Rindis.com

I try to do some sort of summary every year. Missed last year’s though, and I guess, 2009 as well (geez…). Things certainly are happening though.

First off: BackBreaker Studios left a fair amount of debt when we closed it (well, that was why it closed…). That was paid off this year. Baron is now contributing to the house account, instead of scraping together everything he has just to make the payments. It’s a big help, and is starting to take the strain off of me.

Another landmark in the passing of BackBreaker: the domain is going away. Eventually; we own the domain though something like 2014. But Tug, who has been graciously hosting the site (and many others) on his own machine has been slowly phasing out his personal hosting service, and informed us that we would need to go elsewhere (not a surprise). So, instead of just transferring the domain of a dead company to new hosting, we decided it was time to move on. Smudge and Baron have a new site for their new partnership business: Smudge Marks & Engel Works. I got my own new domain as well; Rindis.com.

Most of my new site is just direct copy of the old one. The BackBreaker version is still there, but expect it to go away, and just redirect to the new site later this year. Also, any updating I do is purely on the new site, so if anyone out there actually has me bookmarked, it’s time to update the bookmark. Also, I finally joined the ranks of WordPress bloggers. Well, I suppose that could imply that I have a blog hosted by WordPress, but that is not the case; I simply am using the free WordPress software on my site to run a blog. It is now my central blog, and I just echo it to LiveJournal. I also copied over a couple of blogs I have elsewhere to the WP blog; these parts have never appeared at LJ (these are copies of my Design and Effect blog at GameSquad, and my Star Fleet Universe blog at BGG).

Speaking of the blog, counting the extra entries, I had 49 blog entries last year; thirty-eight tagged ‘gaming’, twenty-four ‘bgg blog’ [SFU blog], twenty ‘f&e’, nine ‘bvr wind’, six ‘sfb’, four ‘vassal’, four ‘life’, three ‘efs’, three ‘ai’, three ‘watson’, three ‘here i stand’, two ‘comics’, two ‘pony tales’, two ‘marathon’, two ‘second wind’, one ‘adciv’, one ‘blackbeard’, one ‘wondercon’, one ‘successors’, one ‘republic of rome’, one ‘pursuit of glory’, one ‘news’, one ‘horo’, one ‘sekigahara’.

Forty-nine entries is pretty good for me; it’s well worth noting that just about half of those originated with the SFU Blog. I expect my number of posts on that to be down slightly this year. It will probably be mostly just reporting on my F&E PBeM games this time, and less of other subjects. (Though I’d sure like to be playing more SFB and reporting on that….) Gaming is really dominating my posting (as always), though I’ve been hoping to talk more about other subjects lately. There’s a good continuing thread on Video Game Geek, “Games You are Currently Playing and Your Thoughts on Them“; I’ve been meaning to post what I have to say there here on the blog.

I’ve also been meaning to write more about what I read. For the last couple of years, I’ve been on a project to “read my way through history”. That is, go through just about the entire library of history books available to me, more-or-less in order (by the start date of the period the book covers). This was intended to be a way of me re-viewing what should get into a list of ‘recommended reading’ I have. Well, the list has been growing, but I never got around to building a real back-end software engine to make the updating easier, and give me a place to write comments on them. Well, I can still write the comments, and I should. Actually, there is a BGG thread (again) where I have started making comments, and I need to repeat myself here.

At any rate, this last year, I basically came right in on the goal I set at the beginning of the year, and went from the year 1000 (and Italian Medieval Armies) to 1300 (and The Three Edwards). Of course, I got a couple ‘earlier’ books about a month ago, so I’m currently reading Empires of the Silk Road (prehistory to current). Initial impression: very good, but very dense. Worth reading if you want to make a time and brainpower investment into it. I have no idea where I will end up at the end of the year.

More on a financial note, this has been a year of things breaking in the household. Just in the last twelve months:
* TV died (it was a CRT inherited from friends–replaced by a new LCD… which keeps having trouble)
* Laser printer died (true office machine type that does get serviced, still need to find out how much)
* Ink-jet printer died (let sit too long, ink nozzles are clogged)
* Nintendo DS lost (lost on airline flight, naturally the airline never found it–replaced DS, still out a copy of FF IV)
* Horo died (main OS hard drive failed, replaced, reinstalled everything, so far, so good)
* Car died (water pump hose blew, replaced, is fine now)
* Scanner died (ribbon cable caught on the circuit boards–surgery performed, scanner is fine)

More pleasantly, I got a bunch of games over the last year. Storage space has become an issue…:
Rindis’ Game Trade 2011

Time to go face the new year!