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What did you do this week (and weekend)?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
I finally got around to wrapping up writing/planning the first session of my first 100% original D&D campaign. The plan is to run that session tonight, weather permitting, and I'm so, so excited. I started DMing last year and I was running the pre-made campaign from the Essentials Kit. But I was heavily modifying it to be more interesting and then our group took a break for a few months and we decided to just start fresh so I began putting together a world and a campaign.
It's basically going to be a Puppet Pirate adventure. The players have been teleported to a world of puppetry and have to come to grips with being made of felt. They'll start off in the Kingdom of Mak'Belif (Make Believe, as in Mr Rogers) and eventually make their way to a number of goofy puppet themed islands after joining a crew of pirates. Grouchland, Shadowflik Island (shadow puppets), the Finger Puppet Lakes, Isle of Sesame , Fraggle Atol, and just a bunch of really obscure references to the Muppets and muppeteers. I am stoked!
This is amazing. I am very interested to know how it goes! I love the place names - I can only imagine the maps!
Oh buddy I've got maps! Basically the first thing I did was start making maps :D
I think world-building and map-making are one of my favourite parts of running a campaign!
The maps are super cool - what program do you use to make them? The lil cobblestones and the effect on the water - "Jimmy Jim Jim Jim Jimmy John's Sandwich shop" - I'm dying, please tell me that's a muppet treasure island reference.
I use Inkarnate which I was hesitant to use at first because it's a subscription based, but it's also only $25/yr and they're constantly adding little packs of artwork you can use in the maps. Saves me a ton of time I had previously spent in Krita or GIMP doing stuff by hand.
And yes! Definitely a Muppet Treasure Island reference :D Almost went with "Jimmy Jim Jim Jim Jimmmy John Silver's Sandwich Shop" but I thought that may be too many references packed into one name (but certainly not too many Jim's)
I've had such a crap week, parenting can be an absolute shit show.
My daughter has gone from sleeping right through the night 7:30-7:00 to getting up two or three times a night, worst thing is her shakiest night's have been mines. Every single night that I'm dealing with her she's been going to bed late at like 8pm-8:15pm, getting up 2 or 3 times and then up at 4:30/5:00, I'm absolutely shattered, feel like a zombie.
Then, my partner went to see her friend on Saturday morning, just her so I was up at 5:00 with our daughter and then looked after her until 10:30 when my partner got back. I then got the chance to get showered and dressed when my partners parents took our daughter for 4 hours during the afternoon on Saturday. I suggested watching a film and relaxing with a beer but my partner wanted to sort out a bunch of stuff round the house. So I wasted my Saturday afternoon getting, to be fair, a bunch of things done that needed done. These offerings from the parents are incredibly rare though, she's nearly two and they've done it two or three times and my parents have done it once so god knows when the next offer will be.
Then my partner had a wedding show this morning that she went to with a couple of friends and her mum and my mum. It was an early start so my morning to lie in and catch up on all the early starts I've had this week was a non-starter because I had to stay at home and look after our daughter. My partner said she expected to be back around 1pm latest and said she'd let me go for a sleep or give me some time to myself but she didn't get back until 3:30pm at which point I had a 30 minute nap and then had to start dinner.
I'm just so burned out this week and all I wanted was a few hours today to play my PC, prep for D&D, or go for a sleep and instead I'm shattered, tired, cranky and tomorrow's my non-working day looking after my daughter again and chances of getting some no pressure time to myself on my PC before next weekend is basically 0 so the burnout will inevitably continue until next Saturday.
I used to love my weekends, now I prefer Tuesday to Friday when I'm working and she's in nursery or it's my partners non-working day, at least then I can stick a pair of earphones in, listen to some music, podcasts, or audiobooks and zone out with my daily workload.
I'm not blaming my partner or daughter as well, she apologised for getting back late and I know she'll make it up to me by making sure I get time next weekend. I'm also happy for her to go out with her friends, I've no issue with that. I know as well that my daughters routine will settle again, I hope. Basically, fuck if parenting isn't the absolute hardest thing I've ever done in my entire fucking life at times and I feel like I'm slowly losing myself, just becoming this thing that looks after a baby.
Just wanted to give some love and support. It's why I'm childfree - not as a "I hate kids" or whatever reason, but because I know I only have the slimmest idea of how hard it is (on top of having to then take care of everything else in life). I honestly don't know if I could survive that mental load.
But as Jimmy Dugan said, the hard is what makes it great and I know there's a lot of great that can be had only from parenting. How old is your daughter?
Thanks!
Yeah, my brother and his wife are the same, they love kids but they both know that they do not have the patience to do it so they've decided not to bother with kids.
There is good with the bad, definitely, I think my frustration is stemming from the lack of good at the moment, she's just being very difficult. She's two in a couple of months.
This was me in 2020 when my son was born, adding covid lockdowns on top of it. Your post brought back some rough memories. In the moment it felt like it would be forever, but luckily it’s just a season. My son is 4 now and rarely wakes up during the night, and I get plenty of game time/sleep in. I no longer feel like I’m just surviving. Hang in there, it gets better!
Pretty sad week unfortunately as I managed to get sick Monday night. Not entirely sure what I caught but it resulted in flu-like symptoms. My nose has been running non-stop, I'd been coughing non-stop, and I've never been more congested. I got tested for the flu and for COVID-19 but both came back negative and I was told to just let the sickness run its course. Thankfully, after a bunch of cough syrup and cold medicine, I've been feeling much better today. Feeling much less congested and my coughs have improved, just gotta deal with a runny nose now.
Other than that, I've had a pretty slow week at work. Our project is in the final stretch before our alpha release next week. The only remaining tasks are front-end tasks and they've all got people working on them. We don't have much back-end work in our backlog for me to pick up mid-sprint either so I've been twiddling my thumbs a bit. Management have slowly been working on scoping what to do for the beta and GA release of the project so I just need to be patient unfortunately. Looking forward to this three-day weekend though! Even if the weather is a bit iffy, I'm looking forward to hanging out with my friends and relaxing.
been reading an abridged version of wizard of oz, in this constructed language ive been learning (toki pona) and having a blast. there's a load of stories that i "know" but never actually experienced all the way through. its been quite fun to take in the wizard of oz story and connect all those random bits of popculture references from over the years.
plus its put out by the creator of the language creator so its been a good learning experience on how certain concepts are conveyed or the semantic space of some words being broader or narrower than i thought. even though its not a huge book, ive been pleased with how fast ive been getting through it - at some points even reading at similar speeds to english until i have trouble parsing something and then i stop to give it some scrutiny.
since i kinda surprised myself with that, i went back and tried re-reading some of the books i struggled with before and had a much easier time. interestingly though, im still sorta slow at parsing latin alphabet version of the language. i wonder if its a dyslexia thing and the sitelen pona is just far less visual noise when faced with a wall of text? either way its nice that my lazy learning has paid off enough that i can get caught up in the story instead of parsing or translating
Well, I just spent 20 minutes reading about toki pona. Pretty neat!
Less so now but when my daughter as younger, I would have to think hard how to explain something using words and concepts she understood. Often I would find when I stripped away what I thought of as "nuance" it was often more like baggage. So I can appreciate the idea of a language designed to push you into that mode.
Glad your enjoying it and making progress with your comprehension. I'll log myself as jealous for now and hope to take a deeper look sometime in the future.
Yesterday I spent something like 7-8 hours with my son at a sort of super arcade (video games, pool hall, archery range, restaurant, etc). More exhausting than anything I’ve done all week, but fun.
Sounds awesome! How old is your son? My son is 2.5 so I don't think he could manage 8 hours consecutively anywhere.
11, and he was pretty tired afterwards but well worth it.
Disc Golf and apartment hunting!
Despite being ~25-35 degrees F with some snow on the ground, managed to get out for a round on both saturday and sunday. Saturday round was a wooded course that was out of the wind, and the muddy areas were still frozen and crunchy. Sunday round is half-wooded, and the open holes had some brutal wind gusts - bad for both wind chill and throwing discs. Still very fun, though I definitely regretted not having a softshell layer to break the wind.
Less fun was apartment hunting. Currently paying "luxury apartment" rates due to pandemic rent raising, but my current apartment is very much a mediocre apartment. So I went and looked at some actual luxury apartment complexes. One was disappointing (an ok apartment, but not nice and shared laundry), but would have been cheaper than my current rent. Second apartment complex is very nice - tons of space, clean apartment, all the apartment features I want, shared gym/pool/basketball/grill areas, and in a great location (off the main road enough to be quiet, close enough to shopping/downtown/highway, and closer to the disc golf courses). Only downside is that its ~$100 more expensive, but pretty sure it will be worth it. Now to do the boring application stuff.
Rent is one of my first splurge spots in terms of budgeting (though to be fair I also try to minimize my general consumerism). I think "home" is one of the biggest impact on overall happiness, so I'm fine budgeting more for rent to get a place I truly love. I think the easiest way to put is is, do you think spending that ~$1200 on something else in the coming year would bring more happiness? Because it does sound quite an overall life upgrade over the other places.
I'm losing out where I'm renting in a couple of months so I'm busy hunting for a place to rent too. Hoping to skip apartments and just keep renting houses (again, I'm willing to splurge that extra few hundred a month and cut back other areas), but man it's expensive here. I have an amazing deal on the place I'm at now, so it really sucks looking at similarly priced places that are also quite worse and knowing I have to downgrade.
Hoping I can find another diamond in the rough before I have to move out, but the entire process is just exhausting.
I'm learning guitar and can reasonably play simple songs! ...When I throw them into Audacity and change it to work with E/A/D chords. But it's something! Having prior bass playing knowledge helps one hell of a lot.
So transposing the song into a different key? Did that a lot when I was first teaching myself the Uke (transposing simple guitar song chords into C key, since a lot are in D or G), when first just needing to learn basic open chords (eg A# and E required barre chords to play, not fun for a beginner lol)
Is there something about the bass that specifically helps with E/A/D chords, or is it more "these are the first chords I learned so I'm practicing them"?
Yeah, dropping suggested stuff like Born in the USA down a step to make it playable. I think the app for the course does that with the playing patterns, but as long as I can dodge paying :^)
It's really straight familiarity with the fretboard that's helping me. During the course it's like "here's a picking lesson for a single line, doing the Peter Gunn theme" and uh, not a problem on my left hand at least. I'm also playing a couple songs like Welcome Home by Coheed and Cambria and it's coming across naturally, just some fine-tuning stuff making sure I'm not muting strings. I have some background in jazz on bass and sax, so I've got rudimentary music theory down, but I'm pretty bad with identifying chords by ear and am trying to go from the ground up to get shapes and chords down. I can pick out a melody with sax fingerings and getting to a similar point where I can figure out chords while listening to something would be hella, but I have to get the actual chord shapes down first...
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I’ve been ill for a while, a recurring theme when I travel by air—one of the many reasons I despise flying. But it was a fine and refreshing trip otherwise. I grow listless when I fall deeply into routines, so the novelty of physical relocation can snap me back into reality (even if what I’m traveling for is incredibly stressful). I’m grateful that I’m not otherwise injured.
I think I heard birdsong this morning. I do not live in a place with birds that sing. The animals detest this land of automobiles and concrete, where trees are relegated to small, dirty plots and ruthlessly leveled before they can mature just for some contractor to install new parking meters. Even in summer they are usually absent, preferring obviously some place more suited to grubbing for worms. So it comes as some surprise to awaken to melodies like I did in my childhood, surrounded by woodlands. I believe a family of sparrows is roosting somewhere in the building’s exterior, along with something a hint more trained in the vocal arts (but I don’t know what—never took that elective). Perhaps some manner of chickadee, but I’m too delirious in the morning to distinguish real sounds from imagined ones. At least, I’m unsure which other birds than sparrows, if any, I would expect to find here in winter. (I know there are pigeons about, but they are not very talkative.) I have not seen these newcomers but intend to keep a sharp eye out. Perhaps Punxsutawney Phil was right for once.