Oops...

Yeah...

The problem with basing goals on previous goals and previous progress is that sometimes the physical
realities of the work you're doing change so as to make existing standards inapplicable, and sometimes that happens so slowly you don't notice right away. For example, when I first set a goal for handwritten pages, way back in 2019, I was using an A5 notebook with 31 lines to the page. Then I switched to wide-ruled composition books which only have 24 lines to the page and encourage you to write bigger because the lines are wider. So I figured okay, I'll write two lines of text on each line of the page, and still count partials at 31 lines to the page, and the composition book being two inches wider shouldn't really affect anything because the margins are wider too. (Spoiler alert: they are not two inches wider). So now my definition of a "page" is 48 lines, longer lines, but it's fine, yeah? It's fine. And it sorta was?

Then I found some college ruled composition books, which I prefer when I can get them. This should have taken me closer to the original standard - they're 30 lines to the page and still two inches wider than the A5. Trouble is, I've gotten into the habit of squeezing two lines into each line, and I'm not inclined to stop now. So now I'm writing 60 lines on 7.48 inch paper and calling it the same amount of writing as 31 lines on 5.5". Yeah. I doubled the amount of writing I considered a "page" without noticing, because my blog posts kept getting longer to match, and because I don't trust myself not to take an excuse to write less. In recognition of this, I have doubled my accounting of handwritten pages this year, and will be counting pages of college ruled composition books as two pages going forward. (And wide ruled, if I should return to them, as 1.5). The lesson is that while it's important to be vigilant for excuses not to write, you've gotta trust yourself like, a little. 

The problem with completely new goals is that you have no idea what's realistic, or sometimes even whether you're measuring the right thing. In September, spending around 250 hours learning unity, and setting a goal to get about 100 "skills" as measured by their online learning platform, seemed pretty reasonable. 

In the intervening time, I have discovered the following: 1. I am not 236 hours worth of excited about learning to program. 2. I'm not at all sure Unity is well suited to most of what I want to do. 3. The rate at which you gain "skills" slows down over time, and I can't make heads or tails of what it counts. 4. I'd kind of like to try my hand at Pokemon romhacks. 5. There are perfectly good structured python tuturoals out there, I just wasn't good at finding them. 6. Making a Foundry plugin should be just fine, and you do that in like, Java - I don't need to make a dedicated VTT. 

So, the goal I've been calling "Unity time" is gonna be expanded to all time learning programming or game design. And I'm not gonna worry about it too much. We'll see how much I get done and scale subsequent goals off of that. May split it into programming and game design for next year, depending on how much time I end up spending on actually learning to code versus like, coming up with gym leader teams and thinking about user interfaces. For "skills" we're gonna be switching over to counting completed tutorial sections, since those are actually under my control and can be counted cross-platform. The lesson here is that just because you've learned not to spend $200 on supplies when you get a new hobby, that doesn't mean you've learned not to overinvest. 

These changes ought not appreciably alter the rate at which you get new blog posts, so look for Grave Peril Chapter 15 sometime next week. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!