Slow progress
This will be my second Blaugust 2023 entry, pretend I posted it before midnight.
Some days I can craft from nothing to some pretty complex shapes, and then there’s days like today, where I spent four hours to make what is a laughably simple shape. But it’s setting up things for further progress, and if I’d balked in advance at the time I would be spending to get this step done, then I’d never finish the project at all.
With any luck, I’ll have a new lamp design finalised this week, and this is the prototype of its socket.
Motivation
Oh no we’re jumping the shark really early this year if we’re talking about motivation on day 2.
There’s a lot going on this month, and I often find that having multiple interesting things on the go at once means I can bounce between them. I’m also aware that most of these challenges are self imposed so I’m not going to be stressing about missing any days. Still, it’s a fine balance between kindly letting myself off the hook once, and slipping out of the habits entirely.
Daily Habits
So, here’s something I’ve made no secret of – I cheat on some daily habits. I know that the sin of moving around the clock is worth it because losing a streak is demotivating, and the only person I’m cheating is myself (ok, maybe there’s people on the Duolingo leaderboards that would feel cheated but that’s really small change). And really, the accounting works out more favourably ultimately; by fudging the calendar a bit, I invest in the motivation for myself to get back on track the next day. This worked really effectively for my Ring Fit streak until two missed days in a row put a nail in its coffin. It’s extra hard to get back in the saddle after that… but I’m mostly sanguine about it now and about acknowledging that fitness isn’t a priority right now.
Anyhow, I’m backdating this blog post. And I’m going to be turning back the clock to do today’s Wordle. And hopefully I’ll return to both tomorrow with fresh enthusiasm.
Oh, cool! I’d love to know more about the processes/tools you’re using to make this lamp!
I also bounce around between interests to get Blaugust done – in fact, I have a bunch of posts about my model horses in my pocket that I can fall back on to fill in the holes between actual posts. Writing is the important thing, though!
Model horses sounds like a delightful fallback! I’ve definitely found that the years I’ve mostly done well at the blogging challenges are ones where I’ve either had a very rigid plan that I could stick to, planning posts in the days leading up to them OR they were the years that I said “eh, doesn’t matter if I even write something, let’s just put *something* up”. The recent advent of the Avian August challenge means that I’ll usually have to compromise between drawing a bird or writing something more substantial for the blog, but my original Blaugust challenge was designed to make me post more art here so maybe it all comes full circle.
I have incidentally done a writeup of one of my previous lamp designs, but it’s all text and no images. Over on Instagram I also uploaded a reel that shows some of the steps. Maybe a Blaugust project will be to tie these things together to finish off the guide properly.