January – new routines

Terraria

Pretty much finished with this now until the update with the portal guns. Played for more than three days over Xmas, from scratch to Pumpking. With four of us, two terrablades (built from scratch) and some potion buffs we couldn’t complete all 15 waves. So did not want to attempt Duke Fishron.

Lol – occasionally as per normal.

 

Depth

The only game I bought in the steam sales, disappointed. I was hoping for a suspenseful game with smooth graphics and a water physics engine like in Hydrophobia. But it reminds me more of CS Source and Killing Floor. Grainy textures and static maps are my other complaints. I get lost in the maps and most times I ate a diver I’ve ended up stuck in the corner of a room then getting shot like a fish in a barrel. If the maps were procedurally generated and the shark team had a minute to familiarise with their “home ground” then it would be much harder for the divers to camp.

 

Finances

Still short on cash, partially due to how much I didn’t spend on holidays, also overestimating the amount of my home loan I could pay off and failing to account for the exchange rate when I bought my 18m kite. It seems I’ve let my general and food expenses exceed $1k per month all year and it slowly caught up to me. So I need to pay closer attention to my economics for a while…
Aim to keep the LLL between 5 and 9 thousand dollars ( a months pay ~4,181.21)
That is to say down to ~5k on the 23rd and not more than 9k on the 30th
Bank $1-2k (prevent homeloan from using the credit card)
Home loan auto pay is $686, add monthly $500 total $1,186. To accommodate ~500 interest.( I think this number should go down every month) Maybe on the 30th I round the loan to the nearest 1K? But for now only the bare minimum in preparation for my next council rates bill.

 

Don’t Starve Together

Seems like a good replacement for Terraria and minecraft. I may even be interested enough to mod my own characters in. Both this and Depth should be on the schedule for the next Sojourn.

 

Kitesurfing

Got two half days in once I was back home from holidays in SA. I may have been able to kite two days down there and it would have been a great opportunity to race against dad with his NACRA 16, but it wasn’t to be. Very sore hands at the moment from holding on tight while going around the island at Elliot Heads, still have to check via Tony’s GPS how far that was. Good fun to be out in the middle of the ocean with the big swell, the main challenge there was to not loose balance. Still unable to reliably jump and aiming to be able to jump+turn rather than tack/gyb.
30km and 2h, or thereabouts but we did get a bit distracted by mucking about in the surf once we reached the Oceanside of the river delta. [LINK]

 

Marvel Puzzle Quest

Since the Bowes Clan started to play it’s gotten more interesting, and they fixed the cheating too. So this is my phone game, just have to play once a day to keep up to speed.

 

Elva the Bass

Has been unused for a month now, while I’ve lost a bit of condition I have not forgotten what to do. So I just need to practice for more than an hour a day and find somebody else to play with. I think I’ll try to learn to read tab music as its similar to the rocksmith interface and I don’t understand how to translate sheet music into finger positions. Plus while I can hear the wrong note I’m never sure what note is actually played. I could get a Behringer US600 pedal to change tuning, rather than actually adjusting my guitar.
Shift it up or down a half pitch or whatever, for the songs with non standard tuning. Alternatively stick to “E” and wait for cash reserves to build up again. I’ve found a coupple of people I may be able to practice with and that may make it desirable to obtain a second Rocksmith cable. Kyle, Jez, Scotty, Geoff.
Additionally there appears to be free DLC, http://customsforge.com/


  and I can request some songs to learn.

Lent

Signed up to lead/host a small group over Lent. So that’s the first new thing to startup as the habit breaking January passes by. Also had my first hot-cross but yesterday, they should make them all year round… or maybe they shouldn’t.