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Overall, this year I listened to tons of Chillhop while at work. Since 99% of Chillhop doesn’t have lyrics, this would allow me to have some background music that wasn’t distracting. As each new Chillhop album was released for the current season, I would listen to it on loop for a while. I also made playlists of all the albums per season that I would listen to as well. Every once in a while I would listen to all my music on random (as I usually do), but this was a year in which I was more focused on listening to newly acquired albums when I wasn’t listening to Chillhop.

At the end of 2023 I had 3283 ebooks and magazines (a change of 234 - a similar gain to last year’s 256). Of those, 2636 were unread (an increase of about 200). I continued to get free issues of The MagPi (Raspberry Pi official magazine) and Hackspace Magazine. Tor.com pulled back on their free ebooks this year. However, Scarlett bought lots of books and I keep all the family’s books together in the same library. At the end of 2024 I had 222 audiobooks (an increase of 25 from last year).

Once again grouping a bunch of book reviews into one blog post. Here we go!

An Artificial Night by Seanan McGuire

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just like the Dresden Files (which it my nearest comparison point to this genre), this series does not seem to be read as a series of standalone mysteries a la Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew (or the adult equivalent). This book is full of details that are building on the details from the last two books. This is a series that happens to have an investigator as the protagonist.

This year was a bit light on programming. I was focused a lot on gaming, cooking, and Tabletop Gaming. (No surprise if you’ve been reading my December blog posts) I constantly found myself desiring to code and I definitely had a few ideas - like a utility to extract EXIF data out of my images for use in Hugo. But when I would sit down at my computer I often found myself preferring to play Cities: Skylines II or Against the Storm. (More on that when I post my EOY video game post) As per usual, let’s go month-by-month (after the first quarter that is)

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

It’s the last 2 days of the calendar plus some images of all the sets together and some final thoughts on the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

When DMing for my kids I used to always pick one of my dice sets for my DM rolls. Sometimes when we would play on dndbeyond we would take advantage of the ability to roll any amount of any dice. (or the fact that it would automatically roll extra dice if needed for an attack or spell) Then I read the 2024 version of the Wizards of the Coast Dungeon Master Guide…

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

The advent calendar is mostly at the point where I’m filling out the glittery dice set. But there was a big surprise on day 21!

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

This batch of dice contains my favorite die, topping the candle die from day 12. It also confirmed that I’ll be getting 2 full Dice Envy sets. A Dice Envy Set has the usual 7 plus a chonky d20, an oversized d6 with the Dice Envy logo and an infinity d4 (those pill-shaped d4s that I already got 2 of).

I don’t have time tonight for the photo editing required for my Dice Envy advent calendar post, but I did have time to turn your attention to a couple professionals in the TTRPG space that have done some retrospectives on the year. They also happen to overlap with my 2024 a bit, which is what made me want to share them.

First up, game designer Richard Green shares his year in 2024 TTRPG gaming. Mr Green worked on the Labyrinth World Book for the Kobold Press kickstarter that I pledged to. I’m excited about the concept behind the campaign setting as described in the kickstarter. The titular Labyrinth not only ties together worlds created by Kobold Press, but they encourage DMs to also use this to tie into campaign settings from Wizards of the Coast (since ToV is currently pretty compatible with 2025 D&D 5e) or from any other publisher of D&D or ToV content. I know I already have some plans to have a lot of fun with my kids and the 5e Multiverse once this book comes out some time next year. (I’m also interested in his Parsantium world which is also now an official world in The Labyrinth)

Let’s take a look at the latest die or dice from the Dice Envy Advent Calendar.

I thought that by not having to worry about solving the advent of code problems to write a post along with the dice I would be able to keep up with writing a post each day. Twas not to be as I’ve been incredibly busy at work recently.

Although the main sets are definitely the Elsa-blue and the glittery set, we had another of their neat pill d4s during this time period.