I once again find myself regretting that I can’t seem to commit to writing anything full length. Yet another nanowrimo gone with just a couple chapters completed. Or at least attempted. So I’m back to just trying to do some writing as often as I can, even if it is an open format and not specifically fiction or whatever.

Work
Work is good. Government contracts are weird. I won’t get into any specifics, since there are probably things I can’t talk about anyway. But it definitely feels like the government contracting office just doesn’t have the proper guardrails in place to prevent abuses from contract companies extending their period of performance without any real consequences (mental note: practice spelling repercussions until you get it right consistently).

Family
Everything is going pretty well on the home front, all things considered (any by all things, I mean, having a teenage daughter and a preteen son who learned how to behave from the aforementioned daughter). The holidays passed by with us all reasonably unscathed. We had a bit of a white knuckle drive back from Minneapolis in a snowstorm that I’d rather not repeat. No worse for wear, but keeping careful focus on the road in low visibility blowing snow for 4-6 hours is taxing. I think next time, we’ll just find a hotel in Nebraska somewhere and not take the chances.

Mortality
This has been front of mind for the last couple of years, honestly. Between my Dad, my father-in-law and a couple of friends who passed way too young, there have just been too many recent reminders of the fragility of … ourselves. Obviously, as I get older, and not everything works as well as you’d like, or some things you used to enjoy just flat out aren’t reasonable or practical anymore, you recognize that you’re going through a process that has an endpoint. I do try to live without regret. For my own part, I’m comfortable with the idea that I won’t last forever, there are definitely things I’d like to see (mostly events in my kid’s lives), if I go tomorrow, I’m ok with that. What it does make me hyper-aware of, though, is that you need to enjoy the company of your friends and family as much as you can before they go. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t mean to go to a dark place, but when you see it happening around you with the level of frequency that is has, it stays on the brain.

Politics
Not sure I even want to go here. Things just feel bat shit crazy, and they have for awhile. The damage done over the last, … oh, I don’t know, lets call it 15-20 years, and especially recently, is just going to take a long time to unwind and fix. There seems to have been this perfect storm of conditions. Social and traditional media outlets creating these nice tight bubbles of messaging that reinforced systems of belief that are just provably wrong. Not to mention external state actors using cyber tools that amplified all of that messaging. Corruption and lying in political and other circles at scales just unheard of previously. And the extremism in elected officials. It just feels out of control, and no real fixes in sight or even reasonable paths to recovery. The ride isn’t over yet, folks and in fact it still feels like we’re ratcheting up the slope on the roller coaster before the big drop. The events of Jan.6 were … hard to watch. I’d put it right up there with 9/11 in terms of the consequences on this country’s politics and policies that will have DECADES of consequences, some of which haven’t even been brought to light yet. I do feel like I have options and “ripcords” if things get significantly worse, but… I don’t really want to exercise them. I do love this country, warts and all. We just need more of that wart removal cream or something. In the meantime, I’ll do my best to stay informed, keep trying to sort out truth from lies and not be too reactionary unless the situation demands it. I don’t think it was historically this hard to accomplish those things, and that is sort of sad all by itself.

Science and Technology
Back to something positive. I do feel like this is a good time to be alive, from this perspective. Sure, pandemic, blah blah blah. I guess it has always been true that the potential for things to sideways has always been there, we’ve just seen more recent evidence lately of exactly how and at what magnitude. But mostly I’m hopeful. Advances in energy production, energy storage will be huge boons to society and the overall ability of even the most third-worldy places to raise up the quality of life for its citizens. Advances in medicine, infant mortality, education, connectivity and access, disease research and cures and yes, vaccines… all exciting stuff. Despite all the negative news, the overall trends in those reasonably objective measures of societal advance are generally all upwardly trending. The climate is worrisome, to be sure. That is maybe its own heading worthy of some thoughts. Another time perhaps, there is a lot to unpack there. I still love watching space launches. Like, nearly bring a tear to my eye sort of love. Its deeply inspiring stuff. It does make me sad that my own kids don’t find it nearly as awesome. But… maybe that is another topic worthy of some energy. Repressive regimes and resource scarcity (food, water, medicine) still feel like the biggest hindrances to this at a global scale, but it does still feel like the needle is moving in the right direction, all things considered. And there does seem to be adequate data backing that up.

Health
Overall, I’d say this is somewhere around “meh” on the scale of suck to awesome. While we didn’t dodge COVID completely, the couple of events we had in our household were reasonably quick to overcome and we’re doing our best to stay that way. I’m definitely feeling my age, and my weight and other factors don’t make any of that easier. Well visit due up in another couple of months. Need more “vitamin I” nowadays. On the overall view of things though, I’d say we’re all pretty damn fortunate.

Gaming and Hobbies
So many games, so little time. Well, that isn’t really accurate, to be honest. Doing more RPG than in the past (two active campaigns and a third coming online). My gaming preferences in terms of computer games were just flat out altered by the pandemic. My tolerance for amount of time spent in a single game in a single sitting has changed dramatically. And while my attention span has dropped for things like MMOs (I basically can’t/don’t play them anymore), I’m totally fine throwing in for games that are just mentally soothing and relaxing (eg, mowing and powerwash simulations?? wow). I’m still playing some of the long form clickers/idle games, for some reason. They take, timewise … sometimes multi-year long efforts to get through all the content. I think I need to get past the couple I’m in right now and drop them, though. It is kind of a self-perpetuating machine in some respects, and I’d like to get off that train now, I think. There will always be a soft spot in my heart for things like FO4 though, especially with all the quality mods and fan-based content out there that are such high quality. And great communities to boot! I also reached out to the person who was most singularly responsible for my love for TTRPGs and thanked him for that. When I made some kind of comment to him about how much time I spend gaming (despite not being retired), he just said “Never apologize for playing games”. I like that. Its just succinct and perfect for how I feel.

I guess I’m going to leave this for now and start focusing back in on some particular topics and maybe get back to reviewing books and posting more aggregate posts on cool stuff I find. I’ve never looked at any analytics or know who even reads this stuff anymore, but this is at least in part just for my own benefit as well, so who cares :)

Peace.

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