Two days until work starts up again — at this point I’m grateful for it, because I think I really need to just get back into my normal routines. And to remember that time flows normally even after vacation ends, because my brain keeps tricking me into thinking that I need to do everything I’ve ever wanted to do before Monday or I will run out of time and lose the chance to do any of it ever again. Silly!

what i’ve been up to

I went home to see my family for Christmas; had a good time hanging out there for the week eating cookies and playing Uno. I came back to Brooklyn to see friends and make New Year’s Even plans — which turned out to be very chill. Dylan and I hung out with a small group of friends and drank wine while we played video games until midnight.

reading

I spent an entire day reading 500 Years Later: An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII, which was pretty cool. It was less about the game itself and more about the business & management stuff happening at Square at the time, told through interviews with a bunch of the people involved before, during, and after the game launched. Really made me want to go back and play more of it!

I also just got a copy of The Norse Myths retold by Kevin Crossley-Holland, and I’ve been making my way through it. I like having a bunch of these stories in a collection together that I can flip through, and there’s a lot of extra context in the introduction & the footnotes for each story, so I’m learning a lot. 50 Watts has a bunch of other collections in the same “Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library” series, and I’d like to pick up more of them once I finish this one.

watching

I didn’t watch any Christmas movies this year! I always kinda forget to when I’m not with my family, and they watch them all early anyway. I’m in the mood for a Phantom Thread rewatch soon, though — it’s a holiday movie in my heart if not in reality.

My family and I usually like to watch comedy specials on Netflix when I’m home. This year we went for the newest Nate Bargatze one, and a couple of Tom Papa’s. And when I got back to New York, Dylan and I started watching the new season of Squid Game, which we’re a few episodes into so far.

playing

Both Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves had updates this week, and Honkai Star Rail has a big update coming up soon, so I’ve naturally been playing a lot of those. I’m also still playing a lot of Kingdom: Two Crowns — I finished the Call of Olympus DLC and started Norse Lands, to go along with the book I’m reading.

The big news is I just realized I can play Dragon’s Dogma 2 again, after not being able to get it to open for months. It’s not really a great time to sink my teeth back into a game like that, because I’ve got plenty of other things I wanted to do, but I can’t help myself. I’m going to try to remember how the controls work today so I can pick up where I left off with the main story.

footnote

I’m happy with the changes I made to my /now page recently, and I’m happy to actually be updating it & writing weeknotes more often, but it does feel a little silly to me that I’m essentially writing the same thing in two places at the same time. They’re not exactly the same, but there’s a good amount of overlap. I don’t know what I wanna do about that…or if I really care to do anything about it at all. Maybe it’s fine! Whatever!