Dune by Frank Herbert

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, that was quite a journey - both in the amount of time it took me to finish the book and in the scope of the book itself. I guess I’ll consider it in that order. This book, like all sci fi books that deviate so much from how we live today that everything has a new name, is hard to get into. While it is good narrative form to jump into the story without walls of text explaining everything, when it’s as alien as this (no pun intended) it becomes impossible to know what’s going on. And that makes it hard to get invested in the story. Additionally, in order to have the big payoff at the end, Herbert spends a lot of time without much going on. I know I spent a lot of time wondering why this was such a heralded book in our fandom.

Video Games Are No Fun by Kill Screen Magazine

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As I usually do with an anthology-style product, I’m just moving over my status updates.

“Big Buck- I’ve seriously misjudged this game all these years”

“King of the Ogres - Although I never got into WOW, I’ve faced similar issues with others (sometimes peers and sometimes the older generation) not understanding games as a diversion as valid as whatever they do for fun.”

Scarlett was in a giggly mood. Stella, not so much.

So much I want to say all at once…I hate when that happens - makes me wish we could speak in parallel threads. Well, I guess I’ll start with the credit. There are lots of photos I’ve posted on here taken by Danielle. But usually by the time I get a chance to post photos I can’t remember for sure who took the photos. Generally, if the photo is taken with the Canon Powershot S100 it’s a greater than 80% chance it was taken by Danielle. But not only has not much time passed since the photo was taken (allowing me to know it was Danielle who took it), but it’s just so perfect, I had to make sure to credit her for having the photographic eye.

Fedora 24 was released yesterday. I updated Daisy, my big laptop, first since it’s not critical. If the update broke something I wouldn’t care. The only hitch it had was that I had to reinstall the RPMFusion repos from the RPM for Fedora 24. Otherwise it was saying that one of the packages wasn’t signed and refused to do the upgrade. Probably has something to do with the fact that for the last release or two, RPMFusion wasn’t exactly in the best of conditions. I’m currently updating my netbook (Kuribo), but that’s more of an all-evening affair since it’s just running on an Intel Atom. There are three more Fedora machines in the house - SuperMario, TanukiMario, and BlueYoshi. I’ll probably save the livingroom Kodi (BY) for last since everyone in the house uses that to watch TV.

I meant to write about the lighting setup in the blog post in which I uploaded the photos from the 7 Month photo shoot, but with twin 7 month olds, there’s never enough time for anything - even with my mother-in-law in town helping us out. Oh well, at least I don’t have to pay per post.

First of all, I’d like to discuss the concept I wanted to go for. For the Five Month photos, I went with the balloon theme I posted about here. For month six, I didn’t do anything special. Danielle did her usual couch portraits. But this time around I had a bit more time for the photos and I started thinking about it a week or two in advance. Unlike 2 months ago, both children were able to sit on their own now for extended periods of time. As of when I took the 7 month photos, the only thing that made them tip over was when they got over-excited and tipped back. It’d been a while since I had done portraits with the black background and I wanted to switch it up a bit. Because I don’t have any formal photography training, I like to browse the work of other photographers to get ideas I can take and make my own. Gavin Hooey, who has a great series of videos on Youtube through the photography store Adorama, has a dark grey background at his studio. He likes to have a highlight behind the model rather than just a plain dark background. If you look at his photos, he does it more often than he doesn’t. I figured it might help with the look of the photos. If you don’t do it, then you really do need to use a light as a hair light in order to keep dark-haired subjects from merging into a black background.

Sometimes Scarlett asks me to draw with her. So I drew this scene:

Of course, what we “see” is dependent upon our state of mind. Having been watching lots of fairy tale cartoons, her first guess was that I’d drawn a dragon and a dinosaur. Her second guess, of course, was correct that it was a giraffe and rhino. She then added a bird and some apples for the giraffe.

Ever since I bought my house and got a BBQ/grill I’ve learned that most of what I thought of as BBQ growing up was actually grilling. The key difference is that you BBQ at a lower temperature (typically around 225 F) and that BBQ is cooked via indirect heat. Grilling is cooking directly over a fire and, typically, done at the highest heat your BBQ/grill can provide (at the very least starting around 350 F and higher). Although I’ve been cooking ribs successfully on the BBQ/Grill for the past 6ish years, I’ve never really been BBQing them. So I looked around on the web and I found the recipe for Last Meal Ribs.