My dog Callie, goes for two-kilometre long walks1 over local farmland. Afterwards, once the adrenalin fades, she lies down and has a big long deep sleep. During which she processes everything she’s seen/done on the walk. Sometimes you can see her dreaming. Her legs twitch and there are little barks – it’s very cute. This is how I feel about this year, completely shattered and in need to take some time off from writing/developing stuff for D101 Games, have Christmas with the family and have some fun. Also, have some space to take in everything that has gone on in 2021, and to a lesser extent 2020, and work out where I’m going in 2022.
So my dreaming (and twitching) is to get back into blogging here. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do all year. Instead, I’ve been distracted by Farcebook and to a lesser extent Twitter. Farcebook is almost at the stage where I’m going to sack it off. It’s dying a gruesome death, and its usefulness as a way of staying in touch with people is rapidly fading because the algorithms no longer show my friends. Just loads of adverts/sponsored content. Twitter working better for me. In that, I have a chat with a bunch of friendlies before starting work in the morning and people follow me to see what I’m working on for D101. But I can’t write more expansive pieces like this, which I miss. So I’m going back in time (I started blogging waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1999 on Livejournal.com) and making this my main form of social media 🙂
Things to do in a determined (yet fun manner) over Xmas break:
- Watch tons of Kung-Fu movies
- Organise the RPG reading pile
- Do a review of the Kickstarter RPGs that I’ve received this year
- Get into mapping
- Run some online RPGs (possibly test driving The Forge as I do it) and grok 4th Ed D&D
- Start painting miniature figures.
Notes:
- I hesitate to call them walks, runs would be more appropriate. Because she is a Spolie, a mixed breed of Border Collie and Springer Spaniel, with a quarter of whippet on the spaniel side. Here’s a pic of her, we’ve had her 3 years now – I’ll do a post on her “gotcha day” which is New Year’s Eve 🙂
![](https://i0.wp.com/mrnewt.dev/files/2021/12/callienfield.jpg?resize=474%2C214&ssl=1)