The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories by Tara Moore

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thoughts as I first read through this collection:
Boy, modern English is so dumbed down. I love to read and read voraciously and still found it so laborious to read some of these short stories. Everyone speaks in purple prose and it takes a bit to figure out what each sentence is saying. (And that’s before even considering the words that have morphed since then)

Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

As a Kickstarter backer on this campaign, I was able to read this book immediately on the first day of the year and I bet it will be tough to find another book that I will love more this year. As the back of the book (and Goodreads description) says, this book is basically “What if Brandon Sanderson wrote The Princess Bride?” It even has a Vizini battle of wits moment and an eel moment! I do not know if the regular commercial versions of the books will have the amazing art in the kickstarter versions, but definitely find a way to see the illustrations - they are beautiful!

Dead Man’s Hand by James J. Butcher

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This first book by Jim Butcher’s son has prose that reads like a combination of his father’s prose and John Scalzi’s prose. It’s fun and sarcastic, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious stakes. I was actually quite happy that Butcher tends towards realism. For example, in a scene where a character normally would have rallied to a heroic speech, the character acts according to what we know of their personality.

About a decade after someone first suggested that I should join US Masters Swimming, I finally did. Originally it was because a local swim team required swimmers to be USMS members. I didn’t end up joining the team because the pool plus team fees were a bit more than I wanted to spend. But, since I was a member, I was eligible to participate in swim meets now.

Ready for my first USMS swim meet!

KDE Wayland has come a long way support has come a long way since I last wrote about it 8 months ago. Yakuake now shows up in the correct place (although it seems to have a hard time remembering to start up upon login). The lock screen bug hasn’t hit me in the past month. Multi-monitor support is way better now. (And this is without the new update that supposedly makes it even more so solid). Scrolling is still a little screwy in Firefox, but it works perfectly in Vivaldi (my daily driver for quite a few months now).

I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.

Meet No4 (Jan 2023)

This meet was at the Arundel Olympic Center. It was my first time there, and what a beautiful venue for a swim meet! Unlike the other pools in the Carol Chidester series it has 6 or more lanes available for warmup and cooldown while the meet is running. This is due to the fact that it’s a 50 meter pool that’s being converted to a 25 yard pool using a bulkhead. The other half of the pool is where the warmup lanes reside. There is built-in stadium seating; nice and high up so that the entire pool can be viewed from up there. The only bummer was that the spa pool was closed during the meet. That would have been a nice place to rest the muscles while keeping them warm between events.

Noah’s Chaos Stella’s Chaos Tight Formations Scarlett Spells Something Noah’s Expansion Spell Noah’s Magic Hands Audrey’s Shapes Firework Fun Audrey’s Circle

https://youtu.be/m_HIofD-nNA

A video version of a large chunk of this blog post

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 Gwent bug and, as you can see, it became my most-played game. The addiction was also facilitated by playing on my phone (although that time is not captured here). Eventually, around September, I had to stop when the heft of the phone was giving me RSI issues. I had moved on to other games on my PC, so I took a break from Gwent. The developers announced that the game only has one more update coming, so we’ll see if the community around the game remains. That will dictate how much I continue to play Gwent because, after all, a multiplayer game is no fun if there isn’t anyone to play with. I expect I’ll get readdicted some time in 2023. ( Last year 23 minutes)