9:30 or thereabouts, and the scraping of the walls began.
9:31 or thereabouts, and my head was already melted.

-=-=-

Saturday was all about preparing the two artex walls. Scraping them down as much as they could, and adding a thick chunky layer of plaster over the top to pretty much blend away the artex.
It's actually done a fairly decent job, if I'm honest, and you can't really see the artex now, at all.
Awesome!!

But that scraping. Oh, boy, that scraping.
Two of them, light metal, sharp scraping noises, for a good 20 minutes or so.
Oh, boy, did it hurt my head.

That's the thing with noises, now. Anything that could be "slightly" annoying before, now seems to echo in my head and become insanely difficult to deal with.

The rest of the day, then, I was in SUCH a bad state. Could hardly think straight, balance was all over the place.
It really wasn't good.
Out of all the work these builders and plasterers have been doing over the past week or two, this was most definitely the most impactful, as far as my headspace went.

Ugh.

We have to wait now until Tuesday, for the thick layer of plaster to be sturdy enough to have the final Skim coating put onto it.

After that, it's plain sailing, and all we have to do is choose a colour scheme, and then decorate the room.
That's all.
Then it's done.
..
I think.

|
Day vs Night

And as we sat facing the chocolate brown of the still-wet plaster, we both agreed, that's a really nice colour.
Maybe a bit lighter, but it kinda suits the furniture really well.
Perhaps we'll go for a "Freshly plastered" look?!

Note : Mum asks that you ignore the fact that, in the day picture, the curtains are hanging out the window!!! That was just so the curtains didn't get all in the plaster!

Meanwhile...

Michael Fernie asked about how the typing tutor's going to work over Advent.
We'll be starting with Home Keys, like all good typing tutors should.
Day two, upper line, next day lower line, numbers, symbols, capitals, punctuation, all over the course of the first week.

I asked one of the chatbots (can't remember which!) to give me a list of typing lessons that expand over the 24 days, and it came up with a fairly decent list, albeit a slow one.
.. And none of them were very "gamey", either.
I've got that as a baseline, though, and will be sprinkling a few AGameAWeek style games over the course of the tutorial.

If you do a search for Typing in the archive, you'll find a few little games in there that I'd like to integrate into the typing tutor.
I've also got a couple more in mind that I can throw into the mix.

I will, of course, have to rethink how a lot of those animate, since the engine I've built is focused primarily on the typing, but for the most part things should be at least vaguely doable.

As the days progress, things might not necessarily become "harder", but they should at least become more than a little warped and AGameAWeek'y!

The very-very-barebones engine can be found here. You can hopefully type and see what you're typing onscreen. It *should* work just fine on all your devices, though it won't allow for Siri Suggestions and the like.
Be sure to let me know if it "Doesn't!" work. Because otherwise my first few days of Advent will be me having to fix the bloomin' thing!!

A.I. Corner

> Reveal 🔎
: Download | Suno Link

Alternative version
: Download | Suno Link
Sung by Suno

Udio Alternative
: Download | Udio Link
Sung by Udio


"Cartoon @Derek hangs from some curtains, dangling out the window" by ArtFlow.ai

> Reveal 🔎