• repairing three bikes. one is a total rebuild. the other two only have minor issues.
• crocheting two baby blankets for twins. they were already born, but they’ll still appreciate the blankets i’m sure!
• getting my foster dog a clean bill of health. she’s got a wrist injury that’s being looked at next week by an orthopedic specialist.

foster dog tax

I’m trying to finish designing my English alphabet poster series. Still missing 10 letters (there’s a poster for each letter of the alphabet, surrounded by ~ 80-110 vintage illustrations of words that begin with a given letter, each labelled), and I’m starting to feel a bit stressed.

Had all of January + February to finish them, which should have been do-able, but then I had three separate client assignments fall into my lap, and couldn’t afford not to take them. Didn’t finish a single poster in January 😔

Also itching to get started on a new branch for my little solo company — creating printable activity sheets (think fancy-design word searches, mazes, word puzzles, dot-to-dot drawings, word scrambles, code breaking puzzles) for daycare/schools/museums, etc.

I’m hoping I can supplement my posters, opening up a new market for my company (marketing/selling children’s posters to private individuals is hard, especially with extremely limited marketing funds, combined with a profound marketing ineptitude), as well as having something in the way of free downloads/printables I can use as SoMe eye-catchers. Hopefully also creating more awareness for my posters in the process. But I need to finish that alphabet series first, so my investor (a parent) doesn’t loose all patience with the project 😬

Then there’s the new shiny idea of creating a Dobble/Spot It!-like card game, also using material from my vast collection of vintage/public domain graphics.

I’ve managed to hobble together some Python code that can generate the data for the cards (“card 1 must have ill’s. 01, 03, 05, 11, 12 …”, “card 2 must have ill’s. 02, 07 …”) according to to the “Dobble formula” (possible cards & number of needed unique illustrations with X illustrations on each card = X^2 - X + 1, where X is a prime number + 1), based on my input for X.

I can then put that data in a spreadsheet, add filenames and descriptions/tags for each illustration, and (hopefully, if I can remember how, as it’s been a while) generate all the finished print files for the cards by feeding the data to InDesign as a CSV.

Going to try to make a mockup with 12 images on each card, and looking at prices for big, custom game cards (A6 / 105 x 148.5 mm / 4.1 x 5.8 inches), with a deck size of 100 cards (technically, the amount of possible cards with X = 12 is 133, but even at 100 cards, the prices start to become prohibitively expensive, at least when looking at the small batch sizes I could conceivably afford).

But, oh yeah, need to stay focused on the main task, getting those posters done first! 🙄

Incidentally, if anyone has some interesting and/or fun Dobble/Spot It! house rules they’d like to share, I’m all ears! Any and all thoughts on possible gameplay with 100 unique, oversized, rectangular game cards, each card with 12 illustrations (animals, vehicles, minerals, historical characters …), and each always having a single illustration in common with any other given card, are also of interest 😁

I was going to make a simple brick breaker kinda game in GB studio. Turns out that engine is really good at very specific kinds of games, and trying to do anything outside that involves some serious engine tinkering.

So instead I decided to spin up a GBA dev environment to make it. Obviously a lot more involved than the drag and drop interface of GB studio but the homebrew scene is pretty large and there have been lots of tools made to make it easier. Mainly I wanted to make something I could play on my analogue pocket. GBA seems the best choice now

Finishing the first draft of a novel.

Designed and now getting out to print t-shirts for my friend’s bridal shower.

It seems like it has been LEGO sorting season for me - I moved a while ago and had a few sets in plastic bags, and one bag that had a couple sets in them and just last night I began organizing it. I was gifted a set I already had (in said bag) and so I doubled it up which was my first time doing something like that!

Other than that, we’ve been working on cozying up the home, we’re a bit crowded with extra stuff so we’ve been going through and getting rid of junk we don’t need anymore, freeing up space in the garage so it can be a functional space again.

I also found a program called Storyboarder last night! It’s awesome, I’ve been wanting to do storyboards for a long time but I only just thought to look for a software for it. It’s free, very fully featured with no ads (you give them your e-mail to get a download link, so you do get an email), and it has a nice UI for the scene image, actions, dialogue (typed and microphone), and notes about the scene, as well as a 3D model spacer with some presets and photoshop integration (send and receive).

Just the other night off the top of my head in about 5 hours I came up with about 5 minutes of scene - drawn out, scripted and voice lined. I’m quite pleased with how it’s turning out considering this is my first storyboard in probably 10 years.

I’m sporadically working on an app for stretching exercises you can do at your desk because I got tired of all the ads on the ones I was using. It’s really a very easy project, but I’ve found I don’t like doing much coding after a full workday as a programmer lol

I’ve been learning rust for the sole purpose of implementing a Minecraft server from (nearly) scratch; I don’t want to use existing frameworks because I feel that building it from the ground up will provide more opportunities for optimization, maybe compatibility with existing Java-based plugins (maybe possible via JNI or J4RS?), and also as a learning experience for project management :)

I’m working on a free software shortcut memorization tool, similar to Anki but specifically for learning keyboard shortcuts. This already exists as a website (shortcutfoo I believe), but I want it on the desktop. I’m using GTK and Python.

I was also working on a sokoban clone in Godot, but that is now past the prototype phase and now the actual cleaning up and completing the experience seems to demand too much focus. So that one just simmered down.

I’m also getting into Bionicle lore again (I used to love it as a child) and am trying out digital animation of bricklink studio models to maybe use for a simple fan-game.

I’m also eternally in the process of organizing and cleaning my old Lego sets :).

is there a sketch

currently working on an update to my native placenames map–i’m almost through with all of California, which of course has a ton of distinct native tribes. there are a few gaps from lack of data or my inability to get on a primary source for place names, but otherwise the map is pretty filled in and i’m feeling quite good about that

I’m learning to play the hurdy gurdy and getting kinda okay at it. I would say, the hardest part is reading the music notation and then quickly translating that to the buttons I need to press. My spouse is learning to play the concertina; her’s arrived yesterday in the mail. And I’m very, very slowly working on a personal webpage using Neocities.

I started doing some basic research for a project for a Linux fundamentals course I’m currently in. The project is to research an open source utility/program available for Linux. Got a screenshot of opening Postybirb for the first time and a screenshot of it without the warning/license pop-up thing.

Now I just need to make some crummy art so that I can test it so I can make my report on it without looking like I don’t know what I’m talking about.

In case you don’t know what Postbirb is, it’s software available for Windows, Mac, and Linux that allows you to connect accounts from various sites* and upload art. From what I understand, it hosts a local server on your device and I don’t know how it works outside of that.

*Warning! Sites like the furry sexy image site E621 or some Anime sexy image site I’ve never heard of. That, or sites like deviantart, a misskey instance, tw!tter, or some others.

I’m working on a multiplayer strategy game, something like a greatly simplified stellaris. I’m trying to use minimal Bevy as the engine with Actix for input and presentation. I’m still green with Rust, but it’s coming along a lot better than I had originally expected. It’s a learning experience, using different containers for messaging between threads and trying to limit blocking as much as possible. I want to avoid getting stuck in the details, it is so easy to want to spend a week building a fancy test rig to verify the capabilities. But I gave myself a timeline to have a working game prototype, and I need to stick to it!

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I figured I’d leave a second comment this week as a continuation! My partner was interested in the voiceovers I was doing for my storyboard and suggested I look into audiobook narration. I have all the stuff I need for it (music production), so I cleaned out our closet, got a mic set up and used my Steam Deck with Reaper and a Focusright Audio Interface to start recording!

I’ve made a couple auditions and some people have already gotten back to me which feels pretty cool!