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Well, I managed to greet the new year last night. Was ready to go to bed at 11 though.

I need to get back to paying more attention to the blog, there’s a number of things I still want to write up. But, for much of the year I was maintaining a pretty good schedule. This next year, I plan to be a bit more aggressive about spacing postings out, so if I can get another big batch going, it’ll cover the dead times, and I won’t go 10+ days without a post.

Gaming has been something of a mix this year, with the usual dead spots for FtF gaming, but we also had a bunch around November. Patch and I got in three games of ASL, and are currently mid-way through AP17 “The Dead of Winter”, which has had a number of problems for Patch, but is still fairly tense. We got in one SFB game, and I soloed a monster scenario, and I’m hoping we’ll do the next one soon. I spent $325 on games, which is a little low for me, but not quite a low as I’d hoped, with a couple larger purchases near the end of the year. I’m currently behind on RPG reading, and not sure if I’ll continue my Pyramid subscription.

The beginning of the year saw Smudge and I say good-bye to ArcheAge, setting us adrift on the MMO seas again. We spent a fair amount of time back with Neverwinter, got our mains from level 70 to the new limit of 80, and got through a couple of the campaigns (harder than it might sound, with much of the content having been shifted up ten levels on us). A few months back, both Wildstar and Guild Wars 2 went Free 2 Play, and we’ve been spending most of our time since on Guild Wars 2. Wildstar is good, but has a poor UI experience, but I hope we can get to it some more some day. Smudge is also starting to talk about doing more in FFXIV again, so we’ve gone back from famine to feast.

The holidays have been fairly quiet as usual, but I got some good gifts. Smudge gave me a wonderful watercolor piece of my main character in GW2, Lunysa:

Lance got me a Kangaroo PC, which is mobile desktop system. I’m not just sure what I will end up doing with it, but at the moment, it’s hooked up to the TV, and allows us to stream Funimation without going through the somewhat flaky iOS app. So, meet Akatsuki:

The stats for the blog show that I had 124 posts last year! I’ve been hoping to get up to an average of a post every three-four days, which I am in excess of, now to continue to spread them out a bit better. Looking at the categories (instead of tags), this breaks down as: 25 books, 11 boardgaming, 8 D&D, 7 ASL, 6 CC:Ancients, 5 BvR – The Wind, 4 each anime, Four Vassal War, 3 each computer games, MMO, 2 each life, F&E, SFB, and 1 each GURPS, comics.

So a lot of my posting comes down to trying to give some sort of review for most of the books I read. The fact that I have three or four reviews that I need to get explains why the blog’s been a little silent lately. And speaking of reading, my official count was 47 books, though I’ll note that one was a three-in-one of The Darwath Trilogy and another was The Legacy of Gird, a two-in-one of the Paksenarrion prequels, so it’s actually more like 50.

A final bit I meant to post on a month ago when it happened: While I was visiting my parents, I naturally got to help solve (or try to) some of the little technological glitches they’ve been having. It beats trying to do it over the phone. And then Smudge’s machine back home suddenly had an error, saying that her second hard drive was failing. This is especially annoying, as we just had to replace her main drive a couple months earlier. Since it was the data drive, I had her go down to Computer Central, get a new hard drive, and talked her through installing it in the machine over the phone/Skype. Then had her format it and copy everything from the old one to the new one, unplug the old one, and shift the drive letter. As far as Myzal’s concerned everything’s right were it was. And with Smudge able to take photos or send video of what was happening over Skype through her iPhone, it wasn’t too hard to do.