July 4, 2017

 This morning I worked on the book overlay thing for Elite Dangerous. I decided to go with a thin metal border around the screen and then a small screen that has the book on it coming out of the middle of it on the right side with the title “Public Domain Book Club. I think it turned out pretty well. At some point I want to turn it into a GIF but I'm happy with what I came up with today.

This afternoon I finally got around to playing Elite Dangerous. It seems like I go far too long in between play sessions. I continued the road to riches exploration and I have now made it through twenty-four scans. I also figured out how to know which planets to scan. The list I am using gives the system to go to and the planets to scan, but the planets in the system don't have names until you scan them. Previously I was making best guesses on which planets to scan and there was a lot of trial and error. Today I figured out that I can do a quick scan when I jump into a system to show all the planets in the area, then I can go to the system map and mark a planet that I want to scan. If the planet on my list has a three at the end, it is the third planet from the sun, and so on and so forth. It is so much easier than what I was doing before. I added another three million credits today and now I'm looking for a place to unload another set of scans.

While I played I listened to Ready Player One. I made it through two more discs today and will be on disc ten when I listen again. I'm kind of getting tired of it. Fifteen and a half hours is a lot of book and there is so much detail in this book. It is also super annoying when the leaderboard is read off because he reads the entire top ten every single time. That is the kind of thing that you would glance at when reading the book but not necessarily read word-for-word. It is very tedious to listen to. But I'm going to power through because I want to know what happens.

For dinner I scrambled eggs with red bell peppers, because that is my combo of choice at the moment, and made nachos, because I had some tortilla chips and cheese to use up. I had just started washing dishes when my friend and his sister showed up, about fifteen minutes earlier than expected. They hung out on the porch, enjoying the furniture I never use, and I finished up.

We went to buy fireworks and my friend got the 10% military discount without having to write down all of his information (because he didn't want to get spam mail) when he told them just to charge him full price. Reverse psychology.

When we got back to his parent's house we hung out for awhile because it was still light out. I got a piece of birthday cake, a bunch of cherries, and a couple thin Oreos, which I didn't even know was a thing but they were pretty good. While we waited I suggested my friend pull his parent's white car out of the garage and park it on the street along with the red and blue cars already there, for the sake of patriotism. My friend did that and also had his sister stand in front of them and wave an American flag. We were definitely the most patriotic group on the block.

After the sun went down my friend lit the fireworks he bought. I was the flashlight guy, which is arguably more important than the fireworks. At least I would argue that. When the fireworks were over I helped pick up the trash, because that's what you're supposed to do, not leave it all out in the street.

On the way home we basically made a loop through town just to see what was going on. The answer, not a lot. And when I got home, I started writing this, with a healthy dose of distractions. And it is now creeping up on 12:30AM so I am going to stop typing, record my audio journal, and go to bed.