goals

Kluwes’ January 2025 Goals

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Happy New Year! Now begins the one to two month period where I constantly write the wrong year. It’s also, what I feel like, the beginning of winter here. No more holidays to look forward to, only grey skies, cold weather, and snow until May. We’ll have to find some fun, indoor activities, to do with little Kluwes now that the weather has actually turned colder. She hates being cooped up in the house on the weekends and, to be fair, so does my wife. I on the other hand, could never step foot outside our house while it’s cold and be perfectly content until Spring! We’ve got a membership to our local Children’s Museum which I foresee getting a lot of use out of in the near future.

After taking a lot of time off gaming last year I feel ready to jump back in and lay out some goals. Not for the 2025 quite yet, I still need to take some time to think about those. But I’ve got a couple ready to go for January:

Explore the Road to the Black Sea DLC in ETS2: After completing the Greece event last month, I was ready to leave the country and explore some more of the map. I liked the rules of the rules of the event: Deliver to or from every city in Greece with a distance of 200km or more. It made me think a little more about what job to take next and I felt like I got to explore more than I would have otherwise. With that in mind, I thought I would do the same thing with each DLC. My last job from Greece landed me in Istanbul, Turkey which is part for the Road to the Black Sea DLC. This includes the countries of Romania, Bulgaria, and the European part of Turkey. The Steam page says there are 20 major populated cities which is only 5 more than Greece so I think this is do-able this month.

Play games I bought during the Winter Sale: I had some restraint this time around with the Winter Sale. Even if I wasn’t playing all that much last year, I was still buying games, which in retrospect, seems a bit silly. So I set out to only buy a handful of games that looked interesting in the moment or had been on my wishlist for a while and were at a good price. I picked up three games for $15, which I was happy with.

Post 8 times this month: This went well last month so I’m doing it again! It was the right amount of post to target to keep me feeling engaged with the blog but not overwhelmed by it.

Kluwes’ December 2024 Goals

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It always feels like I end up speed-running the last three months of the year. We tend to save our vacations for early spring and late fall when the weather at home isn’t as nice. Inevitably, those month pass by quick. Factor in the day to day at work slowing down as people start to take their holiday vacations and a few free PTO days around the said holidays and I’m staring at the end of the year already.
We had to cancel our Thanksgiving plans of traveling to see my parents this year on account of literal feet of snow closing the highway between Ohio and New York for days on end. But staying home and spending the time with the family near us was still fun.

I didn’t get up to too much gaming in November. I played a few rounds of Lethal Company with the Squad and we played through Backrooms: Escape Together. We all bought this one in October but never got around to playing. It was fun for what it was, I probably should get a post out about it sometime soon.

I don’t have too many goals this month on account of it being rather busy and there isn’t much that I can “goalify” (yes spellcheck, I’m aware that’s not a word…). The ones I do have should be achievable but, as always, I’ll see how true that is come January.

Goals

Meet my StroyGraph Pages goal for the year.


I was looking through the pages read stats over the summer and thought that it would be fun to try and beat my 13,200 pages read last year. Which by the way, was the most I’ve ever read in one year since I started tracking my reading stats.

That stat probably isn’t the most accurate though. I’m pretty sure it just adds up the page counts from the books I marked as read throughout the year. Which definitely allows for some fluffing of the numbers as some books have a bunch of back matter. I just finished one that had 45 pages of footnotes and citations…On the other hand, some books have more pages than the editions in Storygraph so it might even out somewhere. It’s not like Books Read stat is any better. I read 48 “books” last year, ten of them were under 100 pages. If a short story is outside of a collection there’s no other way to log it.

I don’t take these “challenges” too seriously. It’s fun to look at the stats, especially year after year, but I have found that trying too hard to read books just to hit the arbitrary numbers I set for myself sucks most of the joy out of reading. With that said, reading has been my main hobby for the past few months and I’m feel pretty confident I can hit my 14k pages goal by the end of the year.

Post two times a week.
I found out in September that posting 1 times a week was about as motivating as posting 1 time a month…so to remedy that I’m going to see how posting two times a week feels. That means 8 posts this month so I’m 1/8th of the way there!

(Bl)August 2024 Wrap Up and September 2024 Goals!

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Whew, I can’t believe August is over already. With it go the last remnants of summer. Break out the Halloween decorations! Take out those hoodies! Bring on the Pumpkin Spice EVERYTHING!!

I love Fall, can you tell? Summer is great and all but we only get so many months of warm weather in Northeast Ohio so we tend to try and pack in as much outdoor activities as possible. This summer was full of concerts, trips to the zoo and the beach and then back to the zoo. Every weekend was booked from the end of May until right now. I’m so ready for a nice break.

I took part in Blaugust this year which was a rousing success. I skipped last year completely, so it was nice to rejoin the event again. My participation was for wholly selfish reasons, to inspire me to write more than I have been. Considering I’m writing this post, I’d say that was a success. I managed to write 22 posts last month which was above and beyond the goal of 10-15 posts I set for myself at the start of things.

Spending all of my time on my own writing meant I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to check out other blogs participating this year, especially all the new ones. When I did, I tended to stick to the blogs I’ve been reading for years anyways. It’s something I would like to work on for next year for sure.

My initial thought is, if I spend more time throughout the year writing I won’t feel compelled to cram it all in one month..or…and hear me out on this one….I might be able to plan better and give myself more time to read all those other blogs. Time will tell!

As always, thank you Belghast for organizing and putting on this awesome event year after year!

Top 5 Games in August

GameHoursTotal % of Time Played
Guild Wars 220h47%
No Man’s Sky11.5h27%
Dragon Age: Origin7.5h18%
Hunt: Showdown2h5%
Disney Dreamlight Valley1.5h3%

I’m going to be honest, I didn’t think I’d have enough games to fill this chart this month.

I knew Guild Wars 2 and Dragon Age: Origins would be up there because I’ve written a bunch of posts about those. No Man’s Sky being in second was a bit of a shock. I know I wrote a few posts about it too but if you asked me to guess before I put together this list I would have said Dragon Age would be higher. It makes sense though, it was the Squads’ weekend game this month.

I gave Hunt: Showdown another try this month and it fell flat for me. I don’t think I’ll be returning to it anytime soon even though it does have an awesome soundtrack. Disney Dreamlight Valley was vying for 5th against 3 other games that had a little less than an hour in them but the new Star Path that came out this month has had me logging in to the game every few days for a quick check. Earlier this year, it would have been higher on the list but my interest in that particular genre has waned since the beginning of summer.

September 2024 Goals

  • Finish the Heart of Thorns story. This one is a bit of a gimmie because I’m pretty sure I’m nearing the end of it anyways.
  • Continue my Dragon Age: Origins play through. I’m not naive enough to think that I will be anywhere close to finishing this game by the end of the month. Who knows, I may never start it up again. Such are the whims of my interests!
  • Don’t go dormant! aka post at least 1 time a week in September. Now that I’m back at it, I don’t want to lose momentum but I also don’t want to set a goal to high for myself the first month post Blaugust. Boom! Got the first week covered already.
  • Bonus Goal: Finish the Living World Season 3 because I think I’m very close – very, very, very close to the end of Heart of Thorns already…

June 2023 in Review

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June has been a solid month. Summer is in full swing which means lots of pool time, outdoor activities, and ice cream. But it’s also been the month where I’ve found myself actually playing a games again. The first few months of the year I was kind of obsessed with Elite: Dangerous but once I fell off of that I hardly played anything at all until this month.

Games Played in June 2023

GameTotal Playtime %
Horizon: Zero Dawn79%
Brotato14%
GRIME7%

I just finished up Horizon: Zero Dawn at the end of June. While I enjoyed my time with it I definately need a break before I try the Frozen Wilds DLC. I wasn’t rushing the main story and took time to explore and do side quests but by the end of the game the combat was wearing thin for me. I do want to see where Frozen Wilds will take Aloy and hopefully learn more about the Baruk tribe which hardly seemed to get any screen time in the main game.

Brotato was a total impulse buy for me this month. Though with a price tag of $5 it’s hardly breaking the bank. It’s like Vampire Survivor except instead of one continuous 30 minute survival effort you only need to survive 15-90 second waves with a break in between to buy upgrades. I mainly bought it because it looked like a good Steam Deck game and it didn’t disappoint. Each run feels unique and there are a ton of characters with different constraints that keep things fresh. I’ll definitely have to write a full post about it sometime soon!

GRIME was my Blaugust Reviews Humble Choice game this month. I was expecting to bounce off of it very quickly but it surprised me with it’s twists on the souls-like formula. I didn’t go back to it after writing my post on it (and at this point I probably won’t) but I enjoyed my brief time with it.

The blog has been pretty quite this year and I would like to change that starting in July. There has been just one thing after another that has really limited my gaming, and subsequently, my blogging time. But it appears things are starting to even out (fingers crossed) so I can spend some more time doing fun things. I’m looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.

February 2023 Goals

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January was all about Elite, Elite, Elite. I didn’t play much else and I defiantly did not write about anything else. Last month I started my career as a Commander, I took a trip out to the Eagle Nebula and found a prison colony, I talked about some third party tools I’ve been using, took a detour to on my way home and stopped at a few more nebulas, and supplied my home station with literal tons of landmines.

Top Played Games of January 2023

Game TitlePercent of Total Playtime
Elite: Dangerous80%
7 Days to Die13%
Pulsar Lost Colony2%

It’s not often that I fall down a gaming rabbit hole quite this hard. There’s just something about it that has captured my imagination in a way games haven’t in a long time. As I’ve gotten my bearings back and I’m getting more established in the game I feel that initial excitement plateauing but that was bound to happen. I don’t feel like I’ll be dropping it anytime soon but I may find some time to play something else this month just to switch it up.

I haven’t written to much about my ongoing 7 Days to Die game with Brother. We’re on Day 23 and are just becoming self sufficient on food and medical supplies. I can’t believe we’ve been playing every week since November and that I’m still having fun with it.

Pulsar Lost Colony

The squad decided to play Pulsar last weekend which I hadn’t played since February of last year. I forgot how much fun it is as a multiplayer game and we’re looking to play it again soon.

February 2023 Goals

Unlock the Engineered Detailed Surface Scanner: If I had posted this yesterday, getting the Engineered FSD would have been a goal too but I just unlocked that last night. The engineered detailed surface scanner is the last module I want before I go on another trip out into the galaxy. It increased the scanning radius per probe which will make mapping planets faster and more efficent. This should be a quick goal to complete. I only have a few more raw Niobium to gather before I’m able to unlock it.

Travel Outsided the Inner Orion Spur: The Inner Orion Spur is the region of the galaxy where Earth and the rest of the Bubble are located. There’s 42 regions in total but I don’t think I want to go too far from our home region. Maybe a region or two away to do some exploring. The only thing I still have to figure out is do I want to go towards the galactc core or away from it.

Participate in this month’s Humble Bundle Community Review: I kind of missed the ball on this one last month and forgot to sign up. I ended up picking up the bundle anyways because I’ve been wanting to play Grow: Song of the Evertree for a while now since it’s from the same developers as Yonder

Read Two Books: My interests between reading and gaming fluctuate every few months where one takes over the other. I feel like I’m in the middle of that interest transition where I want to do both and sometimes I just don’t have time to do that. February is a short month but I think between audiobooks and reading I can knock out two this month.

November 2022 Recap

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November was a busy month for me but not so much for the blog. We had visitors every weekend and despite that I found quite a bit of time to game and didn’t take much time to write. I’m going to try to rectify that this month.

I’m still participating in the Humble Choice group review effort which gives me at least one post a month. This month I took another look at Raji: An Ancient Epic and found it had changed since the last time I played it. I didn’t get too far the second time around. After reading everyone’s posts, it appears November’s Humble Choice didn’t have much to get excited about. I know I ended up skipping it.

Top 5 Games This Month

  1. Phantom Brave PC
  2. 7 Days to Die
  3. Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk
  4. Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope
  5. Generation Zero

I finished Labyrinth of Refrain: Coven of Dusk which ended up being one of the longest games I’ve played in a few years. Then, I decided to follow it up with yet another long game Phantom Brave PC. Whether that was a good idea or not remains to be seen. I’ve crested the 40 hour mark and I’m nearing the end of the main story.

Though I didn’t write about it this month, I have gotten back in to 7 Days to Die with Brother. After many years away, it’s become our go to game again. We’ve tweaked some settings to make things more enjoyable for us since we’ve already done the whole default settings thing before. The biggest improvements have been increasing player block damage to 200% so breaking high durability chests and safes takes a reasonable amount of time and increasing the 24 hour cycle to 2 hours so we have way more time to explore before preparing for a horde night.

We also finished up the alternate play through in Little Hope at the beginning of the month. The Curator’s Cut is shorter but you get to play different characters and make different decisions. We tried our best this time to keep everyone alive and see another ending and we “succeed” at both.

December Goals

  • Finish Phantom Brave PC: I’m only a few episodes away from finishing this game so I’m confident I can finish this one up by the end of the month. Who knows, I might even write about it!
  • Get to Day 14 in 7 Days to Die: With the 24 hour cycle set to two hours we average about a day and a half per play session. I think we should see day 14 by the end of the month. With the holidays at the end of the month we’ll see if we end up playing enough sessions to get there.

August Recap

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It’s September which means it’s time to decorate our house for Halloween and buy all things pumpkin spice. Some might say it’s too early, there’s still some summer left, but I say nay! It’s pumpkin spice time!

Of course, August was dominated by Blaugust. I was able to post more and had more gaming time last month than I have in the last few. I made the 25 post cutoff for the Gold Award this year and am quite proud of it. I’m looking forward to slowing down here this month

Sadly, last month I had to reinstall Windows which means I lost my Manic Time/ ActivityWatch data for the month. I didn’t even realize this until I went to write this post…I reinstalled ActivityWatch on my D: drive this time to prevent the data loss in case there’s a next time. It’s a lighter weight than Manic Time and does exactly what I need it to do without the extra bells and whistles.

Top 5 Games This Month

  1. Melvor Idle
  2. The Elder Scrolls Online
  3. Aliens: Fireteam Elite
  4. Generation Zero
  5. TemTem

Melvor Idle is probably going to remain in my top game slot for a while. Between checking in on my phone and PC daily, it’s going to be hard for another game to overtake it in terms of time spent. I’ve also been enjoying tracking my progress in my new This Week In Melvor Idle series. I don’t see a need to discontinue it on Saturdays just because Blaugust is over. Their so fun to write!

High Isle is pretty!

I’ve been racking up some time in ESO this month. It was a game that’s been on my mind for a while and I wanted to give it another good try before shelving it. It’s a game that I’ve spent more time playing than posting about but I’m looking to fix that soon.

The whole Fireteam is here.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite has been taking up the majority of my co-op time with friends. Brother and I have been playing it about once a week since we bought it at the start of the month. We’re currently on the 3rd set of campaign missions and even recruited SuperToast to play with us. It’s been a blast to play with three people though I do worry our excitement might fall off once we complete all of the campaign missions. There is the new Pathogen Expansion so that’s always an option if we get bored.

Generation Zero has been the squads go to game on Saturday nights. I still don’t really know what’s going on story wise but blowing up big robots sure is fun.

When we’re not playing Aliens, Brother and I have been making some progress in TemTem. The issue is, in order to do the campaign together we can’t get too ahead of each other. We’ve been sitting in a spot during the week to level up our TemTem before we play again. This is getting boring though so we might switch up how we progress when we’re not together.

July 2022 Recap

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The summer is in full swing which means there’s a little less time for playing games and a little more time spent outside. It’s been super nice here in North East Ohio this month and we’ve been getting out to enjoy the weather whenever we can.

It’s sad to see July go since we’ll only have another few weeks of summer. But it’s always exciting to see August 1st roll around with the kickoff of Blaugust! I’ve got 2 posts scheduled and the rest I’ll be winging.

Top 5 Games in July

  1. Melvor Idle
  2. Summer in Mara
  3. Generation Zero
  4. Farm Together
  5. Fallen Earth

July was all about two games for me: Melvor Idle and Summer at Mara.

After finishing up Yonder in June I was looking for something like it that I could dive into. Apparently I hadn’t quite had my fill of fetch quests. Summer at Mara came highly recommended from the internet and I was able to scoop it up just before the Steam Sale ended. I managed to beat the game a few days before the end of the month. I figured I’d save my Backlogged post on it for Blaugust!

Melvor Idle quietly suck it’s way on to my top 5 games in June after I remembered it was on my phone. I hadn’t played in months and I started slowly getting back in to it. Now it’s become a daily game for me to check in on periodically. This month I’ve been tackling some of the earlier dungeons and working catching my Ranged and Magic skills up to my Melee skills.

The squad picked up Generation Zero in the Steam Summer Sale. We played it a few times this month and it is a blast. The game itself isn’t bad but I’ve been having so much fun running down robots and beating them with a baseball bat. Sure there are guns, and sure it’s suppose to be a stealth game, but it’s so statisfying. Also if you hit a car enough times with a baseball bat you can blow up all your friends. We’ve even got a video of our first play session here.

Good times.

June Gaming Goals

I’m still deciding on whether to keep including this goals section but it seems wrong to leave June’s goals hanging.

Play My Turn in the XCOM Succession game: I did this at the last minute, and by last minute I mean yesterday afternoon. I was really trying to knock this one out in the begginign of the month but wasn’t able to. The post for it will be up tomorrow!

Continue playing Cozy Grove daily: This hasn’t exactly been a daily thing for me like I thought it would be. It’s more of an every couple day thing. It’s the perfect game for the Steam Deck but it also feels like the only game I’ve been playing on the Steam Deck so I was trying out some other games when I had the chance. I’m still looking forward to playing more of this but I’m not sure how much more right now.

Write 6 posts: Well I didn’t quite make this one. My post count for July was 3. No worries though, I’ve got a whole month of potential blogging ahead of me.

July 2022 Gaming Goals

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June Recap

June started with the delivery of my Steam Deck. I tried a whole bunch of games on it but eventually settled in to playing Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles. I thought I would be using the Steam Deck as a stand alone device for certain games but mostly I’ve been using it as an extension of my PC. I’ve been getting the maximum use out of the Steam Cloud Save feature which isn’t something I can say I’ve ever thought of as a feature of Steam.

I did finish Yonder this month and even stuck around long enough to get 100% of the Steam achievements done.

This quarters Steam Next Fest took place earlier this month. I had written a post about the demos I was excited to try but never got around to writing about them. I did try a whole bunch but only a few made it to the wish list with the expectation that they would probably “launch” in early access. So I’m sure I won’t see them popping up in my wish list for quite some time. My favorite demo this time around was Glitched.

Top 5 Games of June 2022

  1. Yonder
  2. Melvor Idle
  3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
  4. Trove
  5. Summer In Mara

No surprise here, Yonder took the majority of my gaming time this month. Manic Time clocked 13 hours in total but that doesn’t account for the several hours I spent playing on the Deck. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a good app that I can install on the Deck to track activity. I found ActivityWatch, which is an open source alternative to Manic Time with a Linux version. The only problem is installing on the Steam Deck is a pretty involved process and with the nature of Steam OS it’ll get wiped every time there’s an update. I suppose I could track my time manually but I’m more likely to guesstimate the hours.

We ended up playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge a few times this month. The first play through I completed with Greg. We ended up playing it again with the whole squad later that week. That time we took advantage of Remote play to get the other guys in who didn’t buy the game. There was a little lag but it wasn’t unplayable. 4 players was hectic enough, I can only image no one knows what’s going on when there’s 6 people playing!

Trove actually had a fairly big update at the end of the month. I spent some time checking out the new difficulty and biome and will probably put together a post about it soon.

July Gaming Goals

I’ve been considering doing away with the goals section of this post. I find myself playing less games where I feel like I can set long term goals. We’ll see how July shakes out but this may be the last of the goals for a while.

Play my turn in the Xcom Succession game: It’s over to me to step back in to the role as commander and hopefully not kill anyone…I’ll for sure be knocking this one out soon to keep the game moving!

Continue playing Cozy Grove daily: I picked this one up in the Steam Summer sale and it’s been the perfect game to play for a short bit in the morning before work. Time passes in the game in real time like Animal Crossing. So once all the quests are completed for the day I can put it away until the next day. Right now I’m 11 days in and each of my sessions has taken an hour or less.

Write 6 posts: I had a lot to write about in June and would like to continue that momentum in to July.

February 2022 Gaming Goals

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Aha! We have arrived to the month I can never spell correctly on the first try. Like a lot of things on the blog lately, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so it’ll be a short one. I’ve noticed other bloggers adding books, TV, and other things to these sorts of monthly recap posts. While this one will be mostly gaming related, I like the idea and might try it out for myself next month.

January Recap

The last couple of months and really the whole of 2021 were a bit light on blogging. I’m usually one to start a project and get really into it for a few weeks before I quit. I’m still suprised this didn’t end up being on. Even so, I think I just needed a break from it last year. It wasn’t the lightest year of posts but it was close. It also didn’t help that I seemed to have replaced checking Feedly to scrolling on Reddit….

But, I have returned with a strong desire to write, as I always do. I’m excited to get back to it!

The tail end of January saw four whole posts, more than 10% of last years total posts! Keeping up with the XCOM 2 Blogger Succession game has helped keep me engaged at least a little bit more than I otherwise would have been.

Top 5 Games Played in January

  • Hero Siege
  • No Man’s Sky
  • Chimeraland
  • Monster Hunter Rise
  • Diablo 3

I got in to VR this month. I was thinking there would at least be one VR game in there but there’s not a single one. No Man’s Sky technically has VR but most of my play time has been outside of the VR mode. I have been putting off playing with it until I got myself a new router that could handle Air Link and wireless PC VR better. My total time between all my VR titles seems to be around 9 ish hours which would put “VR” as a whole in between No Man’s Sky and Chimeraland.

I started playing No Man’s Sky with the squad this month. We’ve only played it together one weekend this month but I did start up a separate save because I was eager to play more. That desire lasted for about a week and my brain has moved on to chasing other things.

Speaking of my brain, I’ve been looking for games where I can turn it off for a while which lead to Hero Siege making a triumphant return to my game rotation. The last time I picked it up was apparently April of 2020. I also remembered I owned Diablo 3 on PC so I was playing a bit of that as well.

Coming out of nowhere to take the third most played game is Chimeraland. I’ve only played a few sessions but I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot more time with it in February

February Gaming Goals

Reach Level 100 in Hero Siege

Everytime I play Hero Siege something has drastically changed. Whether that be how the classes work, how loot works, or how the entire game works. There’s always something new added. Considering it’s almost 10 years old at this point, it’s kinda suprising. We’re in Season 14 now and I have my doubts about the new leveling and experience changes but I want to push through to the max level so I can see if the end game is any better.

Spend More Time with VR Game

I’m already starting to build a backlog and I’ve head the headset for less than a month. Like I said, I’ve been waiting to upgrade my router so I can take better advantage of the wireless capabilities of the Quest 2. This month’s budget allows for such an upgrade.

Some games I’m looking forward to playing in VR this month are Dead Effect 2 VR, Dagon, Star Wars Squadrons, and Elite Dangerous.

Play more Chimeraland

It’s a vague goal, I know, but I’ve only just begun my journey there. I don’t know what kind of goals I can have in the game. I do know that I’ve really enjoyed my 6 or so hours with it so far and I want to continue learning more about the game.

Write At Least 5 Posts

Let’s keep the momentum up! I feel confident I can publish at least 5 posts this month even though it’s a short one. One’s done already…