September was a mixed bag when it came to knocking items off my to-do lists. As often happens, some of that can be attributed to the items themselves being too ambitious. Really need to break my long-term objectives down to more realiztic bite-sized pieces. Especially since the university year is starting up and I’m going to be insanely busy between now and year’s end.

Here’s the general plan for the coming month!

University Studies

My two courses have been open for a few weeks now, and I’ve actually done some early prep work for them. Things get formally under way next week and through the end of October. These courses look a bit more challenging than what I’ve seen so far.

As a side note, I can now confirm that the astrophysics course, at least, is likely to give me several items to refine the Architect of Worlds models for that putative second edition. Not redesign those models – it’s gratifying to see that my research is still holding up in general – but there’s been some new work in models of planetary formation that I’ll be able to use to sharpen them up.

The objectives for October are:

• SXPS288 – Complete the Introduction to Python material, as well as all the work for the “Skills” weeks 1 and 2, and the “Astronomy” weeks 1 and 2.
• S384 – Complete the Introduction module, as well as all the work associated with the Exoplanets text chapters 1-3, and the first week of work for the observational project.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

Very productive in September, even though I didn’t quite manage to complete the current “Lower Decks” story – I posted Chapter 5 on the last day of the month, but the story is going to need at least one more chapter before I can bring it to a conclusion.

On the other hand, I managed to perform a light edit on just under a quarter of a million words of old fan-fiction, moving all of it away from FanFiction.Net and onto Archive of Our Own. My FFN account still exists, but it’s now just a stub pointing to the current home for all my work. I also updated my CV on this site so that all my fan-fiction work now has links pointing to the pertinent AO3 pages. That was a big project, taking close to two weeks to complete, which is one reason why other items on my to-do list didn’t reach the finish line.

In October I have more modest goals, especially since a lot of other tasks have moved onto my plate.

The objective for October are:

• Finish and post “Sixpence in Her Shoe”
• Write at least one chapter of the ongoing work “From the Ashes”
• Start the next “Star Trek: Lower Decks” story in the series

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

I made incremental progress on version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game in September, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. Rather than aim for competing a draft for my entire portion of Composer of Cultures in October, I’m going to lay down a much more attainable partial goal. Bite-sized objectives, remember?

The objectives for October are:

• Finish the Catalog of Capabilities for version 0.6 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
• Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
• Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of Architect of Worlds, and make very occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I didn’t carry my run of the simulation game Stellar Horizons to a conclusion, because I realized I was having a hard time believing in the premises. In particular, the game assumes that the human species will maintain seven robust national space programs through the rest of the 21st Century . . . and that seems extremely unlikely, given the era of international chaos and climate-change-driven disaster we’re almost certainly moving into.

So I took down Stellar Horizons temporarily, and brought out a different game as a palate cleanser. This was Daybreak, a cooperative game with a “save the world from climate change” theme. From the same design team that produced the very popular board-game Pandemic, if that’s at all familiar.

Daybreak is a very challenging game, and playing it is quite sobering – if the future it models is accurate, we all have some difficult years ahead of us. On the other hand, it’s an inherently optimistic game too. It assumes that given enough global cooperation and new technology, we can get ahead of climate change, and build a better and more humane world.

I spent a few days in September running through several games of Daybreak (it’s also a fairly light-weight and fast-moving game) and eventually took notes from a playthrough to generate elements of the “Human Destiny” future history. I then wrote a new Stellar Horizons scenario to translate the results of that Daybreak run into conditions for future interplanetary exploration. So far the results have been very promising.

The objective for October is to continue working with Stellar Horizons to build a new timeline for the “Human Destiny” future history.

Philcon 2026 Preparation

The last item is kind of hanging fire. I’m committed to attending Philcon 2026 in November, and I expect my programming schedule will be finished any day now, but for the moment I’m still not sure what that’s going to look like. I’m not going to be running any tabletop games this year, which reduces my preparation effort considerably. I think I’ll be delivering a one-hour world-building seminar, so I’ll need to put that together. For the moment I don’t have any specific Philcon-related objectives, but I fully expect I’ll be adding some of those as “time permits” items once my schedule is ready.