Late Night Learnings – The Climb #712

Wednesday 3^rd February 2021

I got a lot done today, despite it being Warcraft Wednesday. Ordinarily, this is the day weekly quests reset in World of Warcraft and so the priority for the last few months has been to get the new content done on this day to leave the rest of the week free for leveling alts and other content.

Up until recently it’s been a very busy day. I have both my main and a raiding alt that I’ve kept up to date and so the combination of anima quest, maw souls and campaign quest on two characters could take up most of the day.

Except the campaign is now over and after this week the renown upgrades are going to have less impact on my DPS and move more into cosmetics.

I got them done surprising quick, especially as I got up very late today. I recently signed up for a bunch of webinars hosted by Netflix Animation. It’s a series of zoom calls with people working in the industry. As I’ve started dabbling with screenplays and want to push my learning in 2021, I signed up for them. 7:30pm is inconvenient – especially as I usually see my support bubble then, and I’ve been already ignoring them a bit by raiding – but it isn’t impossible.

Except that’s 7:30pm PST, which works out as 3:30am.

The things we do…

I’m not sure I got much out of the session to be honest. It felt more like a convention panel where you’re hoping the panelist will say something earth shattering that will turn your understanding on its head. Instead, it’s the same old stuff: keep your head down, keep working, get lucky.

I made a lot of notes. That’s something I’m really trying to do in 2021 and I feel I’m really ensuring that I do this for any piece of learning. Those notes will be handy to review in years to come. Who knows… maybe something I wrote might prove to be useful.

As I had to wait up, I also typed up some notes on storm photography that I found. This kinda proved to me the benefit. Most of the learning, I kinda already knew. There were some camera settings that were useful to have noted down, but everything else wasn’t really a surprise. I do a lot of those things already… but some I don’t, and those I did, I don’t really do it properly or understand why. So I half-ass it. It was useful to review those notes (though it’s likely to be 15 months or more before I’m likely to be able to storm chase) and proved to me the benefit of notetaking.

As if that wasn’t enough, I also managed to finish the first draft of The Shop At The Bottom Of The Hill today. I’m not sure about the end and I feel there needs to be a stronger emotional arc for the protagonist as it seems a bit wishy washy by the end. I’ll leave it for a few days then go back to it and start pulling it apart.

I had also wanted to start revising an old short story of mine. This one needs a bit of a read through to understand how I can make it stronger, and then pulling apart.

However, there was no time to start this today. Not that I’m too concerned. I feel like I got a load of things done today despite the late start. I’ve got more webinars over the next few days so my schedule is likely to be all over the place until the weekend.

However, if I can be as productive as I’ve been today then maybe I should stay up into the small hours more often.