Marsden is Here

Some people have had a much shittier year than I. But despite feeling really positive yesterday and having a generally good headspace for most of the year I now find myself entering 2024 in a poor mood. A lot of old negativities and feelings of isolation seem to have resurfaced over the past few weeks.

( disjointed )

Slightly belated post.

D & I were only able to attend 3 sessions of BoD, and even these were hampered by her back pain :( We managed to both be in the same game for two of them.

Between arriving and session start we participated in a game of Between Two Cities (board game), which neither of us had played before. It was short with an interesting mechanic, would play again.

Session 2 we played Underdogs of the Underdark, a Dungeon World adventure where the party were a group of F-String gladiators thrust into the ring after their sponsors's main team was uncharacteristically slaughtered by their opponents. My barbarian got to have fun literally throwing various PCs and NPCs around the ring, and we managed to foil the necromancer who was using ring politics to drive his competitors for dead bodies (including our sponsor) out of business and win the grand sportsperson award by saving our final opponents from the fiery death he had planned for them.

Session 3 Daena LARPed and I played in the first of the D&D 5E Dragon Queen scenarios (Hoard of the). I had reasonable fun with my character but the game as a whole moved much slower than I would have expected from the experienced DM. The promoted Dwarven Forge terrain was pretty but didn't really add anything.

Session 5 we played Horsing Around, a D&D 5 game where we played the horses of the royal guard, off to rescue the princess because our knights had stopped and gotten drunk at the first tavern. Since we all had the same base character sheet with a little customisation in terms of skills this was a roleplay heavy game and quite fun, although I'm not sure how awake anyone at the table actually was by this point.

After I played in a 3 no 4 no 3 player game of Seven Wonders which I probably shouldn't have organised, given how many times I managed to cock up putting together the right combination of expansion cards / guilds into the age decks.

Early on D & I were given a surprise engagement present (thanks avron) of Seven Wonders Duel (ie the two player version). We broke it out earlier this week; it lends itself to a more brutal style of play than we are really keen on as a couple so I suspect Splendor will continue to be our favourite.

Reading my state-of-me from the beginning of last year I am in an amazing different place. Now a great deal of this is down to the presence of one particular lady (D) in my life, but the overall trajectory was upwards. Mind you I was in a pretty bad space to start with and through at least the first half of the year if my writing is to be believed.

Stream of consciousness as reading through 2017 journal entries.

Standing desk - still going. Cat has mostly ignored her box in favour of perching between me and the rightmost monitor and demanding attention; cause of quite an amount of frustration over the year. Later in the year I upgraded the leftmost monitor to an actual monitor donated by my neighbours during a garage sale and this has made quite a difference.

I have not opted to (attempt to) switch to a standing desk at work.

Speaking of work although my hours have improved dramatically at least over the latter months of the year my ability to accurately estimate and complete work to-time has if anything been worse. Partly this may be that
- I am dealing with more complex projects, or
- that I am no longer making /simple/ mistakes or that our in-house code base has been rewritten multiple time with ever more abstraction by one of the other programmers so when something isn't working it is taking me longer to find out /why/
- I am taking more time to write up provide our clients with clear instructions for the use of their systems

I am investing more time in planning out projects at the request-for-quote stage in hopes of solving this next year. It feels awkward; I'm still locked into an out-of-whack mental model somehow but I have at least come closer to identifying the exact mental block.

Finances: During the first half of the year I made good progress at putting aside the money for the next stage* of house renovations. About July I took a calculated gamble to help bail out some young acquaintances who had run into difficulty; this did end up costing me significantly more than originally expected (and continues to) but they are mostly in more stable positions and self-supporting now. (After some unrelated expenses this month I expect to be able to start rebuilding my week-to-week base and saving again in February.)

* I say "stage" but it's become apparent that this will have to be practically a complete internal refurbishment; from wall insulation through redecoration ceiling-to-floor and redoing the kitchen. Savings will not suffice; I expect the mortgage to be painfully large again at the end of it.

Managed a little reading through the year but not as much as I would have liked. There are still columns of RPG books and a couple of novels sitting on my bedroom desk waiting. There are also still tasks on my to-do list from January last year which are still outstanding. But D has been visiting from Wellington over the Xmas/NY period and although this has meant a lot of time in companionable activities we are now getting into a pattern which reinforces time and motivation to be productive for both of us.

Social: there were quite a few social events throughout the year as represented by the many photo galleries published. However the distribution was a bit different; while there were many of the same people attending the context was less KAOS-specific and more KAOS-adjacent. I found myself categorising many which I would once have automatically put in the KAOS folder as events either hosted by friends who happen to have been KAOS and are now more-or-less out in the real world, or by friends who I met through their attendance at some KAOS parties but whose lives and primary social circles are elsewhere.

Hosted the 48 hour party for a second year; event was again a success.

Gaming: My Broken Kingdoms game continues, we had a little player turnover during the year and have changed day. I think there is about a year of play time left in it but a great deal depends on the directions the party choose to take at this point.

The other group I play in regularly went through a couple of mini-campaigns and is currently on an indefinite hiatus although I hold out hope for a restart in the new year.

I /finally/ managed to write up the final chapter of the Anthony saga from a few years ago.

Board games were regular; I did sacrifice a lot of SAGA nights in favour of working late and there were a lot more which really didn't do anything for me. The couple of events I hosted were poorly attended. I did sign up for Board game arena so D and I can play online (especially in the evenings as we wind down from the day in our respective beds).

Hall: my commitments weighed heavily particularly through the middle of the year but have eased; particularly with one of the other team members freeing up to supervise bookings again. Significant progress was made on several working bee projects; the credit primarily goes to A and friends but it has been good to see.

National events: the big one of 2017 was the general election. I wrote a couple of other things after the event.

Reading back over the past few years entries I notice a clear pattern of going in already exhausted and not getting nearly as much gaming done as I would like. This year was no exception; various issues at work have triggered emotional breakpoints and seen me push myself harder than is safe. To boot a head cold which has been threatening for the past fortnight arrived with a vengeance, leading to me wearing a flu mask Sunday and Monday; arguably I should also have done so Saturday or even not attended at all. However I had a friend down from Wellington staying with me and commensurate responsibilities to make sure she was able to be there.

Despite my efforts to keep the Hall calendar clear it had two entries; the Saturday morning one was a no-show and the Monday afternoon one arrived an hour late and then was un-prepared and spent half-an-hour doing make-up. I was able to leave them shooting with someone else on site but both instances meant time spent waiting around in cold wet weather when I could have been gaming. An alarm call out just after midnight on Saturday morning did not help matters.

My brain is blanking on some of the games I played and when
- Saturday had at least four games, starting with Betrayal at the House on the Hill which I had to abandon to get to the Hall, but apparently the Haunt won two rounds later (although we'd seemed to be in a good position), late afternoon was Kingsburgh, later in the evening a quick 2-player learning game of Fairy(Faery?)Tale and then ? . I was also able to purchase enough card sleeves of appropriate size from the Comics Compulsion table to kill time sleeving my copy of DC Heroes.
- Sunday I had two long, 3-player games of DC Heroes Crisis with different people where we lost at the very end, the first time to the final crisis and the second time by the stack running out when we had only to defeat the final super-villain two more times. I must have played Roll for the Galaxy because we discovered one of the cups missing. Jamaica because I noticed one of our often-indecisive players was quite quick at it.
- Monday had Castles of the Mad King Ludwig (which someone kindly stepped out of to let me play when I arrived as it was being set up) followed by Egizia. After getting back from the Hall I managed a game of DC Heroes before helping a little with pack up.

Today I called into work sick and have spent it napping / doing chores around the house / a delivery/groceries run / coughing a lung out. I would have liked to go along to Saga tonight for a couple more games but by about 4pm I had to admit to myself that wasn't going to happen.

~~~
Three times during the past few days I have teetered on the brink of emotional collapse. One was Saturday morning trying to get out of the house on time after oversleeping, and that was pure exhaustion.

The second was when I wandered upstairs on Sunday night to try and take some discrete photos of the LARPs in progress (trying to keep myself occupied and stable between running out of gaming options myself and my guest finishing up) to be shooed off. The shooing off wasn't entirely unexpected but the way it made me feel was. The third was being called out on possibly having taken photos including someone without permission - I haven't actually looked at the photos yet but yeah likely. I was sick, tired and probably sloppy with my judgement/recall/asking.

I'm still trying to figure out the reason the last two hit me so hard; I can't tell right now whether I'm feeling hurt by the criticism, upset with myself for not being more careful / not holding myself to high enough standards, or because I caused upset to someone I care about. In any case all there is to be done is apologise and attempt to not repeat the mistake.

Probably also time to book another psych appointment.

This Queens Birthday was a much needed break from work but not particularly rejuvenating. On the one hand it was Buckets of Dice weekend and I had carefully avoided putting my name forward to run anything supposing (correctly) that I would be pretty wiped out after a month with two programmers away from work and would have had no time to prepare. This theoretically left me free to apply my (minimal, as those I gamed with on Saturday can attest) brainpower to board gaming. Saturday in particular was expected to be free of Hall-related interruptions. It was not to be.

I'm not going to type out the whole saga but multiple of my Saturday games (which, as mentioned, I had precious little brain and spoons for) were interrupted by phone calls and txts related to people randomly deciding they would turn up to the Hall /then/ contact us and see if they could be let in to take photos. There was a flow-on effect to this which meant it also happened again today (Monday) causing me to be able to play one fewer game than I would have otherwise. Some damage overnight on Saturday also caused me to stay behind after a (booked) tour Sunday afternoon which may have caused me to miss someone who stopped by BoD specifically to see me :( (But who left chocolates and literal spoons in my mailbox today anyway <3 ). And again today a short-notice (but at least made last week) request for access to the Hall to retake some photos for a project saw me sacrifice a games worth of time in the morning.

The games which all this was interspersed with were nevertheless good and I even won several of them. I was introduced to ... four? new games one of which I had considered purchasing from the sale table just for the art on the box and another which had it been on the Games Depository stall I probably would have bought / will buy next time I am deliberately spending money on such things. I only once found myself in a game with someone I really prefer not to play with if possible and many times in games with people I preferentially play with.

I did not even try to take photos this year, not even of the usual excellent LARP costumes (and there were two flagship LARPs this year to boot). I just did not feel the effort was worth it.

I have marginally improved brain/spoons over each day but I'm still not looking forward to the rest of this week. For tonight: the next thing I am doing is making for a really early bedtime.

This weekend was a SAGA Minicon, and I spent much of Saturday and Sunday there.

Saturday morning I "sat in on" the introduction to GMing seminar, where I inevitably had to put my oar in. It was really quite interesting, with a number of things called out that we experienced GMs tend to do without explicitly thinking about it. Another really good thing was that about 1/3 of the eager young faces sitting around the table were female, and taking copious notes.

The workshop also inspired me with a lo of thoughts for running a worldbuilding seminar, which I spontaneously offered to run Sunday morning.

Saturday afternoon I was running Marvel Heroic. This didn't really go according to plan with the players getting bogged down in mechanics 9i think) and taking the full 3 hours just to finish the introductory skirmish. After that one had to leave but the others were keen to keep playing - we started about 1:30pm and finished the scenario about 8:30pm.

I *think* most of the delay came down to player composition - one player is known to always slows down any game they are in, one player turned out to be something of a power gamer trying to find a way to squeeze every last advantage out of every action, and one who came in a bit late I only learnt *after* the game that it was her first or second RPG ever; had I known I would have handled interactions with her character differently. Fortunately the player seated next to her took it upon herself to help out and did so in a suitably non-controlling manner. Nevertheless it was an exhausting session to run.

For the record the roster was Captain America (female player), The Thing (male player who had to leave after the first scene), Black Widow (female player), Iron Man (female player), and Storm (male player). It has only just occurred to me that there were more women seated across the table from me than men, which really is how it should be - unremarkable.

To round out the evening (one of my passengers was in a game which wasn't going to finish until 10pm) we played Pandemic, easy mode, 3 novice and myself, and managed to win on the very last turn.

Sunday morning between breakfast and leaving I scribbled down a page and a half of notes to get worldbuilding presentation stuff out of my head. There were no takers - when we arrived two RPGs had started and there were enough of us left to board game. This didn't bother me - more time to prep and I might stress test it in an on-demand spot at BoD or at a later Minicon. Else there will probably be a series of blog posts ....

In the morning we played Settlers of Catan, which I managed to win convincingly from a very awkward-looking start position. (Getting two points from dev cards helped). I didn't have critical mass to run a second session of Marvel, which was probably for the best, so we managed to get in a stress-free game of Lords of Waterdeep (2nd) and of DC Heroes (won). After a bit of a break I managed a couple of games of Biblios before calling it a day.

On the whole, good weekend.