Gone, returned

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

Feeling sleepy. Was up until 0500 catching up on RSS reading, which is probably going to have consequences. Of which speaking, my thighs and hips are currently being sore after yesterday moving cabinets and other large things, since my family had a new television cabinet delivered yesterday and that had to be put in place.

Been absent from posted writing a while. Was doing the NaNoWriMo thing, then later in the month mantic_angel was encouraging me to go back to World of Warcraft. Of course I was still busy with the writing so I put that off until the beginning of the month. We only have a limited data allowance, 12 GB per month without even an off-peak bonus, so I went and bought the Wrath of the Lich King expansion hoping to thereby bypass large patch downloads which would eat the whole thing up very quickly.

Of course that did not work. When I put the disc in I was informed my laptop did not meet the minimum requirements, so I ended up having to download those patches after all and we quickly reached the limit of our data allowance. That was before the first 2.5 GB patch was even finished downloading, and after a couple of days at throttled speeds when it finally did come to its end it turned out to have been a stalled installation anyway, so I had to download it over again. That was my occupation for the previous thirteen days, downloading patches for World of Warcraft and complaining about the slowness of the connection.

IM still worked for me, and surprisingly Skype did too, but for much of that time I was not even able to load web pages. So, absent. The downloads finished right about when our new billing month came and our connection speed was restored, so for now we are back.

I have not been doing any writing this month. I had intended to be doing editing of a story from last year (I still intend to be doing editing of that story) but felt I could not unless I had resolved various other tasks and backlogs which remain unresolved. I don't know how I will manage that or when I will feel like I am 'allowed' to get on with that editing. Since I haven't been writing I have been jumping around other, often unplanned creative projects. Outlined some concepts for a couple of magic systems (one based around people who work with books, the other based around sexual preferences). Renewed working with pazi_ashfeather on design for a shared setting (although mostly has been her work). Been stirring some ideas for classification schemes to facilitate using astronomy in secondary world settings without referencing Earth-tied concepts (like 'Jupiter' or 'Edgeworth-Kuiper belt'), which really needs to be properly written out for more progress to be made. Renewed concepts for converting creatures from Doom and other sources to the d20 system for a project, though I am thinking of scrapping that part of the project (or the project entirely, depending on mood). Most recently I started work on an ecology generator for D&D, although it will be a long time before that is done since I have yet to learn all the skills that project will need.

Which reminds me, am also proud codingwise to have recently managed a crude sort of search program. It may not be much good, but I mostly made it myself so I feel good about that. That's where we are up to now; my next task now net connection is restored is to catch up with jobsearching and reading so I can get on with more practical work on my projects.