Just this guy, you know?

The Last Battle by Stephen Harding was a total impulse purchase. A different Stephen recommended it and I picked up the audio with an Audible credit.

For those who’ve not listened to the Sabaton track with the same name. It’s the siege of Schloss Itter in the Tyrols. Essentially there are some VIP French prisoners held in a castle during WW2. They manage to get help from a variety of sources. Initially relieved by a small contingent US and Wehrmacht troops but are then besieged by SS troops until an armoured column of US troops completed their rescue.

Two weeks ago I went to my first Lardy Game Day at Herts of Lard 2023. It was absolutely brilliant. Many thanks to @Joe_Wargamer for running it.

If you aren’t familiar, Too Fat Lardies are a company that produce wargames which are mostly historical in setting. Their motto is “Play the period, not the game” which is very much my jam. At a Lardy Game Day volunteers host games by providing a scenario, armies, a table full of terrain, and GM in some fashion. You don’t need to know the rules before playing and you don’t have to bring anything (though a packed lunch and a mug for tea is recommended).

Book two of 2023 is Second City by Richard Vinen.

I picked it up on a whim from The Heath bookshop in Kings Heath (which is lovely).

It’s an incredibly in-depth history of Birmingham from its geography & mythic Anglo Saxon origins, through The Enlightenment, its rise as an industrial city, the role it played in the British Empire, then onto the Second World War, its transition into the car centre of Britain (and decline there of), finally the 21st century.

A year after my last post on Assassins Creed I have “finished” Valhalla. It didn’t take an entire year because I took a huge break after playing the first couple of hours.

Why the break? Going straight from endgame Odyssey, Eivor feels so sluggish. Valhalla’s combat feels much more brutal and parry focused than the way I built Kassandra in Odyssey. Kassandra would cut about care free slashing everyone into ribbons but Eivor stands waiting to parry and do stun attacks. I no longer had fall damage mitigation and the crouched movement buff so traversal felt slow. Secondly, Eivor starts out so boring in comparison to Kassandra. Remember the Vikings TV show that started in 2013? Eivor would fit right in there. The tone feels overdone in 2023. This resulted in me never leaving Norway.

Aim 3 of 2023 is to read more. I’m going to post reviews as I go. March is still Q1 but this does feel like a very late start.

I’ve picked up the guitar again after 12 years away. I wanted a refresher on the things I’d forgotten. So I picked up How Music Works by John Powell.

It tells a very neat story from the foundations of “what is sound” all the way to selecting a key for your composition and thoughts on audiophiles.

At work we use Azure for infrastructure and Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates to define it as code. Microsoft released Bicep as a nicer way to write your templates.

We’ve recently finished porting a service to use Bicep. It took a lot longer than I’d hoped but we got there. Here are some of the things I learnt along the way.

Decompiling

You can decompile your existing templates with the Azure cli:

At work, we have a weekly Code Gym. Someone will bring a kata/problem along and we’ll split up to tackle it. Usually pairing across normal team boundaries. Pretty normal stuff. We have been doing this for two years now and feel like we’ve run out of kata. So we’ve been trying to invent new ones. I am going to post ones I’ve created which should hopefully be useful to someone.

Non stick pans annoy me. When you buy them they’re incredibly effective. Then slowly degrade until they’re more stick than the alternatives. The prime example is my last pan which had a weird wavy texture that when the non stick coating failed, food would get stuck in the valleys. Awful experience, terrible design.

So I’m trying stainless steel. I’m not sure I have the discipline for seasoning cast iron pans yet. For Christmas I asked for a pan from Samuel Groves who make cookware here in Birmingham. As well as being local they will also service your pan which is very appealing when you’re considering purchases with a Built To Last mentality.

Rather than resolutions, here are my aims for 2023:

1. Paint more miniatures. I had a very good summer of painting miniatures but flagged in the final third of 2022.

2. Play more games with said painted miniatures. I’ll be giving a local club a go soon which should hopefully make this one easy.

3. Read more. It’s not difficult to read more than me. In 2023 I’d like to find a way around my inability to read at home.

   [Read More]

As always, I’ve listened to a lot of music this year. Some old. Some new.

My most anticipated release this year was Ridge and Furrow EP from Dark Forest. DF were my favourite discovery last year and I just love them. The new EP is excellent, Skylark being my favourite track. I hope they put out a full album again soon.

A blast from the past is Jethro Tull’s Heavy Horses. Originally released in 1978, I’ve been listening to the 2003 remaster on Spotify. I listened to Original Masters growing up but never investigate JT’s back catalogue. I heard Acres Wild somewhere (Planet Rock maybe?) which put me onto this cracking album.