This may come as a shock to you: I, Walter Mays, the ardent LaTeX fanatic, am not going to use LaTeX for every assignment anymore. What is this world coming to?! It’s not that I’m going to stop using LaTeX completely. I think that is a fantastic system for typesetting structured documents, and I’ve been having to put together several of those this semester. I wouldn’t trade the power of LaTex for the world.

This is one of several posts in my "Learn You Some Linux For Great Good" series. Part 0: A Word of Caution Part 1: Installation Part 2: Getting Comfortable Part 3: Command Line Syntax To fully understand the command line, you need to have a good grasp of the syntax of the command line. If you already understand how the shell breaks up arguments, and the concepts of flags, pipes, and redirections, then skip ahead to the next part.

This is one of several posts in my "Learn You Some Linux For Great Good" series. Part 0: A Word of Caution Part 1: Installation Part 2: Getting Comfortable Part 3: Command Line Syntax Once you’ve finished installation, your computer should ask you to restart. If it doesn’t, do it anyway. I’m sure you’re just dying to test out your new installation of Linux. Baby Steps When you reboot, you should see a menu pop up.

For those of you who see me every day (or, in the case of my parents, had to deal with this mess), you already know the story. For everyone else: I got in a car accident on February 13th. It was the stupidest accident I’ve ever heard of. I wasn’t hurt, and the other drivers weren’t hurt. It was about as fortunate as an accident like this can be. First off, some backstory: I noticed a few days earlier that my wheel was wobbling somewhat when I drove.

Good news everyone! I finished my first session as a GM, and I didn’t die! I’ve found a few strengths and many weaknesses, but I at least have some idea what’s going on. The Preparation I have a couple of close friends who have been GMs before. Neither of them has tons and tons of experience, but they have a good idea of what they’re doing. They recommended that I watch all of Matt Colville’s Running the Game series.

I’m going to start being a Game Master for a D&D game on Friday. I have no idea what I’m doing. That’s not exactly true. I’ve got a world that a friend built, I’ve got a few ideas going in, and I’ve got some generators I can use. But going into something like this with exactly zero experience is always going to be nerve-wracking. I’ve never run an encounter. I’ve never run a battle.

Those of you who have been following my blog know that I posted something called “The End Is Nigh,” in which I disparaged those who felt overwhelmed by school. Oh how the turntables… All it took was a good dose of too many credit hours. I was doing a healthy 15 credit hours last semester; this semester it’s up to 19. That isn’t to say I’m not enjoying it. I’m not, but that’s not why.

It’s official: I’ve shelled out for a domain name, waltermays.com, and pointed it to this very blog. Amazing! I waited a long time to do this, since a) I didn’t have a reason and b) that’s money I didn’t necessarily need to spend. But I think this is well worth it. I actually have something I can put on my resume, plus I get to say I have my own website.

I’ve been playing with game development for several years now. I’ve researched engines and frameworks, looked into drawing, level design, and music programs, and thrown around ideas. I even started programming a few of them. Guess how many I’ve finished. I’m not the only one with this problem. Most “game developers” never really get much farther than a working prototype of a few of their core mechanics. While that can be fun — if you call fiddling with weights until the movement doesn’t seem to floaty or heavy “fun” — it’s not as fulfilling as (I imagine) completing a game would be.

This is one of several posts in my "Learn You Some Linux For Great Good" series. Part 0: A Word of Caution Part 1: Installation Part 2: Getting Comfortable Part 3: Command Line Syntax So, you’ve decided to forge ahead. In this part we will discuss some important jargon to know, look at some distributions (and discuss how to tell them apart), create installation media, and install Linux.