We're getting into the final weeks of 2024!

This week has flown by in a daze of diaper-changes and baby-coos, but I've managed a lot of reading and video-watching (or rather, listening while tending to baby):

• Losing sleep again from my good/bad habit of reading in bed, and diving back into the wonderful world of Stormlight Archive with the new book Wind and Truth,
• Plowing through 5+ hours of "Stormlight Archive Recap" videos (1, 2), in order to refresh my knowledge of all the Cosmere minutia needed to drop back into the universe after only ~6 months out of it,
• Drooling over all the releases & announcements in my all-time favorite game series (and wondering how I'll ever have time to play games again), including:
  • Stalker 2, which by the gameplay videos I've watched, looks like a very faithful modernization that captures the hesitancy, trepidation, and moments of utter horror that the earlier games elicited so well,
  • Factorio: Space Age, which coupled with the 2.0 release 'finishes' the game and stretches the gameplay into many hundreds of hours more,
  • Elden Ring Night Reign, which by the trailer looks like it brings more engaging movement and boss-rush mechanics in addition to a multiplayer focus,
  • Witcher 4, though the trailer featured story over gameplay, I'm still giddy to drop back into Andrzej Sapkowski's world,
• Watching The Holiday, a perfect movie whose only flaw is that it is not 4 hours long, and dreaming wistfully of the days where rom-coms had successful wide theater releases instead of being sequestered to the weird Hallmarkified-Netflix space they currently exist in.
• Learning about the EU's Cyber Resilience Act which has come into effect and will have interesting impacts on my industry going forward.

A small success of this week has been my ability to completely ignore events in America. Like many, I've found the last 10-or-so years to be utterly exhausting. As a recovering American politics addict, I've spent much of this time glued to various news outlets, staring directly into the void as it were. Now that things are promising to ratchet up to a new level of insanity, I've made a goal of detaching and focusing instead on local (my country and my region) news, and slowly dipping my toes back into engaging in local politics. It might not sound like much, but one week where I'm not up-to-speed on every little going-on is a big win for me, and one I hope I can continue past mid-January and into the next, oh, say, 4 years.