Rindis.com

I usually like to write a post around the new year talking about how the holiday season went and taking a look at what I did in LiveJournal over the past year.

I’m also somewhat distractable, so it’s waited until now. We should probably take down the tree as well.

I should mention that I’ve been somewhat immersed in three different computer games since visiting my parent’s. I helped get Europa Universalis: Rome going on my dad’s machine, and, well… a copy is sitting on mine as well now. I’ve always liked the strategic empire-building stuff of the original, and add in the Roman Empire, and… I need to buy my own copy.

I showed off Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe an Open Source clone of a mid-90s game to Mike and Elaina and Rowan, and got sucked back into playing with it again. They’ve recently gotten to replacing all the sounds and graphics of the original, so it’s full clone now. If you like railroad-building type games, I recommend you try it out.

And Smudge and I have been trying out a free/subscribe MMORPG from France called Dofus. Kind of interesting, since it’s a French take on the genre, as well as a French take on an anime artstyle. The game itself is not bad, and is not too demanding on the system, and has a fair amount of free content to try it with. The combat is, unusually, turn-based, and kind of FFT-ish, which is nice.

Anyway, the week off between Christmas and New Years was fairly quiet. Smudge’s parents visited us for Christmas (instead of the other way around, thanks to the weather), and we had Kris Kruetzman over for X-mas dinner. Presents were even quieter than normal, but I did get The World of Late Antiquity and Eleanor of Aquitane from my parents.

And Baron paid for all of us to see the Star Trek Exhibition at the Tech Museum. It was both more and less interesting than I anticipated. The bulk of it was on the original series and The Next Generation, with the rest being on the other series, and barely even touching the movies era. The most interesting parts actually turned out to be the costumery, but Smudge provided the interest there. Turns out the patterns for the original series uniforms are much more complex than you’d think. Other things, like the reproduction of the original bridge were marred by some obvious mistakes (the viewscreen was all wrong—looks more like the ones you see in auxiliary control once or twice).

Jason came by for a day of gaming while I was off. Introduced him to Pursuit of Glory. He liked it, but apparently not as much as me and Mark. If I can recall exactly what happened, I need to write about that too. Sadly, too much holiday crazyness for much of anything else.

As for what I actually wrote about last year: I had 30 posts, down 11 from last year. Tag count: 26 gaming, 4 c&c ancients, 4 pursuit of glory, 3 adciv, 2 archon, 2 life, 2 micca, 2 playtest, 2 russian civil war, 2 sfb, 1 asl, 1 blackbeard, 1 carthage, 1 f&e, 1 gcacw, 1 goriki, 1 guerra a muerte, 1 haruhi, 1 meme, 1 mmp, 1 news, 1 onward christian soldiers, 1 playmobil, 1 red vengeance, 1 rome, 1 spartacus, 1 winds of war, 1 wow.

I write about what interests me. Gaming. -.-; Well, I can can say what I’m playing has gotten a lot more diverse. Not really happy that SFB playing has fallen off as far as it has, but it’s proving hard to get just the parts of the group that are interested in it together.

Also, about a year ago, I decided to start reading my way back through my collection of historical books, in order of when the book starts out at (in part to help with a project that I really need to do more work on). I got from ca 2500 BC to just before AD 400. A lot of that was Osprey books, and I’m encountering more and more of my ‘meaty’ books a the moment. I’m guessing I’ll be studying the Crusades around the end of the year, but we’ll see.

Oh yes, a few months back, Board Game Geek finally opened their long-anticipated sister site RPG Geek. That immediately got me thinking about RPGs seriously again, and reading through books, and buying new ones…. I just have way too many hobbies.