2023-W44: it turns out you don't accomplish a lot of goals while resting

[packbat]

So, lately we've been reading a lot of travel blog posts from Hundred Rabbits, and it makes us want to blog more. Not daily, but like ... ever, y'know? To create something that people can read.

As the subject line says, this week's been very unfocused because this has been specifically a rest week - and I mean "we told our fellow mods we'd be gone until Monday" rest, we have no unfun obligations at all. (Well, almost none - we posted on our TTRPG patreon and our TTRPG ko-fi, but shh.) Lately we've been in a state of staring at each obligation blankly and wondering if this is the one that's going to destroy us completely, so we really needed some time when we did not have to do that.

(...okay, the unfun obligations thing is almost twice - we did set ourselves a goal to get or make a cover image for an itch.io jam. It's not made, and that's okay - the jam is not gonna be until February.)

So, what did this rest week look like?

...I mean, I don't know, we weren't paying attention. But there was a lot of reading blog posts and there was a lot of playing solitaire or PICO-8 games or 8 links or uxn catcubes while videos were going.

Oh yeah, uxn/varvara. uxn/varvara is a machine language and a virtual machine that runs it, designed to be easy to implement on even very old machines. (Like, literally on a Gameboy DS, even.) We've been extremely slowly progressing through the compudanzas tutorial - currently halfway through the compudanzas day 3 tutorial - and fantasizing about all the projects that are technically possible in uxn but wildly ambitious. (As is our wont - we do it with PICO-8, too.) uxn is how we found Hundred Rabbits, I think.

Probably the biggest thing we did was finally start trying to learn Git, the version control thing. We always assumed that version control would be really really hard, but it turns out that collaboration is really really hard and version control itself can be uncomplicated. So, we downloaded the Pro Git book, made repos in the folders for a bunch of projects, added some files to them, and committed a few commits. We still don't really know all the basics, but we're starting to practice the bits we do know - git init, git status, git add, git commit, and .gitignore. Starting a repo, checking if there's changes, adding files, committing changes, and making it exclude Kate/KWrite temporary files. To do: digging through logs, looking at diffs, and looking at old versions.

(That idea of practicing the basics came to us from the "How I learned Unity without following tutorials" video in Mark Brown's Developing series on Game Maker's Toolkit. In his three-step process - learn the absolute basics, practice those basics with simple projects, slowly build a repertoire of further skills from there - we are currently working on the first and second steps.)

So, like, a lot is happening? But most of it is what we want to do in that moment, and we can drop it whenever. And we do, regularly.

We'll see what happens tomorrow. For today, that's where we're at.