Category: mobilityware solitaire

My Year in Hobbies 2019: November!

I will get to the end of this goddamned year.

November 2019:

The Child from the television series The Mandalorian, a small green alien with long ears and wide black eyes, wearing a beige robe, sips a mug of soup.
The Child, from the television series The Mandalorian, a small green alien with long ears and wide black eyes, wearing a beige robe, sips a mug of soup.

I could really just sum up the rest of this year with this image. I’ll say more, though. While The Mandalorian was a lot of fun and one of the biggest water cooler TV shows of the past decade, one of my favorite things on Disney+ was The Imagineering Story, the multi-part documentary on the history of the Disney parks. Even as someone who’s never been to any of them, and never had a ton of interest, it made me want to spend tons of money and travel around the world to visit all of them. I don’t know how realistic that will be moving forward, because life’s gotten weird since November, but I really enjoyed the series, almost as much as I did The Mandalorian.

The Multiplayer Wins leaderboard for MobilityWare Solitaire for iOS, with me appearing in 400th place.
The Multiplayer Wins leaderboard for MobilityWare Solitaire for iOS, with me appearing in 400th place.

Yep, this took a lot of work, and it isn’t getting any easier. As of this writing, I’m in 369th place, after 962 more wins.

The Skullship Santa Muerte (blue and pink spaceship, shaped like a skull), from the comic book Space Riders, flies through a psychedelic space scene. Art by Alexis Ziritt.
The Skullship Santa Muerte (blue and pink spaceship, shaped like a skull), from the comic book Space Riders, flies through a psychedelic space scene. Art by Alexis Ziritt.

I discovered Space Riders way later than I should have, but I’m glad I did. It’s like Monster Magnet meets Superjail in space. There are 2 volumes of the story completed (trade paperbacks are available here), and a third volume of the story is in progress, but there’s that whole thing right now with Diamond Comics not distributing any physical comics, so it could be a while before it wraps up. I’m pretty sure it’ll be worth the wait.

First-run movies watched in November 2019 (1): The Irishman. Once I got past Robert DeNiro with blue eyes (OK, I never really got past that…it was more unnerving than the rest of the de-aging stuff), I found it to be an enjoyable couple of hours. It’s not Scorsese’s, or DeNiro’s or Pacino’s best work (though it may be Joe Pesci’s, and he was robbed of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar here), but it kept me in it, and it’s a mob movie with these guys involved, so, as a longtime resident of New Jersey, I was obligated to watch it. I will say that, having watched some old news footage of Jimmy Hoffa after I watched the film, I figured out that Pacino wasn’t playing Pacino in this, as he often does, nor was he playing Jimmy Hoffa. Pacino was playing Pacino playing Jimmy Hoffa. It was like he went Method on how he thinks he, himself, would’ve played Jimmy Hoffa, and did that.

Comic books cancelled or ending in November 2019 (2): The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (Marvel Comics) and Ironheart (Marvel Comics). I’m still not over Squirrel Girl ending, and I probably never will be, but I’m glad I got to live in a time when it was being made. It’s that good. There was no possible satisfying ending to a book I didn’t want to see an ending for, but Ryan North did the best he could. Ironheart was a solid book for its year run, but lost me a little bit in the last arc, as it veered in a direction I didn’t expect it to, and didn’t love. (It was still in “solid like” territory, but wasn’t quite as good as it’d started off being.)

One more month, then a wrap-up, then we deal with whatever 2020 is throwing at us (and if you’re just joining us, that’s kind of a lot).

My Year in Hobbies 2019: January!

In the interest of not making y’all deal with 10,000 word posts with 100 images, and in the interest of making the load a little lighter, given the new imaging captioning policy on this site, which I’ll get into a little later (and which I’m still figuring out, years and years too late; please be kind as I’m getting used to doing this, and if you have suggestions on how I can make my captions better, please share them in the comments), I’m breaking 2019 down into months. Here’s January!

Screenshot from the video game No Man's Sky. A space ship flies through a star-lit stretch of outer space, past the silhouette of a planet, and over grey hills on the horizon, leaving a green vapor trail behind it.
Screenshot from the video game No Man’s Sky. A space ship flies through a star-lit stretch of outer space, past the silhouette of a planet, and over grey hills on the horizon, leaving a green vapor trail behind it.

I started out the year, again, feeling quite ill, dating back to a pretty severe concussion I got on my wedding day (life’s weird). I didn’t actually realize how ill I was (we’re talking 14 months of serious post-concussion symptoms, and still some lingering ones, some of them probably permanent because I’ve had a LOT of concussions and sub-concussive hits), because I’d been playing an absolute ton of No Man’s Sky, dating back to the last month and change of 2018. As it turns out, it was helping me mitigate a ton of neurological vertigo, related to eye tracking, which I didn’t find out until I 100%-ed the achievements in the game at the beginning of April. Apparently, “play a video game for 3 winter months to help me deal with some sort of illness or another” is a thing now, though I’m hoping it’s just a 2 year trend. I can play video games just fine without being so sick that I can’t leave the couch for months. I am back to playing the game over the past week, trying out the new update, so if you play, let me know in the comments.

A copy of issue #53 of Jim Balent's Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose comic book, published by Broadsword Comics, with a $7.00 price sticker at the top left (cover price was $2.95). On the cover, in the top right, there is a logo which reads "Jim Balent's Tarot" in green with a black rose with a blue center to it extending from the letter R in "Tarot", resting under the O and T in "Tarot", with "Witch Of The Black Rose written underneath the rose. At the cover's center, Crypt Chick, a white-haired, pale blue-grey skinned (see-through, in parts, displaying her bones) woman in a black bikini top with white outline crosses on it, a black leather belt with silver rings hanging off of it, a black patent leather micro-mini skirt, white panties, black and white striped tights on her right leg, and black leather boots with silver buckles, sits on her knees near green skulls against a black background. Artwork (signed at bottom right) by Jim Balent.
A copy of issue #53 of Jim Balent’s Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose comic book. On the cover, in the top right, there is a logo which reads “Jim Balent’s Tarot” in green with a black rose with a blue center to it extending from the letter R in “Tarot”, resting under the O and T in “Tarot”, with “Witch Of The Black Rose written underneath the rose. At the cover’s center, Crypt Chick, a white-haired, pale blue-grey skinned (see-through, in parts, displaying her bones) woman in a black bikini top with white outline crosses on it, a black leather belt with silver rings hanging off of it, a black patent leather micro-mini skirt, white panties, black and white striped tights on her right leg, and black leather boots with silver buckles, sits on her knees near green skulls against a black background. Artwork by Jim Balent.

Toward the end of the month, I got a copy of Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose #53. If you’ve never seen it before, or have never read the article I linked to above, it’s one of the best worst comic books of all time. I will give you the one-panel CliffsNotes version of why, if you don’t feel like reading the other article:

A comic book panel from Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose #53 in which Skeleton Man, a brown-haired white man with a skull mask over his face and a black leather jacket with a bone on the right sleeve, yells "Samantha Brown! You have to get out of here! Your vagina is HAUNTED!" at a white woman, whose right arm, hip, and leg are barely visible in the picture. Artwork by Jim Balent.
A comic book panel from Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose #53 in which Skeleton Man, a brown-haired white man with a skull mask over his face and a black leather jacket with a bone on the right sleeve, yells “Samantha Brown! You have to get out of here! Your vagina is HAUNTED!” at a white woman, whose right arm, hip, and leg are barely visible in the picture. Artwork by Jim Balent.

Yes, that’s a thing that happened. And I have a copy of it for at-home reading now.

A screenshot of multiplayer solitaire statistics from MobilityWare Solitaire for iOS. The field is broken into 4 horizontal bars. Going vertically from top to bottom, the top bar is a blue bar with "Multiplayer" written on it in white lettering at left, and at right, an up arrow meant to collapse the data if you touched it on the iOS touch screen. The second through fourth bars are a grey with black lettering. The second bar says "Wins" at left and "4569" at right. The third bar says "Ties" at left and "0" at right. The fourth and bottom bar says "Losses" at left and "1162" at right.
A screenshot of multiplayer solitaire statistics from MobilityWare Solitaire for iOS. The field is broken into 4 horizontal bars. Going vertically from top to bottom, the top bar is a blue bar with “Multiplayer” written on it in white lettering at left, and at right, an up arrow meant to collapse the data if you touched it on the iOS touch screen. The second through fourth bars are a grey with black lettering. The second bar says “Wins” at left and “4569” at right. The third bar says “Ties” at left and “0” at right. The fourth and bottom bar says “Losses” at left and “1162” at right.

I don’t know if I’ve ever really gotten into this here, but I play a lot of online multiplayer solitaire, using MobilityWare Solitaire for iOS. Enough that, out of over 300,000 users who have played at least one game of online multiplayer solitaire on the app, I was ranked 650th in the world in late January.

Television seasons binge-watched in January 2019 (1): Grace & Frankie Season 5 (I loved it, of course.)

Comic books cancelled or ending in January 2019 (the first of an ongoing theme for this year): Exiles (Marvel Comics). I loved this book, and hope to someday see more of all of the characters from it. Saladin Ahmed has written some terrific comics over the past couple of years.

February will be up soon!