No post for nearly 4 weeks. I did continue playing Borderlands 3, but got stuck on one boss soon after the last post and then I kinda didn’t play anything for the last 3 weeks, but at least I managed to log in to grab my daily rewards in EVE most of the days.
Christmas stuff happened, was meeting friends and former coworkers over mulled wine, and in general was busy with other things. I just prepared my “Year in review” post and scheduled it for the 31st. Let’s see if I will have time to play anything in the remaining days of the year.

When I moved this blog off wordpress.com 8 months ago I was only 90% happy with my new theme, trying very hard to preserve the old basic look I’ve had since 2009. My CSS skills are a bit rusty and I really wasn’t in the mood to fiddle with everything endlessly, but I was getting less and less happy with something I couldn’t express 100%.

Inspired by Rakuno’s post I instantly noticed what was bugging me most, the author blurb/posted on/meta part.

So as I had a little time I went digging for a theme where I could do this better after spending half an hour fiddling with the CSS on the old theme and overwriting 20 rules. It was close, but not perfect and then I noticed 2-3 other things..

Long story short, now I have a new theme, Astra, and I only had to override one thing with CSS and the rest can be configured. Awesome. Let’s see if I stay happy with this evolution of the basic look.

• Kinda missing the dark border
• not yet 100% sure how to align the site title
• Maybe get rid of that space before the first post

But overall I think I’m happier.

An interesting topic I saw going round: How much to spend for games? Paeroka wrote about it, Naithin did, and Krikket started it.

I’ve been summing up my gaming expenses in the end of year posts since 2014, that post isn’t due for 2 months but the current state for me seems to be that I have allowed myself to pay 3 MMO subscriptions at the same time, maybe for the first time ever. I can justify that because I don’t think I bought any game this year, with the exception of FFXIV’s Shadowbringers expansion, if you want to count that. I resisted any sale and I’ve been busy enough to not be lured in by any new release of any games coming out this year. The only things on my current “I really want to play that” list is Horizon: Zero Dawn and Beat Saber (and I’m certainly not buying a PS4 or VR gear for those). Also the Switch sounds nice, but I suppose I should play all my XBox 360 games first before buying another console.

Compared to the others I linked above my number of games is ridiculously low, and I still played only half of them, but I think I can also pull the bundle excuse – for example the complete idSoftware-Pack. I did play those games, before I bought the bundle, even have some of the CDs somewhere. And I have zero regrets for that purchase, as an example.

So the final tally is still out and I’m too lazy to do the math now, but I guess I’ll come up with the same ballpark as every year, roughly 30 EUR per month for games, which is 1 EUR per day – quite cheap for a hobby that takes up a major part of my spare time.

And yes, overall I feel quite bad to always just buy games on sale and only support MMOs that seem to do well anyway, but I don’t really see why I should hand out money for games I’m simply not really interested in playing. Sometimes I get the urge, but nothing but MMOs seems to really stick in the last years. There simply wasn’t a major release that has me pumped and excited in a way where I could reasonably guess I’d even spend 20 hours on a full price game for 60 EUR. Maybe Cyberpunk 2077 is the first one in years. Maybe.

And in conclusion, maybe I should look up my /played times of various MMOs, that would certainly justify being subscribed there. Marvel Heroes said just shy of 65 days, that’s 1554 hours.