I’d be lying if I said it was the most disciplined and productive week ever; the check mark distribution on my to-do list is suspiciously sparse. But at least I continued working on my second edition of Ludotronics. Back in June and July, I rearranged, rewrote, or scrapped a substantial number of passages I felt could be clearer, had changed my mind about, or found less useful than hoped. During my vacation in August, I took some time to speed-read and speed-watch tons of stuff on every topic covered in the book—stuff I’d missed the first time around; stuff published after “feature freeze” in late 2018; and some tangential matter my proposal reviewers had recommended. Most of my findings I implemented last week, the rest will follow tomorrow. After that, it’s feature freeze again! To be followed by four weeks of intensive editing, including illustrations. Should nothing terrible happen, I’ll hand in the principal script by the end of September and work on my extra “secret level” chapter for the second edition during October. As the winter term will be in full swing by then, I won’t have a lot of wiggle room. But I still hope for an early November wrap-up on my side. (The deadline, as set by my publisher, is March 1 next year; but I yearn to return full throttle to my second Voidpunk novel.)

Hence, I published very little last week. There’s one game engine wishlist post at my Voidpunk blog; a new album on Flickr with images from the Tōkyō Metropolitan Government Building in Shinjuku; a re-edited shot from a highrise facade in Suwon, South Korea, and one post each at my Instagram accounts betweendrafts and voidpunkverse.

For your entertainment, here’s a little hamster navigating Mario levels. Enjoy!

J.