🐶 Week Notes 006

09 Feb, 2025

This has been a draining week for my mental health from a political perspective. But there was also a lot of good stuff too.

Our two Australian Shepherd pups, Hunter and Echo, finally came home Friday. They're a delightful handful, but our family has never been better equipped to give them the attention and exercise they need.
☃️ We got a fair amount of snow this week and it's been cold enough to stick around. It's a nice change of pace from the slightly warmer but mostly drearier last couple of months.
Played a couple of tabletop games with the family this week, Cranium one night and then Risk the next.
🧙‍♂ Shout out to my son, Houston, who 4-0ed (8-1 overall record I believe) an Aetherdrift prerelease this afternoon at our local game shop and won 9 packs as his victory spoils.

👾 Playing

Discovered some fun retro/arcade-style soccer games this week that I hope to get into more in the weeks ahead.

👾⚽️ Bang Average Football is a clever amalgamation of retro classic Sensible Soccer and Stardew Valley. It's only $12 and top of my list as the next game purchase.
👾⚽️ Sensible World of Soccer 2020 is a Sensible World of Soccer 96/97 uber-fan mod that offers modern features like widescreen support and regular DLCs with current teams and rosters. I'm finding it very challenging so far, but games are super quick and fun.
🧙‍♂ Got up to Gold 3 in Constructed rank this week. I've mostly just been completing my dailies and building up gold for the release of Aetherdrift next week. I'm well positioned to do several Premier Drafts out of the gate if I want to with 3330 gems, 67,580 gold, and a draft token.
⚽️🎮 FM25 was officially cancelled. FM 2024 is still waiting for me whenever I get motivated to start playing and the community will keep it alive for years to come, but a huge bummer.

📺 Binged The Recruit season 2 👍👍 in 3 or 4 days and absolutely loved the escalating web of chaos Owen Hendricks gets into in this one. Fully understanding the dynamic of this show let me appreciate the ride that much more this time around and a six-episode season was perfect I thought.
🍿 Watched Labyrinth 👍 for the first time that I can remember with the family. Jennifer Connelly was sooo young. Toby, her baby stepbrother is now 41 in real life!
📺 Severance Season 2 continues to be excellent. S2E4: Woe's Hollow 👍👍 was next level.
🍿 Watched Princess Mononoke 👍 with the family for movie night. Enjoyable but over-the-top violent at times and not my favorite Miyazaki movie by a long shot.

⚽️🎙 Caught up on a bunch of Spurs podcasts this week, but will probably take next week off if they don't win at Villa tomorrow.
⚽️🎙 Accidentally started listening to Good Vibes FC¹ 2/04/25 with Sam Mewis, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Lynn Biyendolo (née Williams), and it absolutely was a good vibes soccer-adjacent discussion for me that gave me a lot of smiles and chuckles. Apparently, Alyssa Naeher went to like eight weddings recently because it was wedding season for so many of her USWNT teammates!😅
Didn't listen to much music, just wasn't feeling it this week.

I'm still subscribed to the Women's Game podcast in Overcast, but with US women's soccer mostly out of season, staying on top of it hasn't been a priority.↩