It's been a while...

Getting back on the horse might just be one of the hardest things to do when you’ve been out of the blogging for so very long. Looking back, I’ve had enough reasons to step back into the bloggosphere and throw a little story out there since I threw out the big ‘things to do during the vacation’ post, which was the last one.

Let’s start with that one, though, because that’s a kind of story that’s reserved for backrooms and sport’s bars, where people have great fun making fun of the person they’re talking about. Looking back at the plans I had made, depressingly little of it has actually been done since that time.

The crate radio I had promised myself (more of an amplifier, really) is still sitting in parts on my desk. I still haven’t gotten any wood (heh, there’s a dirty joke in there, somewhere), so I still don’t have the parts necessary to actually build the case. I have to admit that the wind has been taken out of my motivation ever since it had been delayed, that January. It might be completed sometime in the coming months, but I’m not making any promises there.

The book actually got written. I hated it, though, and it has been waiting on a re-write ever since. I started it, but then my publisher started charging me for every book I have published with them, or I could refuse to pay them money and my books wouldn’t be publicly available outside of the publisher’s store. Needless to say, you can’t order my books online anymore, anywhere other than from the publisher’s store, and I’m not really sure where to go next. That’s something for the future, though.

The D&D campaign actually got another session recently, after about a year of no activity, and it was an absolute blast. The players are taking the story into places that I’d never expected them to go and forcing me to adapt and improvise as fast as I can, but I think I’m managing (I guess I’ll find out I didn’t the very moment everything blows up in my face). I’m already happy that my friends challenge me in such a way, that forces me to try and adapt to the crazy antics that they can come up with and that I, quite frankly, enjoy throwing at them whenever I’m a player. It’s great fun.

The Savage Worlds introduction session was ran with great success. The players appeared to love Reginald and his crazy Artificial Intelligence antics and blackmailing, greatly enjoying threatening him back and, once again, giving me a hard time while we were improvising our way around the rules and the characters I had pre-made for everyone. It actually taught me that, even though I might be able to think about solutions to different problems, a group that’s pushed into a situation and forced to think about those solutions is quite capable of coming up with plans that I never thought about. Learning to say ‘yes’ was one of the most important things for me at that point, because trying to find out how everything was working and how their plans could possibly work out was, even though a challenge, about as much of a blast as the rest of the game was.

The Savage Worlds Declipse setting has made absolutely zero progress, though. Not much to say about that, besides from the fact that I recently looked at the file and spotted some errors in it which I could correct. Even though I’m excited to try and run something like that, I think my plans would restrict the players a little too much. In other words, I’m going to see if I can generalize my personal plans a little more. The last thing I want to do is give my players restrictions that are more than ‘you start out in this area’…

The backlog of games… I don’t even know how much of that I happened to work out. I know I still need to buy the new Bioshock, but I also still have to beat some Mass Effect 3 DLC for the achievements. Internet penis and everything is important to me!

I think the girlfriend I mentioned in that post lasted about four more weeks after that, before we broke up. It was a sad thing, but it was better for me to separate from her and do my own thing again. I’m glad to say that I’m in a new relationship right now (one of the things I could’ve made a blog about) that is a great improvement over the one I had back then, if I look back at it. I’m not complaining, anyway.

And the last three points… I can safely say that I did those things and kept things up. We never stopped playing D&D, though, for one reason or another, we still haven’t managed to make a regular game. There’s plans to do just that, though, so this might change in the near future.

Okay, now that I’ve done catching up to the things I’ve promised in the past, let’s head back to the present for the moment. Though my university has gone on pretty much without interruption (it’s pretty hard to just, you know, stop that for a year), I’ve also found the time to get my driver’s license and start saving up to get my own car. Though I don’t really have a reason to own a car, my job is within biking distance from my house, it’ll be nice to have the money on hand when the moment arises and I actually need some personal transportation that’s more reliable than the public transport that the Netherlands have. Until that time, though… I’m pretty sure I can borrow my parents’ car when I really need it. That’s pretty reassuring, though it sometimes makes me want to have my own car…

What more to tell… One of my friends introduced me to the amazing story of the Kickstarter, the website that allows small ideas to grow huge. By showing me to the Reaper Bones Kickstarter, he showed me the entrance to something pretty huge. For example, I backed the Pad of Geomorphic Intent Kickstarter, which left me with… well, eight pads of essentially squared paper that I used to use to do my mathematics homework on. I’m really using them, though, to build out a semi-random dungeon with a little bit of a terribly predictable twist that the players, should I ever get to running it (not going to happen, we’re way too busy), will see coming from miles away. It’s fun, though, and it gives me the feeling that I didn’t waste my money on supporting this particularly kick to start.

Next to that Kickstarter, though, there’s also the Dice Rings, which were quite a hit, the Lace Anchors, which were ideal for my laces-hating girlfriend, and a couple more that I'm still waiting for the fulfillment.

 

Considering the fact that I'm trying to get back on the Blogging horse, I'm pretty sure I'll find a reason to post about these things when they come in. I might even make a couple of pictures. Just like the miniatures I paint, of which I think my skill keeps increasing with every single miniature I paint. It's another thing that I never mentioned, I guess, but I've been doing it on and off for quite a bit, so we'll see when I find the time to paint again and post pictures whenever the chance arises...

 

Until the next time, I hope I can keep it up, this time!