O-Dark-Thirty

Starbound. I suggest you play the game a little bit on Casual instead of Survival. It takes a while to manage eating food and not dying, and Casual is much more forgiving. You die in casual and you lose 10% of your pixels (money) and respawn on your ship. You can teleport to your ship from anywhere. Not so in Survival! You lose 30% of your pixels, all your gathered materials (you do keep your weapons and armor and I think most of "first tab" stuff). You have to eat to stay alive or you can starve to death. You can only teleport to your ship from the surface. That actually turns out to be a pain. The worst thing that can happen is to be in the bowels of the planet and you realize you have no food left and you need to get to the surface! Ouch. HINT: If this happens, and you are fortunate enough to find a portal to a challenge level, you can go there and die. You'll then respawn on your ship with only pixel loss. So learn to play the game a bit in Casual. Lea...

MERRY CHRISTMAS - 2016. It is the Season of Love. Let me tell you about the greatest present I ever received, the greatest significant event of my life. It started on the first Christmas. A virgin birthed the Son of God in a small town called Bethlehem. Joseph fled with Jesus and Mary to Egypt, then returned to Israel, where Jesus grew up in Nazareth. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. When He began His earthly ministry, his cousin John the Baptist heralded His coming as the Messiah, the Savior of the World. After three years of ministering to His followers, Jesus the Christ went to the cross and gave His life and paid the price for the sins of all mankind. Jesus Christ fulfilled hundreds of prophecies, many of them written in the book of Isaiah, a book found in the Dead Sea scrolls and carbon dated to over two hundred years before the birth of Jesus. (My cousin, an awesome writer, posted more about this on Facebook .) He did t...

December 24, 2016 - and Merry Christmas Eve to everyone! As you are no doubt aware, I am a gamer. I was a gamer before it was a cool thing. We hid in darkened rooms with our Commodore 64 machines and played Bard's Tale (the original - what a rush). We upgraded to the Amiga and slobbered over the fabulous graphics, but still fell back to the game play of King's Quest. I could make a list - and I think I did once. I'll post it if I find it. One of my all-time favorite games was Darklands , and if you ever played it - welcome, my friend! I still have the original disks, box and game book for that one. I also have a CD with the final released version of the game. Now I play Skyrim and Fallout - and it won't be many years until we are all playing true VR games. Not quite the holodeck, but we're getting there. We played World of Warcraft for over a decade, but it grew old and stale (sorry, Blizzard) and we left and never really returned. We play Minecraft, and...

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you But make allowance for their doubting too, If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master, If you can think and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools: If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and ne...

I worked with a guy at Boeing that really knows a lot about guns. This is how he says to clean them, which is a lot simpler than I ever thought. I had to post this so I would not forget it. Thanks Brian O'Keeffe. You know your guns! Well, this is going to sound funny.  But while most people will use the usual gun cleaners like Hopps or Outers or Gunslick from all the gun shops & sporting goods store, I learned from a Master Armourer Gunsmith video (yes, it was VHS) that Simple Green works best, followed by warm water rinse & dried thoroughly, followed by a good oiling. Word of caution here, do not mix dissimilar metals/finishes while immersed in Simple Green (I did not learn this from a video or reading, but by experience), Simple Green is slightly caustic and will cause dissimilar metals to react enough to mess up a gun finish when the dissimilar metal parts touch! I have used this method of cleaning with great success on my semiautos & revolvers & bl...

My thoughts interspersed with the Raw Notes from the sermon on Sunday, 27-November-2016. The sermon encompassed Psalm 1. Here's the entire passage: Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither; and whatever he does shall prosper. The ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind drives away. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the ungodly shall perish. The world can be an ugly place. Wickedness abounds, and we see evil all around us. Just look at the news of the woman kidnapped for three weeks and finally returned to her famil...

A famous photographer once went to dinner with some friends."You take such good photos," said the hostess. "You must have a fabulous camera." The photographer smiled. "I do," he replied. "And dinner was great. You must have some wonderful pots and pans." Yeah, I stole that from somewhere, but the eye of the photographer is as important as the tools. However, in the world of photography, the camera can make a huge difference. Darling just got her new Nikon Coolpix P900 with an 83x digital zoom. Yeah, that's a lot of camera, and I can't recommend it highly enough. (Full disclosure: that's an affiliate link) So here are some pictures of the SuperMoon, one from the night before (Nov 13, 2016) and one from the night of the full moon (Nov 14, 2016). Because we live in the USA, the moon was a little bigger the night before. Nov 13 - love the view of the craters Nov 14 FYI, this was the closest the moon has been...

This was my final post on O-Dark-Thirty in February, 2015. Though I thought I wouldn't continue the blog, I found I wanted to. Maybe I needed to. And Tim would want me to keep writing. This one is a memorial of sorts. In the depths of depression and with a broken heart, my youngest brother Tim killed himself on November 16, 2014, two years ago. That was a  previous post . Much about his death remains unsaid even after all these years, though my brother David wrote an excellent summary on his blog . The news networks publish headlines when young children are bullied and kill themselves. When it happens to an adult, and happens because of political and government bullies, the case simply fades away on some obscure page of the news. Still, depression killed my baby brother. I miss him a lot, some days so sharply that my heart breaks anew. If you are depressed and you feel you have no option except to end your own life, I want you to know something. Please don't. Hundreds...

Peter the Apostle failed. When Jesus called him from the boat, Peter sank. When the Romans captured Jesus, Peter denied him. When Jesus died on the cross, Peter was absent. Life is hard and we all fail. Look again.  Of all the apostles on the boat, Peter is the one who stepped out. Jesus lifted him from the water when he sank. He tried, failed and grabbed the hand of the Redeemer. As the Romans beat Jesus, Peter tried to be there. When confronted, he failed, as Jesus foretold. When he failed this time, he went off and wept. As Jesus cried "It is finished," Peter stayed hidden, probably still weeping at the loss of his friend and Master. Peter did not understand. Look once more. When the women told the disciples that the tomb was empty, Peter and John ran to see. Peter stooped down and entered the empty tomb. What do you think he did then? He searched. He prayed. He dared to hope that a loving God, Jesus, would have mercy on him and forgive him Tha...