Yearly Review, 2022

The Flats on Barton Creek Greenbelt

Work

Still working and teaching remotely for Flatiron School as a Lead Instructor for their Software Engineering program. I wound up teaching around sixty students full-stack web development, about a dozen or so in five-ish cohorts. Some things changed and some things are still changing, but I’m mostly just keeping my head down and doing the work. I’m starting on my fourth year there, and I’m happy to keep plugging away at it until they get sick of me.

As the year starts, I’m in the last week of my final cohort of 2022—they’ll be presenting their capstone projects in just a couple of days. Then, after a promised short break, we’ll be jumping in with both feet to our new python curriculum. It’s gonna be a tricky transition, but it’ll happen.

Laptops have been updated to Ventura with little consequence. Whew.

Travel

Again, travel is really difficult because of the whole plague thing. I’m still mostly staying inside, masking when I go out, and got all the jabs. But!

Nic and I drove down to South Padre Island and Port Aransas for a week-long mini-break in March. Got to see some cool beach critters, had some good hamburgers, and did a lot of walking around. We even got in some real-world mini golf!

I drove up to Dallas for BGG.Con Spring in May, and again in November for BGG.Con proper. Their covid protocols are still pretty okay, and we still mostly played with the same group of vaxxed/masked/testing friends in a well-ventilated space, so it felt pretty safe both times. I did play a megagame with about 45 people in one big room for a few hours, but stayed masked up as much as possible, and everyone was pretty cool about everything, so that felt like an acceptable risk—and I don’t take many around this thing, so I did my microcovid math, and tested before and after, so, all good.

In June, I flew up to Rochester with Nic and Pai to visit my dad and stepmom for a week or so. It was nice to poke around the old neighborhoods, show them some things here and there, and just chill for a while. I drove them over to Niagara Falls for a day trip, which was super fun, and ate a bunch of Tim Hortons.

Flew up to Vancouver in August to meet up with Nic there for a week—they were doing some PhD-related conferences and workshops up there for a month, so it was really nice to get to take a little break with them. Had some big layovers in Seattle, so I was able to get out of the airport and walk around a little bit. And, again, I love Vancouver. Good food, good public transport, lots of fun stuff to do and see, etc. An actual honest-to-goodness city in Canada > a kind of okay kind of city in Texas any day. Both are way too expensive still, and both are super white, but it’s not too far down my list of next places to move to, citizenship notwithstanding.

And that’s it. The coming year looks like it might have a bit more flying around, maybe even a trip to Toronto or Iceland or Rotterdam, schedule and money permitting, but, you know, plans.

Making Stuff

Released a bunch of new games on Majcher Arcana:

• Icebox: Decompression, a generation ship larp that I originally wrote for the stage, but works great for anyone to play!
• Being Ogrim Stormbane, a fifteen-minute excursion into the mind of a sword-and-sorcery barbarian, by way of Being John Malkovich.
• Wag The Cat, a one-last-job /RUN for CBR+PNK.
• Grackle Teeth, my post-apocalyptic cannibal bird Wretched and Alone solo game. I ordered a print run of 100 copies, and they are beautiful. Now I just need to cobble together a way to get them into folks’ hands.
• Wrote up the Powered by Moose and Squirrel SRD, for folks who want to make silly story-telling games in the style of the classic Bullwinkle and Rocky RPG.
• An ashcan of Dragon’s Fire, a mecha hack of Down We Go!
• Antiverse Trader, a free solo space trading game.
• Finished up the art for Roguelike Tarot Cards, ordered a sample deck, and decided that I needed to spruce them up a bit more before putting the final out there. Also poked at the RogueLike mini-RPG that goes along with it, but got all hung up trying to get fancy with it, and it fell apart before it hit playtesting.
• But in some work on a couple of unfinished hexcrawls, The Viper’s Elegy (in advent calendar format), and the Shadows of the Molten Mouth. Both are in need of a lot of work, so I’m linking them unpublished for now, but they’ll be up in the future, so, you’re welcome, future game aficionados.
• Also ran a Better Soulslike Jam on itch, because why not.

And hexle is small and dumb and fun.

So, you know, not much. I started the year strong, but got super hung up on trying to get things perfect instead of getting them done in the last four months or so, so… don’t do that, I guess?

Games

On the other hand, a bang-up year for playing stuff. We’re still playing things weekly on twitch, but the days are jumping around a bit (because scheduling) so you’ll just have to follow the channel to get updates! I also post a bunch of our play videos on youtube, too, if that’s your kind of thing.

In no particular order, the RPGs that I’ve played and run this year:

• The Between
• Stars in the Dark (our Star Wars themed Blades in the Dark hack)
• CBR+PNK
• Once More Into the Void
• Icebox: Timeline
• Brindlewood Bay
• Nightmirror
• Vow of the Knights Aspirants: Into the Bleakwood
• Trophy Gold
• Trophy Dark
• Back Again from the Broken Land
• Dungeon Crawl Classics
• Quest Night
• Fiasco (old school)
• CY_BORG
• Cartel
• Starforged
• Defy the Gods
• Down We Go!
• The Expanse
• Orbital Blues
• Root
• Honey Heist
• Cold Summer
• Zombie World
• Alien World
• 3, 2, 1, Action!
• Apocalypse World Burned Over
• Stewpot
• The Wizard’s Grimoire
• A Torch in the Dark
• Agon
• Coyote and Crow
• Devil, Aim For Me
• Free League’s Alien RPG
• Den of Wolves
• The Zone
• Cairn
• Dungeon World / Hot Springs Island
• Santacide Squad
• Bump in the Dark
• Blood on the Clocktower

All in all, I count 152 game sessions over 42 games, 33 of which were new to me. Not bad! (BUT WE CAN DO MORE)

I’m not going to list all the board games—most of those were at BGG in May and November, if you’re curious. There were a lot of those, too. I did manage to whittle down my collection by five or six hundred games—sold them to Noble Knight for convenience—but I’ve still got a full room full of shelves packed tight with board games, so that might be something to continue looking at.

Our regular Saturday morning VR “golf” game continued on through the year, in which we played some Walkabout Miniature Golf with all the fantastic new courses (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Labyrinth, Myst, and all the rest), a fair bit of Demeo (with all the new stuff, wrapping up the evil elf king campaign), a little Spaceteam and Ragnarock, some Bocce, and generally having a good time hanging out. I managed to get in a fair bit of exercise in Beat Saber, but tapered off a bit in the back half of the year.

I played a bunch of video games, too, some really good, but it’s all a blur.

Media Consumed

A fair bit, a fair bit. I’m just going to list the standouts here:

• Severance, because JFC.
• Peacemaker was unexpectedly great, too.
• Our Flag Means Death, amazing and can’t wait for more.
• Everything Everywhere All At Once, love everyone in it so much.
• Better Call Saul, expectedly great.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is as good as new Star Trek can get.
• Lower Decks, also very good.
• Rewatched the first couple of seasons of The Expanse, and, yeah, still good.
• Crimes of the Future is one thousand percent Cronenberg and I loved it.
• New seasons of The Boys and Umbrella Academy did the thing they do.
• Finally read Parable of the Sower, and, yeah, oof. So great.
• Finally saw Negativland in concert! Also did the thing they do.
• Nope, yep.
• Incantation on Netflix is some top-class modern found-footage horror. I almost didn’t finish watching, for good reasons.
• Barbarian, HOLY SHIT.
• Andor, HOLY SHIT, but for different reasons!
• Cyberpunk: Edgerunners surprised me, very fun watch.
• Deadstream, another youtuber found footage horror, unexpectedly super fun.
• The Silt Verses is an amazing horror podcast, still need to finish season 2.
• Fresh, Bodies Bodies Bodies, The Menu… man, it’s been a good year for horror.
• And Glass Onion, the new Knives Out sequel, was perfect, as expected.

Everything Else

I managed to write 750 words every morning this year, finally completing that year-long streak I’ve been shooting for the last decade.

Also kept up my year-plus streak on duolingo—I’m pretty deep into Klingon, also starting to learn Dutch for some travel this coming year.

Baked a lot of bread and desserts, made a bunch of kombucha for a while, and generally did a fine job in the kitchen all around. Got a new food processor and not-the-cheapest blender, finally, so life’s good there.

Fell way off the woodworking train after the beginning of the year. I let the shop get too messy, it was too hot outside, and I felt like crap and not getting up to do stuff most of the year, so that’s a big blocker I’d like to take care of in the next month or so. I’ve got projects stacked up down there (like everywhere, I guess), so, pressing forward. I took a TIG welding class at the local maker space, too, which is really fun, and if I manage to get everything back in order, I totally gotta learn how to do that better.

Finally broke down and hired an exterminator to take care of the critters living everywhere inside the house. Had to spend way too much money getting the roof repaired before they would even consider it, but overall, aside from a mouse incursion here and there, much better. Got the trees trimmed back from the house, did a bunch of plumbing repairs/installation myself, cut a hole in the ceiling and put in a new attic access, got new insulation blown in, built a new storage shed(ish) out front to keep all my goblin wood collection in, the whole deal.

I’m also starting to consider how much I should put into repairs here in the next year or two—it’s very likely that we’ll be moving out of Texas once Pai goes to college, and I don’t know if anyone buying this place is going to leave it standing. I had some super lowball “we buy crappy houses” place give me an estimate here, and if that’s any indication, I can come out pretty okay when that happens. Only question is, do I spend a bunch of money to make things a little better while I’m here for a while, or do I just tough it out, with the expectation that whoever gets the property next is just going to bulldoze the whole thing and put up another boring (but expensive) square glass house like all the others around here. (Anyone with experience in this, I’m all ears…)

Car died a couple of times this year, too, so, repairs and inconvenience. Whee. Lots of trips to the dentist because of my terrible teeth, whee.

Speaking of, we moved Pai to a new school, and she’s really digging it. Again, super expensive, but I guess that’s what we signed up for. I refinanced the house this year and got a bit of cash out (in exchange for higher payments, ugh), so it’s not killing me, but, yeah. I’m also getting up at 6:30am three times a week to drive her up there, which is wrecking my already wrecked sleep schedule, but it’s nice to spend time with her, so, worth it.

Did some intermittent fasting (only eating from noon-8pm) for the first half of the year in an attempt to get my blood sugar down, and I think it totally worked, and wasn’t that hard to keep up. I stopped after summer because eating is fun, but I might pick it up again for a few months here, just to keep things manageable.

There are still some folks out there bent on making my life really difficult in certain arenas. I still don’t know who, and I still don’t know why, but I wish it would stop.

Started playing with setting up a PKM/zettelkasten thing with Obsidian, which has been working out okay. I still need to build some better habits around writing and entering stuff instead of just dropping garbage in there like everything else, but it’s a process. Evernote has been sucking lately, so I migrated everything out of there, so we’ll see how that all goes.

I build myself a cool little adjustable standing desk thing—it’s cute and works, but I still want to work on a better version now—and got some better lights and camera stuff for streaming and teaching. Still nowhere near, like, “good” quality, but it’s better than nothing. Also replaced my creaky old laptop with a (not) fancy new one, which does things just fine. Did a couple of little podcast things, which were also fine.

Started playing with some AI stuff to generate pictures and words, mostly using Midjourney and ChatGPT. Lots of kerfuffle and discourse around that stuff this year, but it’s neat.

Built a little worm farm for the garden, planted a bunch of sweet potatoes that went nowhere, and took care of the chicken babies. Started a proper compost bin/pile, and started sprouting all sorts of beans for me, and wheat and barley grass for the chickens, which they love.

In addition to cutting my game collection in half, also did a full sweep of clothes and costumes and whatnot and Kondo’d the hell out of everything. I still have too much stuff, but again, it’s a start.

Stayed in a whole bunch for holidays throughout the year, which was very pleasant and relaxing, but I do kind of miss doing ALL THE THING like I did just a few years back. Stupid plague.

Nic is still working on their PhD, absolutely killing it, and doing all sorts of great side projects as well. They’re still the best. We’ve been together five years this past October, and everything is as amazing as it was on day one, better every day. Took Nic to Dig World in Houston for their birthday, which is as fun as you’d imagine. (Very fun.) They’ve been dancing a lot, and did some Nerd Night talking, all good good good.

Plans for 2023

Try doing less stuff, but secretly do more. Other than that, just keep doing the thing. Keep up my good habits, start some new ones, and hope everything stays manageable. Good plans.