Now

What I’m currently doing, feeling, and thinking about...

Here we are in a pretty awful 2025 so far. I’ll not rant about the situation in the US for now.

Gaming

By February, my latest Traveller game fell apart after only a few sessions—likely the last time I'll try to run it, honestly. It turns out that it takes a surprisingly large amount of effort to (1) get strangers online to collaborate on an entire universe setting without there being drama for some reason, and (2) actually just run Traveller's many subsystems.

I've successfully run a three-year long campaign of the Mongoose version back before Covid, but that was an especially solid group—and yet still had a rocky start. I also tried a Classic version early last year that was plagued by my failure to get players engaged. Long story short, I think I'll stick to Uncharted Worlds or Fate for sci-fi, as much as I like the idea of Traveller's mechanical underpinnings. It's just too overly crunchy for me.

Speaking of crunchy, I concluded my Deadlands game set here in the Mesilla Valley. The group was a ton of fun, and the story and ending worked well, but after 25 sessions I definitively concluded that Savage Worlds is also not the system for me. Every single roll becomes a tally mini-game, and only gets worse as characters gain skills and more nuanced abilities. The system's "fast furious fun" tagline is nothing more than a marketing ploy, unless all you've played is D&D.

To contrast all of that, I've "completed" my new version of Absurd Encounters, a Lynchian investigative Powered by the Apocalypse game. After Lynch's passing in January, I was inspired to finish working on the core systems. It draws a bit from the controversial Brindlewood Bay, but the surreal Lynchian angle seemed to align well with its core clue-based "let the players answer the questions" approach, so I figured it was worth a shot. I'll be playtesting a second season with one of my regular gaming groups starting this weekend.

Real Life

I've missed going to the occasional live baseball game for a few years now, but I realized I live just a few miles away from NMSU, and their baseball season just started. So I bought season tickets, attended the opening game, and plan to enjoy the warmer next few months at random games.

I'm also still considering a new motorcycle. My electric CE-04 is great around town, but would struggle with longer day trips or anything requiring the highway. I had almost made up my mind on a Honda SCL-500 last year, but I've wondered if it's suited well enough to (e.g.) camping or weekend getaways. Despite their obvious utility for those activities, I really dislike adventure bikes—not to mention my short legs make their typically tall frames uncomfortable. So I'm still leaning towards some retro- or rambler-style right now. Probably time for another spreadsheet and review rabbit holes.

Updated February 21, 2025.