Wanted to drop a quick status update for how things are going over here:

• Since I'm likely to be out of commission after my surgery on the first week of November tings are (understandably) compressed at work. Doing my best to keep focus and not try to do multiple things at once (that tends to overload me. Focusing on one task at a time. I've been using one of those cube timers with 5, 10, 20, and 30 minutes and that seems to give me the right balance of showing me that I need to focus and giving me a notification when to stop (I got them at Staples but apparently Staples site is incapable of me showing them to you, so they lose the sale. Bummer.).

• Speaking of focus sessions I've consistently done one each day since Monday for working on my game. I'm starting to get to that point where starting up a session is easy, but I'm going to press onward because I know this upcoming week is going to make that challenging, because...

• I start radiation treatments on Monday. I got my tattoos on the sides of my legs, and what I'm referring to as 'the worlds smallest "tramp stamp"'. It's my first tattoos so I'm calling that permission to get more. (That's how that works, right? Back me up here, tattoo aficionados).

• The feeling that I'm planning for being disabled is pretty jarring for me. It feels like planning for an emergency in many ways. And of course there's a lot of paperwork that needs to be filled out for things like disability insurance and the like. I feel for anyone who goes through this, and especially for anyone who continually has to fight a system where your worth is measured by how productive you are. This is going to be challenging for me.

• I've been listening to Sun Ra as of late. Definitely one of the artists that is challenging me, especially with the improvisational jazz sections. As I'm thinking more and more about improvisation (and possibly for how computers could learn to improvise things like story) I'm captivated by how certain structures can produce wildly different results.

• I'm thinking about what the future holds for me and realizing that I can only prepare but never dictate how things will work out. As someone who is my mother's child and tries to plan and prepare for everything this is a little disconcerting. But, it's also a great practice ground for uncertainty.

• I continue to think about how I'm going to do the 8-bit computer revolution game. I think I have the answer for how this will look. It's not quite as free-form as I would have liked but I think telling the story is more important than trying to teach folks the vagaries of how these machines came together and hope they can put the pieces together to tell that story. More to come as I noodle this one out.

That's about it for the moment. More as I know it.