Update… such as it is
Wow, I haven’t posted here in… like forever. Let’s do a little update.
Vacation. We went on the (now traditional) Texel holiday at the start of October. It was good to get away from it all for a longer time - we hadn’t had any summer vacation after all. The weather was not that good, but most days there were some dry periods so we did get to go outside (and to the beach!) almost every day. One day the weather held up, and we took a long hike over the beach and back through the dunes (which are a national park).
Going out to eat was weird, but kind-of okay. Disinfecting hands at the entrance, being seated away from others… It was probably ok? But some restaurants didn’t want to bother doing all the checks and didn’t want groups larger than two. Most stores were doing well with the COVID-19 measures too, but there was one store where the owner basically told us he didn’t care at all. We wished him well and disinfected our hands thoroughly when we left.
COVID-19. But meanwhile, the number of cases has been skyrocketing here in the country. The “hands-off” approach and lack of stern measures gave the predicted effect, and we’re back in the stage with strong measures - probably stronger than before. But of course some people are being idiots about it, so the measures were made even sterner in response.
I cancelled a face-to-face RPG session with local players, and some of the reactions I got were… not good. Not very motivating. We’ll see what happens with that going forward.
Work. So that also means that I’m still working from home, which suits me fine. (And my boss tested positive for COVID-19 a week ago, and I’m glad we haven’t had any face-to-face contact recently…) I’m getting more and more into my role, and I’m enjoying it. Colleagues are friendly and helpful, and I’m starting to understand more and more of the product and our market(s).
I also heard that one former colleague, who got fired in the same reorg as I did, will start in his new job on Nov 2nd. Really happy for him!
Gaming. I don’t think I’ve skipped a single day in Animal Crossing ever since it came out on March 20th. That’s half a year now… But we’re basically in a ‘maintaining pattern’, and we’re not undertaking any large-scale renovations. There are a lot of things I don’t really care about, such as getting all of the bugs and fishes for our museum, and I’ve stopped putting time into that. But I still want to get all the photos of all the villagers - and once we both have the photo, the villager can be rotated out for someone new. Yes, we have a spreadsheet to keep track.
As I wrote earlier, I’ve gotten really deep into Dauntless. It’s a lot of fun and kind of relaxing to queue up a hunt, spend about 15 minutes furiously hacking away at a virtual monster and then be done. I’ve put some money into it (it’s free-to-play so I didn’t have to) to get more load-out slots etc. It’s entertaining, and the makers deserve to get some compensation for that.
We also played through the demo of the remake of Pikmin 3. A lot of fun to discover the game together - I might just get it. We also tried out the co-op play, but that was confusing so we gave up on that very quickly.
RPGs. It’s been hard to get into the mindspace to work on my second D&D scenario. But I’m still running two groups through it, and it got better because of that. Maybe I’ll do some more writing this weekend.
I ran the ‘free RPG day’ scenario ‘Pellenicky Glade’ for the Root RPG, based on the boardgame. It was fun, but I was not impressed with the combat system. And someone chose the ‘mad arsonist’ playbook, so it ended like you’d expect. I rushed the ending too, because we were running out of time and I didn’t think the situation warranted a third session. It was a lot of fun, but I’m not sure I want to get the full game.
I’m reading through “Against the Darkmaster”, a modern variant of Rolemaster, the first RPG I ever played and that I love, warts and all. “Vs. Darkmaster” should give a smoother play experience with some modern subsystems added to it. Would perhaps be fun to run an old Middle-Earth RPG module with this ruleset to see how it compares.
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.