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2022 in Video Games and 2022 Video Game of the Year
1. Gwent (1 day, 5:50:44): Around May I found out that CD Projekt Red had changed the rules around the Gwent Journey, so that journeys were no longer time-bound. This meant I no longer felt pressured to play every day in order to progress. Freed from feeling forced to play, I once again caught the…
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Programming Update: December 2022
December was wholly dedicated to solving the Advent of Code 2022 problem set. Our job was to help the elves trek through the jungle to get magical starfruit. It was a lot of fun to do it live once again! This year I also had experience from the previous years (both live and on my…
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Bigfoot Endurance Trail 5 and 10 miler
Once again I participated in the Bigfoot 5 and 10 mile race near my house. However, I think this will truly be the last time. I didn’t fall this time, but it seems that no matter how carefully I step, this trail is designed to make me roll my ankle. I rolled it twice to…
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Review: A Very Scalzi Christmas
A Very Scalzi Christmas by John Scalzi My rating: 4 of 5 stars A great collection of Scalzi short stories and flash fiction about Christmas. If you like his sense of humor, you’ll enjoy the book. Depending on your reading speed, probably a little over an hour to complete. View all my reviews
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Review: Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution
Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang My rating: 4 of 5 stars It will be very interesting to compare this book to Seize the Stars when I get to it next year. Both involve the seeming impossibility of pushing for justice against a society…
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Review: Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness by Zach Weinersmith My rating: 2 of 5 stars I was more of a fan of the abridged Bible, but that’s probably because I have more familiarity with the Bible than Shakespeare. Still, it’s interesting to see how old negging is. View all my reviews
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Review: Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza
Flour Water Salt Yeast: The Fundamentals of Artisan Bread and Pizza by Ken Forkish My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’m not an incredible baker, I’m an average baker. When I bake breads – my family is often happy with the taste, but my wife always says – “All that work and we could have…
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2022 in Music (Last.FM and Spotify Listening Trends)
Another year, another look at my music trends for the year. It was another year of music acquisition (supporting the artists, ftw! – I knew Spotify wasn’t paying artists well, but Corey Doctorow’s book, Chokepoint Capitalism really brought home how much they’re screwing over artists), although I think things may slow down in 2023. Here…
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Software I used for Programming in 2022
Python This year I really worked a lot on Python web technologies so I came to appreciate all the work that the JetBrains team does to make all the little things (like running Django test server commands) incredibly easy. I essentially did all my Python development in Pycharm. I’ve had access to the paid JetBrains…
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The Pelican Brief is a ridiculous movie
In short succession 2 podcasts I listen to covered the movie adaptation of The Pelican Brief. If you watched it back in the 1990s you probably didn’t realize how bananas the plot of this movie was. It sounds OK in short summary – some evil corporations kill 2 US Supreme Court judges to prevent a…
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Dec 2022 Swim Meet
On Dec 10 2022 I participated in my second swim meet of this year and also my second swim meet as an adult. It was the same day in which I did the Bigfoot Endurance Trail run and rolled my ankle during the run. It wasn’t causing me any issues during my swim or walking…
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Concert: I Fight Dragons with MC Lars and Schafer the Dark Lord (Nov 2022)
The last concert I attended was Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm back in June of 2021. At the time we thought perhaps we were out of the woods with COVID. Instead, variant after variant has COVID a never ending fact life. For a while I was thinking that perhaps we’d eventually vaccinate our way…
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End of Year Review: Running 2021 and 2022
Since I didn’t cover running last year, I’m going to cover both years in this post. 2021 If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I caught the running bug during the Red Hat Summit in 2019. My original goal was to do an official race that would allow me to…
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Ted Corbitt 15k 2022
Because of various issues I wrote about before (mostly stemming from the issue with my right sesamoids), I ended up canceling my summer and fall races. The last one I was really looking forward to was the Ted Corbitt 15k, honoring Mr. Corbitt who has a long list of achievements, including being the first African-American…
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Review: The BlackcollarReview:
The Blackcollar by Timothy Zahn My rating: 2 of 5 stars I’ll start off with a reminder that I use the tooltips for Goodreads ratings and 2 stars is “it was ok”. It may possibly have hurt that this was my first Zahn novel and I’ve heard so much about him because of the Thrawn…