Thursday, 11 December 2025

40 for 40: November

Slowed down in November…

Weight

Target weight loss: 210lbs. Current weight: 232lbs. Weight lost this month: 0lbs.

My weight has actually gone up and down this month, but I’ve managed to keep it fairly consistent, which was something, I guess.

Board Games

This month: 1. Total so far: 53

I had a nice little impromptu board games night with my daughter at one point, which was lovely! The game we played that neither of us had played before was Squadro, an abstract game involving moving your pieces with limited moving and capturing powers from one side of the board to the other and back again. It works well enough, although I don’t know if there’s enough going on to warrant multiple plays. The best bit of the game for me was that Jessie noticed that the playing pieces bore a resemblance – tenuous, but there – to modern ships, and from that point on called them Titanics.

Gigs

This month: 1. Total so far: 30

Well, those open mics I was hoping to do last month didn’t happen, did they? To be fair, they tend to depend on my own availability and Kirsty’s working patterns, both of which are an inexact science at best, and I haven’t been very well for the last couple of weeks. The one I did manage to do was an open mic at Pennfields Bowling club; I was invited by my former[1] bandmate Rob from Cherrybomb. I played a few songs at a relatively quiet point in the afternoon, which were well-received, nonetheless.

Video Games

This month: 2. Total so far: 19

I beat a couple of games this month, and the first one was Super Mario Bros 2 on the Switch. I enjoyed going through this again, though once again I had to make use of the Switch’s rewind function to get through certain sections – some of the difficulty spikes are ridiculous to the point where I’d have stopped playing without the option to try again! I remember playing this game years ago and thinking it was odd, given what I expected from Mario games at that point – of course, by now, it’s common knowledge that the game most people in Western cultures knew as Super Mario Bros 2 was actually a re-skin of a Japanese game called Doki Doki Panic, but it also introduced enemies and abilities that were staples of the Super Mario franchise in years to come. What I didn’t know was that Doki Doki is a Japanese onomatopoeia for “heartbeat”!

The other game was Rage on the Xbox S. This was originally released on the 7th gen consoles and the graphics are certainly of their time, but for all the negative coverage I’ve heard about it, I actually quite enjoyed it. Comparisons to Fallout 3 are obvious – similar plot, similar post-apocalyptic setting – but the game is far more of a shooter than an RPG and as a shooter, it’s actually very good. The distinct gangs of enemies fight you in different ways with different gimmicks, some more so than others, but there’s a sense of cohesion among them. I particularly enjoyed the way some enemies would limp off and go to ground further into the level after they’d been shot a few times; far more believable that people would do that than continue to fight through a hopeless situation! It runs out of steam towards the end – the payoff was never going to match what was set up – but it was a fun journey to get there.

Models Painted

This month: 0. Total so far: 70

Yeah, not much done this month. I started painting an Orc Blood Bowl team and that juddered to a halt. I think because I’m trying to paint the whole team at the same time, even putting one colour on takes a decent amount of time, and it’s time that, for a variety of reasons over the last month, I just don’t have.



[1] I suppose Rob’s technically a current bandmate; Cherrybomb never officially called it a day, and while we’ll struggle to put it back together in its original format given what the members are committed to now, nobody’s ruled it out, as far as I know.

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