What? Who? When?

Absences

You might not have seen me around as much. New Civilization is out, you know.

I'm not a computer game fan per se, but Civilization is my nemesis. I have lost massive amounts of time to that game. If Sid Meier had just kept his shit to himself I could be a doctor right now, but no, he had to go and get me going.

Civ 5 is phenomenal. They cleaned up a lot of the micromanagement and focused on letting you think about what you want to do and not as much about how you want to do it. There are a number of solid changes here and there, usually elegant and well thought out. Combat, in particular, saw a huge change; what used to be my least favourite part of the game is now probably one of the highlights.

And also? Oh so pretty.

Big problem though: they dropped the real-time clock. Dude, I need to know when it's time to go to bed. Throw me a bone here.

Compromise

My eyes are phenomenal. I went for my 3 month follow-up and everything is awesome. My vision seems to have stabilized at a little better than 20/20.

I have noticed that I still can't focus close up. At first I thought it was just a consequence of the healing process, like how they would get tired when I read too much, but those symptoms are all gone now. But I still have problems focusing on detail right close.

This poses certain problems for someone who spends as much time painting miniatures and modelling as I do (or as I used to). My current suspicion is that since the adjustment to my lenses has just pushed my focal point out a ways, my eyes have to get used to a new kind of close focusing that they never had to do before. I'm operating under the assumption that I can train my eyes to do that again, but it's slow going.

If it turns out that I can't, it's something I'm willing to live with. It'll suck but I knew there were tradeoffs going into this. But with any luck it won't come to that.

Warhammer

So tired of the bullshit inherent in that ruleset. Sadly, Armies of Arcana seems to be, incredibly, limited to the crap generic-fantasy force lists that come in the book. I was hoping to give it a shot as a WH replacement but not if I have to do all that work myself. As such I've gone back to my own homebrew WH replacement rules with an eye to giving them a go.

Travel

Coming up on the one month mark to my exotic foreign adventures. I'm excited.