Welp, here we are — 2019.
The first of the year holds several rituals for me; one of which being the great annual password reset…
I generally get January 1 as a day off, so I have all day to go through and change passwords. And being as I use very complex passwords and never use the same password twice across a hundred or so web sites, it really is an all day ordeal.
But I’ve never had an account hacked, so I guess it’s working.
Another ritual is the paperwork purge; where I go through and destroy any filed paperwork that is too old to be useful anymore… It puts a couple more hours on my poor old shredder every year, but better safe than sorry.
I finished my big backup and archive transfer yesterday too — so that’s a hundred pounds of old media I don’t have to deal with anymore.
Tomorrow it’s back to the grind though; my first order of business is dealing with CenturyLink who, once again, billed us for services that never worked or were never even connected… I’m really not sure why this is so hard for them, but with each passing interaction I see that telling them to pack sand was the better idea.
Other than that, I’ll just be trying to stick to my few New Year’s resolutions;
Downsize.
I’ve already started on this one.
Spend less and bank more for the upcoming land and house expenses.
This one will impact my friends more than it will impact me, as over the years it’s become well known that I’ll cover pretty much anything in the name of fun… Not anymore. If there is to be an night out, trip to a restaurant, or some other event, folks can pay their own way.
Write more short fiction.
This is cheap and entertaining, so I should do more of it.
Spend less time and energy trying to appease problematic people.
I always try far, far too hard to work out some mutually agreeable resolution with people who don’t want to agree on anything. I should really just be washing my hands of the problem and moving on if they don’t want to meet halfway.
In other news, I’ve been playing around with “Crowfall”; that game I invested into a few years ago. Crowfall has hit a point where it’s really quite playable, even though it’s still pre-alpha — and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.
As an investor, I got to submit a bunch of names and such for the procedurally generated worlds, and the very first United States ‘campaign’ map was named Roanoak after my roleplay setting — so some interesting history there.
So far I’ve generally stuck with the “Elkin” ranger I decided on when the races and classes were announced years ago… There’s just something about being a half-deer woodsman / archer that I find entertaining. A deer that hunts humans… 😀
I even have an illustration from about two years ago based on how I pictured things eventually working out in the game:
I’m happy to say I wasn’t far off. 😉