2025-W24 EOW Report

Anti-Goal Cycling

• Struggling with scene five of prj:WAITE. Yes, I got all the backstory stuff figured out (finally) at Starbucks last Saturday. But struggled to get into the actual scene this week. I’m in the middle of it. I’m realizing this is actually the climax and not the sixth scene. I’m realizing sixth scene might just be a denouement now. Deadline is probably get something to Cat EOW. I think I can hit it still. The last two scenes might not be what I want it to be exactly. OH RIGHT. Because of the story dev work I did last Saturday, I spent a good two sessions fixing scenes one through three to get all the timelines correct. That’s why progress was slow. That makes more sense now. And then, I lost out on this past Saturday, because I needed to get something done for Client B. Right. Order of what happened much more clear now. OK. So this week’s goal? FINISH.
• Last night was sessions E0C of Fabula Ultima (2023). That’s three sessions of world building, character building, and prologue now. This game is… insane. So much laying down the story dev foundation. I will say though. The characters we’ve created are so much more interesting than anything else I’ve played. Except for one potentially min-maxed mechanical golem… everyone else is purposefully not a fighter. In 5e, we’d be all dead inside the first session. Or not. Since it’s 5e, but you get what I mean right? Fabula Ultima is genuinely story-based.
• Wrapped up The Great Cat Massacre this morning. Need to reread the first three essays again. Just such an interesting and alien thought process. To think in ritual all the time.

Four Thousand Weeks

• Eldest turned 18 on Tuesday. Ended up not doing anything because he had a drum line performance in front of the major of Port Moody, and then another school concert the night of. There are interesting “doesn’t repeat, but rhymes” cycles here. I’m fairly certain on my 18th, I took the day off from working at McDonald’s, and had a band rehearsal. A Saturday? No… just checked. A Sunday.
• Monday was horrible. It was a twelve hour day. I was trying to get a lot done on my to do list, and one of them meant reaching out to someone, and what I thought would’ve been a 10 minute “do this, then do this to get data” download, turned out to be an hour long rant on lack of data integrity and poor staffing issues. And then after that, I still had script reviews to do and a report to prepare for. A weekly report that I am now in charge of that I had never done before and on top of that, came with unreliable data based on unrealistic metrics. And because of that crammed Monday, and the liminal space in my head on Tuesday due to my eldest turning to a legal adult, the week just kept propelling forward in a never feeling like there’s enough time to do anything and everything is late manner. There was trash to take out, mole hills to stare at, ants to genocide, recycling that piled up, dinners that were eaten late. The constant, interminable, relentless small abrasions of quotidian life. By Thursday, I was crashing. Literally crashed on the office couch for an hour. Deep sleep crash. Not a light nap.
• Saturday breakfast at Cora’s. Afterwards, wife and girls to the mall, some ortho, some shopping. Eldest got an Apple Watch from granddad, does not want it, exchanged for gift card, but is waffling non-stop on what to do with it. iPad? reMarkable? No, didn’t like the e-ink. iPad? Use cases dwindled as more waffling continued. Replace parts in that beat up server my brother gave him to fool around with? Maybe. But not new parts. Old parts. ANYWAY, I did my Saturday errands of groceries. I won four free plays in my weekly lottery tickets… so I’m going to look like a fucking addict next week when I check seven or eight different tickets at the barcode scanner. Outside, approached by an older lady on where Terry Fox Secondary is… literally cannot figure out where it is based on walking distance because why would I know that? I drive everywhere in the suburbs. Offer her a ride. This is not unusual for something I would do, but it did feel unexpected in the moment. Her 15yo grandson is on the basketball team and is playing some game or another. Her son is a 50yo doctor or something. GenX, so started late I guess. Later, wife locked herself out of her Visa due to incorrect PIN entries. I’m calling and chasing down Visa on multiple calls. Up until Fabula Ultima.

Story Introspection

• Saw Jason Aaron’s Batman: Off-World on DCUI and it looked ludicrous and absurd enough for me to read. And it was. Batman. In Space. With aliens. Fighting slavery. I mean… it doesn’t get more batshit crazy than this. And in the capable hands of Jason Aaron, you get a solid story with dark humor and even romance. I later find out that these aliens were not made up, but are in fact, part of DC’s cosmic history because I read Omega Men (1984) #3, the first appearance of Lobo. I just can’t help myself as I lean more and more into the inherent absurdity that is comic books. Humanoids flying in space like they’re torpedoing with outstretched arms above their heads is just the dumbest fucking thing ever and I love it. Genuinely unabashedly love it. I wish Omega Men was collected in print somewhere. It just reeks of 70s pulp.
• Want to watch more season two of Andor, but now I’ve somehow got trapped into an unspoken agreement where I have to watch it with my middle one.
• No major comments on the current pulls. Need to emphasize again I think my curation and refining my ability to distinguish what I like/dislike has reached a pretty good synchronization. Like, I know I probably won’t care for the new Emma Frost, but will give it a shot anyway. Like I will thoroughly enjoy Leah William’s Gotham City Sirens while everyone else on the Internet will complain about it. I also know what “epic writers” I’ll always enjoy and savour and read last (V, Hickman, Gillen, Ayodele, some Camp, some Thompson, some Ewing). And I’m fairly certain on how much I’ll enjoy purely out of fun (Simone, Ewing, Adams, Campbell, Rosenberg). I’m also fairly certain that I can probably reduce my entire pull list to twenty books by September and focus more on back catalogue stuff like DC Compacts, Finest, and Compendiums.

Archive of all EOW reports here