End of 2020

 Wrapping up the end of the year 2020 and it was NOT a double critical hit year! A lot of things have happened and I won't go over them as there will be enough of that in the billion other end of year posts.

Looking over my blog stats, I still tend to have about a 50/50 breakdown of Macs vs PCs and an interesting and similar range of browser choices. And somehow I picked up another follower - up to a whopping 17! Thanks everyone! 

Part of that is I am also adding links to other blogs (see my Traveller blog roll over on the right) for those I find interesting. While it started out as all Traveller, this blog, and the ones I follow, gravitate to Traveller but cover other games as well. I tend to post game recaps for the games I run, but not the games I play in. 

This last year I've played an old west game with an English miner who likes dynomite, a space cat in a super hero game, and continue to play Sir Zay, an D&D character in a microlight game as well. That last game we've been playing for almost 4 months now, though there were a couple of gaps. The Asheville Gaming Club did a 2 month / 1 month cycle for games. While this allowed for a good rotation, it also meant some things were rushed or incomplete. Now we're playing until we get to a good spot, then rotate. It give a more natural scale to grow the characters I feel.

I've run the Corsairs game and tried to keep the Fantasy Trip game in play. While the remains of the AGC can play over Skype, the Fantasy Trip group is a dad & his kids, and being 9 and 13 or so, table top gaming really needs to be played in a table top. Hopefully the vaccines and everything will allow us to get back to face to face gaming next year. It better - I have a lot of physical things to hopefully help in game play! Plus a lot of minis coming around next year. Which I need to paint...

This has been a bad year for a lot of things: I am working from home full time which is great in many ways (and funnily enough something I fought for earlier for the other developers and upper management was not convinced people could work from home. Now they are getting rid of the offices and everyone will be working from home even after the pandemic! Turns out we can be productive from home. Go figure!) I am also working at a 30% pay cut, so I've had to cut way back on a few things. Which is probably all for the good as I do have too many things already. Good thing I am generally a cheap person anyway. And, having been laid off more than 10 years ago, I've become a lot more savings oriented, so I can get by with a lot less than I was making if I had to. You learn a lot, after the panic is over, when something like that happens to you.

But it has also been a good year for other things, though I would be hard-pressed to tell you what. I do get to see my cats a lot more, and the dog & I go on a daily 1-2 mile walk at lunch. I miss the ducks, but I also make 50% decaf coffee to get to drink more coffee in the morning. I've saved a lot on gas - the first few months the gym was closed and I only filled up my tank once in 4 months!

I've lost one friend to Covid recently, my son turned 20 and is acting like a 20 year old. Meaning my hair is getting greyer faster than ever now as we worry, and he cannot understand why we worry. If he ever has children, and I'm around with they hit late teens, I'll try & remind him of what he is putting us through. But that is the nature of life: I did the same thing to my parents, and in fact moved in with my girlfriend at 20. That caused a major rift in my family, so him staying over a night or two a week is not the same but I cannot really say anything about it. It is just uncomfortable. 

Sorry - end of year thoughts sometimes get me thinking about times past!

To end this post, thinking about future times. I am hoping to run another Traveller game, either continuing the Big Wreck or starting another game. Assuming we can resume face to face gaming, the Fantasy Trip group is eager to get back to gaming. We've a 1935 vigilante game coming up next, and possibly an anthropomorphic game as well. We may get another round of Corsairs in as the supplements really expand out that game a good bit and bring in more crunchiness. And I've a dark, grim RPG I may want to try & run a short version of. Need to stop by an office supply store to print it out - I just cannot read a PDF and run a game well! And I've actually started prepping for the character challenge (err, cheating, as I have 3 characters ready to go, but will post only 1 per day. I just know that a lot comes up and I don't have a lot of free time to spend on these sort of things. So I need to take advantage of those days I do!)

And to everyone out there - have a great new year, and here's hoping 2021 is a fantastic year for everyone!