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What are your plans for 2018?

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31 Dec 2017 22:31 #259926 by Cranberries
I don't think I've ever really kept a resolution, and some I have been making for over a decade. But I do have one plan, which is to develop and use a writing workflow so that everything I write is archived in a folder on my laptop first, and then gets pasted into a forum or whatever, so I can focus on actual writing and see how many words I've written each month, junk posts or whatever. I've sold most of my games except for a few family favorites. I think I'll probably break down and sell Heroscape too.

What do you all have planned for boardgaming/life/work/hobbies/etc. ?

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31 Dec 2017 22:43 #259927 by the_jake_1973
More working out and lass cake.
Finish painting Arcadia Quest.
Get a wargame night set with my buddy who got me into Memoir 44 in the first place.
Make more mead.
Smoke more meat.
Finish the basment.
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01 Jan 2018 01:14 - 01 Jan 2018 01:16 #259932 by Gary Sax
End my commuting lifestyle while still keeping my current rank of job.
Be healthier than I currently am.
Try to enjoy the parts of life that are actually enjoyable instead of thinking about what is not as good.

I think only the 2nd one is really doable, but a man can dream. 2017 was a much happier year than 2016, but also a much harder year on me physically and emotionally with commuting and the uncertain professional situation. It was a weird year, in 2017 I finally got something I had been working toward for 5 years to solve many of my problems (tenure) only to find that suddenly it solves none of my problems.

2017 was also the year I pretty much gave up on humanity generically completely, we are basically doomed to incinerate the world in the next 75 years. But I'll be dead, thankfully, and only see the beginning of the worst of it.
Last edit: 01 Jan 2018 01:16 by Gary Sax.
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01 Jan 2018 05:04 #259937 by __
Replied by __ on topic What are your plans for 2018?
Far be it from me to sound like I disagree about the state of "humanity" but I do wonder what people mean, like, in specific detail when they say the world is doomed to end within the next 75 years, is it just an inevitable escalation into a global nuclear war, or something more visceral and on street level?
Have you read
bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-9781608196746/

Many might be surprised that we have been far, far closer to that than you might think for a very long time.

or maybe people mean a more low level civil uprising?

Humanity will do just fine, in that, a group of people who are in positions to exploit the apathy of the herd will continue to do so in whatever form remains of society or the world in general. Nuclear war or not, we're all just specks of dust with no real significance aren't we.

I think your 3rd bullet point is the wisest Gary Sax.
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01 Jan 2018 08:08 - 01 Jan 2018 08:11 #259939 by Gary Sax
For me, global warming is obviously not going to be stopped. In the past 5 years I've moved from "hey we can stop this at 2 degrees celsius once we rally" to "I think we're going for our current trajectory of like 3-4 degrees celsius or more" which most projections would indicate resembles something close to environmental armageddon. I mean, some of us will survive but what's left of the globe won't be pretty.

haha, yes, nuclear war is always there too. There was that bomb in North Carolina that didn't go off, the Soviet submarine commander who died recently who had averted nuclear war, there was an all clear for nuclear war that went out for NORAD once IIRC, then the intentional ones like the Cuban Missile Crisis...

But thread hijack, so back to the actual resolutions and changes!
Last edit: 01 Jan 2018 08:11 by Gary Sax.
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01 Jan 2018 08:12 #259940 by stoic
Replied by stoic on topic What are your plans for 2018?
Last year for 2017, I pledged not to purchase any new games (trades are ok)--I wanted to avoid the cult of the new and consumerism. I succeeded, mostly. The only purchases were additional $5 copies of MTG Arena, Blood Bowl Season 2 rules, and Blood Bowl Dwarf & Elves miniatures. The miniatures are due to the influence of the F:AT mini painting cabal who now have me painting anything and everything and wanting to paint better quality GW stuff.

For 2018, I'm again not purchasing any new games.
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01 Jan 2018 08:37 - 01 Jan 2018 08:37 #259943 by Black Barney
Yeah I’m not buying any new board games either.

I think I’m planning two things this year.

1) give up social smoking. I almost never smoke as it is so that makes it extra dumb when I decide to treat myself to one once in a while just cuz I’m drinking or playing my poker. I really need to figure out what to do during poker tournament breaks instead though. EVERYONE smokes at those.

2) exercice. This walking isn’t enough. Tomorrow I’m going to sign up to dance class twice a week which my doctor says is plenty. This will get me out of the house two evenings a week which is probably good too. I’ll hit a pub after so it’ll be good physical and mental health.
Last edit: 01 Jan 2018 08:37 by Black Barney.
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01 Jan 2018 11:57 #259957 by jeb
Replied by jeb on topic What are your plans for 2018?
I want to note all the games I play. I like lists and some folks are so good about this. I might fire the Blog up again. It's been linked down there for eternity.

I am going to add another workout to the week. I have one solid workout per week, and really need two or maybe three, but good lord I hope my body can do it, because I am a wreck after these things.

My wife got a job, so a lot of the day-to-day kid commuting and homework stuff falls to me. I hope to be good at that, so I will be working on getting organized personally.
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01 Jan 2018 14:17 - 01 Jan 2018 14:19 #259961 by Cranberries

Black Barney wrote: Yeah I’m not buying any new board games either.



2) exercise. This walking isn’t enough. Tomorrow I’m going to sign up to dance class twice a week which my doctor says is plenty. This will get me out of the house two evenings a week which is probably good too. I’ll hit a pub after so it’ll be good physical and mental health.


I have grown to love David Sedaris in the last year. Originally I thought he was just a mildly funny essayist, but after having read 2-3 of his books, and his journal, "Theft By Finding" I have upgraded him to "Hilariously flawed and sad person who I enjoy spending time with on the page"

Here is his essay on walking .

I was at an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, listening as a woman named Lesley talked about her housekeeper, an immigrant to Australia who earlier that day had cleaned the bathroom countertops with a bottle of very expensive acne medication: “She’s afraid of the vacuum cleaner and can’t read or write a word of English, but other than that she’s marvellous.”

Lesley works for a company that goes into developing countries and trains doctors to remove cataracts. “It’s incredibly rewarding,” she said as our antipasto plate arrived. “These are people who’ve been blind for years, and suddenly, miraculously, they can see again.” She brought up a man who’d been operated on in a remote area of China. “They took off the bandages, and for the first time in two decades he saw his wife. Then he opened his mouth and said, ‘You’re so . . . old.’ ”

Lesley pushed back her shirtsleeve, and as she reached for an olive I noticed a rubber bracelet on her left wrist. “Is that a watch?” I asked.

“No,” she told me. “It’s a Fitbit. You synch it with your computer, and it tracks your physical activity.”

I leaned closer, and as she tapped the thickest part of it a number of glowing dots rose to the surface and danced back and forth. “It’s like a pedometer,” she continued. “But updated, and better. The goal is to take ten thousand steps per day, and, once you do, it vibrates.”

I forked some salami into my mouth. “Hard?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just a tingle.”

A few weeks later, I bought a Fitbit of my own, and discovered what she was talking about. Ten thousand steps, I learned, amounts to a little more than four miles for someone my size—five feet five inches. It sounds like a lot, but you can cover that distance in the course of an average day without even trying, especially if you have stairs in your house, and a steady flow of people who regularly knock, wanting you to accept a package or give them directions or just listen patiently as they talk about birds, which happens from time to time when I’m home, in West Sussex, the area of England that Hugh and I live in. One April afternoon, the person at my door hoped to sell me a wooden bench. It was bought, he said, for a client whose garden he was designing. “Last week she loved it, but now she’s decided to go with something else.” In the bright sunlight, the fellow’s hair was as orange as a Popsicle. “The company I ordered it from has a no-return policy, so I’m wondering if maybe you’d like to buy it.” He gestured toward an unmarked van idling in front of the house, and seemed angry when I told him that I wasn’t interested. “You could at least take a look before making up your mind,” he said.

I closed the door a couple of inches. “That’s O.K.” Then, because it’s an excuse that works for just about everything, I added, “I’m American.”

“Meaning?” he said.

“We . . . stand up a lot,” I told him.

“Oldest trick in the book,” my neighbor Thelma said when I told her what had happened. “That bench was stolen from someone’s garden, I guarantee it.”

This was seconded by the fellow who came to empty our septic tank. “Pikeys,” he said.

“Come again?”

“Tinkers,” he said. “Pikeys.”

“That means Gypsies,” Thelma explained, adding that the politically correct word is “travellers.”

I was travelling myself when I got my Fitbit, and because the tingle feels so good, not just as a sensation but also as a mark of accomplishment, I began pacing the airport rather than doing what I normally do, which is sit in the waiting area, wondering which of the many people around me will die first, and of what. I also started taking the stairs instead of the escalator, and avoiding the moving sidewalk.

“Every little bit helps,” my old friend Dawn, who frequently eats lunch while hula-hooping and has been known to visit her local Y three times a day, said. She had a Fitbit as well, and swore by it. Others I met weren’t quite so taken. These were people who had worn one until the battery died. Then, rather than recharging it, which couldn’t be simpler, they’d stuck it in a drawer, most likely with all the other devices they’d lost interest in over the years. To people like Dawn and me, people who are obsessive to begin with, the Fitbit is a digital trainer, perpetually egging us on. During the first few weeks that I had it, I’d return to my hotel at the end of the day, and when I discovered that I’d taken a total of, say, twelve thousand steps, I’d go out for another three thousand.

“But why?” Hugh asked when I told him about it. “Why isn’t twelve thousand enough?”

“Because,” I told him, “my Fitbit thinks I can do better.”

I look back at that time and laugh—fifteen thousand steps—Ha! That’s only about seven miles! Not bad if you’re on a business trip or you’re just getting used to a new prosthetic leg. In Sussex, though, it’s nothing. Our house is situated on the edge of a rolling downland, a perfect position if you like what the English call “rambling.” I’ll follow a trail every now and then, but as a rule I prefer roads, partly because it’s harder to get lost on a road, but mainly because I’m afraid of snakes. The only venomous ones in England are adders, and even though they’re hardly ubiquitous, I’ve seen three that had been run over by cars. Then I met a woman named Janine who was bitten and had to spend a week in the hospital. “It was completely my own fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been wearing sandals.”

“It didn’t have to strike you,” I reminded her. “It could have just slid away.”

Janine was the type who’d likely blame herself for getting mugged. “It’s what I get for having anything worth taking!” she’d probably say. At first, I found her attitude fascinating. Then I got vindictive on her behalf, and started carrying a snake killer, or, at least, something that could be used to grab one by the neck and fling it into the path of an oncoming car. It’s a hand-size claw on a pole, and was originally designed for picking up litter. With it I can walk, fear snakes a little less, and satisfy my insane need for order all at the same time. I’ve been cleaning the roads in my area of Sussex for three years now, but before the Fitbit I did it primarily on my bike, and with my bare hands. That was fairly effective, but I wound up missing a lot. On foot, nothing escapes my attention: a potato-chip bag stuffed into the hollow of a tree, an elderly mitten caught in the embrace of a blackberry bush, a mud-coated matchbook at the bottom of a ditch. Then, there’s all the obvious stuff: the cans and bottles and great greasy sheets of paper that fish-and-chips comes wrapped in. You can tell where my territory ends and the rest of England begins. It’s like going from the rose arbor in Sissinghurst to Fukushima after the tsunami. The difference is staggering.

Since getting my Fitbit, I’ve seen all kinds of things I wouldn’t normally have come across. Once, it was a toffee-colored cow with two feet sticking out of her. I was rambling that afternoon, with my friend Maja, and as she ran to inform the farmer I marched in place, envious of the extra steps she was getting in. Given all the time I’ve spent in the country, you’d think I might have seen a calf being born, but this was a first for me. The biggest surprise was how unfazed the expectant mother was. For a while, she lay flat on the grass, panting. Then she got up and began grazing, still with those feet sticking out.

“Really?” I said to her. “You can’t go five minutes without eating?”

Around her were other cows, all of whom seemed blind to her condition.

“Do you think she knows there’s a baby at the end of this?” I asked Maja after she’d returned. “A woman is told what’s going to happen in the delivery room, but how does an animal interpret this pain?”

I thought of the first time I had a kidney stone. That was in New York, in 1991, back when I had no money or health insurance. All I knew was that I was hurting, and couldn’t afford to do anything about it. The night was spent moaning. Then I peed blood, followed by what looked like a piece of gravel from an aquarium. That’s when I put it all together.

What might I have thought if, after seven hours of unrelenting agony, a creature the size of a full-grown cougar emerged, inch by inch, from the hole at the end of my penis and started hassling me for food? Was that what the cow was going through? Did she think she was dying, or had instinct somehow prepared her for this?

Maja and I watched for an hour. Then the sun started to set, and we trekked on, disappointed. I left for London the next day, and when I returned several weeks later, and hiked back to the field, I saw mother and child standing side by side, not in the loving way that I had imagined but more like strangers waiting for the post office to open. Other animals I’ve seen on my walks are foxes and rabbits. I’ve stumbled upon deer, stoats, a hedgehog, and more pheasants than I could possibly count. All the badgers I find are dead, run over by cars and eventually feasted upon by carrion-eating slugs, which are themselves eventually flattened, and feasted upon by other slugs.

Back when Maja and I saw the cow, I was averaging twenty-five thousand steps, or around ten and a half miles per day. Trousers that had grown too snug were suddenly loose again, and I noticed that my face was looking a lot thinner. Then I upped it to thirty thousand steps, and started moving farther afield. “We saw David in Arundel picking up a dead squirrel with his grabbers,” the neighbors told Hugh. “We saw him outside Steyning rolling a tire down the side of the road”; “ . . . in Pulborough dislodging a pair of Y-fronts from a tree branch.” Before the Fitbit, once we’d eaten dinner I was in for the evening. Now, though, as soon as I’m finished with the dishes I walk to the pub and back, a distance of 3,895 steps. There are no street lights where we live, and the houses I pass at 11 P.M. are either dark or very dimly lit. I often hear owls, and the flapping of woodcocks disturbed by the beam of my flashlight. One night, I heard a creaking sound, and noticed that the minivan parked a dozen or so steps ahead of me was rocking back and forth. A lot of people where we live seem to have sex in their cars. I know this because I find their used condoms, sometimes on the road but more often just off it, in little pull-over areas. In addition to spent condoms, in one of the spots that I patrol I regularly pick up empty KFC containers and a great number of soiled Handi Wipes. Do they eat fried chicken and then have sex, or is it the other way round? I wonder.

I look back on the days I averaged only thirty thousand steps, and think, Honestly, how lazy can you get? When I hit thirty-five thousand steps a day, Fitbit sent me an e-badge, and then one for forty thousand, and forty-five thousand. Now I’m up to sixty thousand, which is twenty-five and a half miles. Walking that distance at the age of fifty-seven, with completely flat feet while lugging a heavy bag of garbage, takes close to nine hours—a big block of time, but hardly wasted. I listen to audiobooks, and podcasts. I talk to people. I learn things: the fact, for example, that, in the days of yore, peppercorns were sold individually and, because they were so valuable, to guard against theft the people who packed them had to have their pockets sewed shut.

At the end of my first sixty-thousand-step day, I staggered home with my flashlight knowing that I’d advance to sixty-five thousand, and that there will be no end to it until my feet snap off at the ankles. Then it’ll just be my jagged bones stabbing into the soft ground. Why is it some people can manage a thing like a Fitbit, while others go off the rails and allow it to rule, and perhaps even ruin, their lives? While marching along the roadside, I often think of a TV show that I watched a few years back—“Obsessed,” it was called. One of the episodes was devoted to a woman who owned two treadmills, and walked like a hamster on a wheel from the moment she got up until she went to bed. Her family would eat dinner, and she’d observe them from her vantage point beside the table, panting as she asked her children about their day. I knew that I was supposed to scoff at this woman, to be, at the very least, entertainingly disgusted, the way I am with the people on “Hoarders,” but instead I saw something of myself in her. Of course, she did her walking on a treadmill, where it served no greater purpose. So it’s not like we’re really that much alike. Is it?

In recognition of all the rubbish I’ve collected since getting my Fitbit, my local council is naming a garbage truck after me. The fellow in charge e-mailed to ask which font I would like my name written in, and I answered Roman.

“Get it?” I said to Hugh. “Roamin’.”

He lost patience with me somewhere around the thirty-five-thousand mark, and responded with a heavy sigh.

Shortly after I decided on a typeface, for reasons I cannot determine my Fitbit died. I was devastated when I tapped the broadest part of it and the little dots failed to appear. Then I felt a great sense of freedom. It seemed that my life was now my own again. But was it? Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since, without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they? I lasted five hours before I ordered a replacement, express delivery. It arrived the following afternoon, and my hands shook as I tore open the box. Ten minutes later, my new master strapped securely around my left wrist, I was out the door, racing, practically running, to make up for lost time. ♦
The New Yorker · by David Sedaris
Last edit: 01 Jan 2018 14:19 by Cranberries.
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01 Jan 2018 17:41 #259970 by Black Barney
I like any writer that knows tinkers as a word

In 2014 I used a pedometer all summer to do 10k steps a day. I pulled it off but felt zero accomplishment.
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01 Jan 2018 18:08 #259973 by Matt Thrower
I'm in a funny place with where I want my life to go. There was a time not all that long ago where I dreamed that one day I could give up - or at least drastically reduce - my day job and write instead. Maybe it'd be paid freelance, maybe a full-time copywriter, maybe money from patreon, maybe I'd start a YouTube channel. Realistically, in my bones, I've finally admitted to myself it's a silly pipe dream. I'm not a great developer and I don't earn a ton, but it's more than I'll ever earn writing. My family needs that money.

I'm tired of hearing people say "you can do anything if you want". Maybe I can, but maybe I can't see my kids living like paupers as a result.

Besides, I wrote a book in 2017. That was pretty amazing. It's out in early 2018 and maybe it's crap and maybe it'll bomb but still, hey, I wrote it. And that's quite a hard thing to top. If it was a fiction book, maybe I'd be inspired to write a sequel. But instead it's about games and I don't think anyone would publish anything else I could write on the subject.

Besides, part of me is tired. I have so many games. I want to play the ones I already have more, and enjoy them. I want to paint some figures. I want to have time to do other things I love like walking in the countryside, learning the bagpipes and the tin whistle. Once I thought I could get them by earning via writing and have the time to do it all. Now I know that's not going to happen. Let's face reality with a mortgage to pay off and a pension to pay into and kids to put through college.

So maybe my plan for 2018 is for nothing much at all to change. It's not much of a plan, but I think it's the only realistic option.
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01 Jan 2018 21:35 #259976 by SuperflyPete
1. Hit a target 1000y away.
2. Quit smoking.
3. Play >=10 songs front to back, with solos/bridge/interlude, flawlessly.
4. Get 20 new customers.
5. Try not to have a BGG commenter about Seal Team Flix be the 1000y target.
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02 Jan 2018 02:03 #259990 by Dr. Mabuse
2017 was breakout year for me: 1 year mark of seperation, a return to theatre after 12 years, quit my full-time job which in turn made me change my debt reduction strategy, which in turn meant paying off my debt 4 years early (at a fraction of the total). And fell in love with a Facebook friend's photos from her trip to Iceland.

All that preamble is leading up to 2018.

Gonna do more acting (perhaps out of town), save money for the first time in 20 something years and take a solo trip to Iceland.
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02 Jan 2018 03:42 #259993 by Sevej
Replied by Sevej on topic What are your plans for 2018?
I really, really hope to finish my Space Marine company this year. I started back in 2005. No transports, just the dudes. 100 Space Marines in a correct Space Marine company formation. That'd be something.
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02 Jan 2018 08:45 #260005 by hotseatgames

Black Barney wrote: I pulled it off but felt zero accomplishment.


Story of your life amirite
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