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Sunday, December 31st, 2023

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Baldur's Gate 3 - Thoughts Thus Far

[Disclaimer: I work for Wizards of the Coast. While the game was produced by Larian Studios, it is a D&D title.]

I am nearly 40 hours into playing Baldur's Gate 3, and I'm quite enjoying it. I'm playing a Paladin and Arrolan, and my current companions are:

Karlach is the newest member, so I'm still figuring out if this is the line-up I like, but based on the first battle - I am quite happy. Shadowheart is still underwhelming as an offensive weapon, but we're getting there. I might switch her out for Wyll, or maybe go track Gale down... we'll see.

I'm playing a Balanced game, which mixes the narrative with combat.

I feel like these combats are helping me be a better DM for my D&D games. I've long felt combat is my weakest area for running games for friends. So often I would just be grinding actions and not really introducing variety to what they do each round. We'll see if this bears out over time, but I feel like I'm learning and improving.

The narrative for the game is good as well! There are a lot of hooks for me to pursue with one clear plot that I am meant to follow.

Looking forward to putting in many more hours and working through the plot.

12/31/2023 4:50 pm | | Tags: video game

Denmark's monarch, Queen Margrethe II to abdicate her throne in January

In "countries I didn't know still was a monarchy," Denmark will soon have a new one.

Denmark's Queen Margrethe II announced Sunday that she plans to leave the throne to make way for her son, Crown Prince Frederik.

The queen announced during her New Year's speech that she would abdicate on Jan. 14th, which is the 52nd anniversary of her own accession to the throne at age 31 following the death of her father, King Frederik IX.

I read this news and I wasn't going to post about it, until I found this on a Tolkien subreddit:

In the eary 1970s, the Queen was inspired to illustrate The Lord of the Rings. She sent her illustrations to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity to the style of his own drawings. In 1977, Queen Margrethe's drawings were published in the Danish translation of the book (Ringenes Herre, edition by publishers Gyldendal; one illustration for each chapter), redrawn by the British artist Eric Fraser. Under the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer her illustrations were also featured in a British edition of The Lord of the Rings, published by The Folio Society.

12/31/2023 4:58 pm | | Tags: denmark, royalty

Vox's Best Advice from 2023

As with any of these lists, I like some more than others. Here are my favorites from their list.

Have one meaningful face-to-face conversation every day

I love this advice and I'm going to try and pursue this as much as I'm able.

Start a niche, ritualized social activity

This is an interesting one. Basically it is about starting a "group" and using that as a vehicle for building friendships. It's easier to invite someone to your "thing" rather than to one on one hang outs.

Apologizing is more than saying you’re sorry

While I think I am good at apologizing, it is a continued practice and not something you just are. So a reminder of how to apologize properly and not performatively is important.

Make purposeful activities a regular part of your life

This echoes something I've said for a longtime, about the ease with which we consume content and purposeful things other people do rather than doing them ourselves. (This is not against enjoying media, just that it is very easy to binge and watch and ignore doing other things.)

Give yourself permission to quit

A hugely important lesson. My enjoyment of reading books has increased immensely when I gave myself permission to abandon books I wasn't enjoying. Same for TV shows, and projects.

12/31/2023 5:22 pm | | Tags: advice, wisdom

My 2023 RSS Feed (Mostly)

So I exported the list of sites I currently subscribe to in my RSS reader. It's nearly 200, though I removed a few from this list for various reasons (internal tech being the main one.)

This list is going to be of questionable quality. I'm not diving deep on each link, in most cases, the descriptive text after the link is what the blog itself provided to my RSS reader when it got imported. Many of these will be idle, or may even be broken links (though I've tried to remove those.) I don't remove blogs which go idle because they may one day begin publishing content again.

Additionally, the categorizations are very rough. There are countless examples of how I could reorganize things. The reality is I don't use the categories in my reader. I just skim through my full feed regardless of category. I am maintaining them here as they do provide a little additional context for links.

With those caveats said, I'm sharing here for posterity and as a resource for people looking for RSS feeds to subscribe to.

Blogs

Comics

Government

Magazines

News

Newsletters

Ones which link to the homepages, etc. are most likely managed through kill-the-newsletter.com, which lets you create inboxes, and then provides emails to that address as an RSS feed. Highly recommended.

Science

Seattle

Sports

Substack

Tech

Uncategorized

12/31/2023 8:29 pm | | Tags: links, rss

Automated Archives for December, 31st 2023

This post was automatically generated

Wallabag Additions

These are articles that which I saved today so that I may read them later. Substance and quality will vary drastically.

Chess For the Day

Record: 2-0-3
Net Elo Change: -6

Games Played

Blog Posts On This Day

12/31/2023 11:45 pm | | Tags: automated, longreads, chess
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