What a great year. Kelly and I got engaged. Kelly gained permanent employment and health benefits. We made lots of new friends locally, especially Amanda, Evie, and Wes. We paid off our car. We bought a freezer and organized our home. I'm proud of going way above and beyond to follow the Atkins diet even if it didn't produce results. I launched Pirate Paradise and re-launched Thorough Movie Reviews, and had fun with lots of other things on this site too. I resumed watching movies frequently, something I missed from years past. If it wasn't for losing our cat, losing GooCon, and an ongoing deficiency of discipline regarding food and money, I'd say it was just about a perfect year. Here's hoping for more continued good fortune in 2013, to you and to us all.


Logical Operator

The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

Breaking Monopoly

My latest pastime has been seeing if I can rig a video game of Monopoly to give me infinite money. It turns out that I can, but it's incredibly tedious, far more so than I thought. I like to play with the NES version, because it's just colorful and fun enough without being too sophisticated in its AI. Go »

The Dragon

This is the first of four weekly blog posts about diagnoses that have completely changed my life since the pandemic started. Let's get the gravest one out of the way first. Until recently, I never appreciated how essential the future was to your mental health. Go »

Summer of Suck II

Science says that complaining is bad for you, but sometimes it helps me feel better, so I'm going to do it anyway. It's my blog and I can cry if I want to. Summer has arrived and I'm miserable. Go »

Scott's Pet Peeve #2519

Why do some microwaves have a convenient quick-start option if you press 1 or 2 or 3, so that they instantly start cooking with 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 on the clock... but DON'T have this same functionality programmed into 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9, which do nothing when pressed alone? How does an engineer possess both the vision to provide the former and the lack of imagination that results in the latter? Go »

WLW: No Payin', No Gain

My weight loss plan – which has become our weight loss plan, since Kelly intends to do just about everything I do – is on hold until I can recover from the move, which took my last penny and then some. On the bright side, I've been eating less since getting together with Kelly, and I burned what felt like a week's worth of calories during that move. We should start walking soon before we settle into a daily routine. Go »

Great Weekend

Some people love going fishing all weekend; others prefer a romantic getaway. The perfect weekend for me these days means getting enough sleep and writing a FIN post from start to finish, since getting even one of those is a rarity. But this weekend, I put everything else aside and did both. Go »