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Overall, 2022’s been a good year. At least if you’re not involved in a land war in Asia. Personal savings is down a bit over the year (thank you rising prices), but the overall household continues to gain stability.

Fox Den‘s multi-year project to republish Panzerfaust & Campaign continues, and in fact, I am hitting that particular transitional name with #71 going out the door at the same time as this post. Overall, I got paid in eight out of twelve months this year, which isn’t bad, and a couple of times the amount was fairly high. It’s still minuscule compared to the sweat equity, but I’m on schedule, and with 50-year-old magazines, I consider everything to be low-volume evergreens. For a fair chunk of the year, I was also doing mid-month releases, which got about half of Lowrys Guidon and the three Wargamer’s Guides out, and those last have been doing well. Hopefully, I will find some extra time for some more mid-month releases this year, the two pre-Lowry issues of Panzerfaust I have (#51 & #52) are coming up in the queue.

The five-days-a-week gaming schedule continues eating up the rest of my spare time. Final Fantasy XIV continues being the biggest time sink, with the rocky start of Endwalker over with (and it was a good end to the story arc started in 1.0/2.0), most of the side stuff done, and now trying to get other jobs up to snuff. I got the big “lump” in my series of Paradox reviews done (back-to-back full game reviews), now I just need to squeeze them into the blog’s posting schedule.

And again, the blog was on the standard post/four days schedule. I have more to post, but most of the time I’m running with about one post in the can, and struggling to get the next out on time because of the lack of spare time. However, I started the year with several games to write up, and this time… well, about the same, but only four Vassal games, and I’ve had three face-to-face sessions in the last week, and those need writing up.

Overall, I ended up trying out eight new games over the past year, and while the 1914 system (Serbien Muß Sterbien) is one I don’t think I’ll go back to, I’m still impressed by it, and I don’t have an overall negative impression on any of them. Game buying is back up (in money, at least), but part of that was getting Hollow Legions 3rd edition, which completes the update of my ASL materials. If I can avoid getting sucked into many new HASLs (spoiler: nope, I have Sainte-Mère-Église on preorder), big-ticket items should stay down in the future.

Yearly reading is under my goal again. On the other hand, one of the books I read was Chandler’s massive Campaigns of Napoleon. Good book, but not one to read in a hurry. Overall, it would be one of the better non-fiction books of the year, along with part 2 of Sumption’s series on the Hundred Years War (I got part 3 for Christmas). Similarly, Gill’s books on the 1809 Danubian campaign are good, and I’ll be returning to that a bit later. And finally, Russia Against Napoleon is recommended.

On the fiction side, Mark handed off some ST:TNG novels that he got duplicates of, and I also found out there’s a bunch on sale on Kindle every month, so I’ve read a number of Star Trek novels. Early TNG novels continue to underperform, but Prime Directive and The Captain’s Oath are very good TOS novels. Outside of Star Trek, most of the fiction I read this year was quite good, and I’ll note The Tea Master and the Detective as being one of the best of the year.

The big bad news here is that Covid followed Dave home from a convention, and we all got it during the worst heat wave of the year. Thankfully, it got milder as it went through the household, and me and Smudge’s symptoms were pretty mild. We’ve had other scares, but that’s the only time we’ve had to actually deal with it, and other illnesses have been largely absent. My job isn’t quite as stable as I would like, but so far, so good, and things shouldn’t get any worse without a collapse that I don’t think is coming (we’ll see if that holds up for the year, if so, things should be fine).

Well, it’s a good thing that I don’t generally talk about the world at large in these posts, because I could probably be here for most of a year talking about all the various kinds of crazy this last year has been for just about everybody.

The good news is that overall this household is doing well financially. Baron & Smudge are doing okay with SM-EW, and earnings are down a bit (especially with no convention sales to boost things), but the main Patreon is holding steady. Dave has had a good amount of work throughout most of the year, and seems to be doing well there. Working for a large corporation has the advantage that it stayed steady when everything went crazy with the initial lockdown. Our team was already working from home most of the time, so the change was no big deal for us.

However, as of the day this posts, I’m no longer at a large corporation. ViacomCBS sold CNET and a bunch of associated brands to a much smaller company, Red Ventures, a couple months ago, with us all ‘leased’ back to CBS for the remainder of the year, which has been great for making the transition smooth. The new company seems pretty good, but there’s no long-term track record to go by yet. Certainly, the layoff of my (former) direct boss, Karen, really hurts, but everything else is intact, and hopefully the rest of us will do well.

The second surge of Covid-19 also meant I canceled my annual trip to see my parents for Thanksgiving. I was planning on going until the numbers just kept getting worse every day for the lead up to it. As with many of us, I’ve spent most of the year indoors, which at least is not a big burden for me. Up until everything came apart, the gaming schedule was being fairly busy with at least two game days a month between multiplayer and Mark coming over. I’ve been helping keep Mark company by gaming with him on Vassal Sat & Sun mornings as well as Monday evening.

Thanks to that my gaming schedule is a little over-full. Monday evening is ASL with Mark, Wednesday is ASL with Patch, Friday is Stellaris with my Dad. Saturday morning is reserved for ‘big/learning’ games with Mark, and has mostly been Operation Dauntless as we worked through the tutorials, and are now working through the main ones. We’ve also put Operation Mercury into the mix and are now alternating between the two. Sunday morning is more for games we can get through quickly and did see a number of different things this year, such as A Victory Lost, Great War Commander, GEV, and Star Fleet Battles. And all of those days generally have time in Final Fantasy XIV with Smudge too.

This led to some burn out around July, and I dropped my two PBeM ASL games for a couple months, but have them actively going again. At the same time, it’s also been a busy year for getting games, starting with the new Deluxe ASL set at the start of the year, and a whole string of birthday games during June. It was also an expensive year, even though I got even more than I paid for.

Along with no gaming at the house, there hasn’t been much going out to do anything else, naturally. It makes me really glad that I spent a bunch of money to get us all to a Final Fantasy concert at the end of January. Definitely one of the highlights of the year.

Part of the burn-out has been with trying to keep on top of the blog. I had one point where I was scrambling for posts, as I hadn’t finished any books or games lately (part of the burnout was just a distinct lack of any ambition), but most of the year I’ve had a small backlog of things to write, which has not turned into a backlog of things written. So, a mere 95 posts for 2020 (compared to 102 in 2019).

Part of the change in schedule has been a rearrangement of reading time, and I didn’t get near as much reading done as I’d hoped, with the train reading time going out the window. I only read 50 books this year, and that’s with a bunch of short Osprey books helping out. That said, what I read was generally pretty good. On the fiction side of things, I finally got to Child of a Hidden Sea, which was the best all-new to me book I read, with The Heart of What Was Lost, Servant of the Empire, and Marque and Reprisal being very good returning series for me. Best history of the year goes to Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England, which was excellent, mostly on Henry V’s early carrier. Crucible of War was also an excellent account of the French and Indian War. About the only disappointment this year was The English Civil War: A People’s History, which had a good mission statement, but didn’t carry it out very well.

Osprey Publishing had a very nice giveaway of several books in electronic format early in the year, which got me back to them, and I’m filling out parts of the library with PDF versions of the books. Their recent Campaign book on the AD 717 siege of Constantinople was especially good.

Mechanical/electronic issues have been minimal this year, with the main problem being something giving out on Smudge’s graphics card (probably the oldest part of the current system) just a couple weeks ago. It still works, but is running hotter for less work than before, so presumably a fan gave out. I… hadn’t properly gotten her a present yet, so I got her a new graphics card. (I could still use one a bit more competent for my system.) Also, Amazon seems to have completely cut off their old Kindle app, which I find better than any of the ‘modern’ alternatives, the Edge-based plugin is tolerable. I’ll have to get used to it, but it does mean I’m slightly motivated to get an actual Kindle reader.

With 2020 finally at an end, I (like everyone else) am hoping for a much better New Year!

Well… it’s certainly been a year. At least it never felt like three months flashed by without warning.

Financially, I’m probably a bit behind where I started. Which is a shame, since most of the year things were improving for me. On the other hand, I’ve made three major electronics purchases, and I shouldn’t need to do that again any time soon. Back in January, I built Erza, my new desktop machine. That was more trouble-prone than I expected, and there were a few months of teething issues, but it’s settled down now, and is doing very well. The only loose ends are someday getting a better video card, and expanding the RAM further.

Mid-year I bought a new NAS as a house file-server. The one we had had filled up some time back, and I wanted something better than the ‘NAS of very little brain’ that we had. Luckily, I found an older WD model that had been sitting at Central Computer for years, and was heavily discounted. The bad news was that WD considers its warranty to have expired while sitting on the shelf, and the old NAS started failing a week before I was ready. But I salvaged almost everything, and storage is currently twice what it was, and is expandable from there. I hope to buy a 4TB drive for it this year, and use the current pair of 2TB drives (one is backing up the other) as a backup to it, doubling storage again.

Both of those were actually bought out of pocket, so it was the third that drove up the credit card. Azuna has been struggling this year, and I had to buy a replacement Type Keyboard last year and a power adapter for her early this year. The battery was not lasting as long, and was having trouble with charging… and then around September the touch screen started acting up. It would show a line of five touches constantly hitting it in a line across the screen, which would do all sorts of bad things to programs running, and interfered with actually using the touch screen. So, it was time for a replacement. Microsoft had a $300-off deal for a new Surface Pro 6 on Black Friday, and considering that I needed a replacement, I really couldn’t afford not to take it. So, now I have Sakura, which cost me less than Azuna did. I’m still getting used to the 3:2 screen, and seeing just what she can do, but so far so good, and I hope Microsoft has gotten better with their touch screens.

Sadly, gaming wasn’t much better this year than last. We had one group day in January, and Jason made it over for a couple of games around May (finally tried out Der Weltkrieg, which I definitely liked enough to want to try more, and I nearly went out and impulse bought a second game in the series). Patch made it over a couple of times in December, which was very nice, and I hope I’ll see a bit more of him during the new year. I spent around $250 on gaming this year, including transferring part of my old ASL set to Mark, and finally getting a copy of Armies of Oblivion (by far the single biggest-ticket item), which gets me all the WWII core sets (I am looking at getting the Korea module at some point). I also have a couple more things on preorder that I expect this year, and am in the final internal debate on whether to get Red Factories, which is about to come out. My F&E game continued to monopolize a lot of spare time, but has now been bumped down to low-priority, and I’m in one PBEM ASL game, and hope to have more this year.

My Dad and I started a weekly computer game night last year, and we were enjoying FreeOrion together (still recommended), but it’s not so good on networking, so we used a third party to tie us together for the game. And then that died on us early this year, and I couldn’t get a replacement service to work. I then got into Stellaris when it went on sale, and talked my Dad into trying that. He was hooked, and we’ve moved over to that for our Friday nights. I also got an urge for some of our older console stuff during mid-year, and actually finished Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy Chronicles: Ring of Fates. The handheld stuff is on hold at the moment as it was interfering with reading time too much, and I’m currently busy with clipping counters in the time slot that should be Kingdom Hearts II, but I should start that soonish.

Smudge also got us back into FF XIV right around the turn of the year, and we’ve been adventuring in Eorzea ever since. I’ve been taking advantage of screenshoting, and have gone from no images from the game (and of my main, Rylea, who I really liked) to having nearly 700 images saved off…. I’ve been posting some of them in weekly summaries, and in occasional blog posts about what we’ve been doing.

The blog itself stayed on schedule this year, with only a few places where it was a fight to have something out, though I never got ahead of schedule. If I can get to writing several book reviews, I should have a pretty good backlog built up soon. This year I had 93 posts, and category count was: 43 in Books, 11 in Konya wa Hurricane, 9 in MMO, 6 in C&C Ancients, 5 each in Boardgaming, Computer Games, 4 in Anime, ASL, and 2 in Life, GURPS, SFB. This is the same as last year, but the counts have shifted around a bit. Folding up the subcategories gives 28 in Boardgaming, 14 in Computer Games, and 2 in RPGs. Once again, I need to get around to splitting up the Books category. I didn’t manage any RPG posts other than some more spells for GURPS Dungeons & Sorcery, and I don’t know if that’ll change at all this year. I did get the Paradox review project moving a bit after two years, but I’m currently stalled most of the way through the CK II review. It’s massive, and I hope I can finish it off soon. Boardgaming is down because of the FtF problems… and I really hope that gets better.

I exactly made my reading goal of 52 books again this year, though it took a fair amount of effort after I got way behind in mid-year. Some of it was falling off the comics bandwagon and not really getting any new graphic novels this year. Some of it was some large, slow-moving books. It’s hard to say what my top recommendations for the year are; there was not a lot of standouts. The entire Designers & Dragons series is very good, though I enjoyed the earlier volumes more, Kiln People ended up better than I expected, On a Red Station Drifting lived up to the good review I’d seen of it. The obvious ones (sequels, authors I’ve read a lot of) also lived up to expectations: Penric’s Demon was quite good, The Wavering of Haruhi Suzumiya was fun, Oath of Fealty was a good start of a sequel series to Paksenarrion, and better than the two prequels…. On the other hand, I had a fair number of serious disappointments: The Rise and Fall of Alexandria was much lighter than I was expecting, and riddled with obvious errors. A World Lit Only By Fire was a problematic screed, saved when the author talked about his hero, Magellan. Ornament of the World was also a lot lighter than I was hoping for; still good on the literary study end, but I wanted more of the history outside that. Red Mars was a book that stalled me for a bit, as I didn’t care for about half the characters.

So, going forward, more of the same at the blog here, and I need to start writing up some book reviews before they fade much more in my memory. I’m still trying to figure out how to absorb new books and games and other items I got for Christmas and during my yearly visit to my parent’s into my overcrowded place. Hopefully, I can actually recover some financially this year, but with all-new electronics on my part, that’s one source of expenses down.

This is the second year where I’ve been trying to have a new post up on this blog every three to four days, and this time I made it with no extra gaps. Mostly, posts were four days apart with only a couple occasions where I squeezed it down to three (this is one of them, as I squeezed the schedule for this to be due on the 1st). At least a third of the time I had one or more posts waiting in queue to go up, which is where I want to be. Maybe another third I knew what the next post was, but needed to write it, and the rest of the time I was struggling to come up with something. Hopefully, this year I can cut down on that last a lot more, and get a few things ready for putting into ‘dead’ spots. If I can build up some spare posts, I’ll be moving to a three-day schedule a lot more.

I did 93 posts this year, up 2 from last year, which shows I mostly just avoided having any gaps in the schedule. Looking at the categories, I had: 43 posts in Books, 11 in ASL, 9 in Boardgaming, 6 in CC:Ancients, and Konya wa Hurricane, 5 in GURPS, 3 in Anime, and SFB, 2 in F&E, and Gaming, and 1 each in Life, and Computer Games. Folding those up the subcategories gives 8 in F&E, 37 in Boardgaming, 5 in RPGs, and 44 in general Gaming. This, again, points up the fact that I need split up the ‘Books’ category. Considering I did review a couple of graphic novels this year, I should at least split that off.

It’s been a mixed bag for gaming this year for me. Face-to-face gaming has really come apart, with Patch too stressed and busy to make it over much, and Mark disappearing off the face of the Earth for months at a time. Hopefully, it’ll pick back up this year, but I have my doubts. ASL for the year was pretty good, with 12 games, with 5 wins and one abandoned. I will need to find some time to get a couple more PBeM games going this year. My idea to get into some of the other moderate-sized games by PBeM didn’t happen; instead I ended up with two PBeM games of F&E, one of which has a very eager and active opponent, and so it takes up a lot of my free time. An off-on idea has been to solo a few situations in SFB, and I just started gearing up for one of those; we’ll see if I actually do it.

I have one RPG review sitting in the can, which will probably go out soonish, and I’ve been meaning to write up a review of FR8 and continue my Forgotten Realms reviews, but haven’t gotten up the gumption. Recently, I was contemplating trying to go back and finish off my EU III: Divine Wind review, and get the Paradox series going again, though past that (which is about 1/4 written) I probably won’t. At the same time, I’ve started wondering about doing a similar series just on Europa Universalis IV, it has changed a lot over the course of the expansions, and explaining it all would actually take some work. I’d also like to get back to some more design and genre-related posts, I recently did one, which is far from my best, but it was nice to think about again.

Smudge has been getting her animation going again (leading to some late nights where she just doesn’t stop), which has been part of her not being involved in any MMOs, which means I haven’t either. I did finish a couple games of EU IV during the year (one as the Ottomans, and one as England), and have started a couple others, but haven’t gotten far. I’ve spent the last month and a half bouncing around various other games, including Civ IV, FreeOrion, OpenTTD and Settlers II, enjoying them all. Despite a comparative lack of gaming, I spent around $650 on gaming during 2017, which might help explain why my finances aren’t in as good a shape as I’d like. A decent chunk of that was during a few months where I got a bit ASL-obsessed, and finally decided to upgrade part of my collection to the MMP versions (something I’ve been meaning to get to for years), so hopefully I’ll have a more modest budget for 2018. Though I might do another upgrade round.

However, the big expenditure for 2018 will probably be a new computer. Azuna is doing fine, though I had to replace the type cover, as the original one wore out; I’d abused the hinge a bit. But Horo’s primary components are over a decade old now, and I’m starting to notice. For most things, the processor is just fine, though there’s a few heavy websites out there that can kill the system (one of them being for CNET, where I work…). But the F&E Vassal module really needs the JVM heap to be set somewhere north of 2GB, and my motherboard can only take 4GB of RAM, so I’m constantly running into memory issues. So I will be building a new desktop soon.

I hit this year’s Goodreads goal of 52 books exactly, and as usual have a large backlog of books to read. During July, Amazon averaged two Kindle books per week on sale that I already had on my ‘to get and read’ pile, and I’m still working through that. Best book of the year is definitely Ancillary Justice, though as I said in my review, it’s a slow burn, it was halfway through that the book came into focus, and I realized just what I was seeing. Uprooted was also very good, and the second-best of the year. Best non-fiction (and third overall) was Stilicho: The Vandal Who Saved Rome, which was a very informative look at an important juncture in the Western Roman Empire coming apart. Actually, it’s been a very good year for reading overall, and I could easily go on for quite a while with other recommended books. Reading Through History did not get very far this year, from about 1730 to about 1750, but I read five books in that period, in addition to all the go-back-because-its-earlier reading.

Personally, 2017 has been a good, but not great year. Finances are worse (not entirely my fault, but that’s a rant I’m not going into), but not disastrously so. Gaming  is overall down, despite a good start. System is showing its age. I’m about to fix that last, and that will take some stress off the gaming I am doing, as it should improve F&E Vassal performance quite a bit. There’s been a number of problems around the apartment, but we’re actually getting decent replacements now instead of crap that just breaks again.

This year’s main goal for the blog was to have a new post up every 3-4 days, and to spread out any ‘clumps’ to maintain an even posting schedule. I mostly stuck to that, though there were a couple times in January where the gap stretched out to six days, and a two-week period in July with no posts, largely because I was ill, and not doing much. The idea is to build up a small (probably rotating) reserve of posts that I can schedule into the dead spots, and that hasn’t really happened. Most of the time, I’m posting right on top of deadline. So this year, the goal is to get the schedule a little more stable. A count of the posts says I did 91 this year, which is down from 2015.

Taking a quick look at the categories involved, I had 29 in Books, 12 GURPS, 11 Boardgaming, 6 D&D, 5 each Four Vassal War, BvR – The Wind, ASL, 4 each MMO, CC:Ancients, Anime, 2 each F&E, SFB, and 1 each in Life, Computer Games, and Comics. Folding those up the subcategories gives 12 in F&E, and 29 in Boardgaming, 18 in RPGs, and 5 in Computer Games. I may need to split up the Books category some (fiction and non-fiction, most likely).

One of the things hurting the posting schedule is a lack of gaming. Communication has been breaking down in the FtF group, and Bel’s been busy, so the near-monthly feed of F&E updates has gone dry. I’m doing some PBeM ASL, but that takes a while, and is a lot of effort to write up. I’m thinking that I need to find something new to slot into the dance card. I’d prefer either something a little smaller, or something that’s worth reporting on in 1 (or 2-3) turn chunks like F&E is. So, I’m thinking of trying for some EFS or OCS games, or maybe GCACW. I’d also like to try out the Der Weltkrieg series. We’ll see what happens.

As I just implied, not a lot of gaming happened this last year. Similarly, board game purchasing has been down this year, and all I got was the new ASL Journal, an impulse on-sale buy of Osmanli Harbi, a gift of Hakkaa Päälle!, and the issues of Captain’s Log that made it to PDF. I haven’t done a lot of computer gaming either (though I’ve just about finished up a full game of Europa Universalis IV; no small feat!), and the major purchase there is a 2DS and Pokemon (and that’s about the only thing bringing spending into line with other years). You can see the full details here.

The major purchasing attention has been GURPS, even though I’m not really getting any closer to doing anything with that than at the beginning of the year. I can blame the robust GURPS blogging community for the attention, which has helped keep it in my scattershot brain through much of the year. Further, doing some worked-out spells and creatures has helped fill out a lagging schedule some, giving me a practical incentive. Lately, the fact that I’ve done some work has put me in mind to actually see it in motion, but I keep being wishy-washy on what I want to do.

I hit my Goodreads goal of 52 books read this year (one a week; and I actually hit 53), though that includes a number of modules and graphic novels that I generally don’t count as they’re so short. My “Reading Through History” project is mostly bogged down with new books on earlier eras, but I’m up to the 1730s now. As usual, the annual visit to my parents and Christmas have left me over-full on to-read physical books again, which I’ll spend the next few months trimming back down. I’d say the main reading highlights of the year were Peter the Great (Massie is always very good), The Name of the Rose (which actually has some problems, but is still a very interesting read), and Zita the Spacegirl, which is a very fun graphic novel.

So the year’s goals are to do over 100 posts again, get more wargaming done, and read more books. …Fairly typical actually.