Week 23 of 2026: jarig

It was my Birthday in Wednesday, so I spent most of the week celebrating it. I ran a special RPG finale on Tuesday and played a normal one on my birthday itself. I went to my mom on Thursday, played boardgames with friends before going to a pop party on Friday, went to Utrecht Pride on Saturday and finally visited my dad on Sunday. All in all a busy but festive week.

Read

• started Gebarentaalwetenschap by Baker, Van den Bogaerde, Pfau and Schermer
• started In Deeper Waters by F.T. Lukens

Sure, I liked the ice hockey gays, but I don’t mind taking a break from it and exploring the romantacy genre: romantic fantasy novels. I found myself a gay one with some cute art on the cover and we’ll see. It’s cute so far.

For my non-fiction I ditched the ADD book I’ve been ignoring and started a book about sign language. It warns that this is not a book for everyone and that they will not explain the normal linguistic terms, only the ones that are specific to sign language. It’s about sign language in general, but since it’s a Dutch book it also focusses a lot on Nederlandse Gebarentaal – but that’s also exactly why I got the book, as I am trying to learn it a bit, and it is hard to find sources on how the grammar of it works. It’s been interesting so far.

Played

On Tuesday I played the finale of my open table Brindlewood Bay campaign, but hey, I already wrote a long article about that. Too long; didn’t read: it was a cool session with nine players (!) at the table and I got cake and presents and that was very sweet of them.

On Wednesday (my actual birthday) I played as a player in our ongoing Pasión de las Pasiones campaign. This felt less birthday-like – which was fine. What I like about it is that we slowly get to know more and more about the characters, because we keep returning to it. I feel more comfortable in it now, and I notice the question for me arises: yes, what is going on with my character? Hopefully we can answer that a bit in the next four episodes.

Ran

On Sunday I ran 2 kilometer, easy and with normal running shoes (not the new “zero drop” ones), because I still feel my calf muscle a bit. But I had to run a bit, because otherwise I would loose my 50 week running streak on Strava. (It is all about the data.)