Things That Happened in 2014

This post is part of a collection on Life.

2014 was a pretty good year.

  • Started 1up4play with a friend and ran four events
  • Started playing mahjong with neighborhood friends about once a month
  • Started running a tabletop RPG campaign using Risus
  • Changed jobs, working near Shibuya and from home twice a week
  • Still watching a lot of anime, discovered Galaxy Angel
  • Played Saya no Uta and Galaxy Angel PC games
  • Caught at least three colds, thought I had appendicitis once
  • Got bad RSI for the first time and some conflicting diagnoses I'm still sorting out
  • Started learning about dagashi and visiting dagashiya
  • Went to TGS and helped out with Gangs of Space
  • Went to the Furusato Matsuri again
  • Went to Comike (both), Design Festa, Comitia, and a Galaxy Angel event
  • Went to Wonder Fest for the first time and bought a garage kit (still in parts...)
  • Started drinking real coffee and bought a Bialetti
  • Wrote Deltos and started using it for notes (and this blog)
  • Created verticaltab in the spirit of tilde.club; it didn't take off, but I have a local VPS now
  • Learned about Forth and wrote two interpreters
  • Had one friend from high school visit
  • Went to Scotland with my old roommate and discovered haggis and Auchentoshan
  • Went to a lot of music shows, discovered Wednesday's Campanella and Charisma.com
  • Started going to Cafe Lion
  • Started making some collages from public domain sources
  • Finally made Twitter bots based on my old character generator
  • Translated a post by Kenta Cho about what he learned making minigames

Changing jobs was definitely the biggest event this year, and though lots of unexpected things happened and I wasn't able to get a better visa status it's definitely worked out well. I'm doing work where the research I did in college is useful, the company goes above and beyond in letting me do things my way, and working near Shibuya is great. The new year is going to bring a lot of possibilities I hope I can talk about later.

This is the first year my college roommate hasn't come to visit me in Japan; instead I went with him to Scotland for my big trip this year. It was also a chance to see Paolo Greco again after meeting him in the spring while he was visiting. The only tabletop I ran besides Risus this year was Into the Odd, which he publishes (or published, it's in limbo with the VAT changes on PDF sales now). Scotland doesn't have a moss temple, but Glen Coe had more than enough moss to keep me happy.

After over half a year of playing mahjong on my phone I finally played with people in real life. There's still a lot of things about physically handling the tiles that I'm unused to, and I still play a lot more online than in person, but it's a lot of fun and I look forward to being able to do it more regularly.

I didn't participate in any game jams this year or make anything on my own, unfortunately. Not much to say about that except I hope I can change it this year.

Hope you had a good one. Ψ