It’s the penultimate week of the year, and I’m sure I’m not the only who’s had enough of this accursed year and looking forward to moving on to the next one. I know that’s silly since the world won’t magically become better when the calendar flips over to January the first, but I think it helps our mental health to have this sort of “fresh start” mentality, even if it’s on an arbitrarily chosen date.
The holiday season continues to be weird, thanks to the pandemic. My brothers and I have been trying to hash out how to have the usual holiday gift exchange among the four households. In theory nobody will be coming inside the house, just parking outside and dropping off and picking up gifts, but they need to coordinate since they also need to exchange gifts with each other. They’re trying to see if they can synchronize their visits so that the exchanges can happen, we’ll see if that works out. Meanwhile, the usual family and extended family reunions will probably happen on Zoom, like many of my friends’ recent company Christmas parties. Hopefully they go smoothly.
Speaking of the pandemic and the holiday, cases continue to rise locally. This trend will probably carry on into January as a result of holiday gatherings. In pandemic related government screwups recently:
- requiring face shields everywhere in public, even for joggers or bikers
- a pilot for face to face classes in January because the education secretary says they are more likely to get infected at home anyway
- apparently we could have had vaccines as early as the first quarter of 2021, but the health secretary dropped the ball during negotiations with pfizer
Gaming:
- I guess they were working with some sort of backlog due to the holiday sales, but my local gaming store took an entire week to ship me my copy of Fire Emblem Fates. It finally arrived last Friday so yay! I haven’t started playing yet, beyond opening the package and checking that the cartridge works.
- Instead this week, I’ve been doing a bit of achievement hunting in Civilization VI, since a new patch with balance updates dropped last week. I also tried resuming my Wasteland 2 game. It took me a while to get my bearings, but the game just seems so fiddly, I have a hard time getting into it.
- MTG: Kaldheim previews started this week! We don’t get any more until January though. The metal-themed previews reminded me of something from 10 years ago.
Watching Lately:
- finished The Big Bang Theory rewatch, I totally did not almost tear up at Sheldon’s speech in the finale. TBBT gets a lot of flak for being terrible, but I think it holds up reasonably well
- caught up with Mandalorian and Discovery. Discovery was so-so, but wow, the Mandalorian. What a fantastic season finale. I watched it around half a day after the episode dropped and I was very happy I wasn’t spoiled by the internet. The team behind the show are doing a great job with the Star Wars franchise. After the problematic sequel trilogy (which I still enjoyed), maybe the real future of the franchise is on episodic TV. Looking forward to all the new Star Wars content next year.
- New background binge watching: There’s new episodes of Jeopardy on Netflix! Not a lot, but more trivia is always fun.
Other than that, most of my time was again spent on digging through and sorting old files. Additionally, one of my old external hard drives had also started getting errors, so I ordered and got a new 1tb one, and spent some time trying to move old backup files across from the old drive to the new one. It was annoying because I couldn’t play any games that use a controller while this was happening, for fear of disturbing the long file transfers.
I’m kind of looking forward to doing my year in review blog post for this strange and accursed year.
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