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New Year's Goals projects

My 2024 Goals

Slowing down has been a common theme in my past goals, and that is coming up again. It doesn’t come naturally to me, but I hope to build enough habits to make it happen anyways. Setup a Personal LLM Chatbot ChatGPT is a big deal, and generative AI keeps getting more and more impressive. I […]

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food movies video games

My 2023 Recommendations

This year is pretty thin on recommendations. I looked through my Goodreads and so forth, but this is all I found. Honorable Mentions Just to fill out the list, I added a few honorable mentions this year.

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food New Year's Goals sports

2023 Goals Review

Early last year, I set three goals for 2023. It’s now 2024, and although I haven’t set new goals yet, I at least can reflect on how the old goals went. Notably, we had another child last year, which changes almost everything about life, including how goals went. I’ll focus on progress before my life […]

Categories
parenting

Our Process For Picking Baby Names

One of favorite conversation starters is to ask someone how they got their name or how they chose the names for their children. Sometimes people really don’t know, but often, there’s a decent story behind the name. It’s taboo to ask expecting parents what the baby name is, but it’s certainly fair game to ask […]

Categories
personal

How I’m Adapting My GMing Style

A few days ago, I realized my current Dungeon World game wasn’t working. My players frequently were completely stuck about what to do next. I would follow through on the natural consequence of the players’ actions, and it often felt really harsh. I presented quest hooks, and my players would just move on. In short, […]

Categories
football

The Pac-4?

At the time I’m writing this, the Pac-12 only has four teams left starting with the 2024-2025 season. UCLA, USC, Washington, and Oregon are leaving for the Big Ten, and the Big 12 is getting Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah. That leaves Washington State, Oregon State, Cal, and, most importantly, Stanford as the four […]

Categories
reading television

Can a Book be Compelling but Bad?

My book club is currently doing a series of hate reads, and our most recent book was Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us. This book is incredibly popular, garnering almost 3 million ratings on Goodreads so far, and it keeps gaining 7 years later. At an average rating of 4.23, it’s also well-received. Yet, it’s […]

Categories
tabletop games

How To Start DMing D&D Games

Yesterday, I was chatting online with internet strangers about playing D&D. It started when someone mentioned wanting to play but not having any friends to play with, then switched to players being interested but too scared to run D&D. Having mostly run (rather than played) tabletop RPGs, I was quite interested to hear why. Every […]

Categories
D&D movies

“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” Review

It’s weird when your niche interests and hobbies have their moment. In some ways, it’s quite validating for other people to discover and love what you love. On the other hand, this thing that was once your special thing is now just popular culture. You were there before it was cool, and you hopefully don’t […]

Categories
parenting travel

Road Trip to Monterey

With a handful of vacation days to use, we wanted to take a short, local family vacation. After evaluating the options, we decided to make the short drive down to Monterey to see the Monterey Bay Aquarium and see the beach. We haven’t had many family vacations. In fact, we have only done overnights away […]