I stumbled upon a new Youtuber recently, Sara Dietschy and while watching one of her videos where she was going over one productivity tool or another she mentioned how the tool being more fun than the one she had previously used had positively affected her efficiacy in actually using that tool which ended up resonating with me quite well since I could look back at me switching over to Ghost from WordPress and notice myself actually being much more motivated to sit down and write something in the past few weeks than I have been in a long time.

Now, to be fair, this could just be coincidence and I seem to remember there being a similar effect when I originally switched over to WordPress but it's still something that makes a lot of sense to me especially as I'm rather curious about different tools and their application in the first place which is why I tend to do these experiments like testing different browsers or operating systems.

It has also gotten me thinking about how I could use this to overcome some of those motivation problems I've discussed previously especially since it feels like at the moment I actually do have several projects I'd like to get started on but during the rare times I actually sit down to work on them my interest in actually progressing fades really quickly at the slightest hurdle. I mean, looking at the kinds of problems I'm facing this kind of "hack" feels unlikely to actually have any long lasting effects but the mere act of actually getting started on and finishing several projects might be what ends up leading to the kind of self-improvement that will result in more lasting change so it feels like a worthwile avenue to at least explore a little bit—especially, as noted, in the light of the small success I've had with it in the moment in the realm of blogging.

The problem, then becomes, actually figuring out what my pain points when starting these different projects are and how I would go about solving those or making the tools I use to create these project more fun to use, yet looking at some of the problems I'm facing the tools really aren't a problem since I do already enjoy using them to a degree, it's more the challenges I'm facing or the projects I'm embarking on that are focused on bringing perhaps a more long term sort of gratification which I'm unused to working with.

A good example of this, is I have a website for watching movies together with friends that I've built and I want to do something of a refactoring in the code and add a few features—namely short clips as previews of the movie as well as customizing the video player a bit from the standard controls provided by browsers. Yet when I got started on doing this today and yesterday I could barely get started with the whole thing before I ended up frustrated I suppose at the seeming lack of progress along with the list of tasks still ahead of me even though I had a pretty clear vision of what to do. Maybe exactly that is the problem, that once I have the vision of what to do and how to do it, the project stops being exciting and just becomes a matter of actually implementing what I've already thought out and that just feels boring and not something I want to engage with, yet I know from experience that things are rarely as straightforward as they seem and there is almost always something lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce and actually present and interesting challenge to solve.

But maybe that's the other problem, I just want the thing to work and not actually have to do the work of getting there, especially if there are hidden roadblocks on the way, and maybe the solution to both of these problems is learning to internalize and remember the joy I have felt previously when finally solving those problems so that they go from being demotivators to being motivators in the long run.

What I am also noticing, writing all of this and thinking back at it, is another factor and that is time, namely the times that I have actually set aside a block of time in order to accomplish something are the times where I have been more successful in getting those things done as opposed to the times where I somewhat spontaneously get motivated to start doing something. So it might be that all I need is to actually unplug a bit so I don't have the fear of distraction running in the back of my mind and set aside times where I decide that this is the time I try to solve this problem.

I spent a bunch of time getting WordPress into a state where I could run it headless and then just a short while after I decide to switch over to Ghost anyway because it just ended up feeling like the slicker solution I guess. There were some things that annoyed me with the WordPress setup to be fair, chief among them the fact that all the images hosted there were getting copied over on each deploy which felt very wasteful even if it wasn't time I spent actively waiting for the task to complete since it was done automatically in the background and Ghost seemed to have the more straightforward integrations to get the images hosted on some other platform so that they didn't need to be part of the deploy process.

Beyond that, the writing process is largely similar, if perhaps a bit cleaner of a default editing view in Ghost than WordPress though that is easily enough configurable for it to not really be that big of a difference. The separation of the admin/publishing side and the published website itself is also more clear in Ghost, which means setting up the whole thing for headless operation was considerably smoother than it was with WordPress which somehow makes me trust the whole thing a bit more even if I personally didn't run into any problems with WordPress or the setup really. To be fair, I am now slightly less reliant on any sort of plugins which is a boon in itself, since while they are one of the greatest strengths of WordPress they are also the source of many of its problems which makes me a tad more confident that the current setup will be easier to maintain than the previous one if only marginally.

This change of backend however, has also had me thinking about potentially changing the frontend as well, since one of the primary reasons I went with Eleventy originally was the fact that I could copy over the images from the backend during the deploy but as that is no longer necessary with them hosted off-site I might end up using one of the other static site generators I looked into but discarded due to them lacking this functionality. I'm especially curious about this since during my experimentation Gridsome and to a lesser degree Nuxt really caught my eye since I have had some previous experience building sites with Vue and being able to bring that familiarity in to this as well would be a nice bonus, along with their rendering fanciness really contributing to making the site actually feel a bit snappier which to me is one of the main points of using a headless instead of traditional CMS in the first place.

That project is still ongoing however, so I'll have to update the state of it at a later date if I actually do end up switching, since to be fair for the most part Eleventy is doing its job in a nice and quick manner and there is no real need to switch—though I am ever the tinkerer, never quite satisified with every detail and always curious to test new things so that probably ends up being the primary reason I decide to test something different in the future.

I'm recently noticing that now that I am no longer spending my days playing RPGs since I finished Pillars of Eternity and stopped playing Pathfinder, my general mood is somewhat more down that it was in the weeks prior. It feels like it's related to my, shall we say, revelation at the end of playing those games, namely that I am still somewhat in the search of purpose to my life and now that I'm done with playing those games those feelings of aimlessness are surfacing again.

All of this then unfortunately affects other things poorly, things that I want to get done but may not necessarily feel are core to myself. Examples of this being, my recent difficulties preparing "properly" for our D&D sessions, and while that all ended up going well I still constantly have the feeling that I should be doing more. It is to be fair probably only extra pressure that I am putting on myself completely unecessarily, but it is still something that I end up thinking about.

Another thing it affects at the moment is initiating or accepting invitations to participate in activites that I do enjoy, at the moment the example being mythic+ where I at the moment would have the opportunity to participate somewhat more often but find myself having to convice myself to accept the invitation even though I know that I enjoy the activity which is a somewhat frustrating feeling. I also ended up not participating in the raid tests on 6th and 7th, though to be fair on the 6th it was more down to the servers not being available at the start but on the 7th I just needed a break from people and consequently ended up participating in neither the raidtest nor the achievement run that were planned for the day.

In the middle of all of this, I'm also considering starting my own personal NaNoWriMo, since I'm not sure I want to wait that long nor am I sure that I actually want to do it quite as intensely as the real deal, so more of a personal writing sprint or goal than actually anything to do with that event but anyway. Yet two things are somewhat hindering this, primarily as noted the feeling of lack of motivation to actually get started, which I think is then amplified through a fear that I won't make it, especially if I were to try and follow the goals of the actual event which then ends up demoralizing me before I even get started, which to be fair probably is a bigger part of the whole lacking motivation thing, fear of failure. Maybe it's all even intertwined, in that my fear of failure leads to being fearful of caring about things which leads to not having many things which are important to me which leads to me not having a force driving me forwards? If that all is the case, what are my next steps towards working to rectify this problem and how do I intend to solve it? That I do not yet know, but I think coming closer to identifying it is the first step in being able to actually solve it.

So it slowly seems we are creating a tradition of playing D&D, though with another group than mentioned in the previous post. It’s a bit different since we are running this game online over VOIP and without cameras, so there is a certain amount of communication lost through that, but still it has been quite fun so far. We have even managed to recruit a new player who decided not to join us on the initial session but coming in for the second on and staying for the third, so new convert, yay!

Preparation is still an aspect that I find highly challenging, since it’s hard to know in which direction the players want to go so I don’t really want to overprepare things that are unlikely to end up happening yet simultaneously I often notice how unsatisified I myself am with things I end up improvising on the fly—not that any of the players seem to have minded at any point so far but still! Also the whole “keeping the world consistent” thing is much easier when I actually have some idea of what’s going on beforehand, though maybe that’s an aspect that I personally focus on more than the players themselves do.

Simultaneously, that all can just be solved by taking good notes while we are playing of the things that I'm coming up with on the spot, and our last session actually ended up being mostly improvisation on my part since while I had accounted for a bit what was going to happen if the players ended up going in the direction they finally headed, it wasn't the "primary" story path—more akin to a sidequest or the like—and consequently the world that they encountered on the way there wasn't overly fleshed out yet from what I can tell the players seemed engaged and interested in the characters they encountered while doing a bit of investigation on a missing person in the village and their suspicions even gave me new ideas for potential further stories if they decide to go that way even if I had previously had nothing planned for these characters. Though maybe I also need to be careful of confirming any suspicions players may have to often since if jumping at every shadow yields something dark the world might feel a bit more bleaker than it is.

This last experience though has significantly calmed my nerves when it comes to actually running the game, since it was an opportunity to see that I can actually manage the situation coming up pretty well of having to think on my feet and just kind of blurt out things that are forming in the moment which while I knew was important going into the whole dungeon mastering thing, was something I felt really shaky about especially hearing the amount of preparation some dungeon masters choose to do before their sessions that I haven't really commited to myself—I mean, I try to prepare as good as I can but it just feels very difficult since I don't know here the next session will go. Still, this does mean I'm not as stressed for our upcoming session and am actually rather looking forward to it, well, moreso than I was before.

This past week I ended up participating in some more raidtesting along with a quick run of a Mythic+ dungeon as well as some quick addon development. I finally ended up getting frustrated enough with the healing experience on the beta, and ended up seeking out and fixing the couple of errors I was encountering with Clique in order to be able to actually play the beta with sensible keybindings. The fix was actually rather minor which I’m happy about since I’m not overly familiar with the Clique codebase and since it means I get to test the new expansion properly, though it does mean I’m sligthly frustrated to have waited so long to give it a shot since all these problems could’ve been over ages ago. To be fair, during the fixing I was relying on reports from other people regarding what changes Blizzard has made to the API which might not have been available as easily at a earlier point in time, so maybe it was so easy because I ended up waiting so long to fix it.

Mythic+

The dungeon we did was Halls of Atonement and it ended up rather surprising me with its ease especially since I was still figuring out the keybindings at the time. To be fair, we did not end up managing to complete the dungeon in time and seemingly the only affix that was active was Fortified even though it stated it was a +10 dungeon so maybe all of the scaling was completely broken but still. If it was indicative of what a +2 will feel like come release with some heroic blues it all seemed to be in line with expectation.

Raid testing

The past week I also participated in all of the raid tests, rather than just the one I had participated in the week previous, and well, the new raid is looking rather nice. Sure, there are tuning problems and bugs but that's what we're there for.

The most fun boss of the bunch so far to me seemed the Council of Blood, I liked the flair of the intermission where you have to participate in the dance since from the little story I've played so far it felt like it fit the theme of the place perfectly. Beside that though, the fight did feel rather hectic and I'm really curious to see how it ends up on mythic since it already had so many things going on—maybe this is one of those cases where we only get the numbers tuned up and no real additional mechanics. I might be biased though, since it's the only boss in testing these raids so far that we have actually killed.

My definite least favourite boss of the bunch was Shriekwing, which seems to be the first boss of the raid—gets a bit confusing at times since there is actually another bossfight that takes place in the same room and you just get ported to the correct boss anyway. There was an annoying tendency on this boss for people not to be in line of sight of me which is understandable since it plays such a huge role in the fight and dodging out of the boss' line of sight at the correct time is crucial, but it does make for a very annoying experience as a healer. Luckily, this is the first boss of the raid so it will probably be trivial anyway but those reclears could get a bit annyoing. The second phase also seemed like it could be interesting, the boss basically went into a rage which you needed to wait out where it took almost no damage and periodically did a sonar pinpointing people which you had to hide from.

The other two bosses, Huntsman Altimor along with the Stone Legion Generals, somehow felt a bit more bland though still fun even if the Huntsman once again introduced the twist of there occasionally being an add that needed healing instead of just being able to focus on the raid. This is probably also partially due to the bugginess and tuning of these two encounters, so final judgement is as always reserved until mythic.

Holy

For this week I also took the opportunity to test out holy a bit more again and I have to admit it does feel rather good to be playing the spec again even if I at the same time feel it is probably not the most sensible choice. It all does still feel rather weak and I don't have nearly as much time to dish out damage as was available in Legion but there is still a familiar comfort to it all. To be fair, it's probably also the better choice for new content where the damage patterns are still rather unknown.

All the returning abilities have made it a bit more interesting to figure out what is the optimal play in different situations as well, so that is a welcome change.