Today’s Hobby: Played a demo game of Shatterpoint, and set up this blog to also post to Discord, Instagram, and other social media.
So a few years back I started doing #HobbyStreak thanks to a @Dana_howl video, as a way to try and get through my hobby backlog. Basically, every day I do “some” hobby. Paint or Assemble 1 model, or maybe a bunch. The key was to do SOMETHING. I’ve missed a few days along the way but not many. Some might claim it’s not really a streak but I don’t care. In fact, I care less, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
On Jan 16, 2021 I started doing this. I missed 1 day at GenCon. But I did paint every other day at GenCon, and in particular on that day I didn’t get back to the hotel room until everyone else was asleep (we’d sardined 6 people in the room) and there was a tournament early the next day, so I didn’t want to wake anyone. I made this day up by doing two separate sessions shortly after. I missed another day shortly after I bought a house. It was the day we rented a truck to move all of the furniture that couldn’t fit in my car. We managed to move every large item which saved a few $$ but didn’t leave time for any hobby work.
I’ve been posting to Instagram my progress, but slowly falling behind. I probably made some errors along the way but by my calculations Dec 22, 2023 was my 1034th HS day. However if you do the math that’s 1070 days — somehow I lost over a month. Unfortunately the posting is enough of a chore that it impedes my desire to hobby.
Again a recent Dana Howl video has me thinking, except I think I am going to keep doing my HobbyStreak, but I’m going to get a little more loosey-goosey with it. The goal here is to make hobby progress, so I’m going to count playing the games as hobby time. That’s not to say I won’t usually still hobby on days that I game, but it’s not a requirement. I’m also going to aim for 5 days a week so that it starts to feel like a job. JK — but I’m also giving myself permission to skip occasionally. After all, it’s not a job, it’s a hobby, and it should be fun, but not forgotten.
So how should I count things? I think going forward any day I hobby is going to increment the count. Whether that’s painting, assembling or playing. That said, I have painted every day since then (even brought some stuff with me home for Christmas and painted with my mom! I just haven’t posted to Instagram since 1034 because, even posting twice a day, catching up was taking forever. So I’m going to count the 13 intervening days, including the 4th and put my total for today at 1047.
I’ve got this set up to post to my Discord, and I was hoping to also automate posting to Social Media such as Instagram and Twitter, but turns out it’s much easier to do it “the other way” and scrape from IG than post to it so did NOT accomplish that today.