About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about how my kids got themselves (and, by extension, me) into Dungeons and Dragons. I wanted to reflect on how far I’ve come since then and where I might go in the near future. Starting off with a quick recap of the linked blog post, my […] | Continue reading
This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Decoder Ring. The most recent episode had a very interesting title: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie…Will he want a Welfare check? I don’t remember this book from my childhood, but I do remember reading this one (and others … | Continue reading
I’m a bit late to updating the list this year. There aren’t too many new entries, but there are a few changes. Politics 5-4 Pod – Official Description:5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It’s a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological batt … | Continue reading
Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros My rating: 4 of 5 stars When I saw that this book topped the lists for most checked out book in 2023 in multiple library systems my curiosity was piqued. But it was this episode of Our Opinions are Correct that pushed me over the edge into getting th … | Continue reading
Rick and Morty vs. Dungeons & Dragons: Deluxe Edition by Patrick Rothfuss My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is the definition of a niche product. The only people I think would enjoy this are the intersection in the Venn diagram of D&D fans and Rick and Morty fans. I know I’ve bee … | Continue reading
Fault Tolerance by Valerie Valdes My rating: 4 of 5 stars Valerie Valdes continues the Gen X/Millenial pastiche that the Chilling Effect in this third, and final, entry. A few of the references across the trilogy:– Voltron– Portal (from previous books)– Smash Bros (crash sisters) … | Continue reading
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 114, November 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars Science Fiction———————The Concubine’s Heart (Matthew Bright) – I could not even Begin to predict the turn the story would take. It was quite a fascinating story. I wonder at the culture (a … | Continue reading
Wrath of Empire by Brian McClellan My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’m usually not a fan of the middle books in planned trilogies. They often can’t resolve anything because most trilogies are just one gigantic book split into three. While that’s also somewhat true in this book, McClellan … | Continue reading
First off, I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy listening to the science fiction short story podcast Escape Pod. Today I listened to episode 949, A Foundational Model for Talking to Girls. Large Language Models (LLMs), what we have colloquially called AI for the past few years, hav … | Continue reading
Last weekend I decided to try the Humblewood D&D campaign setting with the kids. For the past year (give or take) we’ve had a lot of fun playing DnD Adventure Club campaigns. Our one major foray in to regular D&D, Dragons of Stormreck Isle, was a failure. I think there were a few … | Continue reading
This weekend we finished The Wild Trilogy from DnD Adventure Club. The first challenge involved sneaking around an Owlbear. The kids asked about their options and I noted that in addition to sneaking, they could try and distract it. Sam’s dwarf, Grumpy McGrumbles, has a cooking h … | Continue reading
I sometimes forget that most of social media is governed by an attention span algorithm instead of a reverse chronological algorithm. There are at least a couple times, however, when I’m reminded of that fact: | Continue reading
After all these years, there’s finally a Humble Bundle that redeems keys to GOG! I don’t have anything against Steam, per se, but I always hated the lack of diversity of locations to redeem your keys. I’m hoping this eventually means that games sold on Humble Bundle through their … | Continue reading
I’ve written a lot about DnD Adventure Club, including my last two posts. Today while I was looking at the Pathfinder Humble Bundle, I went to the Pathfinder website to see if they had a page listing differences (since Pathfinder started as a fork of D&D 3.5). I found this page – … | Continue reading
Scarlett was inspired by my previous post and made an animatic-style drawing of some of her favorite moments from the campaign. The top panel is the party questioning the guards. (The ninja-looking character is Sasha, the character that Scarlett plays) The next panel is Grumpy us … | Continue reading
I was DMing the first third of a DnD Adventure Club campaign for my kids today. My son likes to mostly play as Grumpy Mcgrumbles, a dwarven fighter. The kids were attacked by a group of Gnolls. Normally, most of the time, the kids play pretty straightforwardly although they are s … | Continue reading
Almost exactly a year ago my wife and I took our second trip to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. We’d last visited 12 years earlier in October, and so had missed the opportunity to see puffins. I’d meant to make a series travelogue posts about my trip, but I got busy with pro … | Continue reading
Sins of Empire by Brian McClellan My rating: 4 of 5 stars If you put a godstone on the mantle in act one…. Just to get my one issue out of the way – this trilogy is really just one giant book broken in 3. This book doesn’t really have a resolution at the end. […] | Continue reading
Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells My rating: 4 of 5 stars Murderbot continues to be awesome. As with most mysteries, there isn’t too much to say that won’t end up being a spoiler. Muderbot continues to grow as a character while also not losing that which makes Murderbot such a d … | Continue reading
Middlegame by Seanan McGuire My rating: 5 of 5 stars I stayed up way too late last night reading. Today I took advantage of the fact that it was raining all day long to sit on the couch with a few cups of tea to finish the book. As I finished I recognized that this […] | Continue reading
Prime Deceptions by Valerie Valdes My rating: 4 of 5 stars Our favorite Cuban spaceship captain is back and I enjoyed it even more than the first book. Now that Eva is her new self and knows there isn’t any more lying to her crew, they can move on to more fun adventures. This boo … | Continue reading
The Black Tides of Heaven by Neon Yang My rating: 5 of 5 stars I would probably more accurately rate this book as 4.5, but I decided to round up. Yang does a perfect job in this novella creating just enough history for the world that we feel as though it’s gone on forever. It’s [ … | Continue reading
Save Yourself, Mammal!: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection by Zach Weinersmith My rating: 3 of 5 stars I’m not going to waste time looking it up, but I believe this was SMBC’s first collection. So Weinersmith (or whoever didn’t the formatting) hadn’t figured out the f … | Continue reading
This post continues a series on exploring new browsers (last few posts): Vivaldi About 4 years ago I decided to start exploring various web browsers. Eventually I settled on Vivaldi as my main browser both on Windows and Linux. When I first installed Vivaldi, I mentioned that ver … | Continue reading
Those of us who are deep in the tech world remember about 6 weeks ago when all our social media and news feeds were talking about the XZ Utils backdoor. (Here’s a great writeup from my favorite tech site, Ars Technica) Really quick, bulleted recap: I was incredibly surprised to h … | Continue reading
Red Hat released version 9.4 today. Lots of jargon (including a mention of AI), but one of the big deals considering how long Red Hat support contracts go is the addition of ARM64 as a supported architecture. 9to5Linux also had a summary of the new features. I remember back befor … | Continue reading
This year started off pretty light when it came to programming because I’ve been addicted to the video game Against the Storm since last winter. But I eventually started working again on various projects – some old and some new. I didn’t do any programming in January, so we’ll st … | Continue reading
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night from a dream where I was at a programmer convention. A bunch of devs were arguing and they came to me to be the deciding factor for the future of the KDE Plasma 6 project. Each was very passionate about the direction they wanted […] | Continue reading
Just a few thoughts on programming languages that have been rattling around in my head this week, but which don’t each merit a full blog post. The main theme is that the culture behind each programming language leads to some interesting choices, as is the case with spoken languag … | Continue reading
If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript by Angus Croll My rating: 3 of 5 stars The intro mentions the natural language nature of Javascript. I wonder if the book had been concieved a few years later if it would rather have been Python or Ruby – both of which are way more like human languag … | Continue reading
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow My rating: 4 of 5 stars Got this book for free from the Tor Ebook Club This book is a refinement of many topics that Doctorow has broached in the past: – uploading of consciounesses/backups and how that changes things– living in Capitalism vs leaving cap … | Continue reading
I had to change my wordpress username as it contained characters that were fine back when I started this blog in 2005, but didn’t work for federation. So this is a test to see if the post will properly federate now that I’ve changed the username. Here’s hoping! | Continue reading
Back in 2013 when I started using Fedora Core 1, I had no idea I’d still be on Fedora when it reached its 40th release 11 years later. Congrats to the team and here’s the official announcement. | Continue reading
Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes My rating: 4 of 5 stars Description in one line? Cowboy Bebop meets Mass Effect with a Cuban protagonist. I grew up in Miami, Florida so having a main character speak in “spanglish” brings me back to my childhood. The narrator also nails the voic … | Continue reading
Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking by Maangchi My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is a companion to Maangchi’s youtube channel. It teaches you how to cook the way she cooks. So it’s authentic to her even if it’s not what you’re used to from Korean BBQ. The recipes are a good jumping o … | Continue reading
RELIGION: Ruining Everything Since 4004 BC by Zach Weinersmith My rating: 2 of 5 stars I’m generally a fan of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (the source of these comics) and even though I would identify myself as a Christian, I’m not one of those easily-offended, book-banning … | Continue reading
Happy Doomsday by David Sosnowski My rating: 1 of 5 stars I got this for free from the Kindle First (or whatever it’s called now) program where Amazon Prime members get a free book each month. It’s been a while since I disliked a book a much as I disliked this one. I kept reading … | Continue reading
Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is my second time reading the book. I lowered the rating from 5 to 4 stars mostly because 5 stars is “it was amazing” and 4 stars is “really liked it” so that’s a more honest assessment. This is a book that I […] | Continue reading
Nightmare Magazine, Issue 137 by Nightmare Magazine My rating: 4 of 5 stars The Cut Cares Not for the Flesh (George Sandison) – It was foreshadowed from the first paragraphs, but if one finds themselves in a horror story, it pays to read the contractual fine-print. I’ve read stor … | Continue reading
Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is definitely more political than the last non-fiction book I read, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, but that makes sense. The author’s entire thesis is not so much about but … | Continue reading
I came across this video that’s a pretty in-depth history of video game controller that taught me quite a bit I didn’t know and helped bridge some connections between the different companies throughout the industry’s history. | Continue reading
I first heard MxPx 28 or 29 years ago. At the time my family was still a church-going family. This was my first experience with the idea of a youth group that played rock song versions of the praise music. So I was jazzed to go to church every Wednesday and Sunday. The middle sch … | Continue reading
I didn’t really use any new programs this year. I just continued expanding on programs I’ve used in the past. Python For Python I continued to mostly use Pycharm. I’ve spoken about it for the past few years, but JetBrains continues to add features that make it easier to work with … | Continue reading
Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 113, October 2019 by John Joseph Adams My rating: 4 of 5 stars Another great issue of Lightspeed Magazine. There was only one story I wasn’t a fan of. Science Fiction———–The Beasts We Want to Be (Sam J. Miller) – a historical SF set in Russia after the … | Continue reading
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon My rating: 5 of 5 stars I loved listening to this book. The author (also the narrator) does an incredible job taking a look at every difference between male and female bodies and explaining the cu … | Continue reading
Starter Villain by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars Just like Scalzi’s previous book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, this one is a real popcorn book. It’s also got a pretty silly movie-inspired premise and I consider them to be in a meta series. As the book blurb says, our pr … | Continue reading
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett My rating: 4 of 5 stars this is my second time reading the book. The rating remains 4/5 stars. I didn’t remember liking this book so much given the fact that I’m not much of a fan of time loops, at least, not since I got use to the idea. […] | Continue reading