In some respects I’m a bit old fashioned. One of the things this includes is my favourite pastime - playing table top role-playing games. Never understood the fun of sitting over alcohol in a pub too loud to hear your own thoughts let alone have a conversation. Board games and traditional role playing games combine social interaction with creativity and in the case of the later storytelling.

Being the hero in an epic adventure is a powerful experience, and you get to take your real life friends with you. You all become the hero’s (or villains in some cases). Have you ever watched a movie or read a book and thought that something a character did was stupid, didn’t make sense, and you’d do it so much better. This is exactly what you get to do in these games.

I am so grateful to have a great group of friends and an amazing storyteller as a Game Master. RPG groups often fall apart once people “grow-up”, leave their home towns after playing RPGs in high school, or if they played at uni – move to where their work takes them. It’s hard to find a new group as an adult – less free time, and some people start seeing it as childish and “below them”.

The funny thing is that in many ways, the game becomes even better with older players. Most people will be more cultured, better read, and with more experience in various aspects of life. This adds that special flavour – quirky references that have everyone laughing, things we maybe wouldn’t have known 10 years ago. I think we also often focus more on the story and just having a great time, rather than scoring points and advancing levels just for the sake of these achievements of their own.

Currently we have two campaigns going in our small group – one set in Eonika (the world of my fantasy stories) and the other in Vampire: the Masquerade. Very different Game Master styles, though both are systems focused on storytelling.

The post The Old School Entertainment – 30DB #27 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

This Sunday together with my partner we spent a good several hours dismantling our kitchen sink and trying to clean out a blockage that has gotten so bad that the sink would look more like a swimming pool the moment the tap was run. With the outrageous rates that professions such as plumbers charge I do prefer to exhaust all the options before calling someone in.

Some time ago we tried to clear the blockage with a pressure can. Andy tried it first on his own and missed one of the overflows on the double sink – apparently it was quite a fountain. But with four hands and all holes plugged we got it working and the clog was gone. Not for long though. This time the pressure can didn’t prove any help at all. It was time to bring out the plumber’s snake…

It actually is a really simple device – a long piece of coiled cable with a hook like thing at the end that you feed down the pipes and then wiggle around when you hit the blockage (OK, there are better instructions online, just go to youtube) until you can go through. Hence the several hours of work – it is simple but the process is pretty slow and tedious.

Was it worth it then? Last time I checked plumbers were around £45 per half an hour – just for the pleasure of seeing their face at your doorstep. The stuff we bought to mess around with the sink ourselves add up to about £60 (it’s late, and I don’t feel like digging up the receipts…). I’m pretty sure then, we’re still better off with the DIY option (especially as the clog is fixed, at least for now). And the snake can be re-used again too.

I also never understood why people would pay for things like setting up a washing machine. I found that the hardest part of setting up that appliance was getting it into its designated space in the tiny airing cupboard.

The post DIY Plumbing – 30DB #28 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Today when I checked my letterbox in the afternoon I had a surprise waiting for me. At first I though it was more tax related paperwork, then for a brief panic moment I though I’ve been sued, to finally realize it was a summoning for jury duty. Phew.

A lot of people when they see that immediately start looking for excuses, but personally I was actually rather excited. I’ve already had a chance to see the inside of the local Young Offenders Prison in Reading (just as a visitor thankfully), and seeing the inside of a courtroom could be an interesting experience. Yes, I do watch too many crime dramas…

Unfortunately I do have a holiday planned a month after the date in the letter, so will have to call the number they gave and enquire about  the situation. However all in all I’d actually be happy to attend rather than defer my duty, as long as I don’t have to cancel flights.

The post I Have Been Summoned – 30DB #29 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Struggling to find a topic today. I have a few backups

• Why I love my Win8
• What the heck is a phablet
• What makes an engaging post (not really this one…)
• Daily word counts

However for most of these I have a specific idea about what I wanted to write about, and what I wanted to include. That would involve doing research I don’t have time for. It’s almost like writing about the engaging posts now, but I know there was so much I wanted to reference…

Maybe I should start a new category “Random Ramblings” where I’ll just channel whatever pops in my head on the days the deadline is looming and my quick idea bank is empty…

Recently realized that I seem to write the funny posts when I’m half falling asleep. Might be my internal snob and censor falling asleep and not checking what the hell I’m typing up. The writing almost feels funny then.

I will eventually write about the topics above, but without the pressure of hitting the daily post target. Otherwise my essay on engaging posts might be limited to whatever generic advice I can come up with on the spot. Not very useful for potential readers.

This whole month has been pretty weird. Not being superstitious or anything but I do hope this is not how the whole year is going to look – unfocused, tired, riddled with a cold and unable to get anything significant done (well, a least I haven’t given up on the 30DB thing…). A holiday at my parent’s might not be the best way to start a productive February, but one can hope…

The post Random Ramblings – 30DB #30 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Finally, the last day of the month. Almost fitting that the last day will be number 31 for a 30 day blogging challenge…

I must say I hoped I would enjoy the writing more. It made me realize that in fact I should be writing (almost) daily, but the content is meant to go to several places. Writing for all the various sites AND the personal blog proved to be hard. Sometimes I had an idea for a post, however this wasn’t really the right place to post it, but at the same time I wanted to keep up with the daily writing, so ended up posting here something random rather than the stuff I did want to write.

With all that said, it’s probably obvious I won’t be posting daily here. It did make me realize that I do need to plan my content better and draw up some sort of schedule to keep on top all my sites and make sure they all get more or less a similar amount of attention. I do have a tendency to get excited about one thing and then leave everything else untouched for a few months which isn’t the greatest strategy when it comes to blogging.

Another thing that I struggled with was the quality of the posts. I do prefer writing longer but researched pieces, and having to do that daily, would mean little time left for other things, especially other writing projects. I still have a few topics that I planned to write about for a while, but didn’t feel comfortable just throwing them out as a quick note.

The whole month has been a bit blah, so not sure if it’s specifically due to the blogging challenge, but my book writing has completely halted. Before, I’d often push myself to get that daily word count on one of the books done , but it seems that has been replaced by a push for the daily blog post.Think, I’ll stick to one writing “challenge” at a time from now on.

Despite all that, it wasn’t a completely negative experience, and it did help me get back to just writing in general after a bit of a break. And the blog won’t look so dead now. I’ll probably try to write at least every week or two, and make it a more thoughtful article thanks to the extra time available for research.

The post The End – 30DB #31 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Some people dread the big 30. Personally I had a few brief moments of doubt before my birthday over the last few months, but nothing too panicky. The day finally came, and strangely I still feel the same. No earth shattering drama here. I don’t really have any regrets when it comes to life, and all in all I consider things very much on track where I’d like them to be going… Even a bit boring for some (I’m looking at you Kat…) but I prefer my crazy to by planned…

I had an early start this year when my sister surprised me with a few gifts just after midnight (we are both night owls…), even though technically I think I should wait till something like 7am… She knows me so well – I got a large mug, that means less trips to the teapot to fill me lemon & tea addiction, and among other things a cute blank notebook for all the writing stuff I do.

In the morning I was greeted with a lovely card and a boxset of Lost from the “in-laws”. Have been looking forward to that for a while now! Even the weather was looking good – surprise, surprise! Later my partner took me out to London for a great meal and a surprise treat – we went to see Wicked the musical.

It was a marvellous experience. Makes me wish my books one day get made not only into a movie but a musical too. Hey, one can dream… Whenever I go to see live events on stage I am always amazed at how they are able to create such gorgeous sets and swap them around in such short time. Same goes for the actors and costume changes. I imagine it’s a madhouse behind the curtains with the dramatic differences in attire between the scenes. The songs were awesome and it was a nice surprise to see the where the show differed from the book.

Later that week me and Kat had a shared birthday party – my sister celebrates hers 4 or 5 days after mine (depending on the year). It was a small party at home with a bunch of friends – had loads of fun with loads of cake, a bit of alcohol and a solid amount of laughter.

I tried to make some New Year resolutions this year. It’s tough to admit, but things haven’t been going according to plan much. I’m not even sure where the first two months of this year went, time just seemed to slip through my fingers and excuses piled on. However I do have some goals I’d like to achieve by 35, which means procrastination needs to be cut short. After all, it’s time to start the five year plan of world domination to success…

The post Wicked at 30 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

It’s that time of the year again. Beginning of November, the time when most writers, especially the aspiring kind, get excited and plunge deep into writing. It’s like the writer’s New Year. Time to wipe the slate clean, and make some “resolution”.

I have to say that I’m quite sentimental about NaNoWriMo. After a long break in writing fiction it was this initiative that spurred me back into action. Well, end the character’s nagging in my brain, but that’s another story. It was this contest, that got me started two years ago on the Dragon’s Reborn series. I think fondly of that NaNoWriMo, despite the fact that I failed miserably at it.

Turned out switching into a foreign language and upgrading my technical skills from “aspiring” to a professional level required a lot more work. I just wasn’t ready. Though I still have the nearly 20k words I wrote for that project.

When looking for feedback while working on it the dreaded “too much telling” came up. I knew in theory what it meant. But I didn’t see it back then. I didn’t feel the difference. After two years, I would like to thing I improved a lot in that department.

There are a lot of rules beginning writers need to take in. But you can read and learn about the theory forever, only practice gets you to a place where at least some of these rules become so ingrained that you apply them subconsciously. Or at least they immediately jump out at you in revision (yes, I word vomit my first draft, so no way to skip revision).

But I digress. As I mentioned already, I always think fondly of NaNoWriMo, but I won’t be participating this year. At least not directly. Rather than start a new novel, I have several projects screaming at me and demanding to be finished. Since I’m trying to cut down on the number of projects active at the same time and get stuff done this year I couldn’t officially participate and play by the rules.

Instead, I will try to aim for the 50k word count for this month. This will likely run across several projects (including a short story for a sf anthology). My main goal is to finish The Hunt, which has been work in progress for a bit too long.

Since I’m having fun with that one by posting the draft as I write it on WattPad, you can follow my progress there. OK, draft plus a quick revision… I’ll write progress posts on here too, just to give myself an extra challenge.

The post NaNoWriMo Time appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Here’s the update on my “FakeNovelWritingMonth”. Don’t think these will be daily, but I keep track of my wordcount on a daily basis.

Day 1

Blogs: 433

Total: 433 (433)

I’ve been swamped with work and then stayed out late at my Sister’s place, so ended up with no fiction writing time. Way to fail day one. Well, still another 29 to go.

Day 2

Blogs: 69

Fiction: 770

Total: 839 (1,272)

Nothing world shattering, but making progress. Did a quick post on the blog and wrote another part for the Hunt.

Couldn’t help feeling jealous reading through a thread about writing 50k in one day. Seeing my current speed is more like 500/h, I need to start thinking less and typing more.

Day 3

Blogs: 209

Fiction: 2106

Total: 2,315 (3,587)

Funny how I’m making progress but can’t seem to find a good point to break the scene. At this rate this short story turned novellette might actually level up into a novella. Also towards the end my typing speed got a bit faster, but still nowhere near a level I’d be happy with. I forced myself not to fix typos as I write, so the new part isn’t available on Wattpad yet. Need to do a bit of a clean-up tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow is a relative term in my book.

Next update soon.

The post FaNoWriMo – Update 1 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Time for another update. All the way till day 8 today and I have to say, if I were to go with the daily target I’d be lagging behind. Still a while to catch up though.

Day 4

Fiction: 1444

Total: 5031

Two sessions that gave a nice outcome for the day.

Day 5

Fiction: 190

Total: 5221

Uhm, yeah, not great. Spent some time out with friends, still had to do client work, so not much time left for writing.

Day 6

Fiction: 977

Total: 6198

Nice chunk written. A lot of my scenes are around the 1k mark, at least in first draft. Or mini-scenes, where I reach a good point to break writing even if the scene is not done. Seems like my brain gets tired after two hours (Did I mention I’m a slow typist?).

Day 7

Fiction: 969

Total: 7168

More work on The Hunt – things are going forward and I found a solution to my dilemma. The side character somehow gets a life of her own, too. So many secrets…

Day 8

Fiction: 1231

Total: 8399

Another full scene finished. I’m happy that I’ve finally joined up to where I was before in the story (scrapped part of the concept, added characters and reworked the plot, so the story had a slight detour from the original concept).

Seeing the total, I’m actually quite happy. It is an average of 1k per day, so I’m less behind then I thought – I note down the numbers but summed up only today.

I might need to start adding any longer forum/social media posts to the count. Just to see how much word count that steals from my day.

Since I’ve established my writing speed hovers around 500 word per hour I’ll try to do some dictation to see what the speed is with that method. Though I struggle a bit to get overcome feeling silly when talking out loud and it does throw me out of Scrivener, since DNS behaves funny in that. So need to copy&paste from DragonPad.

The post FaNoWriMo – Update 2 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Here comes another update… *drumroll*

Day 9

Blogs: 325
Fiction: 1267
Other: 1778
Total: 11,769 (3370)

Day 10

Blogs (and forum posts): 445 + 923 + 995 (2363)
Fiction: 690
Total: 14,822 (3053)

OK, I think I can see where my word count is “leaking” during the day. I should probably revert to forum posts that consist of “I concur.” or “Well done!” – my responses are way to elaborate. Kind of depressing I write those a lot faster than a regular 900 words of fiction too.

Day 11

Blogs: 210 + 289 + 136 (635)
Fiction: 1474
Total: 16,931(2109)

Tried not to go overboard with the forum posts. In fact I’m trying to limit my reading and answering time in general.

Day 12

Blogs: 482 + 81 (509)
Fiction: 601
Total: 18,041 (1110)
Day 13
Fiction: 528
Total: 18,569

I’ve been recently swamped with work and this really is starting to affect my word count.

Day 14

Fiction: 1285
Total: 19,854

Day 15

Total: 19,854 (0)

Yeah, one of those days. Tried to get some work done before going out to hang with friends. These meetings somehow always seem to end way after midnight. Not that I’m complaining, but that doesn’t leave me many working hours. And clients do get priority over fiction…

Day 16

Other: 2429
Total: 22,283

No fiction, but I did catch up on some notes from our games. Since these often act as inspiration (and future reference material) at least it counts towards my FaNoWriMo word count. Met up with a different friend and went tot h cinema together, so I did end up going to a different town.  Can someone please invent teleportation, please?

Day 17

Total: 22,283 (0)

Every two weeks we have two games around the weekend (Friday and Sunday). The plan was not to stay up to late, but again – back home at 3am. Ended up working on client projects for a little bit and no time for writing.

I need to focus on a short-story for an anthology and a few editing projects this week, so not sure how that will affect my word count. Since the short needs some planning and plotting that won’t give me words towards my goal. The thing has to be under 6k too. If I had the time I’d overlap the plotting with writing for the other story, but that’s looking very unlikely.

The post FaNoWriMo – Update 3 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Sometimes I don’t really know where the time goes. Another week’s gone by and my word count seems stuck in place.

Day 18

Blogs: 701

Total: 22,984 (701)

Another short day. Stayed up late playing a game with friends on Sunday, and then had another one Monday evening.

Day 19

Blogs: 749

Total: 23,733(749)

No fiction, just a few smaller blog posts.

Day 20

Blogs: 125

Fiction:  974

Total: 24,832(1099)

Started work on a ghost writing project. Had to put my own book on hold for a bit.

Day 21

Fiction: 797

Other: 334

Total: 25963 (1131)

Making decent progress. As usual it seems my brain can handle one scene per day.

Day 22

Blogs: 170

Fiction:  2063

Other: 995

Total: 29,191 (3228)

Decent progress on fiction. Unfortunately need to push harder if I am to come even close to my goal.

Day 23

Fiction:  1280

Total: 30,471 (1280)

Working on the ghostwriting project.

Day 24

Total:30,471

Sundays are proving hard for writing. Though the RPG games we play are a great inspiration, both literally and as far as a more general creative brain reset is concerned.

Well, I’ve reached 30k. That’s more than my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. Can I reach the 50k? Unlikely, but I’ll try to get as much writing done this week as I can. The non-writing work really does eat away at my time. I’ve had some things to do for a loca charity too that I’ve been putting off for way too long.

This leads me to an interesting statement about NaNoWriMo I’ve read somewhere recently. The author didn’t comment on this explicitly, but talked about how by the 20th day people drop out and other cheer them up with words akin to “Don’t worry, you’ll get it next year.” This really struck me as strange. Maybe they are referring specifically to the 50k goal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of them meant it as, “yeah, go back to your day job now, and wait till next Novemeber with this writer stuff.”

Well, whether I fail or succeed this month, it doesn’t mean I stop writing in Decemeber, Janurary, February… you get the point. Every month should be a challenge, pushing for, well not necessarily higher word count, but definitely getting more written and published*.

I’m already pondering on keeping up with the weekly stats at least for December, and maybe later if I don’t get bored with taking notes and people still want to read the numbers.

* Still should be quality writing though.

The post FaNoWriMo – Update 4 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

With November (and NaNoWriMo) finished it’s time for the final update.

Day 25

Blogs: 397
Fiction: 778
Total: 31,646 (1175)

Day 26

Blogs: 608
Fiction: 473
Total: 32,727 (1081)

Day 27
Fiction: 515
Total: 33,242 (515)

Day 28
Fiction: 1195
Total: 34,437 (1195)

Day 29
Total: 34,437

Day 30
Blogs: 1394
Total: 35,831 (1394)

As you can see from the final day entry I ended up coming up short of my 50k target. I did want to catch-up more, but unfortunately client work has pretty much taken over my life. However this will make for an interesting comparison point for this month.

Take aways from this month’s experiment:

It’s interesting to track all sorts of writing. I never realised how many words I’m “losing” on forums, blogs, emails, etc. Turns out it’s not just time spent reading what others have to say on writing that takes my time away from writing, but also my own replies too. Next step would be to try and time these longer replies – might turn out I get a better typing speed there.

Despite planning to devote two hours a day to writing, that’s been rarely met, especially in the later part of the month. I’m still unsure of how to qualify the time spent writing for clients. Should that go under the “client work” or “writing” block of time? With more editing work coming my way that is another problematic task, when it comes to classification.

Regardless of typing speed I noticed my mind gets tired and starts taking shortcuts around the 1k words mark. Seems like I need a break or I naturally drift towards ending the scene. Would be interesting to see if it’s more to do with the time it takes me to write this amount or the word count itself.

The post FaNoWriMo – Update 5 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Another one of those, everyone is doing it, so should you things – the revision of the year behind us and the planning (including the obligatory New Year’s resolutions) for the year ahead. Ah, what the hell, I’ll bite.

The Dreaded 13

I’m not superstitious. I’m really not. But after 2013 I just, maybe just, have started to believe those suffering from Triskaidekaphobia are on to something. In many ways this year has been terrible – business wise, and with disaster after disaster coming left and right. Want some examples? My place in Poland got flooded twice in the same month.

But I’m not one to wallow in self-pity. So just to be contrary I will ignore all the negative things and focus on all the awesome stuff that happened last year. There had to be something, right?

The Engagement

Weee, I’m a Princess!

I don’t care it’s a bit out of order, but since it’s big news it deserves to go first. Andy proposed during our trip to Svalbard. So despite not seeing any polar bears or northern lights, that’s one memorable moment from the holiday!

Also since the ring was a tad too big, I’ve learned that adjusting the size takes a whole three weeks. I have a feeling they needed to melt the thing down and forge it all over given how long that takes… Though it was worth the wait.

Oh, and the holiday was lovely too. ;)

Svalbard

Publishing

Although I started several projects not all of them have seen their deadlines met in 2013. Still, I published 3 books this year, including my longest published work: A Fool’s Embrace (Vampire Bytes) and two titles under a “special” pen name (yeah, naughty books are fun to write too…). Those three titles come to 38.5k words in total. Unfortunately I haven’t been running a writing total from the beginning of the year so not sure how much I actually wrote since the former number is what has been published.

I have a rough estimate for December 2013 – about 16k words of fiction and November 2013 – about 20k. Just need to get these things finished and published. I did complete a sci-fi short story for an anthology but since that won’t be released till a bit later this month (?) it will count for 2014 stats (I’ll publish it as standalone a bit after the anthology is out).

A Proper Grownup

Not sure if this should qualify as a pro or a con of this year, but I’ve moved from the young and spritely category to the old and boring over-thirty. Nah, life hasn’t really changed much. The big three zero hasn’t brought any life shattering revelations with it – mentally I’m still about fifteen…

Mastering Photoshop

This is one area I definitely made a lot of progress in. And not in the “yucky” use for web design. Still think those peeps are crazy and Fireworks is the best tool for that. Nope, I’ve been editing photos, mostly designing book covers. I’m quite proud of the things I’ve learned and how I went from mainly a single photo with minimal tweaks plus good typography, to more advanced photo manipulation. My portfolio has definitely grown a lot during 2013.

Resolution Time!

I still haven’t sat down to do an action plan for my business (and it desperately needs some focus). Want to have that done by the end of next week. Though that isn’t much of a resolution.

Have a game night once a week. It’s way to easy to just spend our free time watching stuff on tv and browsing articles on the web in the evening. Both my finace and I love board games, but seem to never have time to play these days. Will be working on that.

Write a blog post once a week. I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry seeing that the updates on this blog have been: 01/2013, a few sporadic ones and then 11/2013. It’s almost like I should move to Tumblr or something. I think part of the problem is the pressure of preferring one blog over another (I run several sites for different purposes). So the rule will be at least one either for DD or that I can link to from DD. That way I won’t feel guilty for posting on my author site (like this post about the Photoshoot).

Write 500k words of fiction. Well at least one of these goals has to be ambitious…  Then again if I wrote five days a week it’s just under 2k per those writing days, so not unachievable if I’m disciplined about it. I love what DWS wrote about this specific topic in his recent post. I have to agree, that we should learn to take away what we can from failure and move on, rather than dwell on it.

Read 50 books. Nuff’ said. And I mean other than the ones I’ve written myself.

Finish this website. Erm, yeah, that’s long overdue…

I have quite a few things I’d like to achieve this year, but I think these are more goals and ongoing challenges. So I’m not going to vow to eat healthy or exercise just to fail by the time next holiday comes around. I’ve been working on that for a while, and however flawed my efforts have been they need to be more than a resolution. Besides in my case it’s starting to be a matter of not crashing after a high carb/sugar meal rather than dropping a dress size or two. Oh, all right, yeah that would be nice, too.

The post Another Year Gone By appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Decided to make a place to track my progress (or lack of… will see about that). I’ll keep updating this through out the year.

Write 500k

Updates:
8408 – 04/02/2014 January ended up at a bit of a writing loss.
5737 – 19/01/2014 Slow start to the year, but staying optimistic overall.

Write 50 blog posts

1. This one (hey, I like recursion…)
2. SailsJS 0.9.8 and Bootstrap 3.0.3 LESS (ThinkRobot)
3. Are You My Reader? (J.C. Harker)

Read 50 books

Finished books are bolded.

1. Dragon Singer (Pern) by Anne McCaffrey
2. Fledgling (The Dragonrider Chronicles) by Nicole Conway

The post Annual Goals 2014 appeared first on DreamDevourer.

This wasn’t what I planned on writing about today… But since I’ve updated my gaming machine the other day (Goodbye Vista!  – yeah, I was surprised too, to see it was still running that…) I’ve been doing a little bit of clean up on it. The usual, tune settings, update drivers, remove unused or broken programs… That’s when I spotted something I haven’t used for a very long while.

Winamp!

Oh, my. Now that’s a blast from the past. I felt a bit sentimental when removing it. But these days I’m addicted to Spotify. It’s funny how things evolve. I don’t have many paid subscriptions, especially for things that aren’t related to running my business. Spotify is one of the few exceptions.

As a kid I started out with cassette tapes, but during my teens we quickly moved on to CDs. And then there were mp3s. I used to hoard those. Although I didn’t have a portable player for a long while. Though, funny enough I can’t quite remember what I used for on the go music in the period between tapes and an mp3 player – since I’m pretty sure I didn’t have a portable CD player… But back to my hoarding habits. Although mp3 players and then phones allowed me to take a selection of my files with me it wasn’t quite the same as having access to everything. And then I lost it all. Or almost all in a hard drive disaster. My fault really since I didn’t have a backup.

I tried restoring that collection and overtime grew my hoard a bit again. But before I had a chance to go on a proper shopping spree I found Spotify. At first I was a bit doubtful if it could replace “owned” music for me.  But as time went by I found, that pretty much anything I wanted to listen to was on there. Almost everything… and on that in a moment.

Funny enough I didn’t start paying for Spotify for it’s mobile use or to get rid of the ads. I actually enjoyed the ads. Most of them were funny, at least back when I was on free. No, what got me to pay were my bad listening habits. Yes, I’m one of those annoying people who listen to something over-and-over-and-over-and-over-and… you get the point. Playlists, sometimes an individual song. So when they introduced a play limit on the free option that was it. I had to become a subscriber.

So, you might wonder what  is it that I’m missing with Spotify. Well. The one thing that still isn’t there is non-English music. That’s something I lost when my hard drive died – a whole lot of Polish music. Some of it I could in theory recreate from the CDs I owned (or tapes??? As if anyone still had something that plays those…), but there were a few random indie/local bands I just had a song or two of. But in the end you just move on.  On a positive note, I’m actually seeing more and more Polish artists on Spotify too. It’s frustrating that sometimes they’ll just have one, latest album on there, when I’m looking for the classics I know.

I remember the awe and excitement when instead of a single album or a handful of pre-selected songs I moved to my extensive playlist on an mp3 player. I get the same awe now when I stop to think about the music I have at my fingertips through my phone. Everything available anywhere you are (OK, abroad trips can still be a challenge).

Just as I never though I’d move on from mp3s stored on my drive, I can’t imagine moving to some other way of consuming music over Spotify now. But maybe the successor is already out there. Anyone know of a revolution going on?

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While trying to setup a starter project I hit a bit of a snag. Turns out the latest less files don’t want to play nice with the grunt-contrib-less (0.5.2) that comes with SailsJS (0.9.8). parse error: failed at &:extend(.clearfix all); Since the required version is written explicitly in SailsJS package.json it’s not enough to just … Continue reading SailsJS 0.9.8 and Bootstrap 3.0.3 LESS

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When deploying my meteor app to a new server I run into a weird issue that didn’t seem to come back with any helpful errors. Running: meteor would get stuck on Download meteor-tool@3.0.38 which would eventually exit with a “killednloading” message. For anyone else stuck scratching their heads, it seem to be an out of … Continue reading Killednloading MeteorJS Issue

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With a slew of exciting projects ahead I’m thrilled to join Castle Trust this month as their Lead Developer. Yay! :)

At the same time, this does not mean I’m saying goodbye to my publishing dreams. On the contrary – “Feral: The Dragon Within” has just been release (expect a longer post soon about the 2+ years of work I put into that book), and while I’m working on Feral part 2 and Hellena’s story, there’s some exciting things I’d like to try with the Wing & Fang brand soon too.

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Inspired by the Tim Ferris’ 5-Bullet Friday emails, and the fact that not all my friends are on social media, and that sometimes interesting things just get lost in the noise (even when it’s you looking for something you yourself posted earlier…) I’ve decided to do a weekly recap of all the interesting stuff I’ve read or seen. It’s also a way to ease myself into blogging again, but don’t expect too much elaborate content, since most of the time I find other people put the interesting fact more eloquently than I could. :)

Not Just Black Slavery

Hidden away as a photo comment I found this piece about Irish history quite a fascinating read.

(Available on Facebook)

Solar Powered Floating Farm

The article doesn’t offer that many details, but the concept is absolutely fascinating. It also seems to be a bit more than just a pretty drawing, like we sometimes see in case of these futuristic self-sustainable city/boat ideas.

Codegirl the Movie

I watched the movie while it was available for free on YouTube and have to agree with the review. Interesting to watch for someone from the tech community, but a bit too much focused on the competition itself. Felt very rushed, and I wouldn’t really see anyone paying for the movie, so in all honesty it really should stay free. It’s good to see the topic being raised, but in the end the movie fell a bit flat for me at actually showing the way for those girls interested in exploring a tech career as an option.

The Witcher Movie

Yes, we did have a Polish Witcher movie years ago, but it was nothing to shout about (I did like the soundtrack though). With the games success one can hope that a big international production will actually do something good. Not much info yet though.

Brickwork Quality Change

An interesting essay about the difference in building standards and approach to brickwork over the last 100 years. Love the lamp evolution photo in the beginning of the article.

The post Weekly Digest appeared first on DreamDevourer.

Here’s another (almost *akhem*) weekly update. Not much this week, since I didn’t read many long essays and I’m trying to keep the kitty videos contained to social media ;)

Beautiful photography

The article is a nice introduction with some descriptions of the photographs and the stories behind them. More photos on the artists site: http://uldus.com/

 Accents and prejudice

Turns out our brains are quite lazy. Or shockingly lazy, if you were to believe some of the experiments in this interesting article.

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