Nerd Girl Thoughts

To do in February:

• At least 8 posts for #JustOnePercent.
• At least 4 posts unrelated to #JustOnePercent.
• Choose and start a game for So We Meet Again.
• Read / Listen to at least one book from my 12 Challenge.
• Finish up Lovecraft Country and check out Yellowjackets.
• Complete at least two stitching projects.
• Figure out a method of content planning that works for me, and implement it (carried over from January).

Well. I thought I was doing great in February, right up until it became time to check off things on my list! As it turns out, I was probably too ambitious with my goals, and I wandered pretty far off my intended track this month.

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GAMING

Nothing screws up a well-laid plan faster than spending over half of my gaming time on a game I really had no intention of playing at all! However, something made me try out Lost Ark and for the latter half of the month, that was pretty much the only thing I wanted to play. I’m still avoiding much of anything even remotely end-game-y and have started leveling some alts while I try to make some sort of sense of the 8 bajillion systems that the game has. I’m not making a lot of progress figuring things out, but at least the questing around is still fun.

As for the Just One Percent Project, I managed to get in 9 posts this month. For those who don’t want to do the math, that is just about perfectly on track to hit 100 by the end of January 2023. Only six show up in the chart above (Faraway: Puzzle Escape accounts for the unlabeled teal section) however, since one I played the last couple days in January, and two fell well short of the hour minimum I use to build the graph. However, Cozy Grove (which is on the schedule for me to post about in March) made up an not insignificant slice of the pie, and I expect that’s a pattern that might continue going forward. After all, there’s nothing in the rules that say I can’t get a bit of a jump on the play time even if I don’t intend the post in a given month.

As far as So We Meet Again, while I did choose and re-download my next game – Oxenfree – I didn’t so much as launch it during the entire month, so that one I’ll be carrying over into March.

Overall, gaming was back pretty squarely within my normal range of somewhere between 70 and 100 hours a month. I petered out on The Colonists pretty early in the month, and I tried to give The Medium a fair shake before it disappeared from GamePass on the 16th, but I found I wasn’t enjoying it nearly as much as I’d hoped. I’ve still been playing Stolen Realm on my co-op game night, and I attended our guild’s last pre-9.2 raid in World of Warcraft.

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WATCHING

While we still haven’t finished Lovecraft Country, we are only one episode from the end. This has been a hard watch, which makes even two back-to-back episodes a daunting proposition for me. Due to some real life scheduling snafus, my husband and I have had less dedicated TV watching time, so I think we only watched two episodes over the course of the month. I am interested to see how they wrap it all up in that last hour, but man, it’s not a lighthearted show.

And speaking of things that aren’t easy to watch, I must be on a kick.

I elected to watch Yellowjackets on my own, and in a way I regret it because hooboy, it is the kind of show I really want to pick apart with someone else. I generally struggle with any form of story telling that highlights people that are basically good and that the audience is meant to root for doing really terrible things, so I had been a bit unsure I’d be able to stomach this show about a soccer team of girls surviving in the wilderness for 19 months after a plane crash.

It turned out that – at least as far as Season 1 is concerned – I haven’t hit anything that I found that particular brand of disturbing, which is not to say that it’s not really really dark. While it’s tough to talk about the show in any detail without giving away the twists and turns that make it such a compelling drama, I can say that I really appreciated that – at least so far – there’s just a hint of flirtation with the supernatural, and a whole bunch of mostly relatable reaction to trauma. I don’t know that there’s a weak actor in the entire cast, and the soundtrack is perfection.

I binge watched all ten episodes over two days while my husband was staying with a friend who’d recently had surgery. In fact, the only reason I’m not 100% thrilled with the entire experience is that I thought it was a mini-series when I started it; I didn’t anticipate this being a story told over multiple seasons, and I’m a little miffed that it’s not even close to over.

Once I was finished, I did a deep dive into blow by blow reviews (which are full of spoilers if you haven’t seen it and freaking amazing reads if you have), and even found myself browsing the subreddit dedicated to the show. Still, I’d have a hard time recommending it to most folks due to the subject matter, but for me, it was a definite 10 out of 10. I plan to watch the second season as soon as all the episodes are out, which isn’t likely to be much before this time next year.

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EVERYTHING ELSE

I finally caught up on my January goal of figuring out a content scheduling solution and signed up for Asana. I really like how easy it is to set up, and the calendar view is great, but so far, I’m not finding it is actually keeping me more on task than my previous system of just remembering things. There is a free plan which I think covers all my needs, so I would like to keep up with it for at least a few months to see if I find that it actually is helping, or if it just ends up being one more thing I need to do. I did start rather late in the month, so it’s possible this will be exactly what I need to keep up with posting outside of #JustOnePercent things, and maybe even to keep better track of all the things I want to do outside of blogging.

I did not so much as pick up a book or open up Scribd after the first few days of February, and I really need to get back to that in March. Part of it was spending more time than usual at my computer, and part of it was that I did most of my crafting in periods of decreased concentration, so I defaulted to having some of my often-watched comfort shows on in the background while I worked.

I did manage a partial completion of my stitching goals, however. I did finish one of my two projects with April deadlines, but still have a bit to go on the other project I need to wrap up to free up that frame. I’m not panicking yet about being behind schedule, but I definitely need to dedicate a little more time to this going forward.