Category: Site News

Haven’t even thought about the blog for a few months, and have been pretty busy with a few things:

I’ve started a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign with a few friends. I’ve really missed getting together with folks to play since the pandemic hit, and so I decided to do something about it. I fired up my Roll20.net account, purchased some of the D&D material, and became the dungeon master of a new campaign with five of my friends. We’re running through the Embers of the Last War campaign set in the Eberron universe. Been a lot of fun so far. I haven’t run a “paper-and-pencil” role-playing game since high school, and I think my skills have grown considerably since then. I hope to keep doing this into the foreseeable future. This runs every other week.

Tuesday nights are board games; Friday nights are video games. Both nights have been consumed by Among Us lately. Friends’ kids have gotten in to playing, and we’ve all enjoyed lying to one another and killing each other and trying to find the killer. We’ve almost entirely moved on from Civilization VI, but I hope we return to it.

There have also been some commitments at church that have heated up. We’re looking for a new pastor and I’m on the “search committee”. It takes a decent amount of time and thought.

Not sure when I’m going to get back into blogging. I might try to set up a series of posts describing how our ongoing D&D campaign has been going. Stay tuned.

The coronavirus is in full force, instilling fear, wrecking the economy, and generally making a mess of things. I’ve been working from home for the past week – upper management issued increasingly-restrictive imperatives over the past weekend telling us first that we’d rotate in and out of the office, and now we’re not to come in at all. Working at home isn’t really my favorite, but we have to stay safe to stop the spread of this plague, so I understand why.

Like most folks, I’m trying to make the best of it indoors. The weather’s still a little cold outside, so although we’ve gone out for walks it’s still a bit chilly to do that regularly. Here are a few of the things I’ve been up to recently.

• A little over a week ago, before the quarantine, the wife and I went to a friend’s house to play board games with a small number of friends. We played Pandemic, of course.
• I’m finishing up Starcraft 2. Loved the first one, but wasn’t going to play the second one until the entire story had been released…then it took me a few years to get around to it. Great game – reminds me of Blizzard’s days of glory, now long gone.
• My wife and I have been watching the BBS Documentary on YouTube. It’s a fascinating look into a niche hobby from a more innocent era of computing.
• I’ve been re-reading the Dresden Files in preparation for the release of the new book in the series, Peace Talks. It’s been a long several years waiting for it and I can’t wait for it to start back up again. I just haven’t liked the rest of Jim Butcher’s fiction as much as I have the adventures of Harry Dresden.
• If I’m honest, I haven’t prayed about this pandemic as much as I probably should. My goal this week is to devote more time to that. I do believe in a sovereign God, so I might as well act like it and ask Him for protection and to intervene to stop this virus.

That’s about it for now. Hopefully I’ll have more time to update things around here since I don’t have any travel time. Just have to get motivated to do it.

Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. -Ecclesiastes 7:8

I’ve wanted to start blogging for quite some time, and now I finally have. It’s all the rage today to build audiences, market yourself, optimize your blog for traffic, and otherwise turn blogging into a second career. I have no intentions of doing this.

The early internet I remember was a place of untrammeled expression, where it was not only possible but likely that one might stumble upon the personal and public musings of anyone and everyone. New and different points of view were there to be discovered, albeit in low resolution and with rudimentary HTML. Someone looking for information on 19th century quilting, for example, would invariably wend their way to the site of a member of the digerati (the only people to travel the World Wide Web at the time) who happenened to be an enthusiastic quilter, publicly musing about their personal hobby.

These days have gone, and while we cannot perhaps turn back time, I am opting to forge this site in the fashion of that bygone era. I plan on discussing my personal interests – varied though they may be – and allow others to read them (or not) as they see fit. In the interest of organization, however, I do plan on adding helpful tags to separate these into particular feeds, so that individuals can subscribe only to those topics which interest them…at least, I’ll do so as soon as I figure out how.

All that being said – welcome! The future awaits us; let’s hope it is as bright and beautiful as one can be, here in the Shadowlands. I’ll slowly peck away at this blogging thing until I master it.