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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • I got all but one achievement in Subnautica, and all of the achievements in Below Zero (the sequel) in my first playthrough of both games, just from taking my time and thoroughly exploring both of the worlds and completing the story without even consciously trying to go for the achievements.

    With that said, they are open world games and at times don’t really give you a whole of guidance as to what you need to do next. So you are kind of left to explore and figure it out on your own. If you don’t like that sort of game you might end up hating them by the end too.



  • The worst one I remember was having to read Great Expectations in high school. Maybe I might appreciate the book more today, but at the time I found it incredibly boring and it just seemed to drag on and on and on. It really felt like a written soap opera from the 1800’s, which it kind of was as it was originally published a serial where the reader got a small part of it every week. Which probably accounted for how slowly the plot seemed to move.

    Perhaps an honorable mention would go to “Triton”, as that’s the first book I remember where I started reading and actually got a decent way into it before putting it down as it was absolutely boring me out of my mind. Though I was a teen at the time, and one of my main sources of reading material was whatever I could find at garage sales for cheap. But nevertheless, almost always if I thought a book was interesting enough to buy it was also interesting enough for at least one read through, but that one stood out as an exception. Though I have to wonder if I tried reading it again today if I might manage to get through it this time.




  • It probably has to do with whether the driver’s license is Real ID compliant or not. Here in Minnesota, you have the option of getting the Real ID license that can be used as a federal ID card for things like flying, or the regular old driver’s license which soon will really only be good for showing you’re allowed to drive a car.

    I only have the regular driver’s license so I don’t know what all getting the Read ID involves, but having your biometric data scanned and stored seems like something they’d require.








  • I had the same problem, in a similar sized townhome. My solution was similar to your first option. I bought and installed a wireless thermostat. This was back in the late 2000’s, so it predates the “smart” thermostats like the Nest. It’s just a basic programmable thermostat you can move around.

    It works well enough. In the summer, I can move it upstairs so the upstairs stays cool. In the winter I could move it downstairs, but generally I leave it upstairs anyway because that’s where the bedrooms are. I remember the thermostat was a bit pricy back in the day, but I’m still using it some 15 years later so I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it.





  • With David Brin’s Uplift books, I’d just start with Startide Rising. It’s not so much a sequel to Sundiver, but another standalone book set in the same universe. There’s a couple of very minor references to Sundiver, but you’re not really missing anything if you haven’t read it going into Startide Rising.

    While Startide Rising is fantastic and is probably one of my favorite sci-fi books, I found Sundiver just wasn’t that good. It’s not really bad per se, but it was David Brin’s first novel and that really shows and has some issues with pacing, an unreliable narrator, and things like that (IMHO). It’s also more of a mystery/detective novel set in space whereas Startide Rising is space opera, so the whole feel of the two books is very different and can just boil down to what sort of books you like.

    I actually had read Startide Rising twice without even knowing Sundiver existed before looking it up online and realizing it was the second book in a series. I’ll probably pick up Startide Rising for another re-read sometime in the future, but for Sundiver once is probably enough.

    The third book The Uplift War, is also quite good, and similar to the other two it’s more of another standalone book that’s set in the same universe, with some minor references to the previous two. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the last three books - they are a trilogy more than a standalone books, and you’d probably want to have read the previous three books before tackling them (or at the very least, Startide Rising) because things aren’t going to make a lot of sense if you just jump right in. I found them a long read and they got really weird at the end. Like Sundiver I’d say once is enough for books 4-6 too.