T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s Saturday night. I spent the afternoon with my gaming group, playing D&D. The game ended around six PM, but it’s close to midnight now and we’re still hanging out, surfing the web, and talking.

There are three laptops in the room, plus my computer, which allows us waste time with a great deal of efficiency. When clicking around at random, it can take you a few minutes between worthy games, jokes, images, and flash animations. You’ll see several duds before you find something good. But with four of us on the job this search time is eliminated. At any given moment there is always something worth looking at on one of the screens, and so we constantly bounce from one machine to the next. Our communal surfing has become a system of distributed cooperative time-wasting.

As midnight rolls around I grab my coffee cup and head for the kitchen. I don’t remember why. It’s too late for drinking coffee. (I know I mentioned that I quit caffeine a few months ago. I’ve since started drinking half-caff in moderation.) I think I was just getting the cup off my desk so it didn’t get spilled. I’m not paying attention to what I’m doing, though. I absent-mindedly raise the cup to drink. As I swallow two things happen:

1. I suddenly realize this coffee is hours old, and thus it’s stone cold foul and unfit for drinking.
2. Someone says something funny.

I choke. Coffee rises up and goes the wrong way inside my head, and I suddenly have cold coffee in my sinuses. Everyone has a good laugh at me as I stand there hacking and sputtering. It feels like it’s going to start coming out of my eyes. Somebody jokes that I’ve just snorted caffeine, and thus it’s gone directly into my system, like snorting coke. (I do not expect you to be amused by this. It was one of those jokes that’s only funny when you’ve got the right number of tired people and the right mood.)

But six hours later it becomes apparent that this was, in fact, the case. The other guys are all night people, but six AM is way past my bedtime and I should have crashed hours ago.

This humorous mishap is really going to set me back. Let’s see if I can recover while keeping up with my various duties:

1. Gotta keep up with the day job, of course.
2. Keep up with Chainmail Bikini.
3. Keep up with this website. (If you click that link you will feel silly.)
4. I’m about to get rolling on my still-secret new project. It’s the thing I’m most eager to work on and talk about, but certain formalities and logistical hurdles must be dealt with before I can do that.

This should be a challenge. I love a challenge. But I need a nap.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.