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Week in review: Week to 24 January
Jan. 26th, 2025 09:39 pmThe weather was very hot, and the effects could be felt even indoors with the air conditioner cranked up.
I'm working my way through Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, and, on the days where the heat got to me and I didn't have the mental presence for Powers, reading a few entries from The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook.
At board game club, I played Psycho Killer, Mayan Curse, and Waking Shards.
I came up with a new motivational tool for my cardio exercise this week. I've been keeping track on a paper calendar of which days I did some kind of cardio exercise, and ticking off weeks where I reached a target number of days, but it occurred to me that if I kept track in a computer spreadsheet instead, I could get it to automatically calculate not just each calendar week but a running total for any given seven-day period, and generate a coloured strip that changed from red to orange to green to show how well I was doing at hitting the target. One of the unexpected effects was that, because of the way I set up the coloured strip, it doesn't just show the past but also a vision of the future, with the seven-day period following today lit up in the colour it would remain if I didn't do any further exercise in that period. Marking off a day makes the entire following week shift up in colour in a way that's very satisfying. It's too soon to tell if it's leading to me exercising more consistently, but it feels like it is.
I did start playing XCOM 2 again, beginning a fresh game from the beginning. It's been going a lot better; I'm still failing missions occasionally, but it's been pretty apparent each time what went wrong and usually it's only taken a second attempt to get back on track. (The big recurring problem, which has been one of my faults ever since I first started playing XCOM and the source of a lot of strife that I've been prone to blame on the RNG, is a tendency to be impatient even in untimed missions and push on with unnecessary haste - which is a particular problem when, as it often does, it results in being faced with a fresh wave of enemies just when one has used one's last action point for the turn.) I've also been getting more resilient in the face of failure: there have been missions that have gone so badly that the me of a month ago would have given up entirely, but I've pushed on and turned them into successes; and there have been times when a mission did end up going badly, or even failing, and I've kept the result and things have nevertheless turned out well on the larger strategic level.
I'm working my way through Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers, and, on the days where the heat got to me and I didn't have the mental presence for Powers, reading a few entries from The Tolkien and Middle-Earth Handbook.
At board game club, I played Psycho Killer, Mayan Curse, and Waking Shards.
I came up with a new motivational tool for my cardio exercise this week. I've been keeping track on a paper calendar of which days I did some kind of cardio exercise, and ticking off weeks where I reached a target number of days, but it occurred to me that if I kept track in a computer spreadsheet instead, I could get it to automatically calculate not just each calendar week but a running total for any given seven-day period, and generate a coloured strip that changed from red to orange to green to show how well I was doing at hitting the target. One of the unexpected effects was that, because of the way I set up the coloured strip, it doesn't just show the past but also a vision of the future, with the seven-day period following today lit up in the colour it would remain if I didn't do any further exercise in that period. Marking off a day makes the entire following week shift up in colour in a way that's very satisfying. It's too soon to tell if it's leading to me exercising more consistently, but it feels like it is.
I did start playing XCOM 2 again, beginning a fresh game from the beginning. It's been going a lot better; I'm still failing missions occasionally, but it's been pretty apparent each time what went wrong and usually it's only taken a second attempt to get back on track. (The big recurring problem, which has been one of my faults ever since I first started playing XCOM and the source of a lot of strife that I've been prone to blame on the RNG, is a tendency to be impatient even in untimed missions and push on with unnecessary haste - which is a particular problem when, as it often does, it results in being faced with a fresh wave of enemies just when one has used one's last action point for the turn.) I've also been getting more resilient in the face of failure: there have been missions that have gone so badly that the me of a month ago would have given up entirely, but I've pushed on and turned them into successes; and there have been times when a mission did end up going badly, or even failing, and I've kept the result and things have nevertheless turned out well on the larger strategic level.
