Super Mario Bros. 3 by Alyse Knorr

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even though I’m older than the author of this book, I have a different, though similar, relationship with this game. I don’t know if it’s because I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up or because my parents were (at the time) struggling to make ends meet, but I completely missed the marketing blitz of SMB3. I only heard of The Wizard a decade or more later.

Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I bought this book as part of a Humble Bundle. This book wasn’t the reason I bought the bundle. I avoided it for a long time because the cover made it look like something I wasn’t going to enjoy - perhaps a romance or paranormal romance. But two things made me start reading it:

1. I’d read a romance by Marjorie Liu last year and it wasn’t horrible. I wouldn’t actively seek them out, but apparently they’re not all cheesy bodice rippers.

Civilization V (2 hrs)

https://youtu.be/FNgKcM7jf6k?list=PLEJrELYLxNgVwd6MWpI64II_fu14o3KpB

A few more turns in our multi-player games.

Team Fortress 2 (2 hrs)

https://youtu.be/pV8-jgg1G6Y?list=PLEJrELYLxNgWsp76cFb5sqedFrKP9qQLw

I decided to play a little more and work on creating an overlay that allows the game to be full screen while also still presenting my Extra Life information. After a of couple tries, I like where it ended up.

Vertical Drop Heroes (2 hrs)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEJrELYLxNgXBv5HxeZNUxg5AWWM9QGJb

I thought this was just going to be a quick Eric Checks Out, but it turned out to get me really addicted to the point where I wish I was playing it every night before bed. Of all the rogue-likes I’ve played, I feel like this one gets the best mix of allowing you to die without it hurting too much.

Scarlett really likes setting up her Calico critter houses, and I thought it was set up very nicely, so one day I did a photo shoot:

Then Scarlett got the really big house, so I took some more photos of her setup:

I don’t know how easy or hard it is to get a door frame in where all the pieces are at right angles to each other. The previous home owners failed at that and so the door could never close correctly. My father-in-law tried to fix it, but he shaved the wrong side. So when my parents and grandparents came, they decided to fix the door. And that’s a great thing because I’d always thought it’d just be something that would take an hour or 2. No, this door took an entire workday’s worth of hours to get to a point where it would correctly fit in this not-quite-rectangular frame that the previous home owners had put up. But thanks to my grandfather and father’s hard work, we now have a door that properly closes and can be locked.

Other than the generational portraits, probably the most meaningful photo I took that week.

When I saw this happening by my garage it freakin’ BLEW MY MIND! As a kid who grew up in America, I’d heard about spiders and their proclivities for climbing water spouts via kiddie propaganda - aka Nursery Rhymes. But I’d NEVER, in my 30+ years of life, actually seen a spider climbing a water spout before.

I did not stay long enough to see if the rain would wash the spider out and if he would climb again if the sun came back out. I’ve got stuff to do, I’m a grown up! WITH KIDS, EVEN!

https://youtu.be/UySlAfz7e7Q

I created this video to help people learn how easy it is with Libvirt, KVM, and QEMU to have multiple monitors in your virtual machines.

I’m catching up on my photos before I get further than 2 months behind and I came across this panorama that I didn’t even remember creating.

It’s interesting that, at least to my eyes, it’s easier to see the second rainbow on the left and I don’t even see it on the right. Also, this What If is particularly relevant and I’d read it just before going to the party.

Going to do some summer cleaning on my VMs, so I wanted to document peak KVM as a reminder of how many I had running at this time: