Given that we’re never, ever, going to use the Starfinder stuff I set up in the Foundry VTT rig, I figured I’d get all that cleaned out. So I did. All of the systems, all of the modules, everything. In addition, I performed an upgrade to version 12.
It’s clean, it’s tidy, it’s ready for… somebody to make use of for running some kind of tabletop-RPG-type game. Dunno who, when, or what, but hey… if you need a Foundry rig and don’t want to shell out for it, I already did so maybe you won’t have to?
As we’re still in recovery from the move (which isn’t truly over since there’s still boxes and piles of stuff in various parts of the house), here’s a few bullet points of “how I’m doing at this point of my life”:
I sent the Phase 3 materials shipment up the Space Elevator a few play sessions ago. So, how has my overall approach to this new save (the “New Clear Plan”) gone so far?
In short: A qualified success.
There’s a neat light show when you send the Space Elevator up, but capturing the best single instant in a screenshot is too tricky for my skills.
What do we, as a family, get up to when we’re technically “done” with the game but want to wait out the production of Phase 4 products into the Space Elevator to fully round out the game save?
Well… this:
If you want to skip ahead to the really silly parts, go to ~2:15 (h:mm) to see Spud build The Ladder of Babel, and about ten minutes later he discovered the fun to be had with driving vehicles over jump pads and at that point pandemonium ensued… featuring airborne factory carts.
When I started with my current employer, lo the many years ago, I started taking notes in text files. One text file per day, every single day. I have (nearly) all of them, just in case I need to refer back to something I did [mumble] years ago. It happens!
It’s not a bad system, obviously, since it’s served me well. Text files are easy for the computer to index for searching, to name one useful feature.
I manually created a new file every day, and at the end of every month (and every year) I moved the previous month’s/year’s text files into an archive folder. Also, I pressed Ctrl+S a lot to make sure I didn’t lose information as I go. The “ongoing notes” and “to do list” sections I maintained at the bottom of the file needed copying over to each new document every morning.
At home (as it were) I’ve been using Obsidian, the notes tool which saves everything as a discrete Markdown file in its library structure, for all of my personal notes for a few months now. A Markdown file is just a text file with simple formatting markers that reads like plain text in Notepad++ but does fancier things in a product like, well, Obsidian (and others).
So at the start of 2024 I made the change: A new Obsidian vault in my “work” document folder, complete with automatic creation of the new day’s time file every day, already placed into a year-and-month folder structure. The carry-over notes and to-do list are separate documents “outside” the day/month/year structure but still in the vault. And since Obsidian saves changes as you go, I spend a lot less time hitting Ctrl+S. (Or, I will, once I break the habit…)
If you surround some text with a pair of equals signs on each side, you get a “highlight” effect. Handy, since I like to flag which time blocks I’ve entered in the ticketing system.
Was this really worth it? Who knows? Who cares! It feels like an improvement, and “a change is as good as a rest.”
It started with a spark and it ended with a bang, to (slightly mis-)quote a song from one of the new releases I picked up in 2023. I’m just going to scroll down through the artists list (sorted alphabetically) in MusicBee and point out the ups & downs, plus direct you to some highlight songs you may want to check out via the online service of your choice.
