I have another almost entirely written article sitting on another computer so I decided to rewrite the entire thing so that I could have it ready for alls y'alls on Monday, January 3, 2022. That's how much I love each and every one of you.
Bloody hell that was a banger of a year.
475,075 (MORE) people died in the United States from COVID-19, to cap it off at 824,190 for the last two years as of December 31, 2021. Although the current word is that while the Omicron Variant is significantly more infectious, it is appearing to be less lethal because it is not attacking the lungs in the same way that Delta and other more aggressive variants have in the past (as if 2020-2021 is waaaaaay back in the past). This is not my forte so I am going to move on.
There was a mix of outcomes in terms of social issues. There was a guilty verdict for D. Chauvin, the Minneapolis Police Officer who murdered George Floyd. There was a guilty verdict for the three small dick-energy-murderers who hunted down and murdered Ahmaud Aubery in Georgia in 2020. There was a settlement with Elijah McClain's family and the city of Aurora, Colorado after he was murdered by a combination of Aurora City Police and paramedics because he was black and was not acting in a way that was consistent with what some white people thought of as normal. I should be a lot better of an ally by not just talking about the high profile cases
Oh, and who could forget the day 362 days ago on January 6, 2021, when supporters of former President Donald Trump peacefully attacked the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. in an attempt to invalidate the culmination of the November 3rd, 2020 election, to hang Vice President Mike Pence, and do everything else to any RINO or Democrat they came across?
So I got back into reading this year. I bought a Kindle Fire 8 because they were on sale, but mainly because I lost my Kindle Paperwhite and I think it might have been left at my old job after I was let go (fired) back in the end of Febuary, which is the only place I can think of that that I could have left it as I have not seen it since sometime in February and I had taken it to work occasionally. So during those six months that I was unemployed, I read a lot of Star Wars books because I hooked up this schnazzy Kindle Fire app OverDrive to download eBooks from our local library. And by a lot of Star Wars books, I mean that I read 13 books, novels, and short stories (which counted as individual books according to Goodreads). I had thought about writing articles for some of the books and at least for the Aftermath Trilogy, but that ended up not happening because I would go from one book to another and I was trying to read them in chronological order. I also finished Carmilla and The Witch Cult in Western Europe, both of which I started waaaaaay back in 2020. But anyway.
In the realm of board games, I ended up having to back out of our Dungeons & Dragons group that was doing the Curse of Strahd quest. I was finding that it was becoming more and more difficult to participate even after our DM had been accommodating in moving the start time back so that I could help Conklederp with getting Goblino ready and into bed. It eventually got to the point where I was not able to participate because our evening routine was ever-evolving. So I asked our DM to put my halfling Wild Mage Lurien into some type of scenario where it could be possible for him to come back, but I believe that their campaign finished up. But I did pick up the Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft that was released back in May, which seemed to piss off some people by not including stat-blocks for some of the Darklords while the books specifically tell the DM to use equivalent stat-blocks and which ones from the DMG to use. I was pleasantly surprised by how the book worked as a combination of both campaign settings and a toolset for DMs to build their own setting within Ravenloft. It did make me want to start up a new D&D group, but again and is always the issue, finding the time. I do not think we played any other board games the rest of the year, which is a little sad, but again, finding the time that works around Goblino's timetable is pretty difficult.
But I have found time for video games, which is usually relegated to the mornings when I wake up before everyone else, and then after going to bed, usually after Conklederp and I stream a show on Netflix, Disney+, or Hulu (recently being the second season of The Witcher, and now getting into The Book of Boba Fett. I do not have any thoughts (yet) about the Cowboy Bebop series on Netflix because I have yet to see it, and I have only watched half Marvel series on Disney+ (Wandavision, and Loki) but I would like to start in on those. Eventually. At some point. But yes, video games, again mostly played on the Switch this year, although in the latter half of the year I did expand my playable catalog to Wii U and Oculus Quest 2 games.
The Switch in handheld mode has been my primary gaming source for the entire year, again mostly played after waking up in the morning or after getting into bed. My favorite game is probably the one that surprised me the most on so many fronts. I spent around 93 hours on Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity and that was not even counting the DLC which I probably will not be getting. There was just so much in this game that I loved, from the building up of Hyrule before the Calamity and giving weight to the people who survived into Breath of the Wild and all of the principal locations. Like Akkala Citadel was just a place in Breath of the Wild, but in Age of Calamity, the number of battles that you fight there, defending the fortress time and time again from wave after wave of Ganon's hordes. Then being able to see and fight as the Champions as well as ancelary characters like Impa and introducing new characters like Astor.
My favorite indie game was probably Tux and Fanny, because it has been a long time since any has made me literally lol to the point that I had to put the Switch down to be able to breath again. Terry Pratchett has said that "You can't map a sense of humour" regarding early Discworld novels and people asking for maps of the Disc, and I felt that that holds true for trying to explain why "1997 Toyota Tacoma" next to a drawing of a plant made me laugh as much as it did.
The rest of 2021 is a bit less interesting. I did not go out to the movies at all because right now I still do not trust other people who might go into theaters. Conklederp and I did go to a taproom in the Spring and two breweries back in May, being the first time out since March 2020, although were are still not going out to eat at restaurants. I think going out to movies is what I miss most about going out into the world and there have been plenty of movies that I would have like to see in theatres, but that may also just have to wait until Goblino is older and COVID-19 becomes reclassified as an endemic. A little bit longer than lasting until April, 2020 it turns out. And a lot more than 11 or 12 cases*.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
On the Wings of Death by the Hands of Doom
*P.S. Try 57,107,627 reported cases in the United States alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment