Monthly Review, August 2022

Better late than never…

Homestead

Not a lot going on here this month. Pozzo has been broody for weeks and being a little dragon sitting in the nesting box. I’ve got a few potted bags of sweet potatoes and a raised bed full of beans that I’m keeping watered through the heat. Aside from the sweet potatoes, I don’t think we’re getting much out of the garden this summer—it’s been hot as hell, watermelons and tomatoes and peppers are all dried out and everything is just wrecked. We’ll try more when it cools down next month!

But yeah, it’s been over 100 degrees every day for the last two months, and it’s just starting to dip into the 90s as some weather comes through. I’m ready for fall and winter.

Health

My brain’s not been in a great place (half just bad brain chemicals, half con people giving me guff and the usual there), I’ve not been doing great with my sleep, but I’m also evening out on some new medicine, so hopefully that’ll calm down a bit. Getting out of the house (below) has been good, but holing up through the summer has been rough. There’s lots I want to do outside, but I don’t want to burst into flames trying to do it.

Overall pretty good, though. I had a weird blood sugar spike near the end of the month that’s starting to calm down now (again, probably adjusting to new meds), had a few little spells of vertigo, super low energy, but it feels like it’s coming back around again. Bodies are weird.

Games

RPGs:

• Our game of The Between just keeps getting better and better. We closed out the month with a big family meeting down in Dr. Safby’s lab with everyone there, some mild torture, and a plan to wrap up a lot of stuff all at once. After an intense night phase, the Hargrave hunters managed to bring in Sally No-Face and the Limehouse Lurker in one evening, and now it looks like they’ve got a new housemate and a side business running a vampire brothel. So, that’s nice.

• FINISHED the art for my Roguelike ASCII art tarot cards! They’re all laid out and I ordered a test run from DriveThruCards—their quality’s not amazing, but it’s really nice to finally have them in hand. I’ve got most of the two-player mini-rpg that goes along with it written up, and I’m struggling with some layout and design stuff, but I reckon I’ll be able to get that in the books by the end of the month. Next… kickstarter for a full print run? Anyone interested in that? We’ll see.
• Played a short run of Apocalypse World (Burned Over) with Mike Ferdinando and a few other folks on the Gauntlet. It’s nice to give the OG a shot again!
• Did a sweet playtest of the latest version of Stewpot with Adam, Morgan, and Ryan. It’s such a lovely little game, and I hope that the publisher is professional with the stuff they get. Can’t wait to see it in print!
• Our Saturday sessions of Stars in the Dark are cruising along nicely—we hit our one year anniversary for the campaign in the last week of the month! I think that’s the longest continuous game I’ve played since… college, maybe? Anyway, Boko’s out of prison and shit’s about to go down.
• Played a fill-in session of the Wizard’s Grimoire, another sweet game from the Bakers where there’s basically one “player” and two GMs. I’m really excited to get some more sessions in and see what my little wizard buddy gets up to. (I also made a sweet character keeper for it, which, keep your eyes out for stuff…)

Video Games

• Still having our regular Saturday morning VR “golf” game, with Heath and Peter and Roy and Nic. Played through both courses of the new Labyrinth update, which is awesome, and did some Demeo.
• Got back into SuperHot for a little bit, which is strangely relaxing.
• Gave One Deck Dungeon a shot, not into it. Cute, but eh.
• Played some Tiny Folks, a pretty linear “roguelike”-ish rpg, which is also pretty fun, but limited. It’s gonna stay on the desktop for a quick fix, tho.
• Letting the numbers go up in NG Space Company mostly in the background, still.
• Finally played a bunch of Dicey Dungeons, which is oddly compelling and has a very cute style. I’ll probably play it out all the way through, and steal some mechanics for something else down the road. :D

Media

• Still plugging away through Farscape—finished the second season, and… it’s fine. I feel obligated to finish the series, but it might take a while.
• Watched Incantation on Netflix, which is really good. I’m pretty jaded with horror stuff, and I genuinely considered not watching it all the way through.

• Watched the first couple seasons of Nathan For You, which was fine, and The Rehearsal, which was amazing.
• Finished out the final season of Better Call Saul, which was one of the best things on tv in a long time.
• Started watching She-Hulk, which is just fun, and starting to ramp up into even more fun in the third episode. Curious to see what they’re doing with this.
• Watched some movies on the plane—the 2012 Total Recall (execrable), Atomic Blonde (pretty much what it looks like, very cool), and Django Unchained (which I somehow missed before, and… if you’ve seen a Tarantino movie, you’ve seen it).
• Wound up reading a copy of the Checklist Manifesto that was at our AirBnB—I don’t know how people manage to write like a one-page lifehack into a whole book, but good on them, I guess. Good idea, but super fluffy—”using a checklist for things makes it easier to produce reliable, error free results”. Got it. Next.
• Listened to a bunch of Gauntlet podcasts, +1 Forward and Fear of a Black Dragon and whatnot. They’re always really good, and I don’t listen to podcasts that much, and when I do, I guess I don’t really consider them “media” for some reason, but they are, so here we go.
• Similarly, caught up on a lot of woodworking and gardening and homesteading youtube, getting lots of good ideas for when the weather gets better and my body decides that it’s time to do stuff.
• Went to see the world premiere of Lardo Weeping at Crashbox, which was a (mostly) one-woman opera about… a lot of things. Really great, if that’s your jam. (It is mine.)
• Sideways here, been playing with the midjourney ai art thing a whole bunch, and signed up for their monthly thing to work with it more. I think it’s going to be a really good tool, but, lots of discourse out there.

Work

Nothing to report really. Stuff is cruising along, my students all passed their code challenges, and they’re into their capstone projects. Chug chug chug.

Other Stuff

The big thing this month was flying to Vancouver for the better part of a week to spend some time with Nic while they’re out doing conferences and workshops and whatnot for a month. Had a five or six hour layover in Seattle, which meant that I got to step outside the airport to have some amazing breakfast at 13 Coins, and walk down to Angle Lake Park to stretch my legs and chill a bit before getting back in the air. Really, it would have been quicker to catch a bus or train up from there, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I love Vancouver. It’s only the second time I’ve been up there, but the weather is great, it’s in Canada, there’s really good food, it’s an actual, like, city with public transport and a bike rental system and the crazy gelato place and … yeah. It’s on the list for when it’s time to gtfo from Texas. I walked a lot (my feet were one big blister by the end) and biked even more (which I haven’t done in years, and which was very refreshing), and ate a lot of Tim Horton’s and Sicilian pizza and ice cream and Thai food and my blood sugar is still somehow under what it’s supposed to be after all that, so… I’m guessing that getting in miles and miles of exercise every day is probably really good for me somehow, so maybe I should look into that when I get home. But yeah, probably got in at least 20km of biking and whatnot, went on a walking mural tour with a friend of Nic’s up there, got some donuts from Lucky, got some candy from the licorice store over on Commercial, and hung out in Granville and Stanley Island and spend time by the water and… yep.

Anyway, yeah, I miss living in an actual city. Austin is nice and all, but it’s still pretty dinky, comparatively. And in Texas. Anyway.

But I was very happy to be back home afterwards, and even more happy when Nic came back a few days later. A month is a long time, and I’m not fer it. And when we got back, it was raining a whole bunch, which was very nice (unless you were affected by the terrible flooding it caused then, not so nice).

Oh yeah, it was my birthday! I got some cookies from Crumbl and some pizza and relaxed and talked to dad some, and it was nice and relaxing and I’m fifty-two now and that’s weird.

Pai is back in school, too, and I’m taking her to school super early for her weightlifting class, which, yep. We get up at like 6:30am because I guess we’re farmers or something, and we’re both very sleepy and she gets pretty stressed out with all the stuff that gets loaded on her to do, but it’s really nice to get to spend time with her on the drive, and I hope to do more of that when we can.

Plans

LOL good one. But yeah, trying to find someone to replace the soffits and fascia on the house so I can get the gutters replaced so I can do some other stuff, which is going to be way too much money, but it’s gotta be done eventually, so here we are. We’ll see how that goes.

Also going to see about getting funding for a print run of the Roguelike cards and game, and start poking at the next project on the pile. And just, like, keep trucking, I guess. \m/