If I had to guess I last played Magic: The Gathering in 2005. I went to a card shop (a type of place I spent approximately no time, even then,) to hang out with a friend who was hopelessly addicted to the stuff, and played a pickup game with one of the local card sharks. It went poorly, and I swore off the habit for good. Except every once in a while it manages to get its claws back into me.
What began as a fear of undue influence transformed into a realization that ideas are meant to be shared, not hoarded—execution is what truly matters in the end.
Every December my partner and I make the drive down to the Warhammer Citadel in Grapevine, TX to play our end-of-year game. If you’re a fan of Warhammer but have never been to the Citadel, imagine a Games Workshop or Warhammer store that’s also a coffee shop. It’s the closest thing we have in North America to Warhammer World, but it’s closer to a normal Warhammer store than that statement might imply.
I need to figure out somewhere to keep my cookbooks. I need to figure out where to track my project to read and review RPG books. I need to catch up on my back issues of White Dwarf. I need to catch up on my back issues of comic books. I need to catch up on reading in general. I need to get a dev environment set up on my personal Mac.
In no particular order, an update on various interests and hobbies. Clocks The mantle clock is running strong, but about five minutes fast per day. It uses a balance wheel, which is a particularly fragile and difficult-to-adjust mechanism, so I haven’t taken it down and tried to fix that yet. The grandfather clock is out for repairs with a professional. Again. He thinks he’s found the source of the problem, and intends to publish a youtube video about it.
I back a lot of things on Kickstarter. Like. A lot of things. Especially during the annual ZineQuest, where indie TTRPG creators are encouraged to take a chance on the small, wild ideas that sometimes grow up to be Something Big. At PAX Unplugged I had the chance to speak briefly with one such creator, and they asked me what I looked for when I was deciding to back a project, so this post is written to them.
I finished Roots of Pacha at a little over 50 hours of total play time. I still wouldn’t recommend it. “But random internet wizard, what would you recommend?” I hear you cry. Contrariwise’s Definitive and Not At All Biased Guide to Cozy Sim Games Not Sweaty 1) Stardew Valley I’ve played Stardew all the way through to completion twice. I’ll probably play it again someday. Many of its best ideas are now fully dispersed into the cozy sim game ecosystem, but few games really do it as thoroughly and as well.
I’ve been away from home the last two weeks, give or take, smushing some personal travel together with some business travel to minimize my “suffering per airport hour” statistic as much as possible. If work’s going to pay for me to go somewhere, I’m going to try and get a mini-vacation out of it. I’m home for what feels like seven seconds, before heading back out on another mini-vaction-turned-actual-vacation next week.
A couple days belated, but last week was primarily about the run-up to Christmas. My routine for the last several weeks has been to wrap up dinner then settle on the couch with my Steam Deck, play something, and have a movie on in the background. I think as a result I’ve seen more movies in December than the preceding decade. In alphabetical order: 8-Bit Christmas (2021) A Christmas Story (1983) Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (1977) Frosty the Snowman (1969) Groundhog Day (1993) Home Alone (1990) How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) Klaus (2019) The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) The Santa Clause (1994) Scrooged (1988) Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987) A Very Murray Christmas (2015) White Christmas (1954) I have thoughts about most of them, but I think I can summarize and say that the only one I for sure wouldn’t watch a second time is the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, and that’s because the first 30-45 minutes of Part 2 are a direct re-telling of the original.
Resisting the urge to wait until I know exactly what I want to say before saying anything. Spent the day on the couch playing Dave the Diver which I did not like at first, but which I think gets better, and watching Christmas movies. It’s a rare treat to get to spend a weekend day doing basically nothing, by which I mean doing only what sounds nice in a relaxing manner.