First Few Weeks Back in School

Shirttails! School started! D&D club stuff! Disco Tray Studios meetings! Back to work on Cultivating Competencies! Continuing my internship!

These past two weeks have been kind of chaotic as I have been doing an insane amount of things. First of all, shirttails was amazing, but took a lot of my time for a week. In my general life, I have been focusing on finding a good balance between school and work and relaxation. This has involved blocking out time for myself, taking care of plants, and doing fun stuff for my D&D campaigns!

The Importance of Blocking Out Time for Yourself

When you start doing a lot of things, it’s important to take time to yourself. This helps prevent burnout, and improve mental health as well as other things. I started doing this and have felt a lot better about my day to day. Of course, this was hard during shirttails, but now that it’s over I have more free time that I can block as personal time. One example is that I spent this 3-day weekend relaxing, playing games, and taking care of my PLANTS!

PLANTS!

Throughout the summer I have been taking care of plants. This started with my aloe vera plants that I had in my dorm room, but my collection of plants have since grown now that I am in an apartment. Out of the plants that I have successfully grown and kept alive so far, I have 2 aloe plants, some sweet basil, some parsley, a habanero plant, a cayenne plant, a non-spicey jalapeno plant, and a Venus flytrap. However, I have just planted a lot more. I took some of the aloe babies and planted them, hopefully they root, then I also planted some leaf lettuce, thyme, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and bell peppers. Hopefully everything will be producing fruit/vegetables during Friendsgiving time and we will have fresh produce! Taking care of these plants has taught me a lot. It’s taught me ways to recycle old containers into pots, that some plants need a lot of humidity, and taking care of something improves mental health. I have noticed myself feeling a lot better taking care of plants.

D&D

The D&D club is in full swing! We had our Dice-Tray making event the first week of school and had a surprising amount of people show up to it! We started to get a little worried we would run out of supplies, but luckily we still had some left over. We also had a lot of people show up to our Club Fair Table! Our first meeting is 9/7 (this Wednesday), and that will be where we talk about what we plan to do this year, go general announcements, and ask for any input. A lot is planned for this month! Also, the Hendrix Dining Services reached out to us because they are planning on decorating the caf Stranger Things themed for Halloween this year! They want us to come in as the Hellfire Club and play D&D for people to watch. I am so excited we were asked to be a part of this!

The Acxiom campaign is starting this Thursday, Session 0 (setup). I am going to be doing my two campaigns on alternating weeks, unless something happens to where I need to cancel one or put one on hold. My plan is to have both in the same world, which can be seen here. I pretty much finished up the map this weekend which was extremely exiting!

Disco Tray Studios

This past week in Disco Tray Studios I focused on Cultivating Competencies. Not much work got done, since I had to remind myself where we were in the game progress, but I got a lot of my general ideas outlined. Tomorrow I will message Ian about these ideas that I had and see where we go from there. If the story-related ideas are accepted then all I have to do is polish it up and flesh it out a little more.

I got Lucy to playtest Cultivating Competencies with guided play! It was very exciting to get that live feedback on what we were doing.

Acxiom Internship

My personal projects are on hold, but I am working hard looking through the emails we are receiving for review. In about a week or two I can return to my normal projects. My coworkers have been working well with me and my school schedule.

What’s Coming Up?

• Continue working on a better landing page for this blog.
• Change “Projects” page to be a portfolio.
• Edit all the pages connected to the WIP landing page.

TL;DR

• I blocked time for myself
• I was in shirttails
• Plants!
• D&D club is doing great
• Work has started back up on Cultivating Competencies
• My internship projects are put on hold