Hey, when you like bands like The Protomen, Anamanaguchi, and Weird Al, it’s hard to find someone to go to a concert with you. I’d be missing out on lots of fun if I had to go with someone else.

From the article:

Everyone has different internal guidelines for solo outings, and these guidelines are often marked by a fair degree of irrationality. I’ve never been able to work up the nerve to see a movie alone, for example, and yet I’ve eaten plenty of meals in restaurants without a dining partner — despite the fact that it’s a much more visible activity than sitting in a dark theater.

https://youtu.be/jayTknqC2uc

1. Anberlin (171) - Almost the same number of listens as my top artist last quarter (179 for I Fight Dragons). As usual, I continue to enjoy their music and have grown to appreciate some of the ones I didn’t like before. And some of the older stuff seems trite in comparison. 2. Jim Guthrie (168) - As I’ve mentioned before, his folk song compositions are mostly really enjoyable and I like his work on video games and soundtracks. 3. Paul & Storm (138) - I discovered these guys via John Scalzi. I was hesitant to back the Kickstarter for Ball Pit, but I’ve been enjoying the heck out of it on Spotify. 4. Fall Out Boy (101) - A lot of this is from a few recent road trips in which I didn’t want to use data and happened to have Fall Out Boy already on my phone. Doesn’t mean I don’t like the music. 5. Jonathan Coulton (61) - I’ve said so much about how much I enjoy this over the years. Recently Scarlett’s been asking me to play The Princess Who Saved Herself because I got her the book from Greg Pak’s kickstarter. 6. Louis Jorda n (58) - I like to kick it to Louis Jordan on the weekends when I want something classic. 7. Anamanaguchi (56) - Some of this was from the high of seeing them live. Some of it was just from really enjoying the music no matter what, especially Endless Fantasy. 8. Jack White (54) - Another artist I’ve been listening to a lot of because of Spotify. His album Lazaretto does not do well on 30 second preview on Amazon. But because of Spotify, I want to buy the album. 9. Kanye West (42) - Most of this came from listening to my music alphabetically. 10. Lostprophets (41) - I may hate what the singer was accused of doing, but these songs still mostly rock. 10. Lana Del Rey (41) - Something I can throw on that both my wife and I like 12. Willy Chirino (34) - Most of the listens came from a greatest hits album on Spotify. 13. Buddy Rich (33) - Another album I wasn’t sure I wanted until I listened to it on Spotify. It reminds me a lot of the music in Cowboy Bebop 13. Five Iron Frenzy (33) - Perennial Favorite 15. Thelonious Monk (31) - something else I like to throw on Sunday mornings.

A mixture of a growing Ebook library, tracking my goals in Goodreads, and Calibre’s ability to generate a catalog have made me decide to start tracking things quarterly in the book dimension as well. Here’s my second report.

Total Ebooks: 417 (increase of 54 books)

Total Unread: 313 (increase of 45 so I’m reading them faster than I can add them…good)

Goodreads 2015 Challenge: 38 of 30 books complete. Last time I went way over. We’ll see what this year brings.

SDDM just kept crashing on my system. I can’t figure out what’s screwed up about it. And when it would get me to a KDE desktop, I couldn’t click on anything. So it’s back to KDM for now…

Whenever I boot up post upgrade to Fedora 22, it takes much longer to load KDM than it used to. So I thought maybe it has something to do with Wayland and the fact that KDM is EOL’d. So I thought I’d convert to SDDM. I had no idea how to change DMs in the modern day, so I decided to look it up and ask on LinuxQuestions.org. Eventually, I found it on a stack overflow page:

The Witcher (3 hours): Finally had some time to get back to The Witcher. It definitely isn’t the type of game where you want to have long gaps between playthroughs. But there isn’t much I can do about it.

https://youtu.be/3_xIybABzx4?list=PLEJrELYLxNgUtl5L7oM52YnJj9Jt4c5yp

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (30 minutes): Scarlett just asked me if we could play Sonic. So we tried to get past the third world for a while, but I kept slipping up.

Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die by Ryan North

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is, in a way, not what you think it’s going to be when you read the premise. Essentially it’s a dozen or so Oedipus Rex stories - in the oracle sense, not the incest sense. There is a machine called The Machine of Death and it tells you how you will die. Not when (except in one story). Just how. So if you get CANCER you might die of cancer in two months or at age 99. Sometimes, like Oedipus, what you do to avoid it causes it to happen. Other times that’s not the point of the story, but it can’t be avoided. If your death is EATING A PEANUT you cannot commit suicide by any way other than eating one. The predictions are also vague and/or ironic. OLD AGE might mean you die old or it might mean a senior citizen kills you. So I thought this would be a bunch of stories of people trying to outwit the machine. Instead, what I got were about a dozen stories in which the authors explore how our world would change with the existence of the Machine of Death.

Just the Tips by Matt Fraction

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is like the 90s movie Booty Call. It’s funny in a really dumb, immature way. What’s sad is that the tips in all those women’s magazines should be treated with about as much seriousness as these tips, but some people actually take them seriously. It also includes some hilarious joke sex positions and reader-submitted stories.

View all my reviews