2025 in Review

 Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Yes, I know I said I was done with these end of year and start of year posts; I changed my mind. I'm not going to start counting stuff again, though.

Games

Since the last review in September...

• Deadlands clips on despite occasional drama among the players. We've just passed 23 Advances after 46 sessions of play, and I am enjoying actually playing Savage Worlds for the first time after running it for nearly two decades.
• The Jagermeister Adventure has come to a close; that was really fun, and I hope to rejoin the group for the next campaign in 2026.
• Leaves of Chiaroscuro stumbles on, slowly; I thought a lot about dropping out of this one, but the GM has been a good friend for half a century and I decided it's worth it just to spend a couple of hours every few weeks talking with him.
• The Aslan Route feels like it's continually teetering on the edge of collapse, but it staggers on. It doesn't seem to matter how much or how little session prep I do, the outcomes are much the same. If I can just stop feeling anxious before we start each week, it'll be fine.
• The current incarnations of The Arioniad and 28 Months Later have petered out. I'm just not feeling it for either of them at the moment. I shall shift them both into the Guest Games category and let them lie fallow, at least for a while; I can always re-tag them later, but the usual trigger for rebooting the blog is the number of categories becoming unwieldy.

Media

This quarter has seen me focus on TV and books...

• English TV: The Good Place; a philosophy course wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in a sitcom, and good enough for me to binge-watch it - that almost never happens.
• Italian TV: After a couple of false starts on other shows, I picked up Wolf King, a YA fantasy horror based on the Wereworld novels by Curtis Jobling. Not my usual sort of thing, but interesting enough to keep me watching and good for my vocabulary.
• The Marcus Didius Falco novels by Lindsey Davis. Some of these I've read, some not, but this time I'm starting from the beginning and working through them in order. Tightly-plotted Roman crime noir with tons of historical detail about the 1st century AD, fantastic.
• The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. The adventures of a security android whose binge-watching of soap operas is continually interrupted by being caught up in intrigues. I'm enjoying these greatly; the story builds from book to book as Murderbot's decisions come back to haunt it later; I wasn't sure whether to press on after the first one, but I'm glad I did.
• Wool by Hugh Howey. Long after the apocalypse rendered Earth uninhabitable, a few thousand people survive in a great underground silo. Some of them have secrets worth killing for, and the secrets just keep coming as the characters unwrap layer after layer of them. The sheer number of plot twists and the way the story continues to make sense through all of them are very impressive.

I'm at the stage now where if Apple TV makes a science-fiction show out of a book I haven't read, it goes into the queue, because so far they've all been good.

Lessons

This Christmas has been a good one. I sat watching my grandchildren at my daughter's house on Christmas Day, simply enjoying them playing with their new toys, and realised their parents don't need us any more.

My son and his wife came to stay for a couple of days, and as we sat chatting I realised his laptop was running a suite of AI agents writing code for him. Not on my best day could I have done that. He'll be fine too.

Our work here is done, not just from a career viewpoint but from a family one as well. We've got all our children to maturity with their health and sanity more or less intact; just as well, as my wife's health and my own are starting to fail now.

So, now what? Well, stay tuned, more of that in a few days. Meanwhile, I see I forgot to wish you all a Merry Christmas, but I'm still just in time to wish you a Happy New Year.

Have a good one, and I'll see you on the other side, if spared.