Photo by Jennifer Burk on Unsplash

As I mentioned last time, I try to do something in the last 100 days of a year. This time around, it’s nothing terribly specific, more a mundane determination to just get some lingering things done than any grand plans.

One of those things was cleaning up my web hosting a bit.

See, a bunch of years ago, when I was planning on doing a lot of freelance work, I bought a reseller account. In short, that means I have a lot of web space. I won’t say “more than I could ever use” because, well, I have enough ideas that I could probably fill it up. But definitely more than I currently have any use for.

Not having any use for the space doesn’t mean I plan on getting rid of it. Nope. I’m still hosting sites for friends and I really like having the ability to, whenever I want, just spin up a new shared hosting account for any project I want.

Heck, I’ve spun up more than a few accounts.

Accounts I never really did anything with.

Accounts for former clients who haven’t used my services in years.

Accounts that I can’t quite tell you what I was thinking when I set them up.

Over the last five days, I wiped nine of those accounts, flagged two more that I need to double-check on to make sure they’re not being used by anyone, and fully disconnected a domain name from a service I stopped paying for ages ago, but was apparently still serving the mostly empty site (I kept getting notices of WordPress updating and of spam comments).

That cleans up the management interface of my hosting account, stops useless update emails from coming in, removes out of date installs of things, and generally just makes better use of resources all around.

So, that’s progress.

Rollin’ Dice

Aside from that bit of digital clean up, I’ve managed to continue running a couple of role playing games. For the first time in years, I’ve got games running mostly regularly. In the last few months, I’ve managed ten sessions of one–which, compared to the last game I tried to run, is amazing (that one took me a year and a half to run ten sessions)–and six of the other.

The big difference? I’m running these games on Roll20.net… so it’s all online in a virtual tabletop setting. That means no one has to travel to get to my table, which opens up the possibility to play during the week. Seems that’s the key.

Even better, people seem to be really enjoying the games. Always nice when you’re running a new system for the first time and your players haven’t played in the system much (if at all) either.

The games are using the Apocalypse World rules. I’m realizing now that I’ve probably been a little too forgiving and generally nice for Apocalypse World. Have no fear, I’m getting meaner. 😉

Mostly it’s just good to have a regular creative outlet again.

Next

Not bad for the first five days out of 100.

Up next is October. Which means some Halloween flavored things. Possibly the re-launch of my Hat From Hell site. And the Spooky Game Day I’m hosting here at my apartment. (Which means I really need to clean and rearrange things.)

How are the last 100 days of the year going for you?

Today makes the beginning of the last 100 days of the year.

In the past, I’ve done, or tried to do, something special for the last 100 days.

A couple of years ago, I kicked off a vlog a day. I succeeded in that, but the more important lesson was… I’m really not cut out to do a vlog a day.

Last year, I threatened to do 100 movies in 100 days. That didn’t quite pan out. Heck, this year I’ve been keeping track and I haven’t even watched 100 movies in the last 265 days. There’s no way I’m going to watch and write about 100 before the end of the year.

And then, via good ol’ Facebook’s “On This Day” feature, I was reminded that about seven years ago this was one of the best weekend of my life… and the last really solid one before a lot of things started fraying.

Around that same time, I kind of started a 100 day countdown challenge thing. Bought a URL and everything to spin it up into “A Thing”…. that went nowhere. Which is exactly where most of the other projects I’ve started in the past decade or so have gone.

So for the past week, I’ve been wracking my brain trying to decide if I wanted to actually try something again. Knowing full well, of course, that I likely wouldn’t succeed… and that it would stress me out (that volgging thing certainly did).

I’ve decided that, no, I won’t be doing any one big thing. I don’t have the time, energy, or mental bandwidth for that. There’s still too much about my life that keeps me from functioning at 100 percent for regular stuff, I’m not going to promise myself or anyone else anything that’ll degrade that even more.

Then what’s the point of this post?

Well, first I think it’s important to make note of things. Even if they’re vaguely unpleasant reminders of how little actual progress there’s been. Even if they can be downright depressing. They’re still a marker along the path that you can measure progress–no matter how meager–when looking back later. And at worst, they let you realize you’ve slid backward… which is a super useful thing if you care enough for that to bother you.

What I am going to do in these next 100 days is a handful of little things.

Cleaning up various websites of mine. Fully decommissioning others (every now and then I’ll get a notice from a WordPress site I launched back in 2011 or 2012 as part of some grand plan that I completely forgot about). Maybe I’ll really try NaNoWriMo again instead of just signing up and accepting failure out of the gate. I really should finish a book or two that’ve been sitting not quite done next to my bed for ages.

Little things.

Like grains of sand.

They really add up when you gather a bunch of them in one place.

What are you going to do over the next 100 Days?