Week 831

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

First of all, a health update. After finding out a month ago I probably had type 1 diabetes, the definitive blood test results came back from the lab last week. It turns out I don’t have type 1 after all, but type 2 instead.

I’m not sure why I got it, as I’m neither old nor obese, and I’m kind of disappointed that I won’t be able to testdrive all kinds of exciting upcoming technology, but it’s a lot less hassle for sure.

Instead of having to inject insulin multiple times a day, I now only have to take pills (metformin and glimepiride, if you’re curious). I also don’t have to ‘count’ my carbohydrates intake, and ultimately won’t have to measure my blood sugar level, at least not daily as I did last week. I’m even told that if I live (more) healthily, the disease’s effects might diminish.

What else? After some last-minute edits, nrc.next printed a nicely illustrated version of my piece on Flavour’s ambulance control room game on Tuesday (Blendle link). A day later, it appeared in NRC Handelsblad.

I also published some older articles on this site: De hersenkronkels van een game-auteur – Profiel van Michael Brough on Tuesday and Er is weer hoop voor Star Wars on Wednesday.

Popular science magazine KIJK put a list online of its editorial team’s favorite non-fiction books of 2014. I didn’t read all that many this year, but got to choose one anyway. As a precursor to what may amount to more work for KIJK in 2015, I visited Blender on Tuesday afternoon, to interview founder Ton Roosendaal for an article about 3D graphics.

Wednesday night was #hobbydev, my weekly game development hobby night with Hessel. I worked on start and end screens for my sea exploration roguelike, that now carries the working title Ages of Exploration.

On Friday, I met with my old Bashers buddies Robert Gaal and Menno Schellekens. Robert is now at Google and Menno is founding a startup in the educational business. It was great to catch up with both.

After that I met with Saskia Freeke, whom I got acquainted with gamejamming in Istanbul. She now regularly posts ‘geometric shapes’ on Tumblr, which I’m quite fond of, and which may have a place in my upcoming e-novel Ninja Girl. I’m even thinking of calling it Geometry Girl now.

Finally, I did more work on my hybrid writer’s research and my NOS op 3 report.