Too many projects...

I have too many projects! I've mentioned a few that are hobby related here; my SWTOR recording of all my new characters that I created specifically to record, so I'd have a record of their stories when the game inevitably and eventually folds. And this is a big job;  I've got twelve characters that I'm doing this with, after all! And its not just the playing and recording, because then I have to edit the videos. That's a major undertaking, involving what will eventually (if it hasn't already been) hundreds of man-hours of work. Fun work, to be sure, but still—the hours are real. I've spent more time this last week on this than any other hobby endeavor, but I've got quite a few new videos (on YouTube too) to show for it.

I've also talked about my plans for Dark Fantasy X, including finishing the CHAOS IN WAYCHESTER 5x5, and then eventually doing the next two 5x5s. I'm only about half done with that; maybe less. I've done three of the five, but there are then the character specific columns that I want to do for every member  of my iconic "sample" four-member PC group. And I might rejigger slightly the groups; rather than having two groups with two core members and two not quite as core members, maybe I'll start with all of the core members together and then propose that they eventually split into two groups who both pick up new members. Either way, I envision that the work I have to do after creating all five of the columns of the 5x5 will still be significant.

I've also had a revamping of the monsters list from Dark Fantasy X on my to-do list for a while, although that's a back burner project that I'm honestly not really thinking about yet. And my Space Opera X doesn't have a monster/foe list at all yet (although I presume NPCs will be much more important than monsters there anyway. Maybe an appendix with a bunch of statblocks makes more sense for that game. Although it'd be really useful for Dark Fantasy X too, and honestly, I prefer to run either game as more humano-centric rather than with a monster focus.  The monsters are meant to be major set-pieces.)

Of course, monster is a bit of a misnomer. I have low level NPCs in my monster list, as well as a large variety of fairly mundane yet potentially either dangerous or useful animals on the list too. I've got some rather radical ideas here and there on how to structure the document, so there may be bigger changes coming besides just a thorough review of the stats in light of the changes in chargen, but either way...not in the short term. That's a medium to long term project. Closely tied to it are major updates needed for Space Opera X  and even Hack Fantasy X, the game that I don't really spend any time on at all. (I doubt that I'll start spending lots of time on it, but at least one update to really get me from Fantasy Hack m20 to Hack Fantasy X is probably warranted, at which point I can put that game "in storage" as usable and complete as is.)

And I've still only done one race deep dive; the Hyperboreans. I still have Atlanteans, kemlings, orcs and goblins (which I'll treat together since they are two morphs of the same race and really only have one shared history), woodwoses, jann, and seraphim or seraphs, and I probably ought to discuss the various human cultures in more detail too.

Of course, on top of all of this, I've just started a new job. I'm still getting all of my benefits set up and transferred from my last job, but I need to roll my 401(k), figure out how much to contribute, and turn off my severance health insurance now that I just got my new health insurance set up (actually, maybe  I'll wait until my new insurance cards show up before doing that, just in case.) So the personal front has been pretty busy too. On top of that, I have a daughter getting married at the end of the year. I'm not super involved in the planning for that (just the paying for it), but it's not nothing.

And my oldest grandson, who just turned two this summer, asks my son (his dad) to talk to Bapa and Ma! a lot, so he calls to let us video call him every other day or so, for a good half hour to forty five minutes. Although I am sometimes in the middle of something when that happens, I usually drop it to talk to him. Bapa is, of course, his best pronunciation of Grandpa, and Ma! is a funny story. My wife was a little bit sad that he would say Bapa, but she was just "Dat" for "that" when referring to her; what he says when it's not motivated to try and pronounce the word or name of something. So she was trying to really emphasize the word grandMA, saying it like that to differentiate it from grandpa.  Since she emphasized the MA part so much, he started calling her Ma! the way that she emphasized that last syllable. Which made my wife very happy, as she now has a unique name, and she thinks the genesis of it is kinda cute.

On top of that, there's of course all kinds of other things. We're active at church, so we have stuff going on there from time to time. We're in the middle of the fall harvest season, and although I live in a suburb of a city famous for its manufacturing, there are a lot of countryside apple orchards and cider mills and other fall stuff to do that you don't want to miss, because fall is my favorite season, and honestly it doesn't last long enough as it is. I have friends that we hang out with, we have other things to do with my daughter while she's still at home (we're going to go see Black Adam tomorrow night, for instance.)

Anyway, the point is that I'm not grinding out blog posts, and there may be delays on these announced projects. If there's anything that I've been grinding, it's the stuff on SWTOR that I wanted to do. Galactic Season 3 launched last week. But it was a delayed, late launch due to some issue or other, so I couldn't start grinding until Thursday.  So, in typical fashion, when I'd already mentally committed myself to grinding stuff on SWTOR, I grinded something else: I still had two craft skills that were stuck in the high 600s and not at the maximum of 700 which I needed to finish (and due to a stupid oversight on my part, I was stuck on and couldn't figure out for a few days.) I finally finished the reputation track on the three reputations that I had at Champion and wanted to get to Legend; Section X, Yavin 4 and Makeb. And because I had two new characters that needed gear, I built up a bunch of stuff for them so that they can rock fine hand-crafted (by my other experienced characters) stuff underneath their outfit designer custom appearance weapons. I actually did that with several of them as I was going through the game for the first time, and building up my craft skills in the first place (although that was before weapons were in outfit designer, so you actually saw the crafted weapons). But crafting a full set of 10-75 level weapons and off-hand gear for two characters by two characters (because one needed Armstech and the other needed Artifice) is a little bit tedious and time-consuming. Grindy. I'm finished with it now, but I spent more time over the weekend doing that then I thought I might.