You remember Thingadailies, right? It's like Holidailies, except instead of just posting on your blog once a day during December, with Thingadailies, you make a thing and post about it every day.
"Make a thing" has a very broad definition, at least here at Chez Nebulopathy.
- 2016: Origami Suncatchers
- 2017: A chapter a day in the cozy mystery novella that became Death Walks a Dog (which you can pick up for free wherever you like to get books)
- 2018: Concrete stepping stones, some of which I still trip over in the yard
- 2019: Photo editing
- 2020: N/A (Which is weird, but I guess there were other things going on at the time.)
- 2021: Space kittens (this is one of my favorite series)
- 2022: Cover art
- 2023: A truly terrible "webcomic" (I cannot emphasize enough how bad it was, but I learned a lot about Daz Studio, which was the whole point.)
28 days is the perfect amount of time to get comfortable doing something, so I often use Thingadailies to learn something I've been meaning to get around to but never would have the discipline to do otherwise.
Okay, so now the question is: What do I do this year? Here are the contenders:
- A 1-minute song a day using https://www.beepbox.co/. Would this be a useful skill for me to have? Probably not, but it also might be fun to try to make 28 different tunes. And that website is pretty nifty.
- Working my way through this Photoshop tutorial/speedrun, except in GIMP. https://youtu.be/TN_vWXLu9YQ?si=I85UDZr7hKy0uUYC
Technically, this would only be one thing at the end, not 28, but I'd be committing to moving forward every day. I'm not actually sure I could do this in a month, but I'd undoubtedly learn a lot. - I could post bloopers from audiobook narration every day. This would be the easiest thing ever, because I lose my ability to speak English the minute I start recording. But it wouldn't be very entertaining in blog format, and I'll probably just save the bloopers reel for my Patreon supporters.
- Maybe something like learning to create animals in Blender/Daz3D? I ran into a problem when working on the Jackpot Drift covers — there are no goats available. I bought sheep and chickens, but it seems like it would be useful to learn to make my own. There may, however, be a... skill gap. Still, that's never stopped me before! (cf, last year's webcomic)
So there we have it, the current list of possibilities. I'm open to suggestions!
Are you doing Thingadailies? Now's the perfect time to come up with a plan!
As a bonus for scrolling to the bottom of this blog entry, here is my dog in his new bed. It took a few hours for him to decide it was safe to go near (and I had to remove the extra cushion), but now he likes it.
