Wednesday, May 16th

The Daily Report

Finished yesterday up ~1,500 words. I lost a lot of steam near the end of the day, probably relating to the fact that I didn't sleep well the night before. I think I might have been fighting a cold or something... I remember feeling unusually hot and sweaty during the night, and then I felt like it was hot and humid in here all day yesterday, when apparently it wasn't. I feel markedly better today.

That's kind of a combined report/state of me, but it's more about yesterday's state than anything else.

I came here thinking there wouldn't be much progress on A Wilder World while I was here, but circumstances keep leaving me with time and space to think about it, and I've actually made quite a bit of progress on some of the more elusive parts of the game design, like character progression after the game begins and things like that.

The State of the Me

Went to bed late last night but slept well after I did.

Plans For Today

Done a bit of writing. Need to go out and do some grocery shopping, will probably have time for more writing afterwards.

It's day 3 of the MU cycle. I'm refining my "500 word minimum every day" goal for MU to be a hard 500 word minimum, but a slightly softer minimum of 1000 words on days 3 and 4.

It's day 1 of the FIM cycle, which means I need to come up with at least one viable idea for the next ficlet to post. (I actually have a small backlog of unpublished FIM stories that I wrote while it was down, but one of them is thematically very similar to the last one that was posted before it came back up, and I also want to get this cycle established and give it momentum.)

Question for pen&paper/tabletop gamers.

If you’re playing (or running) a typical fantasy adventure focused roleplaying game, how important is the concept of experience/achievement levels to you? Do you like having a means of keeping score/measuring overall ability, or does it add nothing to the experience for you to know that your character is level 1 or level 11, as long as the game gives you ways to grow in power and ability?

My phone is doing a weird thing.

It's something that almost seems like a feature rather than a bug, if it would do it consistently and there were a place to turn the behavior off. Twice today while I had the phone in my hand and was doing something non-telephony with it, it popped up with a notification that I'd missed a call that happened just that moment. No ringing, no nothing. I didn't have my hand on the display or a button at the moment so it wasn't like I'd pressed something at just the right moment to send a call to voicemail or whatever.

After playing around a little, I've found that it consistently (so far) rings normally when the display is off, so I'm probably not in too much danger of completely missing calls in the normal course of things. When I've tried to reproduce the error myself, I get something slightly different: the call pops up on the screen, but the "mute" symbol flashes on and there's no ringtone. Again, this would almost seem like a feature if it had behaved this way before and if it didn't at least occasionally block the call completely. I don't necessarily need it to start playing music if I'm looking right at it.

This phone was pretty cheap for a smartphone to begin with... I got it to replace a phone I lost around the time I moved, and it's pretty well below my specifications/needs in every level (notably, the lack of a physical keyboard). It's been getting flakier and flakier on me, doing things like crashing when I try to take pictures and losing all my recent photos in the process.

I'd planned on switching carriers when my contract is up, so I'd really like to avoid getting a new phone before then... now I'm starting to look at the cost analysis of jumping ship early and taking advantage of new member deals at another carrier, and I'm thinking I'll probably do that shortly after I get back to Omaha.

I miss having a phone I can type on, and I'm at a point in my life when it's important that I'm reachable by phone.