Chainsaw-armed municipality workers

With these weeknotes I track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on. They’re public so you can keep me in check.

Last week ended with a long weekend in the Ardennes with friends. The journey there, on Friday, was rough: the planned two-hour ride from Maastricht to Herbeumont ended up taking more than six.

Along the way we saw huge heaps of snow, trees toppling under the weight of that snow, chainsaw-armed municipality workers decimating those trees to clear the roads. We saw endless lines of stationary trucks and a snowplow that’d nearly fallen of a cliff, but we got there in the end.

We spent the next few days sleighing, building an igloo, visiting Bouillon Castle, playing card games (Quirkle, Love Letter), watching movies (Le Tout Nouveau Testament, The Revenant), drinking beer and eating beer cheese besides the fireplace. Good times.

The week’d started with a nice streak of hybrid-literary meetings. In chronological order, I met up with:

1. Dore, the creative writing student I’m coaching for her graduation project. Her interactive fiction is slowly solidifying, and I’m looking forward to the next version.
2. Liesbeth Eugelink, the creator of Bitterveld, an intriguing book app about Berlin. We got to know each other a little and exchanged our app development experiences, which was useful.
3. Sytze Schalk, creator of De Wentel, who I’ll be helping out this year as a literary/textual coach/advisor. I’m very interested in his world-building approach, and thrilled to be close to the metal.
4. Paul Boon, the writer of Castaway Paradise. Like with Liesbeth, we got to know each other and exchanged experiences.

Other than that, I…

• Visited Two Tribes twice. Once to talk about business stuff with Collin, once to work on RIVE. I added some text to the game, improving the mission goals among other things, but spent most time working on the marketing for Toki Tori 2+ for PlayStation 4, updating the game page and getting my blog post ready for publication at PlayStation EU (Toki Tori 2+ coming to PS4 next month, with added telepathic frogs) and PlayStation US (Why We Added Telepathic Frogs to Toki Tori 2+ on PS4, Coming 2/23).
• Listened to some audio SonicPicnic created for the Geometry Girl app. (I’ve also been demoing the current prototype to people, but that’s about it for the project right now. Steady work will continue soon.)
• Worked on a plan with Jasper and Nicolaas at VPRO.
• #hobbydevved without Hessel, working on my turn-based puzzle shooter. Most time was spent on movement patterns and a weird problem I ultimately, unsatisfactorily, fixed.

Average step count per day: 7.406
Average staircase count per day: 17
Average sleep per night: 6:31
Average weight: 87,6 kg