Stone Story RPG on Steam

(store.steampowered.com)

🎮 Stone Story looks like a fascinating retro take on the modern RPG. It's animated entirely in ASCII symbols (and looks beautiful), but it also has a unique minimalist AI based interface where you equip the character and then turn it loose to do the actual fighting (although you can swap weapons during combat). Resource acquisition and crafting also factor heavily into the gameplay and the longterm goal is a highly replayable game that supports user generated content.

Wonder Building eateries see smiling faces, busy lines during first full day of business

(www.spokesman.com)

Restaurants in the 110-year-old Wonder Building saw their first full day of operation Monday when the building’s ground floor officially opened to the public.

The Spokesman Review has some nice opening day coverage (including pictures) of the newly remodeled space. Looks great, and I'm tempted to go try a lobster roll and clam chowder at High Tide Lobster Bar now.

New Wonder Building marketplace now open

(www.kxly.com)

A piece of Spokane's history has found new life as an old bread factory turned office building now sees even more change -- in the form of a new marketplace that's taken years to shape.

I run and drive by this part of Spokane quite regularly so I've been watching the Wonder Building remodel with interest. The new marketplace is going to be a great addition to the neighborhood.

Upgrade 271: The 16-inch MacBook Pro

(overcast.fm)

🎙 Fantastic 16" MacBook Pro coverage on Upgrade 271 as Jason Snell has an exclusive interview about the new model with Apple’s MacBook Pro product manager, Shruti Haldea, and then he and Myke Hurley discuss his initial experiences with a review unit.

Gruber's 16-Inch MacBook Pro First Impressions: Great Keyboard, Outstanding Speakers

(daringfireball.net)

Looks like Apple's finally back on track with their laptop design after three years in the weeds. Once there's a 13" model with the new keyboard I'm going to ask work to replace my 5+ year-old MacBook Air.

Kieran Trippier: ˜Everywhere I go they shout Rooney at me.

(www.theguardian.com)

⚽ Interesting Guardian interview with former Spurs defender Kieran Trippier. Sounds like he's adapting well to playing for Atlético Madrid in Spain's La Liga and found a level of happiness that was missing last season at Tottenham.

The Final Frontier

(www.newyorker.com)

📺 The Final Frontier is a really moving New Yorker piece on Star Trek: Picard showrunner Michael Chabon's final moments with his dying father, who was an original series purist. This had a lot of resonance for me both as a Star Trek fan, and someone who lost my father to cancer almost 20 years ago.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says Apple Card discriminated against his wife

(www.cnn.com)

First it was David Henemier Hansen's wife getting the shaft from Apple Card, now Woz reports the same issue for his spouse. Apple and Goldman Sachs have a serious issue on their hands and a lot of people and companies are going to be scrambling depending on how this all plays out.

CJ Elleby leads Washington State over Seattle U

(www.spokesman.com)

Led by a relentless defense, WSU chewed up Seattle University for a decisive 85-54 nonconference men’s basketball victory Thursday at Beasley Coliseum.

🏀 I thought Kyle Smith was a great coaching hire based on the job he did at USF; what a great beginning to his WSU tenure!

Garden Shed Report

Made a ton of progress on my garden shed building project over the last four days. I still need to pick up one board at Home Depot on the way home tonight as I'm short a final six foot piece, but otherwise the roof is ready for the final metal layer. I'm actually planning to put down roofing felt first underneath the metal, particularly since my mom had an entire unused roll left at her house. I'm hopeful that it will be enough to cover the whole thing up.

As far as the metal roofing goes I'm going to attempt to recycle some of the siding and roofing from our current metal garden shed after I disassemble it. I'm cautiously optimistic that this will work out, but I'm operating purely on guesswork and estimation at this point. I'll have a much clearer sense of things once the old garden shed is apart and I can fully measure and test the individual metal sheets.

On a funny hardware note I used almost $40 worth of deck screws to assemble the roof. A pound of 3" screws to attach the rafters to the top of the walls and 5 pounds worth of 1-5/8" screws to attach all the cross boards to the top of the rafters. My Craftsman portable Li-Ion Drill has been a serious trooper and even survived a longer than desirable fall!