Hi, LTNS.
I’m still working for Pernod Ricard (Who make Jameson, Absolut, The Glenlivet, Jacob’s Creek and other alcohols you may be aware of) as lead DevOps for our public facing websites for European based-brands. Except the French ones. I’m heading into having held a full-time permanent job for two whole years for the first time since I left Evolving Media in 2006, it’s a wild ride.
There’s not much exciting to post about from a tech angle, really. We’re hosting across AWS & Azure on a fairly traditional multi-site tenancy arrangement with some stuff going through serverless services. When exciting things happen, it’s generally stuff that shouldn’t really be made public. The thing taking up most of my time is hosting marketing sites for visibility in China, which is a lot of voodoo.
I’m doing a lot of tabletop gaming at the moment. I’m running D&D 5th Ed for the first time with a run of Tomb of Annihilation – a homage to the classic Tomb of Horrors – and also a rebooted campaign of Torg Eternity, which is heading out of the tutorial sections into actual story. With any luck I’ll get around to writing that up.
This year I’ve also been running more things. An attempt at adding a new game to play – Death Unto Darkness – has resulted in becoming part of the ref team for that, as well as for Carcosa Dreams’ new Alba setting, and I continue to be part of Diaspora and Of Jacks & Queens. This has resulted in being a little over-commited, so I may need to take a look at where I focus my energies next year – I have a run of 3 events in 4 weeks in November, which is likely to wipe me out a bit.
Part of that is launching a new initiative for managing the admin of LARP events called Ludoistic, which becomes an entity with a bank account and insurance to act as an umbrella for events. Again, I intend to write up separate articles on this too.
Plus, more computer gaming. I’ve recently been on two mutually exclusive kicks, looking into recent releases in the classic LucasArts/Sierra point-and-click adventure, as well as picking up PlaystationVR for the other end of the graphical experience.
But I’m alive, I’m doing a lot better than I have been for a while, and I apparently still exist.
Plus, we dogsat my parent’s Bearded Collie last week, and that was lovely too.