As per usual, I’m several days ahead of a daily update schedule using the “chapter-by-chapter review of a book” technique, which has a spectacular easy-to-produce*actually-good-content product, so I’ll probably be doing more of that in between working on longer term projects. I’ve decided to put the next book I’d like to read to poll, and in the interests of having the results of that poll in before I run out of Threadbare content, I’m sticking it here. The poll is here, and details about the options are below the break.
Month: June 2018
Threadbare: Going In Circles
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 introduces us to the idea that it is possible to offer a public quest, which Caradon (the guy what made Threadbare) does, specifically, a quest to clean all the decaying corpses out of the basement. So apparently corpses rot in this world, rather than remaining preserved forever or dissolving completely after a fixed amount of time, both of which were also plausible for a LitRPG world up until now. The chapter also opens with some more familial conversation, and it’s still kind of petty and mellodramatic, but I’m wondering if maybe it’s supposed to be the emotional core of the story? Because the emotional core of this story is a one-armed teddy bear tearing his own arm off while yanking a shelf down on top of a marauding rat king. It’s a Rocky Balboa underdog story. To the extent that Celia is important at all, it’s because she can play the role of the kid in this picture:
Adding in family drama on top of that would be fine, but it has to be, like, actual drama. Not this “I can’t believe you had me doing laundry when you had a spell for it this whole time” shit, particularly since as far as I can tell Caradon’s position on this is in fact completely indefensible. He’s apparently just making his daughter do an unnecessary chore purely for the Hell of it.
I mean, look at this:
She snorted laughter into his chest, as she hugged her Daddy for all she was worth. “In fact, I’m proud of you for confessing what you did… what you THOUGHT you’d done. So I’ve come to a big decision.”
“Yeah?”
“I was planning on stepping up your lessons, telling you some of the things I’ve been holding back. You’re mature enough to handle the truth now, I think.”
The context doesn’t make it any more impactful. In fact, probably the opposite is true: Without any context, you can imagine that this is coming at the end of a conversation where some kind of actual character development has occurred, but no, Celia has confessed to something we didn’t even know she wasn’t supposed to do until she was confessing to it (she left the cellar door open), and this is apparently the impetus for Caradon to start teaching her the big girl magic, for some reason. Particularly coming on the heels of chapter 3’s “I could do laundry effortlessly but instead it’s your job to do it by hand because of reasons,” I am not feeling a single shred of this family dynamic.
What Happened To Beltane?
Those of you who know your pagan calendars will know that by the time this post goes live, we will be closer to Litha than to Beltane, and that I just didn’t post a Beltane update. The reason for this is mainly that from Ostara at the end of March to Beltane at the beginning of May, I didn’t get a whole lot done. This isn’t entirely my fault, because due to certain events I would’ve expected to be less prolific than normal anyway, but it’s still mostly my fault, because what hiccups and interruptions did occur do not really account for nearly the drop in output that occurred. This is ultimately not a huge deal. Creative output waxes and wanes a little sometimes, and April was a bad month for me. It does mean, however, that I didn’t have much to report at Beltane except disappointment. I am behind on my word count, not finishing up Vestitas on schedule, and the only upside is that Petals and Thorns is recycling parts of Project Regina.
One of the rules I established for myself while clearing my backlog is that if a new project has significant enough overlap with the old one that one could plausibly seem like a retread of the other, it’s fine to call them actually the same project. The amount of recycling going on between the original Project Regina and Petals and Thorns is limited enough that it’s a huge stretch to say that Petals and Thorns is just resetting Project Regina to the beginning and starting over rather than its own thing with a couple of elements in common, but Project Regina is also for an audience that turned out to be deeply toxic over the past year and a half, so I don’t care. Even then, though, most of the work on Petals and Thorns happened after Beltane during May.
One thing that happened on the actual day of Beltane, May 1st, is that I started poking around with Habitica. It’s not the first “gamify your life” thing that’s ever been tried, but it’s working better for me than most have. I think a significant part of it is that you have HP to lose if you miss daily habits, which gets incentives working both ways. I’m trying to avoid ever running out of HP (the penalty for doing so is not actually a big deal, I’m just trying to avoid it on the principle of getting as far as I can on Iron Man mode, as it were), which means I get XP and damage on the boss I’m fighting for ticking off a daily habit successfully and lose HP if I miss one. It’s all on the honor system, of course. I can claim to have done something I haven’t, or even cheat more subtly by giving myself vague goals that are easy to check off with five minutes of effort because technically I still tried. Habitica has no way of checking whether your goals are SMART or VAPID. Obviously, the secret to making things like Habitica work is to not cheat, even though it’s easy. So far it’s working for me, but some people might find that a system so easy to fool isn’t a satisfying reward system. My subconscious is wired to recognize ‘cheating to victory’ and ‘doing the normal way’ as separate accomplishments, so the first being dead easy doesn’t cheapen the other, but not everyone’s will be like that.
Chamomile Has A Blog 