Five mistakes we made during our first Early Retirement

We retired early (the first time) in 2014 at age 33. Within two years, we were both back at work. After knowing what went wrong, we made adjustments, and I’m happy to say that we retired again in 2020 and it’s been going much better. Without further ado, here are five things we did wrong (and five we did right)...

Quest for Glory I

Quest for Glory 1 is one of my favorite role-playing games, and one of the first I played. Sierra walked the line between adventure and puzzle games beautifully in the series, making something that still feels unique. Ultimately, though, what keeps bringing me back is the setting and the story, told with impressive graphics, great music, and witty dialog that...

What To Save For

So you’ve made a budget and now you’re starting to save. What should you do with the money?

Frugal Tip: Starbucks Cold Brew Refills

I’ve been a fan of the Starbucks Vanilla Sweet Cream cold brew since it came out and a lover of cold brew coffee since the days before Seattle’s Best Coffee disappeared. I’m not willing to buy coffee out every day, so I learned to make cold brew at home and mix reasonable replicas of my Seattle’s Best iced mocha and...

The American Rescue Plan, ACA, and Roth conversions

The American Rescue Plan became law on March 11th, 2021, and I was surprised to figure out that it changes the taxable income we want to aim for in 2021 and 2022 significantly.

How We Budget

When we got our first real jobs, we put our paychecks into our checking account and bought everything from there. It couldn’t be easier, and I’m sure many people do the same thing. The problem was that while we didn’t spend more than we had, we also weren’t saving up anything. When we wanted to take a vacation, it wasn’t...

DOSBox Cheat Sheet

Some quick tables about DOSBox that I kept looking for.

Win95 on DOSBox

I needed Windows to run SimTower, so I decided to try getting Win95 to run on DOSBox. The walkthroughs online had some skippable steps and I ran into some problems, and then I got distracted optimizing it.. Anyway, here are my terse, working steps for getting very nice Win95 DOSBox images.

GitHub Pages and Domain.com DNS

After some (mis)adventures, I finally got my custom domain name directed to my GitHub Pages site successfully. Here is what worked, in case someone else has the same problem.

SimTower Max Tower

A few days after my previous SimTower adventure, I wanted to revise my tower design. My retail-heavy-attempt was straightforward and didn’t take too many floors, but I thought it’d be fun to try to build consistently all the way up to the 100th floor cathedral, and to try to max out many of the in-game limits right when I...