Life freewrite

We've had some decent storms so far this year, and I realized I haven't been adding many of my photos lately. So, since I don't have a ttrpg post that I can talk about, I thought I could maybe post some of these.

I was asked by one of my friends in the ttrpg space to play-test an upcoming game of his, which has been occupying a bit of my evenings the last couple of days. I can't speak on it too much as it's unreleased, but it has been a blast so far to read through and I managed to get in one small skirmish that was pretty enjoyable.

It's going to be a miniature-based tactical skirmish game (others of the same type are things like Warhammer 40k, Turnip28, Marvel Crisis Protocol), but unlike a lot of these the designer has purposely chosen to forego any specific minis for this. You can use whatever you have lying around, and it'll be just fine - which is a choice I really enjoy. It means if you have a friend with a 3d printer, or if you're already collecting any of those other minis... you can just plop them down and use them. No extra huge costs to play! What a bonus.

For my work life, we're moving to a stricter GitFlow workflow and that has been a learning curve. I won't talk too much about how we had been doing things, but suffice it to say... when we actually moved to the standard gitflow workflow, we've been learning the hard way how many processes we were extremely loose about.

I think it's a good change overall, and I'm glad to have the structure, but some of the other folks on my team have not had the same good will towards this change. They'll get there, no doubt, they just have to be dramatic about it first. And that's okay! A lot of them are on larger projects that this has caused a bigger disruption for. My life right now is basically keeping Ops issues squashed. With the baby only 10-ish days from when it's due, I'm kind of on "leaving any time now" notice.

In Canada, we get EI-benefits for a certain amount of time off with new babies as Paternity Leave. Because my wife is taking the Extended Benefits which gives her 18 months for the kiddo, I am technically entitled to 8 weeks of paid paternity leave - but it's quite a lot lower than my actual salary and honestly... 8 weeks is a pretty long time! I've chosen to take 5 weeks instead, which will give me most of August off and allow me to help with the new kiddo and our two other kids throughout my wife's healing period.

Overall, things have been pretty good this summer. We only really hit hot temps here within the last week, as it's been a pretty mild and rainy summer so far... until mid-June, my AC wasn't even needed most days! I've been managing to keep up semi-regular blog posts, and have been having a blast with a number of great solo and group ttrpgs lately. I'm currently playing a modified version of 4AD (as mentioned in my prior post), in which I've been using the Solo Gaming Sheets by Perplexing Ruins and a number of the roll-tables in Knave 2e by Ben Milton. Together, they've supplied a lot of additional content that Four Against Darkness' core book doesn't provide and I'm too cheep to pay for via hit-or-miss expansions.

We've been managing to keep our at-table D&D game going as well, though with how busy I've been there have been fewer sessions than we'd like. That said, I have one more session to run this upcoming Sunday as long as new baby doesn't have other plans. After that, it should ironically get a little easier to plan games as my wife will be home and it's just a lot easier to keep up with life when we're not both working full time. So, despite having a new baby and our 3 & 5 year olds around for the summer, I think it'll be pretty easy to schedule games for the rest of the year and I'm excited to get these folks to a satisfying conclusion to our story.

At any rate, that's about it for me for now. Hope you're all doing well!

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