Turned 36

With these weeknotes I publicly track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Last week I spent all of Tuesday at the Dutch Foundation for Literature, for a new round of grant requests in the digital literature space. As a member of the digital committee, I attended six presentations, asked a lot of questions, and afterwards discussed who should be funded.

Then, on Wednesday, I had a meeting with fellow hybrid writer Liesbeth Eugelink, who made the Bitterveld app. We were asked by the Vereniging van Letterkundigen to do a small assessment of local pioneers in digital literature, so we talked about how we’d tackle this.

I also worked on my own literary app, Geometry Girl, applying a new story structure to my text, calculating pixel sizes, communicating with the various departments (code, art and audio) and trying out some color stuff. I can now easily, remotely update the source file with text and calls for audiovisual elements, which makes it a lot easier to experiment.

What else? I…

• Spent two days at Two Tribes, finishing the current round of story tweaks on shooter/platformer RIVE. Other than the final two missions, it’s nearly finished now. So I started doing things like adding comments for the voice-actor to the text document (an Excel sheet) and creating a questionnaire for testers.
• Did a final brush-up of Radio Laika #1, a new creation for literary podcast Ondercast. It’s a fictional pastiche of the radio documentary style found in something like Radiolab, centering on a sandbox and a traumatized young father. It was published on Saturday night, as part of Ondercast #25, and I want to make it a monthly thing.
• Edited the two final Hybrid Writer’s Podcasts interviews, with Hanna Bervoets and Annelies Verbeke. I recorded these more than a year ago and will finally publish them over the coming two weeks.
• Met up with Arjan and David to catch up over Surinamese-Chinese food and beers. Good times.
• Started playing Uncharted 4. It seems like the balance between a 3D-simulation in which you watch pretty scenery and listen to dialog, and an actual game you can play, has gotten a little worse. I’m still having some easygoing fun.
• It was my birthday on Friday! I turned 36.

Average step count per day: 9.229
Average staircase count per day: 19
Average sleep per night: 7:02
Average weight: 87,1 kg