Search the Community

The Hero of Time calms restless souls. Spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:

The Hero of Time learns Zelda's Lullaby... and descends to the grave. Spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:

Most of Zero Week has been taken up by New Year. I'm not very prepared for the new Challenge, but I feel as if I should get my thread started. My previous challenge went quite well so I'm going to continue along the same lines. I'm going to do four quests because that feels about right. Quest 1: write more Flash Fiction In the Great Deku Tree, I wrote Flash Fiction with a word-count limit of 500 words. However, I've discovered, when submitting those stories for publication, that most markets define Flash Fiction as up to 1,000 words. That will become my new word-count limit and should give me the freedom to be a little more descriptive. I still want to write one story a week. However, I don't yet have new story ideas. I may define some ideas according to themes given by Flash Fiction competitions. I'm thinking about entering a week-long competition. All this means that week one may be given over to writing down ideas, but it will depend how much work I can do on this beforehand. Quest 2: complete at least half of the Blender 2.8 Fundamentals official video series This is the course I decided upon during my previous challenge and forms part of my epic quest to write 3D games. The series is 42 videos long and I hope to do at least one video per week day. Quest 3: increase the weight of my dumbbells to 10kg each If I can do this I'll then have to go out and buy more weights because this is all that came with the dumbbells. Quest 4: reduce the 'rest' periods of my interval training to 30 seconds I currently do 10 minutes of interval training on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This involves sprinting (on the spot, in front of Wii Fit U) for 30 seconds followed by jogging for 90 seconds. I repeat this until the 10 minutes are up. Tonight, I plan to reduce the jogging periods to 60 seconds. I'd like to reduce the jogging periods to 30 seconds by the end of this Challenge. If I can also increase the length of the interval training to 20 minutes, that will be a bonus.

Spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: After discovering that I took on too much in my previous Challenge, I'm going to limit myself to two quests. Also, this reflects the fact that Christmas preparations and holidays are likely to make the available time even shorter. I didn't level-up in the previous Challenge so I'm treating this one as a boss-battle. My two quests are related to writing and game-development. Quest 1: submit the previous Challenge's Flash Fiction stories for publication In the previous Challenge, I wrote five Flash Fiction short stories (one per week). In this Challenge, I'll submit them for publication. The current plan is to submit a couple of them to competitions and the rest to on-line publications. Note that the title of this quest is not to be published. I have no direct control over that. All I can do is submit them for scrutiny and that is a challenge in itself. Quest 2: find a good (free) on-line course to learn Blender and start the course One of my epic quests is to develop 3D games. I'll be using Godot for the game development itself but creating the 3D models in Blender. I've learnt the basics of Blender before but I always forget again when I haven't used it in a while. This time 'round I plan to make lots of notes. Also, there have been some usability changes with version 2.8 so I think this is a good time to start again. I plan to use Blender with a graphics/drawing tablet and that may present its own challenges. Zero Week There are a couple of things I'd like to do in preparation for those two quests: edit some of the stories - I want to change the primary tense of one of the stories (present to past) and fix some issues that were caught in proof-reading take the computer I built during the previous Challenge and make it my main machine - this will involve tidying up some internal cables for airflow, transferring a hard disc and DVD drive, and configure software to match my old set-up. Secondary (fitness-related) quests I'm trying to resist the urge to add more quests to this Challenge but I can't quite manage it. However, these fitness quests should be relatively easy to achieve and I'll work the XP rewards so that they're not required in order to level-up. Get to level 7 in the NF diet My wife and I are currently at level 5 of the NF diet. However, I think that, already, we fulfil the requirements of level 6. Getting to level 7 should happen during the course of this Challenge. Add another kilogram to my dumbbells for strength training I'm planning to do this on Monday, anyway. I don't do weight-training as such. The dumbbells are there only to make my normal exercises harder. Then again, I should probably read the Strength Training 101...