Updates

It's been almost a month since I posted, but... I feel like I don't have anything to post about. I still haven't played our session 2. Our trip out West was fraught with drama in many ways, but we successfully married off my son, saw lots of extended family, spent more time with immediate family than we already do, and generally had a reasonably good time (it helps that the weather cooperated. Driving out West across Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, etc. in the winter can be hazardous if there's lots of snow falling. Instead, we got over two weeks of bright sunny skies and generally relatively high temperatures... for this time of year, anyway.)

I had to spend about a week of the time I was away working remotely, which kind of sucked, but it petered off at the end of the week because of the approaching holiday. I'm back at work now, but again, it hasn't really kicked back in yet because of the holiday. I work for a company headquartered outside of the US, and apparently at HQ their holiday is even longer than ours, so it's been quiet. Lots of people here locally have extended the holiday by taking vacation.

Christmas was nice. Given the wedding and travel, we spent a ton of money, so our gift giving was a little subdued to keep the budget manageable. I got a few new flannel shirts, a few blu-ray movies that I wanted in my physical media collection, and a few books, and a few party games (one of which we already own under a slightly different name; for whatever reason my wife's brother gave us the British version, which is identical except for a few letters in the title.) I also have my birthday coming up in a week and a half or so. Maybe I'll get a few more interesting things then.

A few hobbyist thoughts (from various hobbies) have crossed my mind. 

1) Knave 2e is shipping any day now. I actually have the pdf version of the game now, and I believe, if I'm interpreting the email correctly, that that is the final version. I'll wait until my physical copy arrives to read it/ Not sure completely why I bought this. I didn't need another OSR-adjacent game, but the promise of the tables looked... well, promising, and it's nice to support someone sometimes, even if they're selling something that I don't really need. I'm sure I'll talk about it briefly when I get it.

2) In spite of the fact that our second session while out of town didn't materialize, I think there's still plenty of demand for a game, if I can just get it scheduled. I'll work on getting that done sometime in the next few weeks. It's already been over two months since we last played, so I'll have to do a refresher before we start. Maybe a once a month schedule would be sustainable with this crew? Hard to say. Lots of changes still ongoing, including my oldest son's imminent new job.

3) I've been listening to a bunch of hard dance music again, and made a "fix" to one of my megamixes, as well as putting together a new megamix, and queueing up yet another two more megamixes. I feel like the first four that I made I know quite well and listened to a lot, but the fifth one I still don't feel as familiar with, even though I've had it for months now. The new sixth one even less so. Once I bang out seven and eight, although I have a nine mapped out, I'll probably slow down and enjoy what I have more before moving on.

As part of that, I'm rediscovering some files that I haven't listened to in a long time. Really since I got them, in some cases, which is kind of sad. These tracks are excellent, and I've had Klasic & Sanders "Space Odyssey" (sped up tempo to 150 bpm from 140 bpm) playing a fair bit the last day or so, and I've made it a component of the next megamix that I'll mix. For part six, I also pulled out a few classics that I loved when I discovered them but then kind of fell on to the backburner, like some tracks by DJ Darkzone, Cosmic Gate and Bas & Ram that I hadn't listened to a lot since I first got into this hard dance scene. Kind of too bad. I'm sure I got too many tracks way too fast, and just couldn't keep up with most of them.

4) I can't go out west to Wyoming and Utah (and add Colorado, Montana and Idaho to that list too, although I didn't go to those states this time) without feeling the call of the Rockies. I love the mountains and even the deserts, and the big sunny skies, and the wide empty spaces. I'm happy enough living in the northeastern Midwest, but it's not my native country, and if I could afford to decamp to a small town in Wyoming, I'd do so in a heartbeat (now you know what my lottery plans would be if I ever won the lottery.)

I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the US Census bureau's definition of the Midwest, graphically represented here courtesy of Wikipedia. The western four states that make up "the Midwest) are culturally, geographically, politically and climatically extremely different from the core that surrounds the Great Lakes. North and South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas may well not exactly be Rocky Mountain states, unless you count the Badlands and the Black Hills as eastward extensions of the Rockies somehow, but otherwise, once you cross the Mississippi River and especially the more westwards Missouri River, you certainly feel like you're in the West. Iconic Old West locations like Dodge City and Deadwood City are technically in the Midwest, not the West according to this definition.

That said, there is a difference between Rocky Mountain states and Great Plains states (even if most so-called Rocky Mountain states are dominated by the western section of the Great Plains. The mountains of Montana are only at the far western edge, while the vast majority of the state is Great Plains. Does this make it substantially different than the Dakotas somehow?) The presence of the mountains seems to somehow define these states more than most other features, and makes them stand out. Technically, my in-laws, where I spent much of my time while out of town, live past the Rockies and in the Great Basin, the large geographical feature that makes up about half of Utah, most of Nevada and a decent chunk of Oregon—and more modest parts of Idaho and California too. The basin and range mountains aren't technically Rocky Mountains at all, although western mountains are western mountains, and I still love them dearly. They are a bit drier and more xeric in nature than the Rockies, certainly moreso than the PNW Cascades, and have an almost but not quite desert feel to them, rising as they do out of the desert basin floors. Their elevation means that they catch more water vapor than the desert, tend to have more trees and some streams and creeks, and otherwise look like a hybrid between desert and alpine. 

I'm considering doing some hiking in some of these mountains soon, if I can break away. The Ruby and Snake ranges in Nevada are justifiably kind of famous, but the more obscure ranges of Utah, like the House Range, the Tushar Range or the Fish Springs Range are also very tempting. In part because of their obscurity; relatively speaking, nobody goes there, which is what makes them fun.