General Update Log No. 14

I promise, I wanted to get one of these out last month to keep with the once-a-month schedule I’d set for myself, but then I just... didn’t find the time for it. Granted, it’s not like a lot happened in September, anyway.

But anyway, hope everyone’s been well. Summer has finally ended, at least this side of the equator. And with this month came and went my birthday, too – I’m 28 years old now. Not getting any younger, so it’s all the more important that I make as much as possible out of what time I have left.

...And, fittingly enough, I actually have the rest of the month off from work, starting from my birthday last Saturday, so I figured, hey, might as well use all that free time in a productive manner. So with this month’s log, I’d like to update you not just on what I did, but primarily on what I’m planning to do.

First talking point would be that new album I’ve mentioned before at at least one point in the past. So far there’s still only four tracks done, and I haven’t written anything else in months. A lot of that is due to what I can only describe as crippling anxiety at the thought of composing anything. In particular, it’s instrumentation that tends to cause me the most grief, since I often struggle to find good instruments to use, and it quickly discourages me from continuing to try.

I think I may need to do a better job of planning the complete instrumentation for a song in advance. After all, my own discography already provides me with plenty of references for what does and doesn’t work, not to mention what’s my signature style. I just need to get over that mental blockade, and there’s no two ways around just chipping away at it bit by bit. If all goes well, I might have a new song done for the album by the end of the month, as well as the momentum to do at least half an hour of music stuff every morning before work. A 2023 release obviously isn’t in the cards anymore, but it’s still my biggest active project to date, so the more consistently I can make progress towards it, the better.

Something else I’ve also hinted at in the past was my intention to relaunch this website. And, well, work on that has officially started! I’m currently in the process of rewriting everything from scratch to revolve around object-oriented PHP, applying the knowledge I’ve gained from my job. The goal here is to modularize the code, splitting it off into smaller chunks to make things easier to expand and maintain. This means PHP classes for everything, which also meant having to write a class autoloader. That one wasn’t too much trouble, but the ever-evolving nature of my code’s directory structure means having to constantly redefine namespaces, which is kind of a pain.

And finally, there’s my gaming backlog. Surprisingly, despite having bought the game on day one, I still haven’t actually beaten Tears of the Kingdom yet. Not that I’m not close – in fact, all that’s left to do in the main story is beat the final boss – but I’ve been trying to at least do all the shrines and sidequests before putting an end to things.

Other games I’m currently playing through are Ecco the Dolphin on the Mega Drive, and Aztec Adventure on the Master System. The former has passwords for me to save my progress with, but the latter is a single-session slog taking upwards of an hour to play through fully, and while I have reached the final stage once by now, it’ll take at least a few more attempts to learn and get through it.

Incidentally, I have a Trello board to keep track of my backlog with, but as of writing this, there are no less than 34 unbeaten games on it (not all in progress, though), so... honestly, putting any significant dent into it would be a full-time job unto itself. Doesn’t help that I prefer to do my Mega Drive and Master System gaming on console, rather than emulator (if I can help it), and the consoles are hooked up to the living room TV, meaning I can only play them while my mom’s asleep or at work, since she’s occupying the TV all day otherwise.

You may also notice that anything involving drawing is conspicuously missing from this list... but, to be fair, I feel like I already have my hands full with just about everything else. As much as I’d love to get back into drawing again, there are other things I need to get on top of first, and organizing myself is never without extreme amounts of effort and vigilance.

But I think that’s also the extent of what’s worth talking about this month. Here’s hoping to another update a month from now, preferably with good news about having been able to make some good habits stick again.