Camping stuff giveaway

I'm clearing out a closet. It was filled with all sorts of old camping gear. The most recent is about ten years old. I have some distant dream of attending Free Spirit Gathering again. But it's been years, I don't know how long it will be before pandemic safety issues don't dominate my lifestyle, and I need…

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Faire Dreams

I dreamed about the NY Ren Faire again last night. To be sure, this wasn't the first time. I've dreamt about Faire periodically in the years since I left it. What's interesting to me is that my "mental map" of the Ren Faire in my dreams has slowly changed over the years. The layout changes: a new…

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800 Days of Klingon

As a celebration of my streak of 800 days of learning Klingon, I've updated an earlier post I wrote on my two-year anniversary of daily Klingon lessons. The update includes a nice video about the language. I've also corrected a few errors. It may be the sort of thing that no one will notice, but knowing that…

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Upgrading from Mojave: Keyboard, Audiobooks, etc.

About two years ago I wrote a series of posts on why I didn't want to upgrade the operating system on my 27-inch iMac. You've guessed it: I had to upgrade last October. That 2013 iMac was showing increasing problems, and there were software incompatibility issues that become too much to overlook. In this post, I'll review…

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Return to Monkey Island

This is a review of Return to Monkey Island from someone who never played the original games in the Monkey Island series. The TL;DR version: My apologies to the Monkey Island fans out there, but I don't understand what the fuss is about. While I enjoy the occasional hunt-n-click game, such as the various Telltale games, I'm…

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Ironies and charities

As many of my friends know, my mother passed away about two weeks ago. My father passed away just a little over a year earlier. My brother pointed out to me several ironies in connection with their deaths: Both of them had lived in homes they were comfortable in, but were forced to move to assisted living…

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Vallejo shifters, space dwarves, and ISS Vanguard

I originally thought that I'd never had to write this post. At the time I wrote this post on shading Tainted Grail miniatures, I was growing a bit tired of the exercise of airbrushing minis. I knew that painting the second wave of Etherfields minis was ahead of me. That was about the same time that I…

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Etherfields Wave 2: Zenithal Prime and Contrast Paints

This is another post in my series on my adventures in painting miniature figures. You can see the entire series by clicking on the CRAFTS link in the tag cloud to the right (if you're reading this on a desktop) or below (if you're reading this on a phone). Once again, I offer you lots of pictures…

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