Steam Rewind

By Bay Posted Friday Jan 6, 2023

Filed under: Epilogue, Personal 34 comments

Finally, the holidays are over and I am dog tired. I just got some rough news about permanent damage to my ankle and possibly right wrist Thank god that left-handedness is actually the majority in my family. . It’s a lot of stupid bitching and moaning but TLDR; I’m cranky. I swear every time I complain I can almost hear my dad saying exactly the same thing, in the same tone, and with the same candor.  Complaining but with enough humor to make sure no one else is uncomfortable. Jeez, I miss that guy, having annoying health issues just makes it more prominent; we always complained together. It wasn’t ever bitter or angry just…almost laughing at the audacity of the universe. I inherited so many of his health issues, it was something to bond about. In hindsight, I think it ripped him apart that he had any hand in passing on that lot in life, but he never let that be the focus of things. He could have so easily made every interaction about my health a pity party, and I’d have stopped telling him about it. But…he didn’t, we just laughed. I’m really, really grateful for that.

I am meaning to sit down and write a Sims 4 Overthinking post, but honestly, I don’t have it in me. Some weeks are super easy, I love writing, I love the Sims, I love this site, I always have. But…some weeks not so much. I went through Steam Rewind on what has become my steam account but used to be dads, ouch, oops, yeah that might be why I don’t have the heart to talk about virtual plumbing right now.

How were your holidays? Or, if you don’t celebrate any, how were your last 3-4 weeks? I don’t always have the energy to reply to comments right now, but I read all of them. The community here helps, a lot. Thanks for sticking around.


Ha. The whole post isn’t on the front page. See? There’s this little footnote to prove it.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Thank god that left-handedness is actually the majority in my family.

[2] Ha. The whole post isn’t on the front page. See? There’s this little footnote to prove it.



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34 thoughts on “Steam Rewind

  1. Retsam says:

    Over break I finished up Graveyard Keeper, which was a game discussed around here several years back. I liked the game overall, but oof the last part of the game is really not good. It’s weird that it basically tries to give ‘happy endings’ to characters who have mostly just been assholes the entire game, but more importantly, it’s just bad mechanically:

    Several of the ending quest lines require getting four specific random drops from corpses, which themselves are locked behind one of the plotlines – if you didn’t happen to advance that one soon enough to unlock pretty early, you may hit the end of the game with nothing else to do but get the daily corpse, check for a part, try again tomorrow.

    I gave up and save-scummed, and it took 18 reloads to get the last part I needed. The entire playthrough was a little over 100 days, so if I hadn’t done that I’d have spent about 20% of the game’s (in-universe) runtime just waiting for that part to drop. I just can’t figure out why they thought this was a good idea.

    I know Shamus played the game, I don’t remember how far he got. I strongly suspect he didn’t finish it otherwise I think there would have been a rant about this aspect of the game.

    1. Dreadjaws says:

      As I remember, Shamus’ experience with the game was pretty much the same I had. He made two posts mentioning the game (at least one of them on the podcast). The first one was when he had recently started, where he was very enthusiastic. The second one was when he was done with the game, where he said he had his filling but had no desire to continue until the end.

      Like I said, this was my exact experience. Around the 30+ hour mark I realized the grinding was getting too big and there was still a lot to do so I just stopped playing. I had a lot of fun with the game but I cut it short before it became too unbearable and soured my whole experience.

      1. Retsam says:

        Yeah, this was actually my second play-through; I got pretty close on my first, too, I think. (Can’t check, but the save was lost when a hard-drive died, I think) I did probably just happen to stop right before the tedious save-scumming part. (I also got distracted by DLC stuff which I decided not to bother with this time)

        It’s kind of bizarre they went with the “random drops from corpses” thing because whole chunks of the tech tree end up being completely unnecessary.

        I completely stopped upgrading my church about 2-thirds of the way into the game and only a tiny bit into the tech tree for it: (basically just upgraded the benches to be padded), because you don’t need more than 50 church appeal for the quest, and beyond that you *basically* just get more faith, a resource I was never short on after the first couple in-game weeks.

        There’s also a lot of writing stuff that ends up being mostly unnecessary, too. Built a printing-press and paper-press thinking it’d be useful and it really wasn’t – other than a single part of the quest, there’s really not much reason I could find to make books. (It can be a small income source, but nothing compared to the merchant stuff)

    2. Heather says:

      I got way further than he did (I think he stopped not long after opening the second half of the graveyard but its been a while and I don’t remember very well). I was super disappointed because it became my new hyperfixation just as he moved on and I didn’t have anyone to talk at about it. I opened up several more areas then I started a 70 hour work week that included tutoring anatomy (which meant taking anatomy) and I was done.

      I had planned on returning to it once things settle down a bit (back into Stardew Valley atm) and this comment made me realize that no, I don’t think I will.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        Well, you know where to go now when next you hyperfixate over a game…

  2. James says:

    My holidays weren’t anything too major. I’m Jewish, so the Christmas excitement skips by me, and while there’s Hanukkah it’s not really a big holiday. Mostly I just took the time to relax and unwind, read a few old sci-fi books that I had been meaning to get around to. The highlight was probably Sister Alice, by Robert Reed, a sort of dreamy far-future transhumanist tale about how society breaks down in the aftermath of a cosmic disaster and various groups’ attempts to fix or capitalize upon the breakdown. It’s got a weird tone to it, everything is very important and high-stakes but because characters are limited by relativity those high stakes get stretched out over hundreds of millennia, simultaneously frantic and glacially slow. I enjoyed it, though I think it’s an acquired taste.

  3. BlueHorus says:

    I’ve been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077. And my opinion will probably shock you all the core – it’s good! Plus, almost no bugs, which is a benefit of buying late.
    CDPR seem to really *get* the setting, from the tone to the minute details. It’s the way the games advertisments are crude, intrustive and just alsways there; it’s the way you look over the railing of a verdant public park at a slum covered in garbage bags and it’s just normal; it’s the way not even the people running the corps that own everything actually seem very happy or free.

    If I have a complaint it’s – well, some gameplay issues, but whatever – that it’s somehow too big and yet unfinished feeling. I reached the Point of No Return in the main story about 40 hours ago, and I’m still finding new side content. Meanwhile, a couple of great quest chains just sort of end without fully explaining the situation. Odd feeling.

    I can fully believe that CDPR employees were overworked making this – and honestly, it might have benefitted from being less bloated.

    1. Chuk says:

      I’m in a similar boat — got it quite late and have had very few bugs (one floating NPC once and a couple of crash-to-desktops that weren’t repeated) and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. Reminds me of the pen and paper RPG and looks great.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        I’m holding back on it until the DLC come out. I’m fairly certain I only have it in me for one playthrough and in case of Witcher 3 the DLCs were very good so I don’t want to miss out on them due to being done with the game.

  4. Syal says:

    My holidays were alright. Shopping was stressful as always. I asked for a baking pan for putting chicken in and the family went all in on baking supplies, so now I feel obligated to learn to bake something. Then New Year’s was cancelled for unknown reasons, New Year’s Eve was dominoes and a bad headache. Still unemployed, still getting heavy nasal clogging that may or may not be environmental but definitely makes me doubt I can reliably perform a job.

    Got some fun games going; Rune Factory 4 is cute and fun, and the difficulty affects attack patterns not just health or damage. Neo The World Ends With You is good for the opening bit I’ve played. The first one’s screen gimmick is long gone but everything else seems sequel-correct so far; sharp-edged character portraits, Persona-style vocal background music. Haven’t heard anything about it, maybe it’ll implode soon, but for now it’s strictly more entertaining than Aegis Rim 13 Sentinels, which is somewhat fun but mostly confusing. Not even storywise; like, scenewise. I got stuck in multiple conversation loops because there was no obvious way to advance the conversation, then got stuck on a cat because it was unintuitive how to talk to it. That game’s getting shelved until NTWEWY is finished.

  5. Vernal_ancient says:

    My Christmas was nothing special. Rested, got a few presents, more importantly got my family presents they all liked
    Spent the last three or four weeks mostly reading and working. I was playing Hollow Knight but I got to a point where the bosses are more annoying than fun to fight and I don’t have much else to do (well, there’s the Grey Mourner side quest…) so we’ll see if i continue that…
    On the bright side, I’ve read some good fantasy the last couple weeks

  6. RCN says:

    I’m an atheist but love Christmas. My wife is Christian but she couldn’t care less about Christmas (or Easter, for that matter). Guess we’re an odd couple.

    Well, we just had a daughter this past year and now we have several competing family feuds that demanded our (really, our baby’s) presence in THEIR holiday.

    We scheduled a compromise that didn’t really satisfy anyone. So, it accomplished its goals, is what I’m saying.

    We had lunch with my mother and her mother. I baked a dish for each of the holiday gatherings. For this first gathering I baked some sort of stuffed bread that’s apparently a Venezuelan holiday tradition filled with ham, bacon, pork loins, olives and, weirdest of all, prunes. I added some butter and honey because it seemed appropriate. My mother’s husband (yes, not my father), who commissioned this bread from me, said it was pretty good. I took his word on it.

    Then my mother became cross at us because we left just like we said we would, as she wanted (as always) to monopolize our time.

    My sister drove us to my wife’s family, where her brother did her hair so my sister could drive us the rest of the way go to the Christmas supper at my father’s family. Then my in-laws complained about how we wouldn’t be staying for their party as we left.

    The supper was at my uncle’s home, where my grandparents were staying. I made a special custard pie for this gathering that was a recipe from my great-grandmother and my grandma approved, so I’m pretty happy about that.

    We met the new girlfriend of my father’s cousin, who had a teenage daughter who was non binary (in Portuguese non binary people use either gendered pronouns as we don’t have a neutral form) and was discussing LGBT-friendly cartoons with my cousins (my uncle has 3 sons). Mainly Steven Universe and The Owl House. My grandparents were fawning over my daughter because it was the first time they met her.

    After supper we did a round of “secret enemy” (we call “secret santa” “secret friend”. In this variation everyone buys something and leaves it in a pile wrapped up. Then, after picking an order at random, each participant goes to the pile and selects a gift basically from the look of the wrappings and then unwraps it in front of everyone. With the twist that, each person has the choice of either picking something from the pile or stealing the gift from someone else, who will need to select a new gift from the pile. The last to go basically has a pick of every gift that was unwrapped. One gift was stolen several times, a t-shirt with a cool dragon design on the front).

    Then we went to my sibling-in-laws’ party, as they planned to stay up all night and we would be staying the day after Christmas with my wife’s family. There I pretty much collapsed and slept until sunrise.

    1. Syal says:

      Pretty sure “secret enemy” is more commonly called White Elephant.

      My cousins split family attendance between Christmas and Christmas Eve, though I think they’ve only got two households they visit. But, would make each day easier. Maybe talk someone into celebrating Boxing Day and spread it out even further.

      1. RCN says:

        Yep, it is precisely the same rules. Never heard of it, though. Not in the anglo-speaking culture I consume, at least.

        Though I loved the alternate name “dirty santa”.

        1. Jeremy says:

          Also known to me as a “yankee swap,” as is appropriate given my youth in New England. The HuffPost ran an article on the etymology of the terms. Apparently Yankees had a reputation for having traders looking for a good swap, and there might be a connection to prisoner swaps in the Civil War. TIL.

    2. BlueHorus says:

      Got to say I got a bit lost in all the different family members there.
      ‘Wait, is someone doing the sister’s hair while she’s driving? No, no that would be dangerous. And her brother’s not *their* brother…okay, yeah…hang on, new girlfriend of my father’s cousin? Nope, they’re right, that *is* the simplest way of saying that…’ and so forth.

      The entire situation makes me very happy that my dad made the decision to move to a different part of the country to escape that kind of tangled family web before I was born. There’s an entire clan full of uncles, cousins, in-laws and extended spouses somewhere else in the country that we have almost nothing to do with – and I suspect it’s to avoid all the family politics.

    3. Heather says:

      Our solution to the family feuding about grandbaby holiday visits was to stay home Christmas day. With 3 sets of grandparents, an assortment of uncles and aunts, and 5 living great-grandparents it was too much to manage. So we stayed and everyone came to us or had a celebration on a different day. It worked pretty well.

      1. RCN says:

        I wish we could do that.

        The lunch with my mother and grandmother WAS the one staying at home (we are currently living with my grandmother).

        What I left out is that my mother doesn’t want to see my father (in any situation) and my grandmother doesn’t want to see my father’s new wife, so they couldn’t come here. Oh, and both don’t want to see my uncle’s wife (for kicking my sister out of their house… but to be fair, she’s a handful and they let her stay over a year). There’s fault to go all around.

        Meanwhile, there is no bad blood between my wife’s family and my family… but they are poorer and my family would rather they come to them than go to their humbler holidays. But they feel displaced when visiting my family.

        And I didn’t even mention my half-sister.

  7. Storm says:

    Holidays themselves were pretty low key for me overall. A friend let me play his copy of I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, and over the span of a week I lost all track of time and sunk about 30 hours into it (with it somewhere in the 40s now), and it rocketed up from “I’ve never heard of this before” to “easy game of the year.”

    The premise starts out as pretty standard sci-fi; a group of people with a dream build a colony ship and go on a twenty year voyage to a wormhole at the edge of the solar system and land on a mysterious alien planet, hoping to build a life for themselves there. And of course, once they land they have to contend with a number of problems, from both the planet itself and from the earth they left behind. So far so standard.

    The main twist is that you were born midway through the journey – you’re only ten years old when the colony ship lands. It’s primarily a life sim, trying to grow up on an alien planet, with the game ending when you reach age twenty. The colony is facing a number of problems, but people don’t want to worry the children about that obviously, so it starts out with people trying to give you a normal life, you can take it at face value or try and uncover what you can in your younger years, and as you get older you learn more and more about the issues the colony has faced since day one, mixed with trying to discover yourself and what kind of person you are as you slowly reach adulthood.

    There are some other elements in play, including strange dreams and the nagging feeling that you’ve done all this before, and it all comes together fantastically. It’s also designed for replayability, and seeing how you’re life might turn out differently and what experiences you could have by taking different paths.

    It’s been a long while since a game engrossed me so utterly that I completely lost track of time for multiple days in a row, but this one really did hook me completely.

  8. Wyatt says:

    During my Christmas break, I bought Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, and so far I like it a lot.
    I like strategy games, but until Homeworld, the only one I really clicked with was Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, which I’ve played to death. (I’ve had plenty of time to. It was created the same year I was, 1998.)
    Over Christmas break, whenever I wasn’t spending time with family, I’d disappear into my room for a couple hours, put on some podcasts and do a few missions. It was nice.

  9. Fizban says:

    The Christmas I was going to join in was cancelled due to flu, but it sounds like the kids liked my presents anyway (but hey, kids+toys, not complicated). I bought something that was intended to be a slight upgrade for something I already had, but all the little improvements turned out to be not, so now I’ve got to deal with mailing that back.

    But mostly I’ve been playing Elden Ring- got the Steam Deck back in November but I was waiting for the game to go on sale and lo it did for the winter sale. 44 hours in. It’s good- not wowing me with zomg the ultimate souls experience, but good, big, and with a new twist on the format that’s nice. Caster doesn’t seem to suck for once, so pew pew pew!

  10. Dreadjaws says:

    Despite being in a bit of a financial issue due to a bank screwing me over and over for a problem they themselves created (I really don’t want to go into details or I’ll be writing a few thousand paragraphs of ranting) I decided I wanted to give myself a treat, so I bought an Xbox Series S. It’s the first Xbox console I’ve ever even touched and by far some of the best value for my money I’ve ever gotten. Besides all the known benefits (big backwards compatibility, though obviously I’m limited to just digital games, Game Pass, Quick Resume, etc.) there’s the fact that where I live the price difference to other consoles is massive. A Series S is around 500 USD here. A digital-only PS5 costs 1200 USD. Yeah, don’t even get me started.

    True, you get slightly lower specs, but that makes no difference for me as long as I can play the games. I don’t even have a 4K TV, nor do I care. Also, yeah, I lose the Sony exclusives, but these have all been majorly losing appeal for me in the last few years.

    Characteristically for me instead of playing some of the new games I bought I’ve been spending most of the time replaying some old classics. I recently finished a playthrough of Red Dead Redemption and that got me thinking about Shamus. He and I have always had similar opinions about Rockstar games and I’ve always wondered what he would think of this game, which I personally consider one of the best things Rockstar has ever released. Though I’m sure he wouldn’t be too happy about how bleak it got in the second part.

    I haven’t really played much on Steam due to this. I bought only one thing on the latest sale and it was The Cave, a very flawed game I already played on the PS3 back when it came out that I still enjoyed quite a bit despite its premise being far more interesting than its execution.

  11. Joshua says:

    My wife and I were supposed to visit my sister’s family in Pittsburgh, and were planning the drive from DFW over there (~19 hours). However, I got kidney stones, my sister’s entire family came down with Covid, and the severe weather storms during that period made driving that far/long even riskier on top of my ailments. So, we mostly did a staycation.

    We went downtown for New Year’s Eve, and it was ok. Too many people, but that was to be expected. We saw lots of people with sour expressions on their faces. We went to an Improv Comedy Club, and it was also just ok for the significant price we paid for tickets. Their HVAC was busted and was churning out heat even though we had an extremely warm NYE night temps of about 65° or so, the lines to the bar were about 20-30 minutes, and the seating was uncomfortable.

  12. unit3000-21 says:

    Well I just had a week of and it was chock full of God of War (2018), which is great on the one hand (cos it’s a brilliant game) but on the other I thought I’d do some other thing, maybe even something productive…

  13. Sen says:

    The holiday season was exhausting for me. I had family members in and out of the hospital and self-realizations about some of my alters (I’ve got a dissociative disorder) but most impactfully, a dear friend( ? the exact mechanics of that relationship are complicated right now.) is facing housing insecurity and so my partner and I spent the holidays shuffling around our future plans to accommodate allowing him and his partner to live with us for the foreseeable future. My partner is much less close with him and neither of us are super close to his partner (no bad blood, just haven’t had the chance to get to know them/her) so that’s anxiety inducing. On the other hand it’s hard not to be excited about having a household full of autistic, trans, and disabled family.

    On the other other hand I’m probably having to delay gender affirming surgery because of the financial side of this, though that could be for the best anyway since there’s not 100% internal consensus between alters about it. Super sucks to think about not getting it this year though…

    An unfortunate consequence of the chaos though is that I’ve had much less gaming time than I’d have liked, mostly some Elden Ring and FFXIV on the margins.

  14. Simplex says:

    I spent few days around New Year in The Netherlands, visiting a friend. Cool country, but weather was English. I learned that the Pilgrims originally sailed to America not from UK but from Netherlands, that was unexpected.
    I visited Hague (saw the famous crime court), Rotterdam and Amsterdam where I visited Rijksmuseum, saw paintings by Van Gogh, Vermeer, Rembrandt. I also tried weed legally but it had no effect on me, probably because of ADHD. People are very friendly helpful and speak great English but they have one flaw – they are crazy about fireworks. From midnight to 2 AM on new year there was a constand barrage of explosions, literally constant for 2 hours.
    If you ever have a chance to go to Netherlands, take it.

    Also a funny coincidence, after coming back I watched episode of Mythic Quest and one of the characters (played by Ashly Burch) had a t-shirt with Netherland’s Coat of Arms.

    1. PPX14 says:

      That sounds great, I’m going to Denmark soon, hopefully it’s as good. I guess the Dutch Pilgrim thing must be why American churches look like they do, those funny pointy white wooden-looking ones. I’d never put my finger on which part of Europe they look like they’re from. Same place as the white wooden windmills I guess!

  15. Jeremy says:

    My holidays were spent in Vermont, visiting with friends and family, and it was wonderful. My personal highlight was snowshoeing Mt. Mansfield, the tallest mountain in the state. Darned difficult and dangerous, but doggone rewarding to.

    I had some time on my hands to study and work on pet projects, and that included authoring some code for running a dedicated Valheim server on Linux. It’s amazing what systemd and containers let you do.

    The cause for this project was that Valheim recently received its “Mistlands” update, so several friends and I have jumped back in to check it out. I appreciate that the game encourages creatively toying with building designs, through the crucial choice to fully refund almost anything you deconstruct.

    Valheim’s physics model is good enough to generally fool you, but is actually hilariously broken: the integrity of any object is determined soley by its distance from the ground. (Or a ground-equivalent object, such as a tree.) You can build an entire house off the side of a cliff, supported by a single one-meter board, so long as no part of the house gets too far from the side of the cliff.

  16. Sleeping Dragon says:

    I’m not really much for Christmas, generally not a people person and on top of that my family relations were strained at the best of times. Nowadays my close family is either gone or basically estranged plus I don’t get time off work for holidays because I work emergency services so the season doesn’t really change much in my life overall. Around New Year’s however some friends came to town and we played some tabletop and boardgames so that was fun, i was in a lucky and rare position of having a dayshift on the 31st and nightshift on the 1st so I could hang out a bit for the actual midnight countdown.

    From here on this is going to turn into “This (insert time period) I’ve played:” (can we get those back please?)

    Having said that got some time off work due to health issues in December which allowed me to finish Disco Elysium. Oh my what a game it is. I think this is borderline common knowledge at this point but the essential thing is that your “skills” act as a kind of chorus of voices in your head. So for example the narrator will tell you that you see a woman, and if your perception rolls good enough it will chime in with a description of her clothing and features and what that tells you, like she’s doing physical work, her clothes are inexpensive except for one item, then empathy might join and mention that the woman is tired. Sometimes these just affect the mood, sometimes they offer advice (good or bad) or even open entirely new dialogue options. The result of it is that the tone of the narration shifts towards the kind of character you play. Go for a lot of physical instrument, pain threshold and half-light and there will be a lot of aggresive posturing, try authority and you’ll be intimidating people with being a police officer, inland empire and shivers will turn your game into a noir tale with perhaps a touch of supernatural (or just intuition mixed with delusions resulting from withdrawal and possibly brain damage, depends on who you ask). I could nitpick a bit about the progression and the resolution of the ostensibly central murder but I feel that it’s actually less the point of the game to solve it and instead more to explore Harry’s story (and through that the city and the world) and to some extent shape his future. It also deals with things many trigger subjects like addiction, suicide, racism, exploitation in ways that few games do, and that may not be to everyone’s taste, which I strongly attribute to it coming from Estonia and not compromising the tone for more Western sensibilities, myself being from Poland and old enough to have vague memories of the time when we were in the soviet influence sphere I felt parts of the setting very viscerally.

    I also came back to, and subsequently dropped, Destiny 2 again. The thing is I really like this game, and FFXIV, and Warframe, and ESO, and DDO… but I just don’t think I have it in me to commit to an MMO anymore. Every couple of months I reinstall one of these games, play it for about a week feeling that I’ve gotten into that groove again, and then just stop playing it basically overnight.

    On the other hand my third or fourth approach to X: Beyond the Frontier is going well. I got the collection of X games some time ago but since I’m anal retentive like that I’ve decided I have to start the series from the beginning and the first game is kinda rough, janky and barebones. This time however I’ve actually gotten to the point where I’ve sprinkled some facilities across the map and they’re making money at a decent, if not amazing, pace and storywise I’ve met the Goners so I think this might be the playthrough that I actually finish.

  17. Galad_t says:

    I had a pretty good, even if physically exhausting time, during the holidays. I visited Jordan for Christmas. First it was Petra – the reason I went in the first place, Hollywood *can* do good occasionally. Then it was the desert Wadi Rum. It was pretty cool being transported with Toyota technicals so we can climb the highest peak of the country, then living for a couple of days with the bedouin. Almost the entire time there was light rain and/or clouds, apparently this was the rainy season, and it made the bedoiun very happy, as during the off season there’s no rain at all. Finally for the last couple of days, we were to Aqaba, the resort town of the country. We did a lot of shopping, I bought spices, and a scarf for my mom.

    After coming back home, I had a couple of days to rest (entirely insufficient), then had to go to the mountains of my country for New Year’s eve. It was a blast too, we had a homemade disco, we stuffed our faces with food, and I didn’t gain weight, and even found a new friend or two. :)

  18. Randy says:

    My Christmas was… interesting. My car got totaled (no one was in it, a drunk driver hit it while it was parked on the street), and between towing, impound (my city tows everything in an accident where the police respond) and Lyft, I was pretty much out of money until the insurance payment came in, three days before Christmas. Luckily, I knew someone who was selling a car cheap, and my mom was willing to front me the money, but it was kinda rough.

    On the bright side, I don’t have a family to support, I had a car by Christmas, I managed to find gifts for everyone on Christmas Eve, and since Christmas was also the last night of Chanukah this year (my family’s part Jewish), we had a big candle display at dinner.

    1. PPX14 says:

      Gosh that’s bad luck with the car! Thank goodness you weren’t in it, at least.

  19. Luka says:

    I arrived back at home from seeing family and searching for work in Germany just before the holidays, and immediately got swept up in Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with family and friends. It was a wonderful welcome back, but as the new year sets in, I’m reminded of the sense of inertia and restlessness I had before I left. Quite a sobering experience that is strangely reflected in my time playing “Norco” in the evenings.

    Today I was watching the Spoiler Warning for “Fallout 4” that I missed the first time around (inspired by yet another playthrough of “New Vegas”) and was reminded again of how much I miss how Shamus expressed the very qualities you describe, even just in his writing and interactions with the community.

  20. William H says:

    Getting covid right before Christmas was the worst timing
    I spent a couple weeks at home by myself and occasionally talking to people on the phone or discord
    Then I went back into the office for a week before I went to see my parents finally
    I still have lingering bronchitis

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