Checking in for 2023-07-14:

• Did my weekly review this morning. My next-actions lists have a lot of things on them, but that's in part because I have a few things on there that are just reminders for myself to do later (update slides, add such-and-such to some web pages, upgrade sites, etc.).
• The nice thing about a weekly review is it gives me time and space to think about the bigger picture and note the things that are going on in my life. Things like waiting for a call about my prescription for Lonsurf, figuring out when to mow the lawn (weekends with nothing but rain really make this interesting), and other stuff like that. Also it gives me time to review the lists and knock off things that have already happened (toner cartridge for the printer already arrived so no more waiting for it).
• I'm working on being more mindful about my social media use. Using commands like home step or listhome <listname> step in tootstream allow me to see each of these things one-at-a-time and deal with them accordingly. I'm also working more on just dipping in, checking notifications, and dipping out. I'm finding that helpful for maintaining my focus.
• Stomach seems to be settling down a bit. My morning routine seems to consist of accepting that I'll be in the bathroom for a bit until things settle down. It's getting a little easier though.
• Still need to incorporate the feedback for the "Record Shop" game.
• Also working on figuring out a better system for managing which books I want to read and actually, y'know, reading the damn things. I've been shoving my books into my someday/maybe list with a special project tag of +read. I'm also realizing that I have way too many books. This, however, has not stopped me from actually getting more books. Q.E.D.
• I signed up for one RPG game for GenCon. I'm hoping that I can make a go of this and not have to duck-out at the last minute. We'll see what happens. Calling this a practice ground.
• Still working through the Assembly Language for the Atari Computers and the Mapping the Atari books. The more I dive into these systems the more I'm absolutely gobsmacked at how well-designed they were. Also taking a peek at the PAM Galaxian Source Code (Pam being the code-name for the Atari 5200 machine, which shares a lot of commonality with the Atari 8-bit home computers). How they managed to get so many things moving on the screen is quite interesting. It's a combination of player-missile graphics (sprites) along with a clever use of character sets and ANTIC 4 color graphics modes in the display lists. I do wish that the Atari800 emulator had the functionality of the Stella emulator to set debugging colors for the player-missile graphics so I could better understand which is a player-missile and which is a character. Perhaps I can munge the code to get some answers (e.g.: find the code that is tweaking the player / missile color registers and just override them for a debugging build. Apparently I can add things to my next-actions lists while doing a blog post. Who knew?)

More as I know it.