technonaturalist

The month opened with 13yo being inspired by Genshin Impact (a game that 15yo and I have been playing together that 13yo occasionally joins us in) and making a chicken and mushroom kebab, which is one of the food items that can be crafted or purchased in game.

There isn’t an actual recipe to follow so he just skewered and lightly seasoned and pan fried them. Was very delicious.

I think the schedule is working so far, it’s just silly things like my general refusal to go to bed at a reasonable hour and general annoyances with youngest refusing to go to bed on time that’s throwing spanners in my works now, in the form of “can’t concentrate for the entire allocated time block”.

Now occasionally weird things can happen in 3d either then I’m in the process of building something or when I walk away from a sculpt without really looking at where I stopped. So after last night’s work session I stopped at some point and went to bed and came back in the morning to

I’m still on an awkward “holiday” schedule (which is as similar as I could make it to the term schedule working around a holiday program that’s running at the moment). I’m still going to bed late and getting up early and really do have to nix that immediately because the memory issues are back in force and I have very definitely slowed down.

I’ve been up late making sure roleplaying stuff is sorted out because that’s a thing that happens every weekend. And I also have to actually check CoD character sheets because I’m not familiar enough with the system yet to be able to glance and go yep looks right like I can with WoD.

There’s only multiple schedules because I have multiple people that I need to work with/around.

With some assistance from sibling dearest which she started off for me like

I ended up with something that I’m going to be testing and tweaking for a little while til I know what (if anything) needs adjusting or something changes enough to require changing up.

Redcaps is a casual game that I suggested to satisfy the roleplaying habit when people are unable to make sessions or aren’t feeling it but everyone else wants to play (the initial proposal went along the lines of “maybe make some madcap redcaps for a casual game for when people are missing”). Not everyone has to be present for every session, and anyone who has an idea can GM. There will probably be story arcs at some point because that’s just how I roll but they’re otherwise essentially a bunch of mostly improv one shots or short runs. The older boys were initially resistant because “Changeling is cringe” until 13yo’s Redcap character in Mercenaries made them all want to play Redcaps.

I was intending on trying to get back into the swing of things in the first week of January (including my blogging schedule) with the intention of seeing what in the work schedule that I’d done up (and been vaguely reworking on the fly) needed changing up.

I didn’t end up doing the progblog and the work schedule really does need changing up.

Though most of what I suffer from is the complete inability to keep to anything resembling time, and the fact that I have to be interruptable because JJ is the one with the full time job with defined hours. So what I had was just stuff that needed to get done on what day, and just doing what I could when I could.

Yeh right like I ever take them.

I have seriously been moving like molasses and I really do need to actually change something, but because I’m me I’ll probably just burnout again, have to recover for a few days again during which I’ll relentlessly beat myself up over being an idiot again and that I really should have fixed it before it became this bad again, only to do exactly the same thing down the line again.

I don’t know what happened to October either, aside from the roleplaying games continued (I have this vague idea that I will write about how roleplaying games are good for maths, drama and general language development one day). I think we may have also started more hardcore development of my dice system. 12yo has been making suggestions and helping test mechanics. October may have also been the month where I found out that 16yo was doing more algebra, because apparently he thinks he needs algebra for the TAFE course he’s thinking of enrolling in. Not sure how much he’s done as I think he’s gotten himself a new Khan Academy account instead of resetting the password for his existing one so I’ll have to try to remember to check that up when I’m compiling the report for the moderator meeting.

The last major gymnastics event for the year is over, which took a lot of pressure off.

I finished the photobooks, more pressure off.

Then stuff happened with made things ramp up again, and it got so bad that I deliberately didn’t do some mental health stuff that would have helped the frame of mind I fell into because there is literally absolutely no point whatsoever, because I’m wrong and everyone else is right and that’s all there is to it no matter what.

When the kids expressed interest in playing Vampire, I told them that I hated the subsystem. Mechanically it’s not any different from Changeling, it’s the lore that I don’t like (there’s nothing wrong with it per se, just not my style), and while you can be combat heavy with it (which given the insane strength and speed vampires have can be quite entertaining and occasionally interesting to manage), it’s generally geared towards more political intrigue which I am absolutely terrible at because I’m lucky if I have Wits 1.