Monthly Update: December 2018

Happy December everyone! (Granted a few days late on the post, but that's the way the reindeer crumbles I guess).

November was an interesting month.  Part of it was spent worrying about family, part about fires affecting families, but there was also great times spent with families who came to visit us.  I guess November had a lot more to do with families than I had originally thought, not even taking Thanksgiving into account; which is how Conklederp and I approach Thanksgiving and Christmas these days in that it is more about spending time with family than about the religious aspect of those holy days.

Earlier in the month Dr. Potts and Jane came up to visit and while we were only able to spend a couple of days visiting due to other obligations, it was great to see them again.  Coincidentally, that last time I saw Dr. Potts was back in early 2017, and now I will see him again in a few weeks when Conklederp and I go down to visit my family in Nor*Cal for Christmas.  I do not know if we will have a chance to throw some gaming in due to the whirlwindiness of our trip, but maybe there could be a card game or too for good measure.

And just last week, as mentioned in two subsequent MIDI Week Single articles, Beardsnbourbonn and Co. drove over the Rockies and spent Thanksgiving with us.  We did get about 60% of the way through a new DLC story in Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition, but Thanksgiving dinner kind of got in the way, so it was shelved/saved and we ended up not being able to find the time to get back to it.  So now that story may have to be restarted the next time everyone is together; because I can guarantee that Conklederp and I are going to be playing it again and there is essentially only one save slot when booting up the game through Steam.  And Beardsnbourbon and I finally managed to defeat Bowser in Super Mario World on the SNES Classic, picking up where we had left off last Thanksgiving.  And thinking more about that game, I genuinely feel that that is still my favorite Super Mario game to date, 28 years later.  But then again, I only briefly played New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, and I have not played a 3D Mario game since I became disillusioned with Mario 64.

In other retro gaming news, SNK released an amazing compilation of arcade and console games, complete with music and retrospectives on the games themselves.  I feel like Nintendo would behoove themselves to take notice of what SNK has done with SNK 40th Anniversary Collection and do something similar with their Nintendo Switch Online Nintendo Classic service.  I have only perused a few of the games, as well as starting Crystalis, a stupidly under-appreciated NES game akin to The Legend of Zelda.  I do not think I have the chutzpah to go through every individual game in the game and write an individual article about each one, and now I see that SNK has added six more games as a free DLC type thing.  I should probably go and run an update on that game after I get home.

In Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I just entered the inverted castle (sorry, spoiler?) and I forgot how much more difficult a lot of the enemies are compared to the main castle.  But damn is that a fun game!

So, looking ahead to December (now that we're firmly rooted here), I somehow have four completed articles and two MIDI Week Singles posts sitting in the ready to be published queue, plus an article on a couple of Netflix shows that I need to either start and/or finish.  And based on what my calendar is telling me about the rest of the month, having a queue of finished articles is probably going to shape up to be a good thing in between family obligations (and not at all a bad thing mind you), year end stuff at work, and other general life stuff like commuting and being drained of my precious bodily fluids.

So a happy December to you all, doing whatever religious or secular activities you have planned, because that is my plan as well.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental