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If you choose to continue, be warned
That you are missing crucial elements
Of I Am Not's design.

~Thursday

Friday, January 01, 2010

Thursday

I'm starting a new tradition.

Thursdays have been uneventful. I don't have rehearsals. There are no TV shows I watch on Wednesday, which would hit the internet the day after. The one thing that differentiates a Thursday is that Wednesday is new comics day, and Thursday is when many (not even most, but many) of the scans go up on the internet. So with nothing much to do, I wait around all day for new comics to come in, checking my sources every half hour or so. It's not a day I'd ever miss.

So Thursday is now my "Day of Work". Most of the week I keep for myself, Saturday is for God, and now Thursday is for future-me. Thursday will be entirely defined by restrictions:

• No gaming. (Not even Wii Fit.)
• No TV shows.
• No movies.
• No piano playing.
• No comics.
• No access to the web (even e-mail), with one very specific exception that will only be valid for the next month or two.

I decided that the workday should last from 4:00 AM to 8:00 PM, but now I'm thinking it should be a full 24 hours. The thing is, there's just so much to do! Why should it end so quickly? These activities in particular are appropriate for a Thursday:

• Programming my current game
• Doing design work for my next game
• Writing down ideas for any future game
• Practicing the play
• Writing blog posts (This is the exception I mentioned earlier; I'm not even allowed to check the statistics of people viewing the blog!)

Taking a long time for lunch (say, an hour) is not encouraged, but will be tolerated.

These rules will be almost as inviolable as the rules of Shabbat. That is to say, if there is some specific social opportunity which I would miss by holding the principle of Thursday, I'm permitted to break the day entirely.

But! If for any reason a full Thursday is not observed, the Day of Work moves to the next full day (Sunday by default) with which there are no conflicts. There is no circumstance under which a week's Day of Work will be cancelled; if a full week passes and there is not a single opportunity (This seems unlikely -I'm not that busy a guy!) to reschedule the day, it doesn't go away. I just need to put that day whenever it becomes convenient. Theoretically I could get myself into a situation where every day of a certain week has to be a workday, but I'm going to try very hard to ensure that that never happens.

The first Thursday of this tradition (I almost wrote "experiment", but that would not be giving the proper respect to the day, which is going to go on for years.) was yesterday. It was a clear success. With no distractions, I got around five hours of work in on The March of Bulk, and still had time to write two blog posts! (The second I'm going to hold on to; it's not quite ready for publication yet.)

And then at 8:00 PM I went back to the nothing I usually do on Thursdays. This week there aren't any comics at all, so I watched an episode of Flash Gordon's Trip To Mars and played a little bit of Wii Fit. Then I read five months-worth of the Sluggy Freelance webcomic, which I'm still eight years behind on. And I waited for comics even though none were coming, just out of habit. And I kept going to the same five or six websites over and over, hoping they'd update.