The Newsblade ~ The Notebook

[2 new Swords episodes]

Thank you for all the birthday wishes this week!
And thank you to Praedyth for buying me a game on Steam! :O

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I recently became an Uncle - now I'm going to be... an Uncle again! My other brother is starting a family too.

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The Quest Sprout drawing contest didn't get a ton of entries, and we have lots of prizes (including a Momma Sprout plushie!!) so I'm going to extend it by a few days

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[RANT]

I'm going to try to do some self-improvement stuff for a bit, like reducing my sugar and caffeine intake. My health has been... sub par... and I'm falling behind on life admin a bit.

Also leaving the TV off throughout the day, because I just have YouTube running and every 5 minutes I have to make a micro-decision about what to watch next. I'm plugged into a million websites and they all need me to make small decisions every few minutes and it's exhausting. I'm over it.

I'm having a hard time deciding if posting to /r/dndmemes is worth it, because they do well there - but I'm not allowed to discuss my Patreon in the comments without the whole post being removed and a bunch of content farms on Instagram like mydnd20, allthingsdnd and chafingarmor automatically repost them with my name cut off and with product ads attached, which is a lot of work to get taken down each time.

I'm a bit despondent that I can't talk to my family about how tariffs affected Cut the Deck and stuff like that without them getting politically prickly. These are real things that are happening in my real life, it's not some attempt to sway opinions. Feels very isolating for them to "well actually-" me in the middle of a phone call they made for my birthday.

My neighbours threw a party last night and broke a window in the common area. I'm so tired of dealing with this stuff.

[END RANT]

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The hunt for the perfect notebook continues. I've purchased yet another small art sketchbook, slightly larger than my phone.
The ideal notebook needs to:
- Have tear out pages so I don't let obsolete thoughts become distracting mental clutter
- Has to be reasonably thick and heavy so it retains object permanence
- Has to be large enough that I can write words at a comfortable size
- Be small enough to take with me
- I don't like writing on grid paper because you have to unnaturally space the letters out
- I've experimented with notebooks that are only meant to last 3 months before I move to the next one, but I find that's too short a window

I've laid out my Short/Medium/Longterm plans here which I'll keep referring back to

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This weeks polls:
[Poll] Should my Patreon archive be actively tidy, or should I be posting more of whatever?
Most people are leaning towards chaotic, which surprised me a little! The main pain point is that nobody wants excessive emails, which I can manage.

[Poll] A Dungeon Pals Poll
Choplet is still everyone's favourite!

This week I watched Ad Astra and played the first two worlds of Astro Bot. Maybe I'll finish it next birthday.

That's about it this week. Sorry there wasn't more exciting stuff! I'll try to turn the corner this week. Cheers!