This year I’m starting a new thing. I used to blog 4 times a week. Very regularly. It was here for the longest time, but I removed all those posts as my focus and goals in life changed. But as I’ve left Twitter and am still finding a new place to go to online, I figured I have the opportunity to try something new.

Every Sunday I’m going to post a bit about what I did the last week, some interesting videos I liked, and what of my various goals I accomplished this week. This week will be a rough outline as I forgot I wanted to do this until Sunday so I didn’t keep a list of interesting videos or articles I saw. I’ll make more of a point to do that next week.

Board Games Played

This year we’ve set a lot of board game related goals. We’re returning to the Creative 12×12 challenge where we’ve chosen several themed categories and need to play 12 different games each month that qualify. We’re also attempting to play through our entire collection this year with the goal of culling any games not played by December 31st. I’ve also set a goal for playing 188+ different games as that’s the number of unique games I played last year. Finally there’s our Alphabet Challenge where we’re playing a game from each letter of the alphabet in order.

Jan 1 – Fantastic Factories: I played this one solo and it was pretty OK. It was the first time I’ve beaten the AI in that game and even so, it was just OK. I think I like this more with other players, but I might also be willing to let this one go.

Jan 2 – No Thanks and Medium: We got together with friends for a game day since we all had the day off. We played a few larger group games and these were both hits. Medium went pretty slowly but we all had fun seeing if we could come up with the right answer as well. No Thanks was always good. I managed to set a new score record of -2 points by just not buying any cards. I had enough tokens at that player count to pull that stunt off, but it didn’t work out the second time.

Jan 5 – All on 1 Card and Sunny Day Sardines: These were a couple quick games just to get something to the table. Our week was pretty thrown off by rough bedtimes with the kid and this was all we had the energy for.

Video Games Played

I started up my play through of Pokémon Scarlet. I already played Violet and did everything there is to do, and wanted to do Scarlet too. I’m segmenting the game off into the three storylines and picking a different team for each one. There’s so many neat Pokémon in this generation I wanted to try and play with more of them than just one play through.

Also in Pokémon, the Chespin Community Day in Pokémon Go was on Saturday. We went to a few parks while working on our winter letterbox adventure and I snagged 10 shiny Chespin. After that was over there was a brief window to catch Kecleon for the first time and we each managed to get 3 of them.

Movies and TV

One goal for me is to watch a movie every week. I’ve found I really like movies and have missed out on a lot of them. This week being weird, the only movie I managed to watch was a 2:49 playthrough of Pokémon Scarlet from someone. It’s technically not a movie, but it’s longer than most of the movies I did watch last year so I’m going to count it.

Jet Lag wrapped up it’s fourth season on Nebula (one week behind on YouTube). This one was a nail biter and it was a very exciting conclusion with both teams having solid plans to secure the win. Looking forward to whatever they come up with for their next season.

On the TV side of things we continued with the last season of Bake Off. We’re behind on it and are slowly catching up. I also started Bad Sisters on Apple TV+ and it’s very good. The villain is dripping with reasons to hate him and you want the sisters to succeed in killing him. I’ve not finished the show, but I just get the feeling that despite the premise, the sisters aren’t the ones that actually kill him off.

I also watched the season finale of Mythic Quest, also on Apple TV+ and this show continues to be great. I love the characters and how they’ve grown. Looking forward to that coming back for a fourth season sometime.

Question of the week

As I look to build out my watch list of movies, what were some of your favorite non-superhero blockbusters of the last couple years. I’ve very likely seen all the Marvel movies and some of the DC ones, so I’m looking for stuff outside of that realm.