So, how was 2017? Well, mostly it was a year where all the *cancer* related shit stopped happening. My wife got better with every month and it was a joy to be there by her side. This is our life: XKCD on cancer.
What else? I discovered Mastodon and moved my micro-blogging there. I don’t have 2000 followers or more like I do on Google+ (but how many of you are still reading?) but it’s free software, the API is open (I wrote a command line tool to archive and expire my posts!), and it was not too difficult to find a few interesting people to chat with.
a command line tool to archive and expire my posts
I have an account for RPG stuff and an account for everything else. And the blog is still up, of course.
Diary is a good entry point for everything, or just see RPG for the gaming stuff. And if you need a feed for your Feedly or whatever app you use, try `https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/feed/full/RPG`.
What else? We spent six weeks in *Australia* as a reward for making it through the last two years. I took a lot of pictures.
I guess that reminds me that I closed my Flickr account and decided to host all our photos on my own server. If you feel like browsing, I have a lists of all our galleries.
Uhm, I guess that’s it.
I don’t post too much about gaming on my blog and Google+ these days because I felt that all the stuff I cared about has already been said. When I read +Harald Wagener’s end of year post, I felt much the same.
I still play, offline, face to face: I run three campaigns and have people at my table five times per month. It’s a biweekly German campaign, a biweekly English campaign, and a monthly campaign for a good friend and some kids. These campaigns all use my fantasy heartbreaker OSR rules, Halberds & Helmets.
2017 was pretty cool because where as I failed the BX64 challenge which James V West posted on Google+ in 2015, I finished the goal I had set myself after some incoherent efforts at writing up my big campaign arc at the time. That just never ends well. All the copyrighted crap you have to excise, all the changes, all the improvisations, it all gets lost anyway. But I wrote my own boring monster manual and illustrated it! And half the images aren’t too shabby. I recently showed one or two to players at the table and they gasped. Wights and gnolls, I think. That was nice. All of this ended up being the “Halberds & Helmets Ref Guide”.
Anyway. Politics still gets me down, I’m still a melancholy person, I’m still happy to have no kids and I still don’t understand why environmentalism, the end of the patriarchy and the end of wealth inequality, isn’t the absolute top priority of anybody with kids. Here I go again. That’s the kind of ranting that makes me gloomy and I don’t want it. It’s bad enough when I read the newspaper, and I rarely do that these days.
I’m eating cabbage and raw beetroot salad with some einkorn bread, drinking sencha and listening to Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, Op. 37, “Verspers”. The beautiful music nearly moves me to tears.
2017 was also the year I started buying my own *whisky*. Not sure whether I should be alarmed. Glenfarclas Cask Strength 105, and Ardberg Uigeadail. Sláinte!
#Retrospective
