Rindis.com

Overall, 2022’s been a good year. At least if you’re not involved in a land war in Asia. Personal savings is down a bit over the year (thank you rising prices), but the overall household continues to gain stability.

Fox Den‘s multi-year project to republish Panzerfaust & Campaign continues, and in fact, I am hitting that particular transitional name with #71 going out the door at the same time as this post. Overall, I got paid in eight out of twelve months this year, which isn’t bad, and a couple of times the amount was fairly high. It’s still minuscule compared to the sweat equity, but I’m on schedule, and with 50-year-old magazines, I consider everything to be low-volume evergreens. For a fair chunk of the year, I was also doing mid-month releases, which got about half of Lowrys Guidon and the three Wargamer’s Guides out, and those last have been doing well. Hopefully, I will find some extra time for some more mid-month releases this year, the two pre-Lowry issues of Panzerfaust I have (#51 & #52) are coming up in the queue.

The five-days-a-week gaming schedule continues eating up the rest of my spare time. Final Fantasy XIV continues being the biggest time sink, with the rocky start of Endwalker over with (and it was a good end to the story arc started in 1.0/2.0), most of the side stuff done, and now trying to get other jobs up to snuff. I got the big “lump” in my series of Paradox reviews done (back-to-back full game reviews), now I just need to squeeze them into the blog’s posting schedule.

And again, the blog was on the standard post/four days schedule. I have more to post, but most of the time I’m running with about one post in the can, and struggling to get the next out on time because of the lack of spare time. However, I started the year with several games to write up, and this time… well, about the same, but only four Vassal games, and I’ve had three face-to-face sessions in the last week, and those need writing up.

Overall, I ended up trying out eight new games over the past year, and while the 1914 system (Serbien Muß Sterbien) is one I don’t think I’ll go back to, I’m still impressed by it, and I don’t have an overall negative impression on any of them. Game buying is back up (in money, at least), but part of that was getting Hollow Legions 3rd edition, which completes the update of my ASL materials. If I can avoid getting sucked into many new HASLs (spoiler: nope, I have Sainte-Mère-Église on preorder), big-ticket items should stay down in the future.

Yearly reading is under my goal again. On the other hand, one of the books I read was Chandler’s massive Campaigns of Napoleon. Good book, but not one to read in a hurry. Overall, it would be one of the better non-fiction books of the year, along with part 2 of Sumption’s series on the Hundred Years War (I got part 3 for Christmas). Similarly, Gill’s books on the 1809 Danubian campaign are good, and I’ll be returning to that a bit later. And finally, Russia Against Napoleon is recommended.

On the fiction side, Mark handed off some ST:TNG novels that he got duplicates of, and I also found out there’s a bunch on sale on Kindle every month, so I’ve read a number of Star Trek novels. Early TNG novels continue to underperform, but Prime Directive and The Captain’s Oath are very good TOS novels. Outside of Star Trek, most of the fiction I read this year was quite good, and I’ll note The Tea Master and the Detective as being one of the best of the year.

The big bad news here is that Covid followed Dave home from a convention, and we all got it during the worst heat wave of the year. Thankfully, it got milder as it went through the household, and me and Smudge’s symptoms were pretty mild. We’ve had other scares, but that’s the only time we’ve had to actually deal with it, and other illnesses have been largely absent. My job isn’t quite as stable as I would like, but so far, so good, and things shouldn’t get any worse without a collapse that I don’t think is coming (we’ll see if that holds up for the year, if so, things should be fine).