Hey all! In the last few weeks I've revived a project I was posting about here a year ago:
Stream of Pretentiousness

It's daily vignettes about my life (interactive non-fiction, if you will). I'm calling this Season 2 because last year I was making them in Twine, and this time I'm experimenting with other open-source engines for making hypertext stories. So yeah!

Stream of Pretentiousness on itch.io

I'm starting to get antsy with this project. For me it's hard to keep any one creative thing going on a daily basis because my mind bounces around to so many different places (as you might have observed). And I need breaks like anyone else, so I'm planning to take at least a week off after I've completed a month's worth of entries. Maybe that'll be the time to revamp the cover image and other aspects of branding, plus institute private early access to new updates for my Patreon supporters.

Being antsy, I naturally thought "Why don't I just hammer out a bunch of daily twines on one day, and just sit back and release them. That'll buy me a couple days where Stream of Pretentiousness doesn't get in the way of other things."

I decided that was against the spirit of the project. The point is to force myself to use skills like scope control and time management to make daily work on this project sustainable, not to slip into using crunch and major waves of effort, then letting myself burn out.

Still, in the next iteration of this I think it would be healthier to make 5 updates per week, not 7.

Today's entry is probably the sloppiest one so far, because I happened to be awake when the clock passed midnight, and I wanted to get a headstart on my goals for the day. It feels a bit like bending the rules to do 2 of these updates in the same continuous stretch of wakefulness, so I'll try not to do it again.

I just uploaded today's chapter of Stream of Pretentiousness, bringing the count up to 12 (unless I need to count again)!

This chapter deals with my emotional response to getting so many new Patreon supporters in such a short time after coming out as queer to my family/friends. I'm not sure it does justice to both the positive and negative ways in which the experience was overwhelming. If anything, it emphasizes the positive, which is fine by me because absolutely everyone has been amazing about the whole thing!

P.S. I'm considering making Stream of Pretentiousness available to patrons only, or at least giving patrons early access to new chapters. Basically the game would cost $1/month. (Making money from it might give me a strong enough incentive to keep going longer.) Any followers have an opinion on that?

Stream of Pretentiousness on itch.io

I'm making a new chapter of an experimental Twine game every day. As of posting, there are 5 chapters and I haven't missed a day. I'd fiddled around in Twine before, but not much, so I'm really learning as I go. My goal with this project is to break down the mental barriers telling me my work needs to be perfect, polished, while also being unoffensive to every conceivable player (because I do value accessibility in my games highly—but that can become a big encumbrance).

So far it's also been a place to express my inner thoughts, process my life, and explore my issues with gender.

I heard about this community forever ago and it's been on the back of my mind. I thought I'd give it a shot and actually share here now that I have a project which is such a good fit.

See you tomorrow!