The BIG THINGS I mentioned previously are nearing completion. This Tumblr will see the fruition of what I’ve been working on towards the end of April, after I get back home. My close friends can get a look soon - I’ll be needing some feedback.

In the meantime, have some more music:

I am working on some BIG THINGS and listening to Brand New.

I’m still around. I haven’t been posting weekly reviews because there hasn’t been very much to review. I’ve been working, working out, and idling my time away. I have been working creatively in a small way (writing) but I’m beyond burned out at this point in time. I’ll be back home within the month - that’s what I’m focusing on right now.

Project Candle - the Gam3 Game I’m working on - has been put on pause until I return home. I’ve made a lot of progress with it, which is good, but there is more work that needs to be done if I am going to create a well-rounded demo.

My programming is on pause.

Working out? That’s going great.

I have returned to writing short stories.

I am working on a revamped version of my site.

And I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Too much thinking. Too much thinking on problems that don’t have immediate solutions.

This felt like a very long week. I’ll keep this weekly review brief because, quite frankly, I’m in a weird place emotionally and I don’t feel like sharing.

I wrote 788 words. I have started - slowly - to get back into writing fiction.

I worked out 3 times. I started a new routine and stuck to it. It is a full body routine, Monday-Wednesday-Friday. I spent most of this week feeling physically exhausted but I’m going to continue forward. Eventually I’ll need to include running but this week it was difficult because my legs were sore.

I continued working on Project Candle, my browser-based-strategy-Gam3-game. This project was formally known as Juliana but apparently that was confusing people. My goal was to have a strong demo completed for a select group of people by the end of February. I’m close, but not quite that close. I’ll keep working and it will be ready when it’s ready.

I’ve been watching Sherlock. I’m enjoying it.

I’ve been playing Mass Effect 3. I’m enjoying it.

And that’s about it. See you next week.

An update to my previous post:

I took a shower and hit the gym for an hour. This song was my anthem.

Weekly update time. I’ve been feeling out of it this week.

But time moves on. I’m halfway through my deployment now; I’ll be making it home sometime in the summer. My 25th birthday was this week - not much in the way of celebrating but I appreciate the kind words people have given me.

Very little happened this week besides my birthday and Valentine’s Day with the Little Box Girl. I made her a dopey board game, which was fun to play and proved to be a good creative exercise. I missed working out because my new work schedule has been difficult to adjust to. Most nights I barely sleep. I’ve been moving along through my two classes. Working on my Gam3 project (Juliana) a bit. Brainstorming.

I feel restless and tired. I’m on a safe deployment (knock on wood) but the repetition is maddening at times. It’s all too easy to drift through my days. I blink and it could be any day - I often forget what day it is. My 12-hour shifts leave little time to schedule outside of work and if I do have a schedule, one bump in time throws everything off. I lose ten minutes doing something and there is no chance to make it up. There’s minimal room for error.

It’s okay, though. I’m taking a breath, see? Breath. What’s important is that I keep myself going. I’m going to take a few minutes today to work out a plan for the next few days and move forward with that. Nothing else to do but push myself back into a routine and let things happen, one by one.

I would like to get my Gam3 Demo completed by the end of this week. It likely won’t happen but I am going to try and at least get the majority of it done. Enough that I can start tweaking mechanics. It’s playable but there’s much more I’d like in it before I hand it over to Vael for feedback. If it goes well, I might do a small release to a few select people.

Thanks for reading. Onward, to a new and reinvigorated week.

PS: I stopped watch the 100. The writing has gotten so painful I simply can’t do it anymore. Onto Sherlock (the one with Benedict Cumberbatch).

It’s my 25th birthday today.

Animal Collective released a new CD today.

Venetian Snares released a new CD today.

And work was busy.

Here we are again. Hello Sunday my old friend. 

Time seems to be moving quickly. I’m officially halfway through my deployment now, which means about another three months I’ll get to go back home. I’m definitely at the point where I’m ready to get this over with but I’m doing everything I can to make the most of my time here.

In that vein, this past week was a quiet yet productive one. I kept up with my workout routine and I’m ready to shift into something more difficult. I’ve picked out a plan that I’m going to follow for the next eight weeks, which includes a full body workout and running for cardio. My biggest challenge this past week was dealing with the new shift I’m working, which has absolutely destroyed my sleep schedule. I’m getting it back in alignment and I’m going to carry my momentum forward.

My focus project-wise this past week was Juliana, the Gam3 Game I’m developing. She has a few rough spots but overall, I’m happy with the progress that I’m making. I won’t be able to properly judge how all the mechanics work until I see everything tied together, which is what I’ve been working towards. The goal is still to have a demo by the end of February but regardless of whether or not I hit that deadline, I’m going to continue pushing forward and working on it piece by piece.

On the topic of deadlines, I’ve done a lot of thinking about how I should approach them. My intention when I set a deadline is to have a goal to work towards - complete this project by X date. It’s straightforward and gives me a timeline to follow but when obstacles come up, sometimes pushing that deadline back can’t be avoided. Leona is a good example because I’m happy and proud of the progress that I have made but it’s not completed yet. I am going to have to work on devising a new system that allows some flexibility while still remaining on a track of some sort.

What else happened this week? Well, it’s Valentine’s Day today - so I’d like to express my love for the Little Box Girl, who I can’t wait to see when I get back from this deployment.

The 100, a TV show I recently did a post on, is starting to breakdown into garbage. Episode 4 of Season 3 premiered this week and it is venturing dangerously close to textbook-bad-writing. It’s so awful, in fact, that I’m going to give them one more episode and if it doesn’t get back on track, I’m leaving the show for good. I’ll do a more detailed post on this in the future but it’s worth noting that this episode wasn’t just a bad apple - it shows a lot of underlying problems that the 100 have played with before (characters flip flopping personalities, 2-dimensional villains, clearly dumb choices being made) but now they’re coming to the forefront. Three seasons into a show, these types of mistakes should be left well behind. It’s disappointing but I’m going to start watching Sherlock, so that’s something to look forward to.

I also started two new classes this week - Leadership and Business Systems Analysis (which is basically IT in the business world). They seem to be discussion-board-and-writing focused, which means I can do them during my downtime at work. Overall not too bad.

And that’s about it. I have a few plans for the next week but overall, I’m just going along. Ready to get home. Ready to not be here.

I’m technically two days late on posting this review for last week but, like any good computer system, I experience the occasional glitch. In this case, the “glitch” is a shift in my work schedule that turned me into a zombie for twenty-four hours because apparently adjusting my sleep schedule by five hours is the equivalent of swimming too far into the ocean to come back. You keep paddling but the current does with you whatever it wants.

So what happened this last week? I made a post about my thoughts on the 100. Conclusion: Good sci-fi show with some weak moments and some very strong moments.

I made progress on Leona, the Progress Tracker. My goal was to complete it last week but that didn’t happen. I’m satisfied with how much I got done but I’m also disappointed I didn’t finish. It wasn’t really for lack of trying; I just ran into some programming obstacles that my new-programming-brain is having trouble sorting out. There are concepts that I need to grasp that I do not yet.

I worked out three days but I included every muscle group. My goal was four days and every muscle group. I can’t complain with those results.

I wanted to work on the revamp of my website but that didn’t happen. Eh. It was low priority anyways.

This upcoming week, I’m focusing entirely on Juliana (my Gam3 Game). I need to have a demo by the end of the month and this goal is non-negotiable. The plan is to get the bulk of it done this week and next before I polish / playtest, then I’ll release it to a small group of people for feedback. Leona might get touched but it’s a low priority for this week. It needs one more solid day to really get it finished, I believe, and I don’t have the time to devote right now.

I would also like to keep going with my work-out schedule, which for now will be three days covering all the muscle groups. Eventually I want to transition into five days, spending one day on each of the muscle groups, but with my new schedule I need to readjust everything.

And that’s about it. Things have been going well. Not amazing; I’m tired and beginning to feel myself wearing out. I also start two new classes today, so there’s really no time to rest. Once I get settled into my new work schedule, I’m going to have plan for a down day. In the meantime, I just need to keep pushing myself forward.

Today has been productive. I spent most of it working on Leona, the Project Tracker. My goal was to finish it by the end of the day; that goal is not going to be realized. However, I have made a lot of progress and there’s a bit more I’m going to get accomplished before I call it a day. I need a break, though, which is why I’m making this post.

Here is what I spent most of today staring at:

(Click here for a larger version)

Windows Powershell is on the left and Sublime (with my program’s code) is on the right. This is a glimpse into the code I’ve been working on for the Project Tracker. You can’t see it very well, but I also had a bunch of tabs open because Google is my friend.

So what’s it look like so far? Here we go:

A few things that I need to change: the icons at the top are currently part of a toolbar that the user can drag around. While this is neat, it’s not exactly intentional. I’m either going to find a way to lock the toolbar in place and leave it there or turn the icons into static buttons and place them towards the left, horizontal to the title.

The list is also a bit dry, isn’t it? I’d like to spice that up with some larger font sizes.

One thing that’s not pictured here is what happens when you double click on the project names. It opens a new window! This took me a long time to figure out how to do. Now the real challenge is going to be figuring out how to create unique instances of each of those windows, so when you double-click on Leona (for instance) it opens a window with Leona’s information. I also need to figure out how to lock the main window when the second window is open. I’ve come close but it’s proving rather difficult to figure out.

Eventually this little program will be used for managing all my projects in a simple, cohesive list. I’d like to be able to double-click these items on the list and see information such as a mission statement and target completion date. The checkmark in the top left, by the way, is for creating a new project. Or at least it will be, when I get that part figured out.

This was all made with Python using PyQt4. I’m going to keep working on it over the next few days but I might need to get some outside help, possibly utilizing Reddit or stackoverflow to solve some of the harder problems I’m facing. Starting tomorrow my main focus is going to turn to Juliana, the Gam3 Game I’m developing. The deadline for a demo is the end of the month and unlike Leona, the only obstacle I really face is putting the time in to get it done. There’s the matter of gameplay testing and a few mechanics that need to be finalized but the majority of it is going to be grunt work.

I’ll post another update on Leona, the Project Tracker, when it gets closer to completion.