At least 12 posts for #JustOnePercent.At least 4 posts unrelated to #JustOne Percent.Hit level 40 in CSD2 with all gold medals.- Complete the chapter story of Elsweyr, Greywood, or Blackmoor in Elder Scrolls Online.
Listen to / read at least 3 books total.- Read at least 1 print book.
- Listen to / read at least 1 book from My 12 Project.
Finish cross stitch with June deadline.- Hit 25% on one other current stitch project.
Get new project in a frame with all floss carded.Cancel Starz.Get crafting desk cleaned off and usable.
Apparently, in my world, May is grumpy and full of procrastination. I was super ambitious with goal setting, and by the end of the first week, I was worrying that I wasn’t going to get anywhere all month long. I was super stressed about, well, pretty much everything – projects at home, frustration in my social circles, and the whole entire state of everything in the U.S. and globally, and I just … couldn’t focus or relax. All of this led to my first setback in the #JustOnePercent project, which, in retrospect wasn’t too much of a setback – I did end up skipping over one game out of my planned thirteen for May, but other than having to shuffle some post days around, everything else I managed to get done.
But as much as I enjoy checking off entries on any sort of to do list, I never expect to complete all of my goals every month, so I’m not too upset where I ended up. My desire to play ESO again passed as quickly as it appeared, and I didn’t even open the launcher all month long. My stitchcraft goals were perhaps a little overly ambitious, but getting derailed mid-month while I waited for a magnifier light which got lost in transit probably didn’t help. I did better with books, but am still mostly disinterested in actually reading (as opposed to listening) or to diving into any of the books that have been recommended to me.
GAMING
Since receiving my Steam Deck earlier this month, I have accepted that my gaming hours chart will likely never be accurate again. I’ve made an effort to record hours spent playing stuff away from my PC, but I also am relying on memory and my own faithfulness to entering it in manually before I forget. I primarily played two games on the Steam Deck this month (Bugsnax and Atomicrops), and since I did not play either of them before the beginning of the month, I went with the hours played stat in Steam, but I would like to have a better system going forward because this is unlikely to always be the case.
#JustOnePercent
Non-Project Gaming
Once I dropped all the games that I played for less than an hour, I was down to only five games again outside of #J1P gaming. The first part of the month I was obsessed with Bugsnax, playing through it twice on GamePass before purchasing it on Steam and playing through a third time on my Steam Deck. The last week or so, Atomicrops has been my go-to portable game; I’m dreadfully bad at it, but for whatever reason, that’s not putting me off, and I am … oh so slowly … starting to see some improvement in my handling of the controls. This may be my gateway drug to twin-stick shooters. It’s a genre I’ve always been interested in, but I’ve never been able to manage the required controller dexterity.
Terraria is still the co-op game night game; progress has slowed a bit as the loot gods have not been kind to us, so we end up redoing a lot of boss fights. We have now moved into “hardmode”, which means a lot of time spent gathering resources and gearing up for the bigger fights that I know are coming and am sort of dreading.
Somewhere around mid-month, I missed my first day of Cozy Grove in over three months, and since then, I’ve found myself less and less interested in doing my ghost bear chores. Frankly, I’m surprised that this one lasted as long as it did, and having sunk more than 50 hours total into the game, I’d say I definitely got my money’s worth of out it, even if I never actually finish it. I only have a handful of ghost bears left to help in the base game, but I find the later characters far less interesting than the early game ones.
I feel like I played a lot more Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2 this month than my actual hours show, because there were a lot of sessions where I’d try two or three shifts, fail them all early, and walk away frustrated. If my count is right, I have completed 87 gold star shifts to get enough experience to reach level 40.
Gaming Related Spending
I made a handful of individual game purchases in May: Bugsnax, Abomi Nation, Recipe for Disaster, Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, The Forest, and State of Decay 2. Other than the Humble Choice bundle for May, I managed to not buy any bundles this month.
Most of my fun money this month went to other hobbies, but I still managed to spend $85 on gaming. This includes my Humble Choice subscription, my XBox Game Pass subscription, and six new games for the library.
EVERYTHING ELSE
READING: It really hasn’t taken too long for me to go from being basically disinterested in audiobooks to almost completely being disinterested in print. The anywhere anytime advantage of print pales in comparison to the hobby multitasking of audio for my current situation. I’m not really going places all that often, and I’m getting to enjoy two hobbies at once that engage different parts of my brain. The major downside is that I can read way faster than I can be read to, so finishing these four books took approximately 35 hours!
STITCHCRAFT: I learned an important lesson this month – while I might be fine stitching on 18 count with my readers on, 20 count is just enough smaller that I need more help to be able to see comfortably. I tried to push through with stronger readers, but those would make me queasy every time I looked anywhere that wasn’t my work area. I finally gave in a splurged on a magnifying lamp, and I took a few days off while I waited for it to arrive.
Amazon lost the first lamp I ordered, and when I had given up hope of it ever arriving, I ordered a different one. I feel like this is another sign from the universe to stop cheaping out on everything, since when they both arrived, of course the more expensive one suited my needs far better. I managed to rig it up to my stitching-in-bed setup, but it also was the impetus I needed to finish getting my desk cleaned off and usable. I expect I’ll be able to make more progress and be more comfortable doing it going forward.
WATCHING: I cancelled my subscription to two different streaming services this month – Netflix and Starz – and it sort of feels like the perfect time to have done so because it seems like all of the televisions in the whole house are off more often than they aren’t these days. I have been watching some Guy’s Grocery Games during dinner or while waiting for things to be done cooking, but I just haven’t been willing to put on anything that requires more from me.
RENOVATIONS: This time last year, we were in the middle of contractor hell, so I’m glad that what we’ve got left is mostly smaller projects. I didn’t make a lot of noticeable progress in my personal space (or honestly, anywhere else in the house) this month, but I’ve found that just small jobs of tidying and organization in here to be very satisfying, and I’m generally not a fan of slow work with little visible effect. I’m still planning to get some shelves up, and dithering about what art I’d like to buy for my space, but it’s really past time I start moving onto other things as well.
Nerd Girl Thoughts 