Month: March 2023

Keeping up with the roughly one-post-a-month cadence, I can share that I got in a weekend of woodworking!

After just a handful of years of doing the occasional woodworking project, we had an abundance of offcuts, scraps, and other bits of wood spread across four or five bins in the garage. After coming across Steve Ramsey's video showing off a simple lumber cart, along with provided drawings, I decided that was probably the right solution for our garage shop. That happened probably a year ago, and we picked up the plywood sheets a couple weeks back when we had a truck rented to haul more materials for the library build. Only last week did we finally set aside from time to get the rough cuts done, and this past weekend I sank about 4 hours each day into cutting the dadoes and bevels, re-cutting pieces I'd screwed up, gluing and everything, and of course running to buy casters, washers, screws, etc. For a piece of shop furniture, it took a solid time investment; that said, the garage is so much cleaner and knowing where, for example, all my 3/4" stock is, will make it a lot easier to know what's needed for future projects. I didn't think to take photos until everything was done, so enjoy a corner of the freshly de-crowded garage.

Back in early 2022 I picked up a copy of Elden Ring on steam and played through it a couple times, trying out different builds and pursuing different quests each time. I can't recall exactly how I got the idea of doing challenge runs into my head, probably YouTube, but I decided to do a couple. First was a fist-weapon only run, which honestly was a blast and far easier than I thought it would be. Second was a level 1 run, so starting with the Wretch class and never leveling up. That proved to be a much much harder challenge. While there were certainly breaks, and a month-long vacation in the middle, it took me about 6 months to complete that run. After about the first third of the run, it occurred to me to record my boss fight attempts, partly for instant-reply to figure out where I'd screwed up, but also to share the successful attempts afterward. The /r/OneBros subreddit, a place where people post their wins in From Soft games with characters at minimum level, had no small part in encouraging me to keep at it. Some of the videos are straightforward recordings with minimal annotation, while others I used as exercises to practice my basic video editing skills. I've embedded the toughest fight below, but the whole playlist can be found here.