brute forcing things

writing, for one.

write more. maybe at least once a week. even when i'm not feeling it. post it here. write so much i start dropping my waffling maybe's and I-think's from my sentences.

a math problem with darts, for another.

my attempt is exceptionally stupid. the problem says there are like 42k overall. but looking at the data and getting messy is what i want to do first, and then let the more elegant math come back to me.

repeatedly realizing that the problem's intended solution is to use recursion. duh.

repeatedly feeling like i'm wasting my time and destroying my personal worth for doing it in a brute force handwritten kind of way.

repeatedly understanding that this pressure is the depression talking.

in my defense, i started it on paper because no mobile app makes working a spreadsheet pleasant. in my defense, i'm doing it the way a beginner player would learn, with one dart manually thrown at a time. in my defense, i'm doing a puzzle for the exploration, not getting it efficiently correct.

tracking what books exist in tiny bookshop, for a third.

the urge to just datamine the game itself to populate the tables. someone has done this before, surely. someone has done this already.

except. what if i just browse. play normally. use my notes to fill the tables in. continue to argue out loud with my monitor every time a recommendation is rejected for "not having" a book's trait which i think is very obviously true. midway through start a new spreadsheet of the deutsch book info because i realized it's not a translation but a whole different set of books.

a memory of playing might & magic: world of xeen alongside my dad. i was making my own monster manual at one point, so i could plan my resistances. my dad points out that a printed monster manual came with for each of the world sides. they were on the top shelf where i wasn't tall enough to see they were there, let alone reach them. he starts to pull one off the shelf to hand it to me, but midway, he puts it back. "no. you know what? keep doing your thing. this will still be here if you ever get frustrated."

i learned from blue prince that my notes don't have to be blog-guide-ready. blue prince also taught me that notes don't have to be handwritten.

my notes for this game keep wanting a calendar. it does have a calendar – it shows you the next five days and what the weather for the next day will be. it even has a month calendar entry in the journal. but i mean i keep having to write to myself little schedules of "go here this day" or "go here today but then there tomorrow". especially for when i put the game down, so when i pick it back up i don't go "ok what was i doing?" my notes are trying to interlock the side stories into one cohesive action plan, not rest between 20 different character or location pages.

tiny bookshop's calendar is just 4 months, i think. one for each season. i can make a calendar, print it out. put it in a paper transparent sleeve and write on it with wet-erase marker, the way we do with d&d character sheets. yeah. that could work.