Adam's Cool Website

What I'm Into This Week, 2022 Holiday Edition

Emotional space exploration, Nordic skiing, sleeping in my car, and one great podcast

Behold, the menorahsaurus in all his glory.

Merry Christmas! Or, as we Western Civilization-destroying lowlives say, happy holidays!

For all the “War on Christmas” shtick, I’ve been saying “happy holidays” more or less my entire life and have never really gotten pushback. Most people who regularly touch grass aren’t interested in picking a fight over a phrase that’s essentially just a seasonal way of saying “goodbye.” At this point, I strongly suspect the War on Christmas is mostly being fought on the darker corners of cable news and inside the heads of people who are defending some precious, Thomas Kinkade image of what their childhoods were like. (Thomas Kinkade is actually a pretty good metaphor for that idealized American monoculture: In people’s imaginations, it’s wholesome, all soft light, fireplace-lit windows, and family values. In reality, it’s shallow, hyper-commercialized, and occasionally takes a public piss on your beloved childhood traditions.)

I have the rest of December off (mostly, I’ll likely take some of that time to catch up on some backburnered writing, and I’ll be popping in here and there to keep an eye on things). Honestly, I don’t know what to do with myself. I’m not good at kicking around. After work, chores, and hanging out with my family, I usually have just enough free time to fit in the activities I like to do—climbing, running, skiing. I struggle with big blocks of it, to the point where I resort to making to-do lists of stuff to do for fun. If you’re planning on making a leisure-time list, these games, podcasts, and activities deserve a place on it.

Voyageur

Despite Elon Musk’s best efforts, space remains cool. The coolest thing about it is its scale: Massive stars, inconceivable trillions of exoplanets, a scale so vast that the laws of physics themselves bar us from even seeing all of it. Thanks to that cosmic speed limit known as the speed of light, the only people who will ever build an engine capable of carrying us to distant worlds are sci-fi creators.

In the narrative game Voyageur, that engine is called the Descent Device, and its a poorly-understood artifact left behind by an ancient alien civilization. Install it in a ship and it can carry a crew toward the center of the galaxy far faster than the speed of light. The catch: It only works in one direction, meaning the voyage is one-way.

That could easily be the setup for a grim and self-indulgently melancholy game, but Voyageur, which I bought in a bundle on itch.io is neither. Put that down partly to the fact that the procedurally-generated star systems of the game never feel empty; instead, they’re teeming with life, from ice-planet outposts to labyrinthine bazaars, each with their own culture. Along the way, you trade goods and manage your crew, encountering everyone from pirates to old voyageurs in bars who ruminate on the meaning of a life spent getting further and further from home.

Developer Bruno Dias worked on Fallen London, the weirdo-Victorian browser game whose universe spawned Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies, and the game has some of the same feel, though a bit more serious. A playthrough is quick, friendly to gamers of any level, and a nice little journey for a cold day.

Morning ski at the Frisco Nordic Center

Parent-Child Nordic Skiing

I owe an apology to cross-country skiing: All these years, I never gave you the respect you deserved. When someone would tell me “I don’t ski, but I cross-country ski,” I judged silently. Maybe it was because my first experiences with you were on slushy Illinois golf courses, or that my later exposures to you came mostly in the form of spandex-wearing skate skiers who, in true Boulder style, took themselves way too seriously. But of all the winter sports, Nordic skiing somehow always seemed like the Daddest.

Then I became a dad myself, and I found myself fighting for my ski days. Skiing the resort with a toddler wasn’t practical and carrying him into avalanche terrain was out of the question. So I picked up an old pair of metal-edged Nordic skis from Play It Again Sports, built a DIY pulk with a knockoff Crazy Creek chair and an improvised sit harness attached to the bottom (plans here, follow them entirely at your own risk), bundled up my kid and headed out onto the Front Range’s forest trails.

And somewhere in the mix, I discovered: Nordic skiing was a lot faster and more fun than I remembered. We do it about once a week, either on ungroomed USFS trails or, more recently, at the Frisco Nordic Center. The Boy loves it, especially the downhills. I’m trying to teach him to shout “YOLO!” when we start going fast. All in all, it's been a big step in my quest to become the most stereotypically Colorado parent ever.

So: I’m sorry, cross-country skiing. I shouldn’t have judged you. I’m sorry, spandex-clad dads roller-skiing around Boulder in summer. Your hearts are in the right place, even if your fashion sense is not. And to all you younger people who think Nordic skiing is lame or slow, consider giving it another chance. You won’t be sorry.

Car Naps

I still do alpine ski, though. In Colorado’s Front Range, that means contending with serious traffic. The only surefire way I’ve found of getting around it is to leave early—really early. I’m typically out of my house by 5:30 AM at the latest. That leave me with a dilemma: I’m at the resort an hour and a half before lifts start spinning. How do I spend that time?

"Beating the I-70 ski traffic is easy actually, anyone can do it," I say, as I zip myself into my sleeping bag in the backseat of my car at A-Basin, where I have arrived an hour and a half before the lifts start spinning.

— (((Adam Roy))) (@adnroy) October 30, 2022

If I’m feeling motivated or planning on a short day, I might skin an inbounds lap or two. Lately, though, I’ve been spending that time sleeping in the back of my car, which has been kind of a revelation for me. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, or just because I’m tired of being tired all the time. But it feels unimaginably luxurious to climb inside my car sleeping bag—a 45-degree bag I bought at Fred Meyer in Oregon, but I’ve taken down to the single digits paired with my ski layers—and just snooze.

Fireplaces, Even the Virtual Ones

Of all the holiday traditions, holiday lights have to be my favorite. It's the most universal for sure. Christmas, Yule, Hanukkah, Diwali, Kwanzaa: I think there's just something intrinsic in human beings that's drawn toward lights in the dark.

With temperatures consistently around and below zero since last week, I was making good use of our fireplace at home. My in-laws' place, however, doesn't have a working fireplace, so I've resorted to those virtual yule log videos available on TV. They're not a perfect substitute but they do the job of creating holiday ambiance. (Back in my old studio apartment in Denver, I used to sit my space heater under the TV and pretend it was an actual fireplace, which in retrospect feels like kind of a sad bachelor move.)

You've got a lot of his options for virtual fires this year, from Hallmark's puppies-and-kittens holiday fire to Pluto TV's classic fireplace, which you can stream for free with no signup. The best, though? I'm biased, but I think that has to be Backpacker's virtual campfire streams, which you can get with or without a thrilling new episode of our Out Alive podcast.

Appreciation Post: Friends at the Table

I spent 7 hours behind the wheel last week, and I used it to catch up on Friends at the Table, an actual play podcast that I’ve been listening to pretty loyally since 2017. The cast, including GM and former Waypoint editor-in-chief Austin Walker, is currently prepping for their upcoming eighth season, Palisade, a fantastic sci-fi story set in a universe they’ve been developing since 2015. I think this crew may be some of the most imaginative and emotionally evocative storytellers in audio right now, and the prequel games they’re playing to set the stage for the next arc have me really excited to hear it. All their episodes are available for free on their site, or on Spotify if you already subscribe; $5 a month on their Patreon gets you access to exclusive episodes and livestreams.