The Backlog – The Climb #852

Wednesday 23^rd June 20210

I’d originally anticipated that today would be a day of side effects of my jab yesterday. After my first jab, I felt pretty shattered the day after, and so I had steeled myself to expect more of the same.

Except the side-effects never seemed to come. I did feel very lethargic yesterday. Maybe that was the jab, maybe that was just me feeling exhausted after the walk yesterday, but I did find myself pottering around a lot.

It was Warcraft Wednesday today so the plan had just been to work on my last round of renown, watch the latest episode of Loki, and just generally chill out. But even then it took me until Midday before I jumped into the game.

So I decided to stream for the first time in months and had a really good time with probably one of my best audiences. All I was doing was doing the world boss and the souls quest on all my alts but I had loads of people drop by. I even managed to get someone from my old guild, join my new guild.

I also managed to do a load of new thumbnails for The Climb. I used to take the picture that day for inclusion with that day’s episode, but come the pandemic and the risk of repeating the same type of photo over and over again, I’ve been using excursions to get different backgrounds. Of course, if I take them all the same day, I’m wearing the same hat or shirt, so I started staggering them out.

I’ll take a bunch of photos, create thumbnails and then space them out at least 7 days apart. When I do another batch, then I space them out next to the existing pictures. So if I have thumbnails for editions 900, 907, and 920, I’ll most likely put the new thumbnails as 901, 908 and 920. That way, the thumbnails fill out over time.

It’s not an exact science, and because I go out so rarely, I try and take a load of photos when I do. My thinking is that if I do get stuck, then I always have the boring, samey type of pictures I was doing at the start of the pandemic.

But I have now got myself to a stage where, some of these pictures might not be seen for 2 years. Will I still be doing The Climb then? What will the world look like? What will I look like? I have this mental image of the future editions swapping between a current fat me and future thinner me (hopefully).

It’s made me think about finally getting round to putting the backlog online. Everything is written but I think it’s a three day job at least. Whilst I might not need to worry about thumbnails there’s still over 60k words to be roughly edited.

I kinda hope that I’d be finishing up the first draft of The Accursed right now, and have some time spare to dedicate to it for a few days… but The Accursed hasn’t been finished (hello, the last 4 days of no productivity), I have some other project work that needs a lot of focus, and there’s a Warcraft patch out that after a content drought these last 6 months is going to feel like a new expansion.

I found myself getting a little overwhelmed by what to do, but given that it still took me until Midday to log into Warcraft, whether it be fatigue or post-jab effects, I figured today wasn’t the day to worry about them.

My focus this week has been my jab and any after effects, however small. Everything else can wait a day or two. Yes, there’s loads I need to finish off. Yes, there’s work I need to start. But for today, I just needed to chill a bit and play some Warcraft.