The dice game I use to be instructed what to do when I tie myself up, “Master Dice”, started out as a rather simple set of instructions translated from the roll of a dice. With time, it evolved into something a lot more complex. The version I use for my after work self-ties I write about here actually requires me to have some cheat sheets to be able to translate what the dice means in various situations. The complexity actually started to become a distraction, taking away some of the fun, and I didn’t know how to handle it.
I happened to mention the problem to an old friend who is pretty computer-savvy, and he immediately came up with a solution. If he could borrow my cheat sheets, he would “simply” program it into a web page I could access from my smartphone to get the proper translates for the instructions. I was amazed when he had it done within a week, and it seemed to be working perfectly. One difference was that while the dice gave me the instructions one by one, as they were needed, the web page delivered a full list immediately, and I discovered that took away some of the anticipation and thrill about not knowing what would come later. A few more days and he had that solved as well, letting me click through the instructions step by step, and even with an animation of the rolling dice letting me wait a few seconds for each instruction.
The next problem was with my reports. They took much too long to write, especially when I finished the after work self-tie late in the evening and was totally spent from it. I solved that myself by changing from writing them as novels from scratch to copying and pasting them together from templates, reducing the time required from sometimes a few hours to usually about half an hour, which was manageable. I didn’t complain about that to my friend, but he actually suggested himself that he could let the web page generate the report as well in the same style as my copy and paste, after having read a few of my reports. Another couple of weeks and the web page included the report. It was even more amazing to me than the game, even if some of the attempts to add in my responses sometimes were a bit off. Still, I can’t even predict myself how I will respond, so if his web page would have, that would have been real creepy. The small adjustments I needed to do still just took a few minutes, compared to the original hours and later half an hour to produce the report, so I was very happy with it.
I know the after work report format is a bit square, both my copy-and-paste version and the computer-generated, but even if I don’t like disappointing people, to me the experience is the important thing, not the report, even if it is a bit of a thrill to share my experiences like that as well. After finding an acceptable compromise about how to write my weekend reports, sometimes involving others I don’t want to risk “outing”, I’ll put my novelistic efforts into them instead, so those not happy with my after work reports and my art reviews hopefully can find something of interest here every now and then anyway.