I unfortunately procrastinated the March status update so much that it has melded into the April update. Over the past 2 months I’ve been working on 4 of my 10 Projects for 2017. Those 4 are: Paper Towers, Spanish, Krav Maga, and learning the Cello. My current core focus is learning the Cello and I’m spending 3 – 4 hours a week on the rest.

Paper Towers (Now Tower Storm again)

Firstly I decided to stick with the name Tower Storm instead of re-branding this project as Paper Towers. I’m proud to say that Tower Storm is finally Open Source!. I spent around 30 hours in the last 2 months removing all copyrighted graphics and sounds from the game, and cleaning up the code so it’s easy for anyone to run and make modifications. I finally pulled the trigger a few hours ago and put it up on Github. I also did my first open source development stream, if you’re interested in seeing how I develop Tower Storm, how to mod it yourself, and my thoughts on programming in general you can follow me on Twitch.

Spanish

As of the 21st of April I was up to a 25 day streak on Duolingo doing at least 30 minutes of spanish a day (50xp per day). Unfortunately I lost that streak, but I will be continually learning Spanish on Duolingo over the next year. Alongside that I’ve been watching movies, LoL games and random Youtube videos in Spanish. I’ve also switched my PC and Phone to use Spanish as their default language. Every little bit of learning helps.

Krav Maga

I signed up for Krav Maga 2 weeks ago and so far have done 6 classes. I’ll probably continue this 3 times a week schedule. So far we’ve practiced basic punching, hammer fist, kicking, roundhouse kicks, getting out of chokes, and defending yourself when you’re on the ground. I’m really enjoying it so far, it’s useful, it’s a ton of fun fighting as hard as you can (into pads) and it’s a great workout. I hadn’t been punched in maybe 15 years and it’s an eye opening experience, and made me realize I have to toughen up a lot if I want to survive a real life fight.

Cello

To celebrate the open sourcing of Tower Storm and the down-winding of that project I went out and hired a Cello for 3 months. I’ve only had it a week now and haven’t had lessons yet. I bought a beginners book and have been teaching myself how to play with that and YouTube tutorials. I’m excited to report that I can already play the beginning of the Rains Of Castamere song! Albeit with a lot of squeaks and quite slowly. I can’t wait to learn more.

So that’s it. I’ll be continuing to focus on these 4 activities until at least the end of May whereupon I may start on another depending on my progress and time available.