Friday, December 29, 2023

Putting Things Together at the end of 2023

For some reason, I decided to finally put together at least one of the sprues from the Dungeons & Lasers stretch goals. I now have 3 more harpies, some frog men, a bunch of mushrooms and a few other bits and pieces at least (badly) glued together. It reminds me that I have fat fingers and some of the pieces were very tiny. Good thing I am not into WH40K - think that would make me go crazy!

Anyway, I've even started to paint some of them, so I plan on completing at least the harpies by the end of this 3 day weekend. Plan to at any rate...





These are close to traditional 28mm scale minis, so smaller than the Reaper ones I believe. Though with harpies, that is probably okay.

And building things is a nice segway into what I plan on building in the coming year. Yeah, you didn't see an end of the year post with that coming, did you? 

Game-wise, I plan on having several more OSE sessions but will be raising the stakes a bit in the next couple of sessions. I am bringing in a couple of the things we did way back in October for our personal game group RPG challenge. I am hoping to have an exciting few sessions more, then depending on where that ends up, we'll switch games but hopefully they will want to get back into those characters and further explore the world around Windemere Crossing.

Speaking of challenges, the traditional January character a day challenge is about to start. I'll have to pre-build a few posts as I tend to get busy during the week. I'll have to email Carl over there and see if I can get on his list again. I've not decided what my sub-challenge will be: last year was adding characters to the towns I was building mostly, the year before I linked all the Traveller characters to a single space station where they were at by the end. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

I've stalled again on the personal software front. My Traveller world explainer basically works, but I got stuck when trying to add it to the Google app store. I really need to see if I can sideload it on my phone  - while it works on an android simulator, not sure how well it will work on an actual phone. And of course, I can run it in Windows as well. I may go ahead and add speculative trade and link it to the TravellerMap APIs. But it seems silly to write something that no one else can use. I can make a Windows installer again, or, hmm, wonder if I can make a Docker container for people? On a side note, I started attempting to update it to .NET 8 and broke everything. I've since installed an updater packager that I will test. But I had to delete the entire directory and restore from Github. Which I have done for a lot of projects over the years: get too screwed up, the only way to be sure is to nuke it from orbit!

Why Docker? Because at work I think I am planning on making our new rewrite of the main system I work on use Docker for deployment. I got it all working locally, including the NestJS prototype we have a consultant working on. Basically, a Docker image is a self-contained application you run through some sort of Docker management system. It is very popular for cloud stuff, which is where the application needs to live. Just not sure we can make a Windows program a docker image...Yes, I have to build a LOT this year at work as well.

What else am I going to build? I am really hoping to build a couple good Fantasy Trip games. Both my Sunday small game group and my regular Monday game group meet face to face. And as I did buy a 6x3' folding table for our Saturday skirmishes, that also works great for mats and scenery for RPGs! My Sunday group may rise from dead: we've been playing Zombicide on our game days (we alternate games and lifting weights at his gym, which is, BTW, where I met the huge guy who loves playing runty goblins. The dichotomy is really funny sometimes!) His nephew has joined us for the Zombicide games we play, and it turns out he runs a D&D game. I am hoping he will want to play in TFT so that he can play and not always GM the game. And the Monday group has mostly switched from skirmish games to TTRPGs and want to get to a Fantasy Trip game. I am also hoping to run another Traveller game, or continue the one we started and left at a cliffhanger basically. 

I am not going to build an end of the year review. Though I suppose I could have one of the LLM (aka ChatGPT) bots review my blog for this year to see what it thinks. Well, I tried but could not get the 2 I tried to actually summarize the site. Though one attempt thought it was written by Marc Miller.

I hope everyone has a happy and safe New Years! Happy Traveller Holiday! And 2024 is a Leap Year!

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