Back from the family road trip vacation and.... feeling pretty neat, for the most part. It'll be time to move on soon and I still have absolutely no idea where I'm going, but I do, at least, have... suggestions. Yeah.
On the last day of vacation, I went through all the scraps of paper I had my various to-do lists on and organized them onto a new, pristine sheet of paper. Normally, that sort of thing upsets me, and it did to a degree this time as well, I hate that every week when I make a to-do list it's mostly just a copy of the previous week's to-do list because so little of my to-do list gets done in a week, but I don't know, something about being on vacation and having gotten so much fresh air and just how clean the new list looks without all the scattered crossed-out stuff, it pleased me so much I had an interest in blogging about the entire new agenda.
You know what I think helps a lot? Working at a desk or table instead of a bed or couch. Seems obvious, I know, but I never really had the opportunity, but now, well, maybe I should look harder for a better workspace.
I started with three things that I ought to do basically right away:
- Vacation Photos. I took lots of vacation photos in our trek from Denver to San Diego and back, gotta crop them and put them on Instagram. ...In a minute, on the drive back my phone charger end up hanging outside the car door and scraping on the road for a few hundred miles, so, my phone's dead, but I should have a new charger any minute now and be ready for 'gramming.
- Crown of Wizards. Podcast #43 has been in development for many months. I guess the depression just hit me like a truck and it took me ages to get through all the podcast tasks I used to do on a weekly basis. Eventually, I watched the 1993 Disney films Homeward Bound and Hocus Pocus. Eventually, I read some of my old fanfiction. And now, I'm finally, FINALLY, two chapters in to The Secrets of Droon special edition #6, Crown of Wizards, which has been taunting me for ages.
- Stacy Stuff. My good friend Stacy has posted a few art pieces and YouTube videos recently that I'm interested in, haven't had the time to check out, definitely putting it early on my list to make the time and give Stacy some love and attention.
Incidentally, speaking of Stacy, just last night she finished the Deities Project, here's the last few pages:
The entire thing, in very high quality, can be found here on the website:
After that, a scattered list of other things I think it might be nice to do.
- Schedule. The overall TAPAS schedule is arranged quarterly, in three-month sections. The third quarter of 2020, obviously, started in July, but I haven't gotten around to looking at it or adjusting it, or... yeah. Gotta do that.
- Screenshots. When the Hamilton film was released, I saw a lot of posts complaining that you can't take screenshots on Disney+. As I rely on Disney+ screenshots to be the visual aids for my Disney Retrospective videos, I should probably investigate and find out if that has indeed become a thing since last time I did a retrospective.
- Rob Heinsoo. I have gained access to the personal email address of famed game designer Rob Heinsoo. He's a family friend, and while I've never met him, he did stay in my room once, where he came upon my vast collection of D&D gamebooks he was involved with and was very flattered, gave me a couple of autographs as well as helping my aunt gift me with a copy of his own game, 13th Age. Having an interest in game design myself, I wanted to contact him privately... not sure what to say to him. Maybe the fact that Keys & Kingdoms is, thus far, way too much like Dungeons & Dragons. Perhaps he can give me some advice on building originality.
- Documents. I'm thinking of buzzing all the documents and files I have on my computer, Google Docs, and a few other places and sort of trim the fat so it's not so overwhelming, so I'm working only with what I need.
- Playlist. I have a playlist. I like it to have exactly 150 songs on it. It's overdue for a few revisions; some songs on it I'm not so passionate about anymore, which can easily replaced by the songs of a few artists I've neglected in its earlier iterations; I'm thinking Flight of the Conchords, Lily Allen, Barenaked Ladies...
- Doctor. Need to contact my doctor, who's been trying to reach me for months. My medications and therapy have helped me feel better in day-to-day life, but not actually... be better. For example, my anxiety medication was not able to help me overcome my anxiety well enough for me to call my doctor to ask for a refill on my anxiety medication. So... I haven't done that. Gotta start over, I guess.
- Podcast 43/Cast Announcement. Once I've read Crown of Wizards, I'll finally be able to make a big comeback on the YouTube channel, starting with the much-delayed podcast entry and then a video I've been working on announcing the voice cast of Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices. There's some cool new artwork in that video I've been waiting to share.
- Videos. I have a bunch of vacation videos from last winter which I never put online. Gotta do that.
- ERB. My mom hasn't seen the five most recent episodes of Epic Rap Battles of History. I want to show them to her.
- UEBS. My youngest sister had an interest in playing Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator on my computer while I'm visiting. I thought maybe we could make some videos on the subject. And we have. Score! That's one item crossed out.
- House Hunting. In terms of house hunting in Quincy, I've exhausted every avenue I can possibly think of. I freely admit that every possibility I can imagine in the field of such an adulting-related task is probably no more than 10% of the options that exist, so while I'm still here, my mom is going to help me figure out that process. I was originally going to return to Wisconsin at the end of this week, but I'm sticking around a while longer so we can really get that done.
- The Mechanisms. My fiancee wants me to check out the musical group The Mechanisms. Gonna do that.
- Irregular Fantasy! David Morgan-Mar has given me the permission to at least begin the process of adapting Irregular Webcomic -- just begin it, he wants to check out what we're working on before we get too into it, see. I commissioned some character designs, but unfortunately I accidentally deleted most of the story outlines I'd been working on, so I have to start that over.
- Kingdom Butts. Been working on building comprehensive story summaries of the Kingdom Hearts series in order to have a clear picture to work with for the super-epic parody series Kingdom Butts. Gotta get back to that.
And then, well, it's time to return to routine TAPAS tasks, such as:
- playing Icewind Dale
- playing Dungeon Siege
- writing fanfiction
- writing the Some Sweet Kind of Vampire pilot episode
- finishing the video summary of my Secrets of Droon adaptation fantasy
- storyboarding the Keys & Kingdoms: The Choices pilot episode
- writing the Keys & Kingdoms: Explore Cosmos short films
- preparing a good world and story arc for Iris
- readying the Whirlwind reboot
- blogging
- podcasting
- retrospectives
After that, well, I guess it's time to see what remains in my digital to-do list. A few months ago I took the advice of my therapist of putting all my to-do list stuff on paper instead of on my computer. Didn't seem to work terribly well, but I got into the habit, so once I've cleared all the tasks here I should check out my to-do list Word document and see what's still on it.
After that, some daily tasks:
- exercising
- meditating
- being a better friend
...And nowhere on this list is the process of acquiring qualifications for a better-paying job, but, that's also a thing I'm working on.
I'll leave you on that last bullet point: being a better friend. I have a lot of love for a lot of people, but I'm shy, and I'm always scared of saying the wrong thing, and I have no idea how to interact with people apart from talking about my projects and asking them to participate. I need to do better.
