Update (October/November 2021)

It’s been a while and I fancied writing a little blog post, so here we are.

Personal & Work

This weekend me and Nat are staying at a little holiday house in Dunkeld, the first time we’ve managed to escape Edinburgh all year. It’s good! (Unfortunately the internet connection is very bad.) We went for a long walk today in the Tay Forest Park and got very lucky with the weather.

It’s a welcome break from work, which at the moment is a bad combination of difficult and slow.

It’s been kind of a weird year, to say the least, and it has made me tired. I’m always mega tired around October due to the changing season, but this time it’s been particularly crushing. Hopefully I’ll finish adjusting soon and be able to do useful things like get out of bed on time and stay awake past 6pm.

Tabletop Games

Board gaming has resumed a bit. Me and some friends have been playing Oath, a big fat political intrigue game with absolutely gorgeous art. It seems really complicated, but is actually quite simple, and works as a very effective storytelling engine, albeit not a particularly strategic one.

Over the past few months I’ve managed to play Age of Sigmar a few times at home. 3rd edition is… okay. Is it better? Maybe? It’s probably not worse, at least.

Hobby-wise I’m desperately trying to finish painting a whole new army for the Rollmodels meetup next weekend, which I’m very excited about. It’s got 3 Steam Tanks, lots of Drakespawn Knights, a big block of dark elves, and two ballistas. (I’m excited about the meetup, too, of course!)

For the past few months I’ve been working on a game of my own, a simple small-scale skirmish affair with a cool (perhaps unique?) magic system. It’s been a slow process of playtesting, iterating, playtesting, iterating… I wish I could speed it up but it’s quite hard to find the time and energy for it, especially right now. It’s definitely the furthest I’ve got with one of my miniature game design projects, however, so I can at least be pleased with that.

I do playtests using Tabletop Simulator with a small cult of folks who are willing to sacrifice a bit of their free time on the altar of game design. If you’re interested in joining said cult, please get in touch!

Video Games

I’ve been playing Enderal, a total conversion mod for Skyrim. It really is very impressive, managing to usurp Skyrim itself in terms of quality despite its sometimes amateurish trappings and zero-budget constraints. I’m not far in, having only just arrived in the big city (and been bombarded with a million sidequests), and it’s doubtful I’ll make it all the way to the end of the game’s presumably-epic runtime, but in the meantime I’m itching to get back to this weird German alt-Skyrim every minute I’m away from it.

I was playing Psychonauts 2, and loving it - it’s more Psychonauts, after 15 years, incredible - but haven’t found the time to continue.

Reading & Listening

I am reading Earthsea for the first time since childhood, remembering very little about it so that it is almost all fresh. Finding myself swept away, as I always am, by the understated beauty of Ursula Le Guin’s writing.

Meanwhile, I have run out of Genevieve stories to listen to. Maybe I should try Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series, which allegedly contains a character who is basically just Genevieve, and has a similar storytelling and worldbuilding vibe which I can only describe as ‘dark Pratchett’. I’m worried it won’t be quite as good without the silly Warhammer backdrop, though.

Until Next Time

That’s all I can think to write for now. I hope I can get back into regular blogging, I do rather like it.