David's Boring Blog

Christmas has been an up and down holiday throughout my life. There are so amazing stand out memories from my childhood. The year Santa left me a Lionel train set was pretty good. There are quite a few memories of great toys, fantastic food, and loving family from when I was a kid. The preteen and teenage Christmases left a bit to be desired. Quite a lot of that was because I was angst ridden for a lot of those years.  That followed me into my twenties. I came to dread the holiday. This did not get better going through broken relationships, divorces (yes, plural), and awkward family dynamics. Along the way I started to try to help reverse the trend. Things improved and hopefully there were some decent memories along the way before we lost my Mom is 2018.  Her death changed everything. Don't worry. This post is about that.  Even during my "I only wear black shirts and combat boot with my pants tucked in" phase I was always pretty happy to jump in and help Mom cook. Her Ham

I decided to get Taila, my oldest, a Nintendo 2DS for Christmas. The reason for that gift is steeped in her earliest history. When Beth was pregnant with Taila she was sick the better part of nine months. We spent a lot of time resting and relaxing at the house. After Taila was born we did much of the same. We watched quite a bit of TV, mostly cartoon network. We also played a fair few video games mostly on the SNES.  Then we picked up a pair of Gameboy Colors. I played the hell out of Pokemon for the first two generations. We had Blue, Red, Yellow, Silver, and Gold. I might have gotten a little obsessed with completing my Pokedex. I had a couple of link cables for that very purpose. Those were good times. With the fall out of our split, the days of sitting around playing Pokemon stand out in my memory as some of the best times. Losing Beth lost me my Pokemon playing buddy. I didn't follow the series after that point. By the time X and Y were out, I didn't speak fluent Pokemon

 There are 262 entries on my comic book tracker for this year. I got my final shipment of comics in on 16 December. It was a Previews order and had very little in it that I plan to read with the notable exception of Fire Power  Vol. 5. It joins a couple of other great trade paperbacks that I am going to get to: Saga Vol 10 and Deadly Class  Vol 12. I say that I will get to them eventually because I really want to revisit both of those series from the beginning.  Image I am starting out with Image because they are doing a fantastic job of keeping me reading comic books. I may be aging out of capes and tights, which may or may not be happening about 30 years too late. Then again it may be that the MCU being omnipresent has flooded my sensibilities around super heroes to the point I have started to become indifferent.  It should be a bit of surprise then that two of my favorite Image books are about super heroes. I am loving Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman's Vanish ! It is an interesting

 Steam updates their OS for the Steam Deck. As a result, I notice an option to install Final Fantasy XIII to either the internal HD or SD card. On a whim, I install to the SD card. The download takes 14 hours for 50 GB of data. I boot the game and it refuses to move past the launcher regardless of my chosen settings. I delete. I reinstall to the HD. The game runs beautifully.  I learned a thing. I continue noodling on the implications for several days. Data read from the micro SD card processes more slowly than data on the hard drive. This makes sense to me. The SD card is large capacity but I did not consider data transfer rate when I purchased it. The internal solid state drive has the best capacity offered at launch and solid state drives are sold on the merits of their small physical size and amazing processing speed.  What have I been running from the SD card up to this point? Nothing but classic game emulation. Thinking of these games they run in 8-bit, 16-bit, and 64 bit graphic

 I have had one question burning through my mind lately: "What are you willing to sacrifice to accomplish your goals?"  There are lots of reasons that I could be thinking about that. I am happy for a friend of mine who recently got her doctorate. I've known a few Ph.D. recipients. They all had to sacrifice something to get to that place in their education. I respect the sacrifice and dedication those people have... in some cases even if I don't care for the person. I also had waited a few years to drop," What's up, Doc," on her. Sometimes my "wit" is lacking, but that gem was worth the wait.  This is me victory dancing about it.  I have also been contemplating 2023. I am late to the game this year in ciphering resolutions. Then again, I don't really give a shit about resolutions based around the calendar. I much prefer goal setting. One thing that has worked for me in the past to change my diet is to use the first day of the new year as a c

This last week has been a struggle. It started with Ashley coming in feeling bad last Saturday. I was relieved for her when she was mostly recovered in about a day. I thought to myself," That seemed nasty. At least it doesn't last long." Teagan set out to prove me wrong. She waxed and waned sick all week. She would go from bouncing around the house (an action I worked to curtail) to laying about and finally cycle to vomiting repeatedly.  I made a few good decisions at this point. I lessened my food intake significantly. I ramped up my hydration slightly. I made sure I got plenty of rest even if it felt odd to take a nap rather than eating lunch or right after the end of my shift. I had a few minor stomach upsets and thought I was in the clear. No. I was not. Early Friday morning I got Sick. It was bad enough for me to call out of work for the day.                                                                                                                               

 I struggled so hard to enjoy Final Fantasy X. When I found myself avoiding playing it for literally anything else I abandoned ship and went to Final Fantasy XII Zodiac Age. I put eighty hours of game time into FFXIIZA. I completed the main story and all but one of the hunts. I realized that there was probably another fifty hours of content that I wanted to get into. I wanted to run through the challenge tower. I wanted to finish that level seventy hunt. I wanted to unlock the last three espers.  I also have been pretty excited to get into Final Fantasy XIII. I have not replayed XIII at all. I finished it once in the Playstation 3 era and never looked back. I haven't run through the sequels. There was a bit of an internal debate on picking up my Nintendo 2DS and running through Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings before getting into XIII. I was also tempted to keep grinding on FFXIIZA.  In the end two things won me into moving on to XIII. First, the road ahead in my Final Fantasy seri

It has been a good weekend for my cooking. It seems as if it weren't meant to be that way, but I pulled a few things out of my bags of tricks. Let's start with Friday which was Dad's birthday.  Dad likes few things better than going out to a restaurant. I cook nearly daily and always make enough for the whole family. Rarely, Dad joins in. I have paid careful attention to the things he likes and things he avoids. I have one big problem in cooking for him. I love spicy food. He does not. Even when I tone down my chili from a five alarm to a two alarm it still doesn't sit right with him.  By sheer happenstance, I stumbled across a meal he enjoyed a while back. I made up cubed steaks with mashed potatoes and corn on a whim. Dad joined us for dinner. He commented that cubed steak with gravy is one of his favorite meals. I took note and decided I would make it for his birthday.  I had my plans change on me a few days of last week. Things come up. It happens. I didn't want