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A Player of Games
Dec. 24th, 2019 06:16 pmThe past several days I've been a fair bit of my spare time doing games writing, the sort of writing where you take old stuff out and put new stuff in and your word count for the document hovers around the 65K mark, which is what it was when it started. I've been pondering doing a book about the history of cartography, geography, and astronomy, with plenty of side-bar material for authors of fantastic and speculative fiction. It is a pet hate of mine to see the basics of this subject dutifully ignored (rivers that go over mountains for example) it is extraordinarily common in such literature. Obviously something to consider more deeply for the year 2020, but certainly something on that agenda. Besides, I have a few ISBNs which I need to use up.
I have had plenty of opportunity for actual play as well in recent days. On Sunday ran a session of Eclipse Phase which resulted in a total party kill, a nice way to end the year. Of course in EC being dead is not quite being dead, so their opponents popped their stacks and have morphed them into their own exsurgent bodies; if you can't beat them, join them. A couple of days prior was in a session of Lexoccultum, which has a great setting (a low-fantasy version of western Europe in the 18th century), although the ruleset is a little on the complex side. Neglected to mention the week prior we finished our scenario for Star Wars: Force and Destiny with a satisfactory conclusion; afterwards played a session of Khan of Khans.
Finishing off work for the year has also been quite satisfactory. There was a staff-based unofficial lunch today where I made one of a giant tiramisu, which coupled well with an awesome baked cheesecake made by a co-worker. In actual work, I'm pleased to say that I finished all the objectives that I had at the start of the year, including running over twenty HPC workshops, and doubling the range and content of helper application scripts (I finished with Delft3D and SQLite). Despite the end of year, there was user requests to do right up to the last moment, including a massive data transfer and some genomics software installs. With the exception of running some things in the background, that should be it for the rest of the year. I'm rather looking forward to the opportunity to spend time on my own projects.
I have had plenty of opportunity for actual play as well in recent days. On Sunday ran a session of Eclipse Phase which resulted in a total party kill, a nice way to end the year. Of course in EC being dead is not quite being dead, so their opponents popped their stacks and have morphed them into their own exsurgent bodies; if you can't beat them, join them. A couple of days prior was in a session of Lexoccultum, which has a great setting (a low-fantasy version of western Europe in the 18th century), although the ruleset is a little on the complex side. Neglected to mention the week prior we finished our scenario for Star Wars: Force and Destiny with a satisfactory conclusion; afterwards played a session of Khan of Khans.
Finishing off work for the year has also been quite satisfactory. There was a staff-based unofficial lunch today where I made one of a giant tiramisu, which coupled well with an awesome baked cheesecake made by a co-worker. In actual work, I'm pleased to say that I finished all the objectives that I had at the start of the year, including running over twenty HPC workshops, and doubling the range and content of helper application scripts (I finished with Delft3D and SQLite). Despite the end of year, there was user requests to do right up to the last moment, including a massive data transfer and some genomics software installs. With the exception of running some things in the background, that should be it for the rest of the year. I'm rather looking forward to the opportunity to spend time on my own projects.
