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This year, I have decided to try a new movie, book, or game each week.
Now, this isn't quite as hedonistic as it sounds (or perhaps it is, haha). I've noticed that I have accumulated a great many games, books, and DVDs that never get used. In fact, if I don't read it with the kids, it is never read; if I don't watch it with the kids, it never gets watched, etc. I feel rather limited, and would like to explore the world of possibilities, which I've already paid for by the way. I'm hoping that this resolution will give me motivation to plow into my field of interests rather than piddle my time away. The runner-up resolution was to post about my miniatures every week, but I wanted to choose something that was actually going to get done.
Week 1: January 4 - January 11, 2014
Games: Last year's big purchase was an XBOX 360 and Skylanders Spyro's Adventure (thanks to Walmart and pre-Black Friday online sales). Skylanders is a game where you buy your content one miniature at a time, which unlocks new characters and powers in the game. So of course we had to get them all. The amount of money that drained from me throughout the year was ... quite large. Of course, when we got Spyro's Adventure we couldn't play the new Skylanders Giants figures (which are pretty big, more like bigatures), so we had to buy that game as well. This year's Black Friday purchase was Skylanders Swap Force (thanks Mom and Dad!) which we received over Christmas. The large size characters for this game come in two pieces (with magnets holding them together) so that you can swap parts, and the RFID reader picks up both signals. Which means a new portal, a new game, and new figures. Still, it's something that I, S1, D1, and D2 can all play together (although not at the same time), and we play a lot of it.
DVDs: DW and I are watching a WWI documentary The War to End all Wars. which I got a couple year's ago. The quality is about that of a school "flimstirp", with narration so dry it makes Ben Stein look animated, low quality map animations, and film footage played repeatedly. It's pretty low quality, but I got it for a $1 and it's the only WWI documentary I can find (in stores anyway). The best feature of this DVD is that it comes in 10 self-contained chapters, so watching 1 hour per night doesn't leave us in the middle of anything. One thing I have learned from this documentary is how astounding the casualties were, especialyl on the Eastern Front. Losing a 100,000 soldiers per side in one battle was something that just happened, and the Russians lost 1 million during just part of the year. I read a line once by C.S. Lewis, about the boys of his generation being swallowed up in the maw of WWI, but those sorts of numbers are hard to process.