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2022 in Video Games

2022 in Video Games

I’ve played some computer games in 2022. Here are some words about some of them. Final Fantasy 14 – Endwalker My FFXIV Character. Okay, so yes, by numbers this is the game I’ve spent most time playing. I’m enjoying FF a lot, the story for the most recent few expansions has been incredible, and the latest one is a powerhouse concluding a storyline of the last ten years, most of which they…

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Record of Achievement

Sgt Pepper. Trad. Audiophile is not my usual brand of geekery, but over the start of the year I got a record player. I’ve no illusions of my ability to distinguish sound quality, warmth, digital compression, etc, but it does push my units of music towards the Album rather than the Track, which works for me as both a continuation of mood thing and a time measurement thing. That is, I use systems…

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Geekcode 2022

Another even year, another odd Geekcode. The Geekcode is a very old tradition. It was written by Robert A. Hayden and last updated in 1996, It’s a formated series of codes that are not unlike the kind of at-a-glance keyword biography you now get on Twitter, only… well, geekier. Here, it’s a kind of milestone marker. I’ve published my geekcode every other year since 1999, each year updating it…

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Pupdate

Pupdate - Introducing our new dog, Rylan.

This is Rylan. Rylan is 12 weeks old, he’s a Bearded Collie puppy, and he’s currently occupying… a lot of my life right now. How (Not) To Buy A Puppy There’s a meme wandering around Twitter/Facebook at the moment: … though to be fair we have been planning this for a while. One of the considerations for this house was it has a nice garden suitable for a dog. I’ve wanted to have one for a…

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#Bearded Collie #Dog #Pet #Rylan

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Hot takes on an 11 year old game: Mass Effect 2

Hot takes on an 11 year old game: Mass Effect 2

I completed Mass Effect 2 a couple of days ago for the first time. This article contains spoilers for ME1 & 2. I played it on release, but for some reason didn’t get more than about halfway through, so these are my hot takes on an 11 year old game, albeit the slightly remastered version bundled with the Legendary edition, which smoothes out the levelling a bit, and has altered a lot of the…

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#Mass Effect

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Bripe and the world Bripes with you

Bripe and the world Bripes with you

This is, without doubt, the stupidest coffee device I have ever bought. But I have bought it.

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#Youtube

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Wk3/4: Better late than dead

Wk3/4: Better late than dead

The difficulty of this weeknotes things is that entire weeks can go by without anything interesting happening. That’s not what happened last week, but the things that did happen I can’t entirely talk about, because… well, because talking about security things in public is a good way to need to look for a new job, and I quite like this one. So this is combined Wk3 and 4, Work Launches coming…

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Wk2: Knows the Grindstone

Wk2: Knows the Grindstone

Work My current office setup 2021 at work started in a fairly typical way. Over the course of the christmas break our central IT team had updated the VPN to add a secure traffic proxy. This was mostly transparent to the entire group, except for our development environments, which don’t have the corporate certificate trusted, and therefore were – correctly – throwing errors about possible Man in…

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Weeknotes wk0

Another year, another attempt at keeping track of what I’m doing. The weird thing about this site is that it has a fairly complete record of my existence for about 10 years, and then a gradually less useful one for the following 10 years. I find the bit where I’ve got actual documentation of my life really useful, but not – apparently – enough to keep doing it. So, let’s try a new…

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Drinking Age Everywhere

This website is 21 years old today. It’s possible that this is the year I get around to writing more on it. But I’ve said that before. 21 years ago, it was a direct copy of my old netmanor site, and therefore looked roughly like this. Happy holidays.

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Thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077

Thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 may not be generically reviewable. When I’ve mentioned I’ve been playing it, and I’ve been asked what I think, I’ve tended to refer people to Kieron Gillen’s 2005 review of Boiling Point: Road To Hell, a game whose ambition was obscured by its execution (and a review that entertainingly breaks the Eurogamer site every time they update something on the back end). It reminds me a…

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#cyberpunk 2077

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Old Blood

On accidentally creating a new vampire game

I tripped and wrote an RPG.

It’s not a big one, two A4 pages printed out, and it’s called To Stifle the Light, and it was written for friend Jessie.

I like giving RPG one-shots as birthday presents, as discussed recently, but in this case Jessie actively solicited a vampire style game, for they had never played one. Since I’ve never run one, I stepped up, because that’s a thing I do.

Vam…

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Unix Shortcuts: p

A thing I rely on in my daily life, bit haven’t really ever documented. It’s a bash function that’s in my global .bash_profile, and it looks like this:

function p { PROJECTDIR=$(find ~/code/ -maxdepth 2 \( -type l -or -type d \) -iname \*$1\* -print -quit); if [ $PROJECTDIR ]; then echo -n "🔍 " pushd $PROJECTDIR else echo "😞" fi }

It’s…

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T'was on a Monday Morning...

Adventures in home ownership continue

It’s a year since we finished completion on the house and were given the keys. I know this because the first thing I did when we got inside was to claim it (fig. 1).

fig 1. A claimed chimney.

Over winter we made a load of plans for what we wanted to do with the house, from garden improvements to loft improvements, and by spring we had sorted out some priorities and started to get quotes…

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#moving house

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In Which A Masks: A New Generation Game Optimistically Labelled A One-Shot Is Created And Run

In Which A Masks: A New Generation Game Optimistically Labelled A One-Shot Is Created And Run

During Lockdown I’ve been doing a lot more RPGs and GMing than before, most recently, I ran a one-shot of Masks: A New Generation for friend Robin, and I’m going to talk about the process of putting it together, partly because writing stuff down helps me internalise it, and partly because it helps me stay present in the process and do things deliberately, and therefore maybe repeatably.

Plus,…

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Weeknotes 2020-26: Let's try this again

Weeknotes 2020-26: Let’s try this again

In which lockdown is bemoaned, some code is written, RPGs continue on, and the excess of television provides an opportunity to waste more time.

Outside The Asylum

Day 121 of lockdown. I mean, the first few weeks were dogsitting, but that was the last time I left Oxford, or Headington, really.

I am a professional remote worker. I’ve been working remotely for most of the last ten years, on…

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Campaign Notes

Campaign Notes - In which I ramble about Torg Eternity and session design for a bit.

Words are hard. The Current Situation™ isn’t great for my head, and I’m finding it hard to write about anything else, and I really don’t think I need to add to the current covid chorus. So, here’s some stuff around how I put together an adventure for the Torg Eternity campaign I’m running.

Torg Eternity is a game where our world has been invaded by some other realities. Each new reality is…

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#odysseylrp #Roleplaying #Tabletop #Torg #Torg Eternity #TorgEternity