Failing a challenge, but accomplishing a goal

Summary: Time for the annual “I am alive” post, hopefully this time with less breaks and more posts in between!

"Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" by Caspar David Friedrich

Seems like a tradition at this point that every time I make a big break with writing here I post a “checking in” update in January. Might be that the holidays make me warm and fuzzy inside and in the mood for contemplation.

The basic gist of it is that I simply took up way too many challenges and new endeavors in 2024, so some actually had to suffer a little bit, writing being one of them, but on the flipside other hobbies massively succeeded. Half of my hobby time was spent on RPGs, while the other half was spent on painting. I’ll go over them in order. 

My Hex24 attempt failed for the blog, but succeeded in real life. What I mean by this is that I continued writing for my own personal use, but I didn’t keep up with posting stuff on the blog. Believe it or not, this was mostly because I wasn’t happy with my map drawing skills, so that halted the project… ridiculous, I know. That's what you get when you overthink projects. So essentially I have a bunch of notes and almost the entire map laid out in scribbles and sketches, just didn’t translate almost any of it into blog form. 

What I’ll do now is just rename the “hex24” tag into something else and post occasionally just for fun, not as part of the challenge. The posts which were published so far managed to generate a fair amount of views, so I guess some of you like them. I already have what should have been the "hex24 February megapost" mostly done, just need to tidy up a few things and I'll publish it.

Another thing which I would really like to start doing is RPG module reviews, especially for things which are in or adjacent to the LotFP space or muse over some of the ancient TSR or JG material. This mostly stems from my frustration with the majority of other RPG reviewers since a lot of them seem to form their opinions simply from reading and not actually using the said material at their tables. Often times you'd get a hold of a book after reading a glowing review, only to find it unwieldy during actual use, or vice versa, people crapping on a release just for the sake of verbal masturbation. So yeah, it irks me when I see it, so instead I'd like to contribute with thoughts on books which I had experience with.

One more thing that ended up consuming a lot of time was actually what I hinted at in one of the previous posts, I randomly started running a game for some friends back home and up to now we’re some 10 sessions deep into what is shaping up to be a proper campaign. Naturally I’ve been toying with the idea of posting session reports on the blog, since we already have a 70 page online document of recaps and campaign stuff which just keeps growing, but it is in our non-English native language, so that might take a while to translate properly and retain the proper vibe. I’ll probably do it in smaller chunks or approach it differently, I’ll see, but I’m fairly excited to share all that on here.

When it comes to painting, the first half of the year was pretty busy, which mostly caused the publishing here to take a back seat. I took part in two Infinity (the sci-fi skirmish game by Corvus Belli) escalation leagues where I painted roughly around 30 or so miniatures in a handful of months. It was quite fun while it lasted, but CB decided to behave like Games Workshop and pretty much obliterate half of my collection out of the game with their latest edition of the game which came out at the start of this year, so I decided to quit it. Quite depressing actually, they basically removed the things that got me into the game in the first place, so no reason to be there anymore, nor do I want to support such capitalist behavior. Fuck you.

On the brighter side, I finally pulled the trigger on a long dead miniature game which has been on my mind for more than a decade, Confrontation by Rackham. At least long dead companies can’t make you sad. I’ve been collecting those for a while now and then at the start of 2024 there was a Confrontation painting challenge, so I took part in that and actually ended up being one of the winners! 

Not only that, but some months back I decided to start a blog about all things Rackham. It has been accumulating posts at a very sporadic rate, but it is shaping up nicely. I published a recap of the painting challenge a few days ago, so if you’re interested in my skills with the brush or you are also a fan of Confrontation/Rackham, now is the perfect time to check it out. Link to the blog is here or in the right sidebar with the rest of my blogs.

So that’s basically it, my guilty hands have paint on them. Honestly I’m really happy about painting so much last year, yet also a bit sad about publicly neglecting the RPG hobby. This is mostly due to still not having a gaming group in the city where I currently reside, so me running games right now is reserved specifically for when I travel back to my home town. I'm currently mustering the strength to go out and find a new IRL group to fill the void, since every time I GM’d a session I realized how much I actually miss doing that on a regular basis.

We’ll see how things move onward, for now I know not to make any more promises since that tends to fall short at times. Good luck to me in 2025 I guess!

That’s it for now, stay tuned and thanks for reading.