A non comprehensive list of things to dig into in greater detail in 2023:
A Star Citizen Gift Guide: Christmas 2022
Sign up using a referral link: For most of the year there is some sort of promotion where both you and the person you invite get a bonus: Currently the bonus is a ship!

Use my promo link: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/enlist?referral=STAR-VZF6-9RBT to create an account. This is free and enables you to fly during the free fly events throughout the year even if you don’t buy a game pack yet. There are two major free fly events in May and in November that usually last 10-12 days and let you fly a wide range of ships for free during the event.

When you decide to buy a game pack, head to the pledge store and add a game package ship to the cart:
Cutter, Avenger Titan, CX8 Pisces, Nomad, Cutlass, or Freelancer are great choices because you can do all sorts of missions with them. Arrow, Hornet, and 100i are good too, but don’t pick Aurora or Mustang. The other options are significantly better. I would get the Titan or Pisces as top 2 contenders for best starter ship.

Most ships can be purchased with in game currency, but if you want it in your hanger from the start you have to buy it from the pledge store. One nice thing is that you can exchange your purchases for store credits and buy something else if you get bored and want to try out a different ship between free fly events. You do needs game package ship to play, but you can upgrade that game pack to a more expensive ship if you find one you really enjoy.
Ships are sold on a rotating basis so a particular ship might not be in the pledge store, but they will all be there during the November free fly and ship sale event. The May free fly and ship sale event is military themed so while it does have a ton of ships available, it is not the full selection as it is in November.
the more things change
eudaemonia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
“The good composed of all goods; an ability which suffices for living well; perfection in respect of virtue; resources sufficient for a living creature.”
Aristotle says that the eudaimonic life is one of “virtuous activity in accordance with reason…
even Epicurus, who argues that the eudaimonic life is the life of pleasure, maintains that the life of pleasure coincides with the life of virtue…
Eudaimonia implies a positive and divine state of being that humanity is able to strive toward and possibly reach. A literal view of eudaimonia means achieving a state of being similar to benevolent deity…
a better surface
Here are a few ideas for improving the Microsoft Surface:
Replace the custom charger with two additional modern USB ports, or one legacy USB port for backward compatibility.
Replace the custom Keyboard connection with another USB port.
Stop selling low RAM devices. Make 16GB RAM the base amount.
Pair the keyboard cover via Bluetooth.
a look into popular family history presentation formats
A look at the familysearch.org family tree view:



Now a look at the same family on Ancestry.com in their ‘Pedigree’ view:


Ancestry offers both a ‘Pedigree’ view and a ‘Family tree’ view, and the ‘Family Tree’ view functions relatively (pun intended) the same as the familysearch.org family tree view, but they are presenting it with every node open in both directions, which gets unwieldy fast.

thoughts on Control
Here is my one sentence review:
AMAZING; WHERE IS MORE?
The key game mechanic that sets Control apart from most games these days is that it allows itself to be hard. The Board training gives you just enough info to survive. You slowly acquire more and more abilities, but it is up to you to figure out how to figure out the right combos for the right enemies. There’s no magic bullet; no one size fits all OP ability that lets you just stomp on everything just by pushing that button every single time.
I’d been flying spaceships in Star Citizen for too long and Control reminded me of everything that I really enjoyed about the ghost of gaming past.
Happy Easter – Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Next year this will turn out looking much better, but it tastes and smells wonderful.
2020/4/2 space math
Assuming SpaceX hits their 100T to orbit goal, one relatively full load of steel plates at 6.36m² x 0.31cm thickness (and roughly 175,000 lbs) laid out in a square would be a flat surface of 484m². If you think about making a bigger ship where the surfaces are 484m², you can build a borg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borg) cube style vehicle hull in a month… or a drake cat hull ( https://starcitizen.tools/Caterpillar) style vehicle of 5325m length in less than a year (assuming they can match current capabilities of weekly launches and not the multiple times daily that SpaceX has ambitions for).
As a visual reference: 484m² is roughly 210 shipping containers square and 5325m is roughly 978 shipping containers long. This type of vehicle could easily self-sustainably support a crew of 100+ very comfortably with current o2 tech. SpaceX and others will no doubt improve on and significantly advance the life support tech needed for larger sustainable space vehicles.
As with most estimates, all these numbers have rounding slippage at every level of the calculation, but this is actually a good thing given that the vehicle hauling things to orbit (Starship) is currently in prototype form and having extra wiggle room on volume and weight is a good thing.
Fedora – it just works
Switched over to Fedora in Q1 after fighting Ubuntu for too long. Fedora just works right out of the box. https://getfedora.org/en/workstation/
April 1, 2021: Quick Links
Commentary from Flula on NFT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3TQ8yR-erg and Crypto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUB9jgMuC7U
Bell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM8T-6OvWpo from the same animation studio that did Wolf Children
Coinbase is putting their stock on the public market https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-announces-effectiveness-of-registration-statement-and-anticipated-listing-date-of-its-1509b281f760
Hunt for Red October is still amazing.
Argo: https://blog.argoproj.io
Origin 404: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/18064-404#skus and accompanying video: https://youtu.be/nF7NR8ffOqM
Lumber dislocatio: not a joke, both futures and in-person, if you can find it in stock (and they let you buy it), the prices have multiplied significantly.

