Blogging in 2024

The last few months have been a disaster in terms of blogging; I haven't been consistent, and my topics are all over the place. This probably inevitable for a variety of reasons; I don't want to be rigorous about blogging; it's meant to be fun and relaxing and I talk about whatever I feel like. I don't blog for an audience, I blog for myself. That said; I've felt pretty disorganized and chaotic.

The biggest part of that is that my life has been disorganized and chaotic the last few months. My youngest son came home from California a few months earlier than we expected him due to some health problems, and my oldest son moved in temporarily with his wife and three small children so he could finish his Masters degree, find a job, and then move back out again eventually. He was burning out trying to work full time to pay the bills and do all of this at the same time, so we were glad to help out. But, of course, it meant that my home life has become very chaotic since late August or early September when all of this started. On top of that, my new (it's not so new now, but still—after more than twenty years in one job, a little over a year in a second one still makes it seem new) job continues to be more stressful and busy than my old one, and bleeds over into my free time somewhat. Even if it didn't, I'm more in the market for "veging" as they say with my free time than doing anything productive. Even if by productive, I merely mean making blog posts.

So let's get a little bit organized for the new year, shall we? 

• I had a decent run the last few months of posts about Heroes of Might and Magic III. I haven't played that already now in more than two months, probably closer to three or four. I don't think it's likely that my picking up of that hobby is going to stick; I'm just over video games of any kind, even older strategy games like this one. I doubt I'll post about it anymore, or do anything with it anymore. I know my oldest son is going to be disappointed, but that's the way it is.
• I haven't really blogged about Star Wars related anything in a long time, and I doubt that I will anymore. Although I do still watch a fair bit of pop culture youtube commentary from guys like Nerdrotic, Ryan Kinnel, Midnight's Edge, etc. the reality is that I've become very disengaged from pop culture otherwise. Sometime last year, and I think it was the Boba Fett show that was the nail in the coffin for me, my attitude towards Star Wars completely changed to one of absolute apathy. I simply don't care about Star Wars anymore. That had been building for a long time, but now the conversion from Star Wars fan to ex-Star Wars fan is complete. I probably won't talk about it anymore. There's juicy commentary to make, about the execrable Obaid-Chinoy, or whatever her name is, being assigned to direct the up-coming Rey movie, but it's just tired commentary at this point. Yes, it will be terrible. Yes it will be woke. Yes it will directly insult the original long-time fans while generating absolutely no new ones. We already know all of this. I simply don't care.
• On a related note, although I never blogged much about it, my attitude towards Marvel has taken a similar trajectory.
• I don't have any concert plans this year, after having had a pretty busy concert schedule last year; we saw Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Air Supply, and a few others that I can't even remember off-hand this last year. This year; probably nothing. Having my sons back home has been a noticeable drain on our budget for both money and time, and my wife's work has largely dried up for reasons that we haven't completely understood yet, so she's making less money than we're used to. Good excuse to tighten the belt. Realistically, we should be doing smarter things with our money than seeing a bunch of concerts anyway. My being laid off in 2022 really borked my retirement plans, and we're not saving more for retirement like we should be. That means that realistically I won't retire anytime too soon, of course, because I won't be able to afford it. If anyone can afford to retire in the future, which may be a debatable thing. I should also get my mortgage paid off, which would free up tons of cash, but will require throwing extra cash at it in the meantime first. This belt-tightening for various reasons means that we'll be doing less frivolous yet fun things to blog about, and even when we are making more again from my wife's babysitting, we should keep the belt tight for other reasons too. We also spent a ton of money just now on my son's wedding and the trip out of state to support it. Much of that cost we threw on a credit card, so we'll be paying it back down over the course of the next several months.
• That's probably more personal information than anyone needed to know, but still; that will be a theme for 2024. Doing less, saving and paying stuff off, rather than running around having lots of fun. We still have some big costs on the (relatively) near term horizon that we know will hit us soon, like one more wedding (not imminent), more grandkids, more kid moves, etc. Not saying that I expect any of these to be imminent or even in 2024, but we have at least two trips that are obligatory in the coming year, so we're doing our best to keep that contained and preparing for the future.
• All that said, I do blog from time to time about music, and no doubt still will.
• One hobby that I haven't done as much with as I'd like in the last couple of years is hiking in the Rocky Mountains, or the Southwestern deserts. I'd love to get back on the bandwagon this year, but I don't know if it'll be really feasible or not. I have done a lot of day hikes here locally with my wife and some of our friends, but hiking in the forested Northern Midwest is not really the same hobby at all, and I certainly don't backpack here. To be honest, I need a new backpack. I bought a bunch of cheap Amazon Basics backpacks a few years ago, and most of the cinch buckles have failed, making them almost unusable. Once I get a new backpack, I'll probably toss them entirely, since they're not really any good to anyone. What a disappointment those ended up being.
• To be fair, hiking and backpacking are not necessarily the same hobby. I might be able to do a bunch of low altitude desert red rock hikes after Easter Weekend. But I might be in too much of a hurry to get back home and work. It's not clear to me yet what I'll be able to pull off there, because that's a terrible time for work to be away, given that we have a April 1st fiscal year. Sigh. What I really want to do is a late July or August hike somewhere in the high elevation Rockies. I've got a lot of ideas in my head about where to go, but I don't yet know which (if any) will be feasible to actually do this year.
• In any case, as details start to flesh out, I'll probably talk more about them on my long-neglected hiking blog anyway.
• I ended up reading 39 books last year. While I didn't talk a lot about my reading, I set a goal more in line with my actual performance for 2024 of 30 books for the year with a 40 book stretch. I read several books at a time, usually if they're in very different formats or very different subjects so I don't get them mixed up. I'm already in the middle of two pdf gamebook, a regular hardcover gamebook, a slim hardcover neo-retro sword & sorcery novel or novella, an old Kindle adventure story, and I've got a regular fiction and non-fiction and religious book all queued up too. To hit my goal, I need to average 3 books a month, or more, but with any luck, I'll actually knock out half a dozen in January. I need to stay focused on that, though. With all of the craziness of the trip, year-end, the wedding, etc. I haven't read much since before Thanksgiving, so I need to buckle down on that.
• I've also pretty much bailed on Hero Forge. I haven't renewed the subscription (unless it auto renews; I should double check that, I guess) and I haven't played around with the app in quite a while.
• And finally, my fantasy gaming and science fiction setting design. The ostensible purpose of this blog, which I talk about increasingly infrequently. Sigh. I do not intend to not talk about this, but I need to come up with some specific plans of what I think I'll talk about relative to these topics, and soon. I have a few ideas:
• I do intend to get my campaign with my daughter and her husband, and my son and his wife going again. We've all been caught up in a lot of the exact same chaos, but the new year looks like it'll settle down into a routine, I hope, so there's hope that this will be easier than it ended up being in November and December.
• I do intend to finish the Races Deep Dive series, specifically by talking about the human ethnicities of Dark Fantasy X, which was my intention last time I actually posted on that. I think I've done all of the non-human races now, but I'll double check.
• I'm not sure if I'm going to do any more Space Opera X (formerly Ad Astra) data sheets or other setting development. Probably not. But, possibly.