DEC 31

2023

Sunday: call volume was just low enough that I didn't have to back up the phone bank. My dread for next week keeps increasing, but after playing through The Case of the Golden Idol, it was nice to binge a couple of youtube playthroughs last night and this evening. After evaluating health circumstances and the fact that Meagan and Justin were only just on their way back into town today, we figured we'd better not push our luck with a New Year's party. We had leftover pasta for dinner and wathced both Chicken Run movies on streaming, followed by MacGyver for a change of pace. Over in Fallen London, I'm officially a Person of Some Importance. Didn't think I'd actually stay conscious through the New Year, but here it is at midnight and I'm still awake.

Second half of 2023 round up
This half of the year had some problems; I didn't make as much progress as I would have liked on my projects, though I am farther than I was in June. I enjoyed adding trivia to my weekly routines, and I'm not sorry that Cliff is a permanent part of our household, now. Normally I'd like to do a run through some of the highlights of the last six months, but I'm still too run down from my cold. Might come back and add it later.

2022

Saturday: we went shopping at the Acme on Passyunk, I finished the Shadowbringers patch content, and we went to Katie and Daniel's place down the road for New Year's. Lots of charcuterie boards and getting licked by vocal dogs. They couldn't decide whether they wanted karaoke or to just watch music videos. I was indecisive about drinks, but I masked it my spending most of my time on my phone playing The Little Match Girl 4: Crown of Pearls.

Have I had a year with as many big changes as 2022? Let's see.

2022 in Review
In January we were living at the Shade apartments in Wichita. I was working at the bank, and Julie was working at the collections company. Our storage unit down the street had a fire, but our unit only had smoke damage. There was no saving the love seat or the extra bed or various pillows, but most of our things were fine with a wipe-down, and we had to move them across the parking lot to a building that wouldn't be torn down. Final Fantasy XIV was on a sales freeze due to the popularity of the Endwalker expansion, so I got reacquainted with Guild Wars 2 while waiting for sales to resume.

In February, I started playing FFXIV, and I started making notes toward the creation of a collaborative "meetup" game. Didn't get very far with it at this point. I did some minor revising on The Exigent Seasons and uploaded version 2 to IFDB/itchi.io. There was some drama on one of my forums about the de facto leader passing the reigns to a successor, but I was minimally involved in that discussion.

In March, Julie got a job offer from one of the places she'd been applying to in Philadelphia, so the plan to move out of Kansas was officially underway. We celebrated my 40th birthday and our plans to leave town at a local pool hall with family and friends from all over, and immediately afterwards flew to Philadelphia for a week to see the apartment we'd just leased.

Through most of April, we put our possessions in boxes and said our Wichita goodbyes: one last dinner at Sabor, last visit to The Cat Hospital, etc. The movers picked up our stuff, and on the 22nd, Dad came out and helped me start driving our seven cats cross-country, a stressful and noisy three-day process. We arrived in Philly just in time for the movers to deliver our (scraped, soaking, somewhat ruined, partially missing) furniture. I got a lot of parallel parking practice in a hurry. Dad drove back to Missouri and I spent a few days by myself with just the cats for company, trying to get the apartment set up.

May started with Julie flying out to Philadelphia and me flying back to Wichita the next day. I spent the month cleaning up the storage unit and the apartment before turning over my keys; I was staying at my friend Carl's place. I'd been following the Interactive Fiction community forum for a while, and I finally posted my portion of the Cragne Manor source code, which prompted Zarf to create a public archive of all the source provided by authors so far. Meanwhile, the chances my employer would allow me to work remotely seemed thinner by the day, so I was spending my evenings applying for as many jobs as I could. Carl's enthusiasm for Magic: the Gathering's Commander format proved infectious, and most nights saw us playing at least a couple of games before bed.

June was basically just a continuation of May: still at Carl's, still working at the bank, still looking for work. However, at Carl's recommendation I applied with his employer again, and since they'd gone fully remote, it wouldn't be a problem to take a job and immediately move across the country. They offered me the position I'd applied for, so it was time to say goodbye to Wichita again for real!

I started the second week of July by picking up my remote-work equipment from my new employer, and then driving cross-country for (hopefully) the last time. My drive in April with Dad had felt like something I wanted to preserve as an interactive fiction game, but it made more sense thematically to adapt the final solo drive, so I bought a voice recorder and commentated the entire three-day drive. Once in town, we got a new desk for the office, and we sold my car. I spent my days in online training classes, and at night, we continued unpacking: situating the living room the way we wanted, moving stuff to the basement for storage, mounting art and coatracks on the walls, etc. We joined a local gym and started settling into a routine. On Julie's birthday, her dad came up and we finally had Philly cheesesteaks in the city proper. We ended the month at a local Mexican restaurant's block party.

In August, we finished the immediately-relevant unpacking and continued our routines. I kept twisting my ankle or rolling my feet on Philadelphia's patchwork sidewalks.

September saw our friend Phil officially move to Philadelphia, so we had more opportunities to hang out and play board games with him. I joined Select Button in getting more into VRChat as a remote-socialization game. I began thinking about reworking The Exigent Seasons into a Halloween-themed game for ECTOCOMP 2022, but I wouldn't really start working on this until...

October! This is the month my training process completed and I started actually taking calls for my new job. This is also the month of the Select Button meetup, so I invited people on multiple web forums to participate in that Meetup game collaboration I'd been thinking about. I also also completed the conversion of The Exigent Seasons into This Old Haunted House. We saw Metric in concert at the Fillmore, we went to Phil's friends' place for a Halloween showing of "Heavy Metal Zombies", and on the day itself, we handed out candy for the first time in like a decade. Good month.

In November we saw the Silversun Pickups show, and by way of an anniversary event we visited the Philadelphia Zoo. Julie spent a week in South Carolina for work, and I continued collecting contributions for the Meetup game. Work kept me busy.

December saw the launch of this website, I continued working on the Meetup game, and we started putting a lot of time into Civ VI. Speaking of which, I should get started on dinner so we can play again!