P.P.S. It's very important to note that finishing something that I started yesterday does not give me the good feeling of doing a thing. I won't say that it has to be something new because it doesn't, but 'keeping my word' so to speak is not enough. Following through is a good habit, but is not the root of my "doing a thing"-type satisfaction.

Anyway, I'll cut to the chase. My trick, which I'll state despite a fear that speaking its name will cause it to dissolve, is to do work with the spirit of seeing/creating the meaning in it, and also to think in discrete terms, even arbitrarily and too discrete terms, of 'doing one thing' and to let myself feel satisfied with doing one thing.

This is where the droqever of it all comes in: I want to do one thing every day. That's my goal. If it's 9PM and I haven't "done a thing," then I usually have a 'thing' available to me that I have, for whatever reason, not been doing. So I will do it, even if it means I stay up until 3AM doing it. On the other hand, if it's noon and I've "done a thing" already, then I'll try to remind myself (gently) that I've already done my thing today. On the other other hand, actually forcing myself to get something done too early can have dire consequences. This isn't a game to minmax. If I treat it that way it's easy to trick myself into doing something that feels like it "should count" rather than something that genuinely satisfies.

There is something very reliable about this psychologically. For me, that is. As I say in my EGW 2024 talk, this is a process which I've developed for myself and for my brain's functional patterns. It is not general purpose advice, but operational instructions for my particular appliance.

P.S. Even as I write this of course I'm doing more than one thing in a day, but as I attune myself to the feeling of "doing a thing," I can tell that I've "done a thing" today and I could stop right away and feel very happy and satisfied, especially knowing that I'm currently operating under the influence of this habit and that tomorrow I'll get to feel this way again. That's really helpful for achieving the union of [Feeling good] and [Getting enough sleep]: I'm going to bed with trust in my heart regarding tomorrow-droqen's actions.

It occurs to me that Chapman's meaningness might be useful here, especially "A rainbow is a three-way interaction among the sun, water droplets, and an observer. // A rainbow is a physical phenomenon, but not a physical object."

This resonated.
Recently . . . I felt like I could sleep well, but I was also kind of sad, and I was spending a lot of time mired in theory. Then I started to do things again, similar to droqever but without the constant self-imposed pressure to release something every damn day. It's started to become really good, tapping into my droqen @ EGW 2024 talk... the important part is not doing something productive every day, but the other part, the feeling that every day is not wasted. If I am going to make or do something on a given day, I have to

1. BELIEVE that it is actually valuable/worthwhile to do in the long run
2. DO THE WORK to ensure that it is, or at least has a reasonable chance of becoming, actually valuable/worthwhile to do in the long run

These things are c l e a r l y   r e l a t e d.
One part of this is... understanding what it is that I value.
The other part of this is putting in the work to have justified faith that I will follow up and create/find that value.

Something else gate said, which maybe I should not quote because it was in a private Discord (PARADISE) but I'll do it and if he wants it taken down (hi gate) then he can tell me:

Quote from: gate88, again. . . meaning isn't inherent -- it's assigned
i'm my happiest when i'm assigning meaning to things, rather than searching for meaning
. . . i do have to believe the meaning on like some deeper level than just choosing
but also i don't think meaning is imbued in certain things and not in others

Quote from: @GateEightyEight. . . if i'm happy i stay up too late bc stuff interests me, and if i'm sad i stay up too late to try to find the joy that i felt i was denied during the day. i basically only get enough sleep when i'm unenthused about life.

~ tweet

from yesterday, a day of differentiated processes

- further terraforming Pit, but specifically working on (and finishing!) the swamp zone.
- tbt games.
- a design solution to a design problem in the spellcasting game. player still trapped in this one screen, but things are interactive, and in particular interacted with via text.
    - wrote a small newforum post about it: Solving Problems
    - "Problems must be solved in order."
- "WE ARE THE MEANING MAKERS". something about what gate88 said... making meaning...

I love to wear different hats but I have to remember to wear one at a time, which is actually a pretty nuanced act. I have to not only wear one hat at a time, but I have to wear a hat and not take it off in the middle of solving a crucial problem. The availability of such hats presents significant opportunity to put off real issues! The nuance is in noticing which issue is load-bearing at the moment. Problems must be solved in order.

I had a loose bad feeling, like, if you shake your phone around and it sounds like there is something rattling around inside... That kind of 'loose'... Something in the design was rattling around.

My response was to run away from the problem and:

1. Try to design a bit of narrative (Successful!)
2. Try to add some sounds / juice

I added sounds / juice and noted that it was distracting and annoying, so I removed it all, and suddenly realized that I had been putting off solving a deeper problem with peripheral, extradisciplinary work.

Finally, I solved the problem of the thing that had been rattling around the whole time. In that very first initial prototype, when you submitted your spell, it shoved you out of the 'text' view but now that the text view had more content, it felt sort of wrong. What if you wanted to interact with the text? The spells are doing a bit of dual duty, which may present new problems in the long run, but I made it so that submitting the spellword did not automatically kick you out of the text view.

The loose rattling around feeling stopped.

I made a small prototype where you type commands into a platformer and those commands affect the world. It worked fine, until I started to want to add text-based feedback, especially objects that you could "examine" out in the world. Then a whole bunch of problems cropped up.

Originally, you pressed a sort of 'meditate' button to enter the typing state, and once you had finished typing and submitted your spellword, it pushed you out of the meditation state and the text went and did its thing in the world.

Then, I had the idea to allow the player to type anytime they wanted. But I also wanted to display text when the player was somewhere interesting. So there was a window off to the left, and the text in that window would change depending on the player's position. It worked... alright. It was OK. The typing was also fine, but I had lost this oddly important feeling of positioning. In the original prototype, the place where you were standing was very important, and being able to stand somewhere meant that you could cast a spell from there. If you had to be a tile up, you couldn't cast the spell (at least not without creating a floor to stand on).

So that second prototype was a bit awkward and I left it on the cutting room floor without any further development. I had not even added any spells that did anything. It had ripped an additional hole-wrinkle in the concept, though. What if the 'thing' you were examining or near could affect your spells' effects, make new spells available, etc? It was a big question, and a big problem.

I made a third prototype two days ago. When you press 'tab' anywhere, you get a spell prompt. Same as the first demo: You can't spell freely in real time, you have to switch modes. I think it was a good idea to return to the original idea, and I'm not sure why I strayed from it for a second prototype.

In this third prototype there were also, immediately, 'points of interest' which would add detail to the 'tab' window and actually prompt you with a sort of "press tab" tooltip when nearby. (This provided an easy way to push the player into using the tab button, which was a dual purpose kind of thing.)

Then further problems began.

Sometimes . . . I forget what it's like to solve a problem, and I mean really solve a problem. I want to record this so that I have a reference point for what it's like to recognize a problem and solve it appropriately, completely.