This may not be your thing. I’m pretty sure my wife will hate it, but I think Pogo’s work is a perfect example of why culture needs to be free and with less onerous copyright rules. I’m pretty sure all of this is within fair use, but it would take a legal fight for him (or her) to win rather than just give up to Disney’s (and other studios) army of lawyers.

How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story by John Scalzi

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

That was an unexpected short story. For one thing I went into it thinking it was the story of how Scalzi proposed. But once it was clear it was fiction, it still took me by surprise and the ending was unexpected. Scalzi continues to be my favorite source for funny (non-slapstick) science fiction. This story made the collection it came from worth getting.

Super Mario Bros. 2 by Jon Irwin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like other Boss Fight Books, it’s a great look back at a classic game. What was most interesting to me is that Doki Doki Panic actually started off as a prototype of Super Mario Bros 2. Since as all gamers my age or older know, that game was reskinned for USA SMB2.

So I found out today that there is no way to re-enable different backgrounds and plasmoids per virtual desktop. It appears to be a mix of forcing people to finally use activities and a complication that was causing all kinds of bugs (according to their bugzilla). I was bummed for about an hour. The different backgrounds can make it very easy to know what virtual desktop you’re at without having to glance at the pager. And if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time longer than a couple months you have seen my Desktop Screenshots and know how much I customize it in KDE.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the next day, when I woke up, that plasma had loaded up despite the fact that I removed kmod-nvidia. Also, I did not have the same issue with KDM as I did with tanukimario. I was loaded in with the blue triangle background. I was greeted with the message “Your saved type “kde-plasma” is not valid any more. Please select a new one, otherwisee ‘default’ will be used.” I select “Plamsa” and am greeted with the KDE loading screen I’ve become oh-so familiar with.

This summer she’s trying a lot of new spots, it seems.

Today was the big one, time to upgrade supermario, my workhorse machine. As usual I had to remove the kmod-nvidia packages. This time around, because my card was getting a little long in the tooth, it was the kmod-nvidia-340xx packages. I also had a bunch of plasmoid packages to get rid of that I didn’t need to remove on the other computers because I was only a heavy plasmoid user on this computer. Thankfully, I’d long since abandoned all the ones I had to get rid of. After running fedup 3 times (once initially, once after removing plasmoids, and once after removing kmod-nvidia packages) to make sure nothing was expected by the program to cause problems upon upgrade, I finally rebooted to upgrade. If the past is any indication, I should be able to get to a screen where I can reinstall kmod-nividia after the upgrades. I’m only a tiny bit worried that Fedora only seems to connect to the internet when a GUI comes up, but if it comes to that I’ll investigate what I need to do and be sure to publish the procedures here for anyone else in the same boat.

Big Pulp: Ted Bundy’s Beetle by Various

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I bought this anthology last year at Baltimore Comic-Con because Dynamite had awakened within me the idea of enjoying modern pulp fiction. Whether the collection succeeds as pulp depends on how strictly one hews to the definition of pulp. However, I did enjoy more stories than I didn’t. Even many of the romance stories were enjoyable to someone who doesn’t read within that genre. As I do with story collections, below are my thoughts on the individual stories.

Today I upgraded my netbook. Interestingly, this had less problems than yesterday with the guest computer. Perhaps because I wasn’t using KDM on my netbook? Anyway, I was actually expecting a worse time, but it worked out. It appears that KDE Netbook edition didn’t make the jump to Plasma 5. But maybe it’s just a setting I need to discover. See, my netbook is a 2nd gen netbook - not a piece of garbage like our EEE Machine, but it has a sub-HD resolution and so using most programs is hard unless the Window Manager or Desktop Environment is getting rid of window decorations. So far, KDE 5 is OK. I may end up going to Fluxbox. (I did not like XFCE on this screen resolution) Here’s my desktop as of now:

I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a long time - Scarlett finally plays on her own, allowing me to photograph her. It’s much harder to capture the awesome moments if you’re also playing along with your little one. I have lots of spontaneous photos of her extended cousins (and even my adopted brothers) at a young age, but a lot less of her because of that. Here’s a batch from April: