Annual_Review
Annual Review
I'm cleaning up my email folder. This should be part of my annual "prepare for a new year" process. I'm mostly just making this up, so it's not really annual yet (and may never be).
Over the last few weeks, I've thought about what I want to do next year. Writing my annual Christmas letter (which is an annual tradition, running on 6 years now, I think) has put me in an introspective sort of mind-frame. I suppose you could look at this as research for my new year's resolutions.
I'll start with something small. Actually, I have a few small recurring resolutions. One is this blog - I want to post every 5 days or so, so if you come back once a week, you should always have something new to read. I can't promise this, of course, as I do occassionally go on vacation, but I'll do what I can.
Also, I want to clean up by selling something on eBay each week. I'd probably do better if did a dedicated ebay push, just take a few weeks to sell everything, but that would introduce the possible (likely) problem of sending the wrong thing to the wrong person. So, instead, I'm going to try to post something on Friday (each auction ending on Friday) and get it in the mail on Saturday morning (presuming I get paid more or less when the auction ends). I'm hoping this will be a maintainable pace.
Heck, I hope that writing a new blog entry each 5 days is a sustainable pace, too. I've got (I think I mentioned this earlier) a script that prompts me (I refer to it as Nag-amation) every 5 days, looks in my unsent folder, and (if it finds anything) formats it for me review and makes it easy for me to send it along. Sweet.
Well, after babbling for three paragraphs, I can finally get to what I want to tell you. 2008 will be aboout 3 things for me. Music. Games. And Magic: the Gathering. Ok, so technically, Magic is a game, but I dedicate enough time to it that it merits its own category. I'll start there.
It's a kind of Magic
I play at least two hours of Magic a week (and this doesn't include the homework time of making and tweaking decks). Additionally, I'm blessed with a wife and a housemate that also play Magic, so it's not hard to convince either (or both) of them to crack open some boosters for a quick Winchester draft or sealed deck.
Then there's the tournaments (running them, not playing in them - which is a rare treat). I'm on track to have at least one tournament a month - in January, I'm teaching new players how to play, and in February, a new set it coming out, and in March (being my birth-month), I can probably arrange to have a casual tournament at my house. In April, another set will come out, and I'll probably have the opportunity to work at a pre-release. Six months away, and I see a good amount of Magic in my future.
Other Games
"Well, Sheep, " you might say, "that sounds like a committment. What else do you have time for?" While I've more or less stopped going to my local gaming group on Mondays (which is sad, but they simply go too late for my schedule), the Jedi Princess and our houseguest (who deserves some sort of FlyingSheep name) have dinner and games with friends of ours once a week. We only usualy play one game (or two short games), but it's something. Also, a little bird told me that one of our friends is getting Race for the Galaxy for Christmas - I can't wait for that.
New paragraph - what I really want to do is spend more time designing, developing, and testing my own game designs. There's another Unity Games event at the end of January that's providing a nice deadline, and with Sara's family visiting, I've got a few people to try out my ideas on. I'd like to say I've got both a carrot and a stick as incentive, but I have no idea whether the family is the carrot and the deadline is the stick, or vice versa. Some metaphors are better left unsaid, I suppose.
I have some interest in creating a web app to either share these designs (and encourage other budding game designers to share their ideas) or just to track what games I play and when (although I expect board game geek has such a service already written).
Sweet, sweet Music
Music is the easiest of these three, as I'm more of a twig in a stream, rather than the stream itself (my metaphors are getting worse, aren't they?). I'm in two groups (three, if you distinguish between the Dance/March+Medley community groups) that rehearse weekly or monthly and perform whenever the opportunities arise.
Website?
You may have noticed that, short of the blog resolution and some ideas for potential web projects regarding gaming, I don't have many plans for FlyingSheep.com. While I hope to continue to play with existing public tools (like MySpace, and possibly FaceBook), and this site will continue to be a playground for ideas that I want to try out, I don't have any plans to commit a large amount of time to the website. I hope that doesn't come off as disappointing to the two of you who still read this blog (: But one of my goals with making this list of goals (a meta-goal, if you will) was to replace my guilt over not getting more stuff done with a recognition of the stuff that I do get done. I suppose I don't want to have a dozen half-finished projects, I'd rather have 6 finished projects, without driving myself crazy (:
posted by FlyingSheep @ 12:22 PM
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