Beware those who tread here, for there be MAJOR Spoilers ahead.

Stephen King has never written an ending I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve read many of his books, most of them from his younger days, and I’ve never really left any of his books satisfied. There is a fundamental disagreement Mr. King and I have. I truly believe that the ending of the book should never make the journey feel worthless. What I mean, is that you should never write an ending that makes the reader feel like they’ve wasted their time, and with almost every King book I’ve read, I’ve felt that the ending just didn’t quite make the story worth my while. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, as they say.

I’m a keyboard guy, we all know this about me. During my time as a “keyboard guy” I’ve tried out several different layouts. Everyone uses qwerty, but there are benefits to some of the other, less popular layouts. I’ve tried Colmak (dh and regular) and Dvorak. I’ve always failed at this transition. I can write about 100WPM on qwerty, depending on how bad my dyslexia is handling the day, but that drops to the low 20s on other layouts. Now, as with anything, the way to improve is to practice. But I’m not good at sticking with things when it impacts using my computer. And switching layouts does that because all of my keybindings for my text editor, my window manager, and many other things are all done with the expectation that I’m using qwerty.

Yesterday I talked about some of the things I’ve done on the blog. Well, today, I’ve been under the weather a little, so I decided to go ahead and tweak my blog some more.

If you’re on desktop (i.e. not on mobile), look down at the lower right hand corner. See the theme name? Click that. Change to one of the provided themes and BAM! You get a new theme on my site. Honestly, the hardest part was adding in all the hex codes. The JS was fine, really just a redo of my light theme switcher. I did finally make all my css colors variables, so it will be easy to add more themes in the future, should I choose to.

More updates have happened on the blog. I have a new “link” post type, that will allow me to share links to things I find interesting. This was fun to set up, and took a fair bit of doing. I wanted it to appear in the main hugo feed, and I wanted the posts to appear a bit different. At first, I thought about having a different background, but that didn’t look right. What I did instead, was make the post underline and the metadata a different color. If you go to the home page and scroll down, you’ll see my first attempt at this. I like it, though I will probably tweak it a bit in the future.

Did you know that I once had ambitions of being a tech blogger? Before I came to be a Linux content creator, I had several blogs that “covered” technology and gadgets. I even started a podcast about Tech and such with my friends. We still do that podcast to this day, but we now just review movies. I really loved the idea of making tech blogging my career. I loved new gadgets, and the idea that companies would send cool things to me for free? That was awesome.

One of the things I’ve noticed in a lot of adult fiction, is that authors tend to have their characters swear way too fucking much. Now, I’m not opposed to swearing. I think that it adds flavor and personality to dialogue that would be missing otherwise.

The problem is that it’s overused. Like with exclamation points, using the word “fuck” over and over again dilutes the message you’re trying to portray. Now, there is an exception to this. If the character is a potty mouth, then it’s fine. But having all of your characters swearing like sailors all the time? It just makes the words mean nothing.

I’m staring at my blog right now. You ever do that? Look at something you created and just stare at it in wonder? I often times will look at my blog or my YouTube page and think: “I made that!” It’s a good feeling, but not one you really remember until you’ve created something. It floats out of your consciousness, replaced by the lazy monkey in your brain that I talked about before.

So, September has been a total bust when it comes to reading. I just have not been able to settle my attention enough to actually get any reading done. I wrote back at the half way mark, that I was hoping to catch up. That did not happen. Not at all. I’ve opened a couple books, but I don’t think I’ve read a single page.

I’ve read some fanfiction, but I can’t seem to settle on a book and actually read it. So, I’m challenging myself. From October 1st (tomorrow) to October 31st, I’m going to strive to finish every book on my currently being read list. Right now that consists of:

It’s not like I don’t care about what goes on in the world. I do. But I don’t care about your opinion. It’s not personal, it goes for both sides of the political aisle. I think both sides are full of zealots who would watch the world burn if only they could be proven right. And the thing is, if you’re one of those on the far right or the far left, and you can bring yourself to be honest about it, you know I’m right.