the many faces of 2021

Last year I resolved to do more CREATIVE THINGS (construed quite broadly), and part of that was producing a little self-portrait every month. I’ve been doing these every few months for years and years now (the original template was from 4chan back in the late 2000s),  but this was the first time I did them regularly. As with most things about me, it’s partly narcissism but mostly laying the foundations of future nostalgia, so another me one day can look back at what I wore and and cared about in the pandemic years, without having to struggle with the useless memory we share.

I do these in Paint Tool SAI and add the text in MS Paint. I’m not sure yet if it’s worth doing the same for 2022 (or if I want to share this sort of thing on the regular), but it was a fun little thing.

krai me a river

My first city in its first winter.

Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic is the most complex, and thus obviously the best, city builder ever made. For those who know the genre, consider the sophisticated supply chain optimisation of Factorio or Satisfactory plus the managing population demands of Banished or Surviving Mars (complete with oh-god-you-screwed-up-everyone’s-starving-to-death failure spiral) and a fair bit of the classic trains-and-logistics TTD gameplay. It doesn’t have a difficulty curve so much as a cliff, which makes the payoff of eventually getting everything working a lot like that old Dwarf Fortress comic about fun.

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