Mail delivery today consisted of one (1) envelope.

Hand-written address, which certainly stands out from the usual pile of machine-generated credit card offers, bank account offers, and similar “please give us your moneys” material.

But… I have no idea who this person is. Okay then! Get the envelope safely into the apartment, use my handy-dandy letter-opener, and inside… there’s a letter. Shocking, I know!

Hand-written letter, which (after the heading & salutation) begins thus:

“I am a local neighbor and part of a large group of volunteers taking time to share some encouraging words and news.”

V. L. (full name omitted because I’m not a complete jerk)

Uh… huh. Okay.

There’s something else in the envelope, what could that be…?

Aha. A leaflet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Now, I am not here to shame someone for spending their time carefully hand-writing a letter that, I’m sure, they meant in all the well-meaning earnest goodness of their heart. However. It was at that moment that I knew I’d be doing two things in rapid succession: Writing this post, and shredding the envelope and everything in it.

Nothing personal, stranger. But all your efforts brought was a few minutes of amusement. Please enjoy your life and avoid darkening my mailbox ever again.

I really don’t use this place much. But it’s getting better!

Prior to this year, January 2021 was a high-water mark out of most of the previous decade, with a whopping tally of five entire posts… and every one of those was about Satisfactory. (Yes, I love that game. Still do.)

One of my “resolutions” going into 2022 was to make more and better use of this thing. At least I’ve done “more,” not sure about “better.” In January of this year I managed 17 posts, which isn’t quite more than all of 2021 combined… but not that far off, either. (And I refuse to tally up previous years because it’ll probably depress me with how far ahead that single month’s tally will prove to be versus any number of entire individual years.) Most of the rest of this year I wrote six or seven posts in a month, with a couple of lower counts along the way for various reasons.

If I can keep at the habit I’ll achieve quantity again, if not actual quality, and that’s something to celebrate. No joke, I actually feel good looking at the improved output for this year on this site. I did something I said I wanted to do! Intent paired with follow-through! Imagine that.

To be sure, it helps that Twitter’s a deteriorating mess now that The Emerald Scion has taken over and seems hellbent on “lithobraking” that bird as fast as he can. On the other hand, I transitioned over to my new Mastodon instance just fine without abandoning the blog, so… go me! (Also, hey, one of the improvements made here recently involved adding the RSS feed of my fediverse output to the blog’s sidebar. The miracles of modern technology, eh?)

Plans for the future? Keep at the pace, such as it is, and keep going with what works, which means you’re almost certainly going to see more Satisfactory content, more silly videos, and what-not.

Here’s to 2023 sucking less, if at all possible.

We were getting 80F+ temperatures in the middle of October. Not just once, but repeatedly. Today, however, the rains finally arrived and “Augtober” can be nailed into its coffin and buried in the deepest pit we can find.

If “endless summer” is what we have to look forward to in the Pacific Northwest going forward, I want to know where I can go to escape from it.

And no, I’m not going to trawl through the years worth of archives to see if I’ve done that joke before. It’s my website and I’ll repeat myself if I want to.

I fell down on posting in September, and that’s largely because summer is awful and this one was particularly awful and somehow it’s not even over yet because here we are, partway into the tenth month of the year and still seeing high temperatures in the upper 80s Fahrenheit.

Good thing global warming’s a myth, eh?

The job’s fine, everyone in my closest circle of humans is fine, I’m playing a lot of Three Hopes and have picked Satisfactory back up again, etc. (I continue to expand my current/existing Satisfactory savegame and have started a new co-op game with both of the kids. We’re out in the desert this time, where none of us have started a savegame before!)

Dunno, I might do some Satisfactory posting soon. It’s nice to be back in that groove again.

Other than that, I’m just trying to keep my head down, my mask on, and survive all the things I need to survive.