow through on them. All my energy is spent on dieting.

I finished this acrylic painting last week. I've been painting very casually for about a year now, just finding my style and whatever feels good to me. If anyone has constructive feedback for how I might improve I'm very receptive.

I'd like to get better at blending colors and adding gradients within segments, but there's always a bit of worry about messing up the painting. I've only started playing around with line work very recently, so I know that's another area where I have a lot of room to grow.

I'm organizing a painting project for the back to school picnic at my daughter's school. The plan is to set up a grid of 4x6 watercolor paper cards and put a large image across them, so that each card just has a little bit of a letter or a few lines. At the picnic, people will take the cards off the Grid, paint them with watercolors, and put them back on. Then we'll put the whole thing on a bulletin board at the school. It's pretty simple, but I'm excited to see how it comes together, especially since the school is birth to 8th grade. We should have a whole range of interesting art.

This feels like as good a place as any to talk about my latest "project": juggling.club

I've been struggling with mental health issues recently and while this is essentially nothing, it has been fun to focus on something.

I first noticed the domain was available about 5 years ago but didn't manage to get it then, it had been used my some american soccer company. I thought it would be a cool domain to own, although didn't have a plan or need for it. I told a friend about it and they asked "why? What are you planning on doing with it?" I said "I don't know, just put a picture of a juggling club on it"

I would periodically check up on the domain and finally a few months ago I noticed it hadn't been renewed. I set up a small script to monitor and alert me when it became available, which happened last week!

I then got to play around with very gentle, minimal styling and I'm happy with it, particularly how silly and pointless it is.

I'm already having ideas, I could have a collection of pictures that randomly load each time, or when someone clicks/taps the page a little juggling club appears before spinning off screen, or maybe even offering webspace to others who run actual juggling clubs (i.e. juggling societies) but that's a lot of work for me right now.

I don't really have anyone to tell or share it with. But I appreciate being able to share it with the world here.

I've designed decals of the Derpy Tiger from Kpop Demon Hunters, as well as Trump's little peen with it's eyes from the South Park episode, and I'm getting those printed soon.

I've still been working on my attempt at writing.

I read through it and marked up the things I wanted to change as I went. Then last weekend I finished applying those tweaks. I killed several sections but ended up writing nearly as much in replacement as I trimmed. Went down maybe 2k words. But it gave me a better sense for how everything came together and let me take care of the things that'll most annoy/distract me.

I didn't get the large changes handled in that first past of the first draft. Right now it's like I know there's 5 things I need to change, but there's 10 options those 5 might be. Like a strange who-did-it puzzle game. The one thing I know I definitely need to address is the opening. There's like 3 preamble bits that sets up the narrator's character and (partially inaccurately) the world/setting. But pretty much nothing interesting happens, with lots of "telling". Given that character is intentionally not super-loveable and the world building won't be interesting to anyone but me, it'd be a small number of hypothetical readers who would be bought in by that opening. I recently got an idea for how to rework the entrance train ride to have some activity if not action and accomplish the intro-ing without being so overt.

I'm still unsure how to balance "myself" vs "reader" with this project. I'm decided I'll let some people read this but whether I'll do anything with it (even if just dumping it somewhere public online) is still a coin-flip. The "myself" for this is to get it as good as I can reasonably get it according to my taste, which of course means making it at least somewhat in accordance with conventional standards--but I'm certainly not turning it into romantasy or litrpg.

I'm thinking I'll redo the beginning then call that Draft 2. Then I think I'm going to hire some alpha readers. I should get (useful) feedback on the things I'm torn on. And it'll force myself to face someone reading it so I can see how badly it eats away.

Getting back into brainstorming for a long story idea of mine. The tricky part is the story basically starts in the aftermath of another adventure (specifically, the standard "sent to another world to fight the demon king" formula). I mean, I think of the potential prologue with the title "The Prologue that should have Been an Epilogue" since the first chapter would basically be the epilogue, with the events of the first adventure being expanded upon through flashbacks.

So basically, I have to hammer out the big details of that story—the biggest story beats, and (most of) the specific characters involved who'd come back to Earth—before I can actually start writing this story.

So tonight, for the first time ever I went to the ChatGPT site since I found out I don't actually need an account anymore, and used it to hammer out one of the most important questions: how the heck did this group of then-teens explain their absence for a full year despite massive search efforts? Because uh. They can't really tell anyone the truth without sounding crazy, or attracting ridiculous amounts of attention. They all just wanted to get back to their normal lives (or as normal as possible).

And the conclusion I reached: they were on a ship in a storm, and claimed it went severely off-course before sinking, at which point they ended up island hopping across deserted islands with rafts. I went into the chat thinking that or a bus ride, but decided the logistics just don't make a bus disappearing for a whole year plausible enough.

So next step: figuring out all the extra adults involved now, and why they were on the ship in the first place. Because even small ships need more crew members/staff than a bus, and this ship would have had to go pretty far out to believably be as hard to find as they supposedly were.

But man, ChatGPT turned out to be a good soundboard for this. Most of these conclusions were my own as I was talking. It really got my creative juices flowing again, and I got an idea for a new background for the male hero which also led to one new character and some plot bunnies regarding another character concept I wanted to feature. It got me to thinking more about relationship dynamics outside the main group, too. Just a big burst of creativity, love when that happens~

This is not as cool as anything here, but...

I made an app in Python I'm calling "subtitlarr", meant to be used on my Raspberry Pi 3b and its meager 1GB of RAM. What it does is to recursively scan folders and automatically downloading subtitles for the videos contained inside, and stores them alongside the video.

It's a wrapper for subliminal that adds a web ui and a scheduler, so the process can run regularly at configured intervals. It also doesn't depend on Sonarr or Radarr, it's completely standalone.

It's not super awesome and the code is a bit messy, but it works.

So after realizing how easy it was to re-wrap my cat's scratching posts with sisal rope, and how easy it is to dye sisal rope, I've kind of started brainstorming making my own cat scratching posts and cat trees.

I work at a printer so have access to cardboard cores and tubes for banners and posters.

Will probably leverage my 3D Printing to design anything from wall mounts to other things.

I've got a lot of ideas for cute and creative cat trees/scratching posts, including like bamboo stalk scratching post to tombstone scratching post/Litterbox combo(so it looks like the cat is digging and pooping in the grave), and even a pirate cannon tree/scratching post that the cat can crawl into the canon lol.

I'm excited and want to see if I can find any local carpet shops around Seattle that sell scraps and remnants for cheap, as well as other print shops that throw away the tubes. Oh, and ideally I'd need a shop with access to a CNC table that would be willing to let me purchase and CNC cut shapes out of plywood/MDF.

I’ve been meaning to get into this book about games you can play by yourself in your head :) I’m a bit forgetful when it comes to e-book - I usually need to see it to remember it. But hopefully posting here will help me remember

https://ia600301.us.archive.org/28/items/top-ten-games-you-can-play-in-your-head-by-yourself-2-ed-0998379417-9780998379418_compress/top-ten-games-you-can-play-in-your-head-by-yourself-2-ed-0998379417-9780998379418_compress_text.pdf