just recently moved to portugal, Tara has a job here for ten months (longer would be nicer but welcome to academia). living somewhere again is weird after more than a year, getting some old possessions out of storage. the Proteus artifact edition just arrived (it's lovely) and it's surprising that hey i can just keep this here, have it around to look at when i want to and not worry about it the rest of the time, not having to aggressively minimise the weight of everything i carry.
portugal seems pretty good. i don't have the language yet so that's a bit of a barrier but i can hopefully fit in a course sometime. (i really regret not having gotten more german out of the year i spent there but at the time i was stressing out burning myself to make a game nobody wanted anyway, bad times, i'm left with a complete vocabulary of german food but nothing else.). speaking of food, it's really good here. fresh vegetables from the supermarket, very cheap and very good quality. especially the fruit, like wow it is just so reliably amazing, in the uk i was just hardly ever buying fruit because it's often poor and sometimes terrible, here every fruit is delicious and also cheap. and like i just bought some locally grown cumin and it's so aromatic you wouldn't believe, it would be worth living here just to cook with ingredients like this. also there's cool music and stuff here, Owen recommended checking out Tribal Baroque who are amazing street musicians but just walking through the city centre there'll be something cool any time. also we saw Radiohead last week.
portuguese team won at sports a couple of days ago, it's not something i pay much attention to but it was kind of nice hearing all the expressions of joy around, nice sense of living in a community even though i don't really know anyone here yet and language barrier.
don't have a home internet connection yet so that's slowing me down some. it's hard to find something that's not demanding a 24 month contract, maybe ok for people who get to live somewhe long-term but extra annoying when you already have the inconvenience of being temporary. typing this on my ipad at a cafe, my pc wouldn't connect here for some reason.
blues dance scene here is tiny and infrequent so we were thinking of getting into another style? went to a balfolk weekend which was cool but then their regular local thing felt way less welcoming and also had volumes set to physically painful levels. went to one kizomba class but it was gendered as heck, really offputting. and again, painful. (seriously i like loud music and i'm often listening to it at volumes that will probably cause long-term damage but there's a difference from that to being immediately unpleasant.). there's a queer tango group so we'll try that, it could go either way, just want somewhere /safe/. blues isn't immune to theses problems but it seems like they're way way bigger in other partnered dances, wtf people
started working on an expansion for imbroglio. turns out to be even more work than i'd expected, i had a lot of unused effects partially implemented and i thought i could just throw those in but actually constructing a reasonable set of things that work well together is a big deal and the complexity ramps up a lot when there's more to choose from. so yeah this won't be that soon (which is fine because people are still figuring out the game itself). i had some more design posts to write too, i'll get to those once i have more internet.
thinking about starting a new project too. feels like way more of a commitment than it used to when i was making something new every week or two; spending months or years of my life to work on something plus unknown amounts of support work afterwards when platform controllers break everything. definitely want to make something /new/, i have more dense roguelikes i can make and i will eventually but not straight away especially with work still going on the last one. i've learnt and grown a lot since i last started making a game, maybe i want to reflect that somehow but maybe i shouldn't try, just see what comes out. kind of want to remind people that i don't just make one kind of thing, kind of want that to be true again. but also intensely aware of financials, now i'm known-ish for roguelikes i can kind of sell roguelikes, that doesn't translate to selling anything else, i'll make something new and amazing and everyone be sad it's not rogue again (hello helix), but hey that's still better than when i started and got no response at all. eh probably i'll agonise for weeks what to make, finally calculate the right answer, then accidentally make something else instead.
some good progress on shoulders, they're still a bit confused what to do if they're not hunched all the time but they're getting somewhere. some knee pain though, think i injured them a bit dancing on a concrete floor a few weeks ago and then my jandals slip a bit on the stones on lisbon footpaths so i end up holding tension in my legs all the time walking around here. the paths are actually fantastic for bare feet, lovely uneven surface, but people here sometimes get very upset and once a mall guard even threatened physical violence so i was trying to be careful.
ok this all for now
portugal seems pretty good. i don't have the language yet so that's a bit of a barrier but i can hopefully fit in a course sometime. (i really regret not having gotten more german out of the year i spent there but at the time i was stressing out burning myself to make a game nobody wanted anyway, bad times, i'm left with a complete vocabulary of german food but nothing else.). speaking of food, it's really good here. fresh vegetables from the supermarket, very cheap and very good quality. especially the fruit, like wow it is just so reliably amazing, in the uk i was just hardly ever buying fruit because it's often poor and sometimes terrible, here every fruit is delicious and also cheap. and like i just bought some locally grown cumin and it's so aromatic you wouldn't believe, it would be worth living here just to cook with ingredients like this. also there's cool music and stuff here, Owen recommended checking out Tribal Baroque who are amazing street musicians but just walking through the city centre there'll be something cool any time. also we saw Radiohead last week.
portuguese team won at sports a couple of days ago, it's not something i pay much attention to but it was kind of nice hearing all the expressions of joy around, nice sense of living in a community even though i don't really know anyone here yet and language barrier.
don't have a home internet connection yet so that's slowing me down some. it's hard to find something that's not demanding a 24 month contract, maybe ok for people who get to live somewhe long-term but extra annoying when you already have the inconvenience of being temporary. typing this on my ipad at a cafe, my pc wouldn't connect here for some reason.
blues dance scene here is tiny and infrequent so we were thinking of getting into another style? went to a balfolk weekend which was cool but then their regular local thing felt way less welcoming and also had volumes set to physically painful levels. went to one kizomba class but it was gendered as heck, really offputting. and again, painful. (seriously i like loud music and i'm often listening to it at volumes that will probably cause long-term damage but there's a difference from that to being immediately unpleasant.). there's a queer tango group so we'll try that, it could go either way, just want somewhere /safe/. blues isn't immune to theses problems but it seems like they're way way bigger in other partnered dances, wtf people
started working on an expansion for imbroglio. turns out to be even more work than i'd expected, i had a lot of unused effects partially implemented and i thought i could just throw those in but actually constructing a reasonable set of things that work well together is a big deal and the complexity ramps up a lot when there's more to choose from. so yeah this won't be that soon (which is fine because people are still figuring out the game itself). i had some more design posts to write too, i'll get to those once i have more internet.
thinking about starting a new project too. feels like way more of a commitment than it used to when i was making something new every week or two; spending months or years of my life to work on something plus unknown amounts of support work afterwards when platform controllers break everything. definitely want to make something /new/, i have more dense roguelikes i can make and i will eventually but not straight away especially with work still going on the last one. i've learnt and grown a lot since i last started making a game, maybe i want to reflect that somehow but maybe i shouldn't try, just see what comes out. kind of want to remind people that i don't just make one kind of thing, kind of want that to be true again. but also intensely aware of financials, now i'm known-ish for roguelikes i can kind of sell roguelikes, that doesn't translate to selling anything else, i'll make something new and amazing and everyone be sad it's not rogue again (hello helix), but hey that's still better than when i started and got no response at all. eh probably i'll agonise for weeks what to make, finally calculate the right answer, then accidentally make something else instead.
some good progress on shoulders, they're still a bit confused what to do if they're not hunched all the time but they're getting somewhere. some knee pain though, think i injured them a bit dancing on a concrete floor a few weeks ago and then my jandals slip a bit on the stones on lisbon footpaths so i end up holding tension in my legs all the time walking around here. the paths are actually fantastic for bare feet, lovely uneven surface, but people here sometimes get very upset and once a mall guard even threatened physical violence so i was trying to be careful.
ok this all for now
