Phil Olin

Yesterday’s road trip was to Nashua, NH for a new bike day! Things lined up to check out this XXL Trek Fuel 8 they had on the floor. A big upgrade from the Surly Moonlander I bought a decade ago. Can’t wait to hit some mountain bike trails.

After 6 hours in the car on Wednesday and 9 today, I’m ready for no road trips for at least the next month.

My haul from the Baltimore Pen Show. 6 new nib grinds, including on the Kasama Una, and Esterbrook Estie Honeycomb. One new bottle of ink, Wearingeul For Whom The Bell Tolls, picked up a preordered Schon Monoc nib, and an oversized Esterbrook Estie.

The Baltimore Aquarium was a ton of fun. The Sawfish in Shark Alley was really cool.

Made it to the Baltimore Pen Show. Our first show since the Philly Pen Show in January 2019. We had a great time, so nice to see friends that we haven’t seen in 4 years. A bit overwhelming for the 3yr old, but we survived.

Made it to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Museum today. We had a great time, old steam engines are amazingly huge machines.

Finished reading: The Empire of Gold by S. A. Chakraborty 📚

This was a fantastic series, I found myself reading this one at any free moment, even if it was just a page, because I wanted to see what was going to happen with Ali, Nahri, and Daevabad.

Pearl has been sitting next to me at the table quite a lot lately. Normally she isn’t clingy like this.

Finished reading: The Kingdom of Copper by S. A. Chakraborty 📚

I think this one was better than City of Brass. Looking forward to the final book of the trilogy.

It’s February in central NY. We should be getting cold weather and plenty of snow.

Instead we are getting torrential rains and thunder and lightning.

Trying out the new Stops app and it’s film style grain. I like the simplicity of this app.

Finished reading: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern 📚

I don’t know where to start. The Starless Sea was very intriguing, and nothing like I expected. I didn’t want to put it down.

Finished reading: Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game by Joseph Goodman 📚

Ok, yes, I skipped reading most of the spell and monster sections, because that was a lot. But I’m really excited to try this system at some point. The impending death, complete randomness of things, this really sounds like a fun system to play.

I love my watching my computer’s uptime count up. Current uptime on my M1 MBP:

❯ uptime 16:14 up 72 days, 19:55

[Scones] tastes like a muffin, but it sucks all the spit out of your mouth.

• Ted Lasso

I hate scones for exactly this reason, and this line got a good chuckle out of me.

Finished reading: The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty 📚

Really enjoyed this one. Having Djinn as the subject instead of the typical European/Tolkien fare was a nice change.

I’m a fan of Kraken Rum, but not so much their limited edition Black Roast coffee rum. It had a sickly fake coffee flavor. This bottle label was the only good thing about the bottle.

Finished reading: The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik 📚

Really enjoyed this series, and this one wrapped things up with a solid ending. I think I’ll be looking for more of Naomi Novik’s work.

Finished reading: The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik 📚

The cliff hanger from the first book felt insignificant, but once I got halfway through, I didn’t want to put this down. The lead up to the the final pages sucked me in like a maw-mouth. Looking forward to book 3.

My Dungeon Crawl Classics handbook has arrived. I was not expecting a college textbook sized tome.

Pretty sure this is proof that both college textbooks and WotC D&D books are grossly overpriced.

My D&D book collection. I haven’t played in about a year, and hope to play again soon. I have no plans to get rid of these books, except maybe the 4e ones (ugh, bad), but WotC won’t be getting more money from me. I have a few other TTRPG handbooks headed my way to review.

Set up a new micro.blog theme. Still playing around with ways to combine omg.lol and micro.blog.

Micro.blog is amazing. I’ve been using it for a few years now. Omg.lol is also amazing, but I haven’t done much with it yet as I need to figure out someway to combine them to work together.

Finished reading: Ink & Sigil by Kevin Hearne 📚

Really enjoyed this one. It was a bit interesting, I can’t say I’ve ever read a book written with Glaswegian dialect written out, but after a couple chapters, it got easier. A modern day setting, with old fantasy elements.

Played Magic the Gathering for the first time in over a decade. Pulled out my old decks to play with friends. We had a good time, and even played with my Planescape cards to throw chaos into the battlefield. Might have to pick up some booster packs in the near future.