Monthly Review, November 2022

Wow, November feels like it just *vanished*. Let’s see what happened…

Homestead

We’ve been putting our stuff to good use lately, it feels like. Harvested a big bin of worm castings from the three-tier worm farm I made a few months ago, and used those to amend the raised beds. Got a bunch more Texas-appropriate worms and re-loaded, because the red wigglers took pretty poorly to the extreme prolonged heat.

I finally got around to slapping together a “proper” compost pile out of a few of the approximately one billion pallets that I’ve collected, and that’s getting started nicely. A nearby food bank was giving away huge boxes of cabbages that were way past their prime, so I grabbed a trunk full of those for the chickens and the pile. Similarly, a nearby coffee shop had a ton of excess pumpkins from their halloween decorating, and again, trunk o’ pumk.

The chickens are doing great—Gogo started molting and looked like a sad little naked dinosaur for a while, but thankfully started to fill out some once it got colder. They were terrified of the cabbages and pumpkins we gave them for a while, because, you know, chickens. I’ve also started to buy bags of wheat berries and barley to sprout for them, and they love those—I cut out big strips like it was a sheet cake, and the babies just destroy them immediately. Pozzo has been holding out on us, egg-wise, but it looks like everybody is over brooding season, so that’s a relief.

Health

Had a couple of trips to the dentist to get some fillings and get a crown done, which was a lot more money than I was planning on putting into my mouth, but better than the alternative, I guess. (Unless the alternative was taking way better care of my teeth in the first thirty years of my life, in which case, that’s the better one.) But I’ve spent so much time in the dentist’s chair that even root canals are kind of routine, almost pleasant, so no biggie except for the cash and time lost.

Also managed to get my first annual eye exam since the beginning of All This, and it turns out that my prescription (which is terrible) hasn’t changed any, and my retinas (which are genetically predisposed to coming loose, apparently) are super healthy and everything’s fine in there, which was a pleasant surprise.

Went to the doctor for my quarterly check-in for everything, which is going fine, more or less. All the drugs are doing the things they’re supposed to be doing, and although I’ve been pretty lax about diet stuff, it’s more or less been working out. I had a little mung bean sprout farm going on for a while, and I’m dipping my toe back into the intermittent fasting again, just to make sure I don’t slide back into eating entire boxes of cookies too often. Also got my flu shot while I was there, and the covalent booster a few days after, so that was a fun couple of days. Also also, started back on some nightly trazodone, which seems to be helping a little with some intrusive thought stuff that’s sent me into a brain spiral for a bit, which is good to know. We’ll see if that’s temporary, or placebo, or whatever. Good times, brain.

Games

Okay! Back to the fun stuff:

• We are still hurtling towards the end month or so of our game of The Between. The hunters took out the Shoreditch Slugger during bout club at Brathwaite Hall, and now will only have one threat left to deal with (the Terrible Goose) and then it’s on to taking care of Mastermind Theodora and her nasty little Void Camera!
• Stars in the Dark is over, but a bunch of us (plus one) got to play a few sessions of XCrawl World with Rich running, which was great fun. Basically dungeon crawling a la American Gladiators, with the trad core stripped out for some more appropriate PbtA stuff. Star goes to: Lightning the Ferret.
• And that’s it for RPGs! We’re trying to figure out what we’re doing in January with the SitD crew, but it was a super light month for me there.
• Of course, I spent a fair portion of the month designing, drawing, programming, writing, and otherwise working on The Viper’s Elegy, a hexcrawl advent calendar on itch.io—I’m revealing one new location every day in December, with encounters, npcs, all that good stuff, and it’s looking pretty good so far. Of course, it’s only half written, but that’s the beauty of dripping it out a day at a time! No pressure…
• Since it’s been getting chilly, I’ve leaned on the Oculus for exercise a bunch of times in lieu of my daily walk, so I put some hours into Ragnarock (new songs!) and Beat Saber (also new songs, but I had to buy them!) instead.
• We’ve still been doing our saturday VR golf game, this month trying out the new Myst golf course in Walkabout, and it’s pretty great, as usual.
• I also fell into playing Cookie Clicker again for a while—I hadn’t tried it in a few years, and there are a bunch of new mechanics and stuff I wanted to try out, and yep, that’s still a thing.

And, of course, it’s November, so that means it’s BoardgameGeek.Con time! Drove up to Dallas—went by myself this time, because Nic had a bunch of stuff to do down home—and spent almost a week hanging out with folks I only get to see once a year and play a bunch of games that I’d never get to play otherwise. So, in more or less chronological order, here are the games I played there:

• Tussie Mussie
• Ten
• Magic Maze
• Bureau of Investigation: Investigations in Arkham
• The Wolves
• Crash Octopus
• Décorum
• Order Overload Cafe
• Scout
• Oh My Ring
• Gardeners
• Fun Facts
• Cat in the Box
• Jam Sumo
• Return to Dark Tower
• Hunters of the Lost Creatures
• Intrigue
• Frequency
• Mazescape XP: Cryo-C
• One Card Dungeon
• Kites
• Camel Up
• Hush N Rush
• Quacks of Quedlinburg
• Den of Wolves
• Paleo
• Titan
• Sprawlopolis
• Agropolis
• Food Chain Island
• Rove

Only played around thirty (mostly new to me) games this year, which actually is about average, considering that Den of Wolves was a seven-hour megagame (put on by Dallas Megagames, which was amazing, and I should probably talk about at length sometime), which basically killed me for the day, and Return to Dark Tower is also a pretty big time investment. Great time all around, though, and things felt pretty safe from a covid standpoint—not as much masking as I’d have liked, but we mostly kept to our own group of mostly-masked vaxxed-and-boosted crew, and folks were testing, and it all worked out fine. (Better than fine, actually, because covid precautions also work against run of the mill con crud, who knew?)

Media

I feel like I’ve also been a little bit behind/lazy on my media consumption this month, because I’ve been so heads down with the Viper.

• Listened to the first season of the Silt Verses, which is fantastic beyond words.
• Finished watching Andor, which is 100% the best Star Wars thing made to date.
• Watched Wakanda Forever, which was fine.
• Went to see Three Shining Lives at St. Edwards, which I could say a lot of things about now that I’m on hiatus from the BIPAC council, but I’ll just say that they did a thing, and I’m happy for people to be doing things.
• Reading some RPG books and pdfs as they (constantly) come in—the Old School Essentials boxed sets are exceptional.

Work

Things happened! The people who do things upstairs decided it was time to do things again, and some folks got let go, and a bunch of people got shuffled around. My immediate manager and his manager got reduntanticized or whatever, along with a bunch of other folks in the middle, and we instructors finally got moved under the Education department (where the lecturers and curriculum folks are) instead of the Delivery department, which… made no sense, and never did. (If only someone had been harping on that for the last year and a half…) We’re still… I dunno, I still have notes, but ultimately, it doesn’t really matter, so as long as they’re sending me checks to do the thing, I’m gonna keep doing the thing.

Speaking of curriculum, we’re about to switch over from using Ruby on Rails for our backend stuff to… python. So. Notes. But whatev.

And in fluffier news, I was asked to do a little interview (I would tell you the exact questions I was asked, but it would sound like I’m making fun of them, so I won’t) for the internal newsletter’s employee spotlight thing or whatever, and they dropped it in pretty verbatim, so here that is:

The thing that’s most exciting to me about working here at Flatiron School, honestly, is working with our students. It’s incredibly fulfilling and inspiring to be able to help people from all kinds of backgrounds improve their lives by learning new skills and making connections with other folks in the industry—starting with their cohort-mates! I’ve taught everyone from established tech folks looking to upskill for their current jobs, to people who were homeless or stuck in bad situations who literally changed their lives in a matter of months. I’ve been a professional developer for going on three decades now, and nothing I’ve worked on compares to getting a message from one of our graduates telling me how excited they are to accept their first job.

Fun Facts:

I’ve spent a lot of time on stage in the last fifteen years and change, winning awards for directing, producing, and performing in improvised theater. I’ve traveled all over with troupes and shows and taught hundreds of folks internationally and here at home (including Alaska and Hawaii!). These Unprecedented Times have taken their toll on my ability to get on stage in the last few years, but it’s all still in there.

I also design and self-publish tabletop games—mostly role-playing games these days, but I’ve done a handful of card/board games in the past, as well. I’ve definitely spent more time playing/streaming RPGs since remote life became a thing than I have in the years previous, so that’s a plus side to *gestures at everything*.

We’ve got four chickens at home here (Gogo, Didi, Lucky, and Pozzo) who provide us lots of eggs and entertainment, but our best friend through the staying at home times was a raccoon (Fortunato, because he used to live in our walls) that we eventually trained to eat from our hands. (I KNOW, I KNOW)

I have many more fun facts about myself, of course, but I’d like to keep this job for a while longer.

Other

Went to see Nic give a talk at Austin Nerd Night about their work on Performing Environmental Counter-Narratives, which was awesome (and another talk on coral, which was also fascinating).

We had another First Friday with Friends at Little Deli, got pizza with Nic and Mitchell and had one of their super good half moon cookies nom nom nom.

Took Nic to the Field of Light exhibit at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, and that was very cool.

Worked on a bunch of stuff that is just okay, and realizing that I think it’s just okay because I have really high standards for myself, and when someone else does something similar I always think that it’s SO MUCH BETTER and I get discouraged and the realization never really sinks in and I have to struggle not only with my executive dysfunction/ADHD brain chemicals but the existential crisis of why do anything at all if everyone else is better at it than I am and even if I was better at it, it wouldn’t matter because like three people look at the stuff I do and even if people cared, I work too slow and I’ll never get two percent of the things I want to do done before the lonely train comes, but fuck it because might as well do something while I’m here, so here I am pushing the rock back up the mountain and imagining myself happy about it, I guess! Wheee!

Plans

December is going to be frantically finishing up the Viper’s Elegy and getting that published day by day until it’s over, or I run out of juice.

Got some more games on the calendar, so that’s nice to look forward to.

I’m going to see if I have the energy to take care of more outdoor/yard tasks now that it’s not a million degrees out there every day, but no promises.

I already got most of my holiday shopping done, so no stress there. Got some free tickets to the “neighborhood” night of the Trail of Lights, so probably going to that with Nic and Pai.

Also need to plan our Secret Satan get-together in a couple of weeks, and figure out what other holiday (but probably not travel?) plans are around the Traditional Days of Joy near the end of the month. Which may (probably) wind up being no plans and just playing it by ear or chilling at home, which is totally fine by me.