Last week, a historic heatwave hit the UK. Worse, it kicked in right as I was recovering from another ear surgery—this time, for a second bone-anchored hearing aid abutment.

It was an extremely minor surgery, compared to the one last year. It was purely under local anesthesia, and it was about an hour from when I was getting prepped for the procedure to the time I was walking out the door. But it’s still surgery, so I was light-headed for a few days, and weak for about a week. I’m still recovering, actually, although I’m up to the “careful how much I lift and take some paracetamol for the pain once in a while” stage.

As much as I wanted to work last week, though, I simply couldn’t. My brain and body simply weren’t up to the task. I managed to shift my schedule enough that I could start working at 6am and get some things done before the heat and exhaustion got to me, but I just wasn’t able to do as much as I wanted to. As the week dragged on, I talked to my clients and cancelled or postponed pretty much everything that wasn’t time-critical. That freed me up to spend an hour or two each day focused on anything urgent, before spending the rest of the day melting on my couch.

During this time, I watched several freelancer colleagues push themselves despite the situation. I don’t know their situations, but I suspected some of them had clients who were unsympathetic to the situations (in which case, I’d personally just fire them and find better clients), and in other cases they might just not have communicated to their clients that they were struggling.

Don’t do that.

To be clear, I get it. The first couple of days last week, I was fighting with myself because I simply couldn’t accept that “not working” was a solution. I felt guilty each time I had to say “I can’t do this, sorry.” I’m lucky that I have a group of clients who think of me as a person and are always happy to be flexible. But freelancers need to advocate for themselves. So let’s talk over some strategies to do that.

Get in front of the story. If you know something’s coming up, let people know. I talked about my surgery a couple of weeks ahead of time (well, technically a couple of months, because I got the date wrong), and I let folks know as soon as the heatwave looked it was going to be more than just a single day. It can be uncomfortable to give people bad news, and you don’t have to give details if you don’t want to, but if you give your client advance warning, it gives them time to adjust things on their end, if possible.

Stay in contact. Try to give regular updates. Some clients won’t need them, while others will ask for daily updates. At this point I have an instinct for how often I need to stay in touch, but it’s always good to ask if you’re unsure, and err on the side of communicating more instead of less.

Proactively replan. If you have to push things out beyond the original deadline, give a new deadline you can stick to. It can be as formal as asking for an extension to a specific date, or as informal as “Sorry, I’ll get to that next week.” Again, if you’re not sure what the client needs, ask and err on the side of providing as much information as possible. (Also, if the new, revised deadline is also in danger of getting missed due to things getting worse or a new complication, go back to the first step and start over.)

It all boils down to communication, and going quiet is never the right answer. I’ve found there’s rarely any circumstance where you can’t say something, and in severe emergencies you can go through all three steps quick: “Sorry, a severe emergency just came up. I’ll be out of touch for a few days, but I’ll reach out as soon as I’m able, and I’ll get your project to you next Friday if I can.” These not only help keep a professional relationship with a client, but it also means in the rare circumstances when you do actually have to drop everything on no notice and can’t communicate what’s going on, clients will realise that is an unusual circumstance and will likely be more patient.

Even if it feels like pulling teeth to admit you just can’t get anything done right now, do it. Stay in touch. Be open about what’s wrong. Trust me, a small delay now with clear communication will pay off in the long wrong.

Even if it takes me getting a hole in my head to do it sometimes.

News

First, let me promote something for a friend of mine. Laurence Bianchi-Phillips is doing a Kickstarter for their new TTRPG, Il Fantasma del Giallo (don’t worry, despite the title the game is in English). It’s a low-prep noir-ish crime drama game using playing cards. I’ve played it a few times since December of last year, and it’s tons of fun.

You can sign up to the mailing list to get the free quickstart and sample STL files (for your 3d printer of choice). If you want to see how the game plays, I was part of an actual play that shows off an early playtest draft of the game, along with some other extremely talented folks. The campaign is simple and has no stretch goals, with extra money just going back into the book to make it higher quality.

I also did another long-form video with Extra Credits. This one is about the history of the Xbox, which turns 25 this year. If you enjoyed my previous long-form video about the legal history of Dungeons & Dragons, I think you’ll enjoy this one as well!

My character is (somehow) still alive in Red Moon Roleplaying’s Masks of Nyarlethotep campaign. Here are the latest episodes on YouTube!

• #61: Deep beneath the Australian outback, the investigators find that the path ahead was built for purposes far older, stranger, and more terrible than any human expedition.

• #62: Beneath the desert, the investigators discover that some things buried in the dark are still very much awake.

• #63: The darkness is no longer empty. Every light points somewhere, every path leaves something behind, and not everything down there intends to let the investigators pass.

• #64: As the investigators press deeper into the unknown, the darkness begins to answer them.

Finally, I was the lead writer and developer on the Storypath Ultra Core Manual! This was a different kind of project from what I’m used to, as it was a lot of compiling and editing rules into a cohesive shape, but I did have a chance to write up a fun post-apocalyptic wrestling setting in the back, called “Pinfall from Grace, Body Slams from Hell.” It’s a great and flexible TTRPG system, with loads of advice on how to customise it for your table.

My Media

Continuing my trend of 90s era nostalgia from last month, I took advantage of the recent Steam sale to pick up Blippo+. Blippo+ isn’t a game per se, so much as it’s a 90s cable/satellite TV simulator.

The premise is that you’ve somehow managed to get access to TV signals from an alien planet, and each “packette” of information consists of about a week’s worth of TV. So you watch TV to figure out what’s going on with planet Blip.

Each week has around ten channels of shows. There are five episodes on each channel (each episode is a couple minutes long), and they play in constant rotation. There’s also a Ceefax-style message board you can explore. You can switch between channels, but you can’t pause, rewind, or fast-forward the episodes.

Over time, the signal degrades, and you occasionally have to fix the signal. Once in a while an episode glitches, but if you wait for it to come back around it’s fixed. That’s it in terms of gameplay.

And yet, I was fascinated. All of the video is live-action, and shot with authentic equipment from the 1990s, which is the time period I was learning TV Production in college. I managed to track down an interview with the lead creative on the project, and in the background I could see a tape-to-tape editing deck I remember from the studio I used to work in. So the whole thing is extremely late 80s/early 90s in vibe, and there are bits of it I can actually kind of figure out how it was made.

It’s also a wide variety of shows. There are the fairly obvious narrative devices like news programs and educational shows, but it also has shows clearly inspired by, among other things, Doctor Who, Knightmare, Max Headroom, Antiques Roadshow, and Gumby. But there’s also a cooking show, an exercise program, and a show about a guy walking through the woods with a knife and axe for some reason. There’s even a “porn” channel that has a scrambled signal so all you get is a sleazy music track and some vague shapes (you can’t unscramble the signal in game).

There are also a lot of drag queens in it, which is absolutely a point in its favour.

So if you haven’t experienced TV from this time, or aren’t interested in how TV used to be shown, it might not be interesting to you. If, however, you like piecing a story together from a wide variety of media, give it a shot. It’s low-stakes “gameplay” was perfect when I didn’t feel like I could muster up much thought during the heatwave. And, like with Forbidden Solitaire, it seemed to be a retro game that was specifically targeted at me.

I think I’ve put off my work for long enough. See you in August!