In case you're wondering how things are going up in Vermont this week...
We're living in the winter of perfect conditions here in the Northeast. It's been snowing virtually every day. If you don't mind dressing warmly, life has been pretty good. Conditions then warmed up yesterday, and now, I think maybe we're into spring skiing for the rest of the season.
Which is fine, if I'm being honest.
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| Stowe Mountain as seen from a chairlift |
It occured to me Thursday as I was working on the newly updated D&D archives for this very blog that I've got more than enough material here to create an entire Wanderhaven sourcebook. I think I might actually do that, using the pay-what-you-want model on DriveThruRPG and also maybe drop the damned thing as a free download on Amazon. I'll then add a link in the Foreword where folks can support my other projects, and with luck, that will actually help sell a few copies of other stuff I've written.
I'll have to use AI for all the art, unfortunately, which is a very large part of why I do not want to charge for this "new" project. I realize full well that modern AI creates via statistically driven machine-plagiarism, and that charging for other people's work is a sin.
Nevertheless, I feel like I should still do *something* with all this stuff.
Anyway. Behold this cover for the would-be Wanderhaven sourcebook, TALES FROM THE TIPSY MERMAID.
What do you think, friends?
Friends, I get requests almost every day for the PDF version of "The Mystery of Malvern Manor".
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| I expanded "Malvern Manor" into "Mordecai's Monster" a few years ago for EN Publishing. |
Friends,
As many of you know, I will be competing in the Swim Across the Sound to support St. Vincent's Hospital's Cancer Center again this year. 2025 marks a decade with the Swim for me. I first competed as part of "Team Y-Me?" way back in 2015. We've learned a lot and raised a lot of money in that time. This year can and should be our best year ever!
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| Action shot of me from the Swim in 2017. |
Sally and I went to Mount Snow over the weekend for what proved to be a fun, somewhat eventful weekend.
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| Sally and me at Mount Snow Saturday afternoon |
Sports gambling enthusiasts will argue that betting on sports makes the games themselves more exciting, especially games in which the viewer has little to no rooting interest. This may be true. However, gambling can also be addictive, and as a matter of reality, it’s next to impossible to win often enough on an ongoing-basis to make money gambling.
Yes, pro-bettors exist. However, the good ones, like Steve Fezzik, often have advanced degrees in a field like Statistics and often also have experience as bond traders in the financial markets, especially via international finance and currency trading. I’m talking about trading real currencies here, not Bitcoin. These guys are used to doing the grinding work of evaluating international corporate spreadsheets and macro-economic currency trends to find opportunities in international debt markets. There’s nothing sexy about any of this unless you happen to truly enjoy statistics and probability.
If you’re wondering, I myself have an MBA in International Finance from Fordham University plus a very long history playing the most statistics-driven game of all time, tabletop Dungeons and Dragons. Unsurprisingly, Statistics became my favorite course at Business School, and here we are.
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| Ross Tucker's "Even Money" podcast, starring Steve Fezzik, is my favorite betting podcast |
I have a LOT to do today, friends. But I need to warm my brain up a little before we get into it, and for that, we turn to Five Things. If you're wondering, our last Five Things on a Friday occured on Friday, September 11, 2020.
So yeah, it's been a while. I hope you're all doing well in what very much feels like a world gone mad.
To that end, I've signed out of X.com & removed the app from my phone and browser favorites. I don't want to formally close my account because I don't want to facilitate someone pretending to be *me*, but I also refuse to be party to anything that's going on over there in any way.
I just can't with a lot of this stuff. I won't.
UPDATE: I've also disconnected & deleted Instagram.
I set a goal for the New Year to spend less time on social media and more time here. It's not that I don't want folks to be able to catch up with what's going on with me and Sally, it's that social media writ-large feels like a dying a medium. I've only ever been on social media to promote my own writing and/or to see pictures of my friends doing awesomely fun stuff, but even with that, it's a little too easy to just pontificate mindlessly on those sites.
Which is dumb. I have a site for that, it's here, and it's actually mine.
So anyway, here are some recent social media posts. I'm posting them here, so that you can catch up if you want to. I've presented these in chronological order.
I designed my simple workout-tracking spreadsheet way back in 2017 to help track triathlon training. I'd overtrained and given myself athletic-induced pnemonia that year, and in the aftermath, I realized that I'd done a ruinously bad job managing the three phases of triathlon training holistically.
I got exhausted, and then I got sick. That was stupid.
The problem is that I don't necessarily get sore when I switch sports a lot. So if I'm not careful, my total work load can sneak up on me from week to week. Most of the time when I get sick or injured, I can trace the cause to overwork the previous week or to stringing together too many heavy weeks in a row without a break. That was the case back in 2017, and it damn-near landed me in the hospital.
Happy New Year! I hope this note finds you happy and healthy heading into 2025.
It feels like a lot happened this past year for Casa Cabeza, to the point that this is now my third attempt to put it all into some kind of context. I finally decided to publish a simple list of highlights.
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| Danno & Sally Cabeza |
These are presented in no particular order.
Our last two posts will be reversed this year. We usually write something like a Christmas letter in this space this week and then do a Top Posts entry in the days leading up to New Years Eve. I still want to do that, but I need to think a bit about the State of Casa Cabeza before trying to sit down to write about it. We lived through a chaotic end to this year with much, MUCH more chaos seemingly on the horizon. I'm not totally sure how to sum all that up just yet.
With that in mind, we'll do our Top Posts of 2024 this week, and if you're interested, you can look for my State of Casa Cabeza post at some point next week.
