November has been a breath of fresh air compared to October.  There's the obvious "outside world" stuff that I am not going to write about because everyone else is already writing about it, but =besides= that, we've gotten hit by a wave of cold weather here which has kickstarted us straight into winter vibes in the best way.  I'm no longer fighting to stay abreast of all my todo items -- instead I seem to have fallen into a weird state where I keep on worrying about what the next thing to do is, even though the next thing for me to do is probably "chill the ^%$# out".  Such is the life of a productivity addict, especially in this particular age and corner of the world.

I finished up Ikenfell!  A very good game, and though I can offer critiques, I can't offer any complaints.  A highlight of 2020, I'd say -- despite not being mindblowing it just does enough things right to simply be a =fun game=.  I had actually started writing up my review of it here but I'm actually probably going to try and start moving critiques and reviews over to my website proper so that they can just stand as more permanent articles.  I would not say that I am the best person at writing critiques of this sort, or even talking about games and art in general, but that is all the more reason for me to practice writing such pieces.

Someone on twitter a while back was posting something about Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward, the sequel to 999/Zero Escape, an NDS visual novel you might know of.  I played through 999, though I never managed to get the true endings or whatever.  I'm pretty sure I looked up the plot summary and endings once upon a time but totally forgot, so I just now watched a YouTube plot summary.  This is a pretty complicated story that you can barely follow along with, but it's pretty cool in the way it ties everything together, and there are some random small details about it that are absolutely killer like how June ends up getting feverish at some points in the game but not others, etc.  They literally released every single game in the series on a date on which the digital root is 9 -- now THAT is attention to detail.

Anyways someone on twitter was lauding Virtue's Last Reward and I've seen it agreed by others that that one is very very good, so I'm thinking maybe I oughtta try it out at some point.  We'll see though...there are a couple of different games/projects I could take on at this point and I don't even know if I will take on any of them to be honest.

I've been continuing with my Animorphs re-read -- finally at the point where I actually hade access to my physical copies of the books, so no more having to read them on a digital screen anymore.  Yay for reading physical books!  I've just finished reading the David trilogy (#21-23) which is a high point for the books, certainly the most memorable arc and the one where the stakes feel the highest.  Some serious stuff had happened in some of the previous books up until this point, and you can tell that each of the group has definitely changed, but I feel like after reading this book you can tell that there's just no more going back.  There's a sort of "loss of innocence" feeling here and I don't think that really hits very hard when you're in middle/high school reading these books, but it definitely hits now, especially since I already know that things really aren't going to get any easier for these poor kids as time goes on.  Such a good series!

We are closing out our first wave of MtG remote play -- we did some casual sealed deck with Theros: Beyond Death.  I ended up with a UG constellation deck featuring Setessan Champion, a 2G 1/3 that gets a +1/+1 counter and draws you a card every time you play an enchantment.  Combine that with a bunch of enchantments/auras/cantrips and it's a real engine.  The rest of the deck was solid too.  I actually also ended up with a WB build that didn't having any haymakers but just had some decent/solid cards and removal, along with the 1WB menace lifelink vigilance cerberus hound thing.  The pool was actually kind of tricky to build at first since I had the WG gold uncommon and the WG planeswalker that cared about auras, but WG just didn't cut it as a build.

We're onto Zendikar: Rising now (the current "live" set) and I've got a UB deck that isn't actually a rogues deck and doesn't really have mill payoffs, but rather is just trying to be a bit control-oriented with a great black removal suite backed up by blue card advantage and some light wizard/instant/sorcery themes.  There are a bunch of great commons that are unfortunately totally missing from my pool (no bubble snare, no into the roil...) but overall the plan is basically to just play some guys, stick a flier or big threat, and cast oodles of removal.  We'll see if that ends up good enough.  I got a pretty bomby double-faced land in my red pile but red was just way too shallow and I'm pretty confident that UB is the right build.

Did some digging into the great Flash apocalypse coming up in a month or two and it doesn't seem like it'll be a TON of trouble for me to deal with, just need to point people to a standalone flash player download and/or Flashpoint and provide my swf file downloads as nice links.

Finally did another ALTTPR run the other day, for the first time in over a month...I did OK, got a bit unlucky on some of my calls, though one of them could have been a bit smarter.  Still, I've been consistently sub2 which feels nice.

Kicked off another music commission project this month, which I hope to finish after another 4 weeks or so of work.

I have started xmas shopping in earnest!  Been ordering batches of stuff online, it's been going well so far.

Thanksgiving vacation is coming...I think we could all use some holidays and time off...seriously.