Ben Overmyer's Site

Iron Arachne's eighth anniversary

2026-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Today is the 8th anniversary of the launch of Iron Arachne</a>. In those eight years, I've built some things I'm pretty proud of. The planet generator</a> and the culture generator</a> stand out most. There's still a lot of things I want to improve, and the list keeps growing. I daresay the list of things to do is increasing faster than the rate at which I do them.

The context for Iron Arachne shifted over the years. When I started it, I was no longer active in Silver Gryphon Games, but I was still working on tabletop role-playing games. A year or two later, I rejoined Silver Gryphon Games, and Iron Arachne shifted just a little in support of that. Then in 2023, Silver Gryphon Games formally closed. I focused more on Iron Arachne after that, and that's when the bigger releases (like the planet generator's current form) showed up. Last year, I sold most of my tabletop RPGs when I moved from North Carolina to Newfoundland, and Iron Arachne shifted to a worldbuilding focus over an RPG focus.

The only non-SGG RPGs I kept were Shadowdark</a>, Orbital Blues</a>, and Scott Compton's S.O.R.D</a>. </blockquote>
Since December, I have been working on a massive update to the site. I originally intended it to be launched today, but the scope of the changes requires much more time.
At first, the big update was a change to the @ironarachne/rng</a> library. I needed to be able to instantiate and seed more random number generators without affecting the global RNG. This was so I could fix a bug where, in a number of situations, altering the random results for a small piece of generation would affect completely unrelated random generation. So, I rewrote rng so that it would handle all of the random logic. This meant it replaced the random</a> and seedrandom</a> libraries I had been using up to that point.
Updating Iron Arachne to use the new version of the library was a huge effort and affected every part of the code. While I was working on this, I saw many opportunities for improving the site. Some of these I shelved until later. However, as I was just finishing up a course on applied algorithms for my master's degree</a>, the algorithmic complexity of the dungeon generator appalled me. So, I decided to include a rewrite of the dungeon generator as part of this big update, since the rng update would be invisible to users.
It did not dawn on me until later just how many subsystems would need to change as part of updating the dungeon generator.
Initially, I wanted to get as close to deterministic as possible for every function. This meant having local random number generators and unique seeds all over the place, and it took awhile for me to learn the appropriate balance between "no randomness at all" and "completely random and dependent on global RNG." I'm still learning that balance, honestly.
I rewrote the treasure generator first. I assumed it relied on the fewest dependencies. This assumption was wrong, as it led to rewriting the item system. This, in turn, affected several other things. The magic item generator relied on the item system, for one. The magic item system isn't where it needs to be, but it's good enough to be on par with how it was before the rewrite. The new system takes into account container logic, including liquids. This is a massive foundational upgrade. However, since I'm focused on just getting this done, the initial release isn't going to use much of that beyond putting treasure in chests and other containers.
The next part of the rewrite was the encounter generator. At time of writing, I'm still working on the side effects of rewriting this subsystem. I rebuilt all of the underlying mob system. This includes the characters library</a>, which is used by a ton of other things. The religion generator</a>, for example, relies on the characters library. So does the family generator. I've already rewritten the family generator and I'm working on the religion generator. I'm trying to limit myself to just making it work with the new system instead of adding features, but the new family generator includes a family tree image. I couldn't help it.

The family tree images are pretty basic so far</div> </div>
Also, I didn't need to do this, but I added a little bit of new functionality to the heraldry generator, along with many new charges. These new charges are AI-generated placeholders until I can find a real human artist to recreate them.

One of the new charges, a housecat</div> </div>
Once I finish fixing the side effects of rewriting the characters library, I'll finish the encounter generator. I built a new combat and magic system unique to Iron Arachne and added a translation library for turning those stats into Dungeons & Dragons stats. This is an experiment that may lead to more generators in the future.
So, that's what's been done. Now I'll write about what's still left to do.
For the dungeon generator, I need to write the following systems from scratch.

grid manager</li>
layout manager</li>
corridor builder</li>
door and gateway manager</li>
biome/theme applier</li>
lighting and shadow engine</li>
acoustics engine</li>
trap and hazard generator</li>
lore generator</li>
prop and clutter generator</li>
signage and navigation generator</li> </ul>
I can reuse some of the old dungeon generator's code for parts of these, but not much. It may be worthwhile to write about each of these systems here as I work on them. If you look at the list and think, "that sounds an awful lot like the subsystems of a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD)</a>," you're not far off. I have an idea for another experiment later this year, but I won't write about that here. First, I need to complete the massive project I've already started!
In the coming weeks and months, there will be more blog posts about each of these systems. Writing about them helps my understanding and clarity. Drop back every so often, or follow my RSS feed</a>.

Sandwich Questionnaire

2026-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

This is part of a blog post title trade with Zachary Kai. We swapped title ideas, and I got this one. You can see his original version</a> on his blog. I spent a few days refining this post. My answers to several of the questions changed rather a lot during that time.

Photo courtesy of Bimo Luki on Unsplash</div> </div>
How Many Sandwiches Do You Eat Per Week?
On average, less than one. However, sometimes when I do meal planning I'll include several in one week. I do this partly because I want to buy as few ingredients as possible for a given week, and partly because I don't want to have to come up with a distinct meal for every meal of the week!
When Do You Eat Sandwiches?
I usually eat sandwiches at lunch. However, sometimes if the mood takes me, I'll have a breakfast sandwich. On rare occasions I'll have a sandwich for dinner; most often when I do that, it's a burger at some restaurant or pub.
What's Your Go-To Sandwich Order?
I never order the same thing twice… unless it's Jimmy John's, in which case I always get a Vito (the #5</a>) with quadruple hot peppers. It's the closest thing I've found to my dad's Italian hoagies that he used to make at the family restaurant</a>.
Do You Prefer Hot or Cold Sandwiches?
I don't have a preference. I like hot paninis, grilled cheese, croque madames, and cheesesteaks. I also like dagwoods, hoagies, and other cold sandwiches. Both categories are good.
What's Your Favorite Type Of Bread?
Sourdough. The depth of flavor is awesome. It's not great for making French toast, though. I also like a good rye bread.
Do You Like Condiments?
If it suits the sandwich, yes. Hot dogs get the most condiments. I'll pile a ton of random stuff on those. For brats, I'll usually pile a bunch of sauerkraut on it, then add a ton of coarse-ground mustard, and then top with a bit of horseradish.
What About Pickles?
Pickles are great if they suit the sandwich. For example, they're vital for a cubano. I doubt they would go well on a grilled cheese. The choice of pickle matters too. While I love Indian pickles</a> ("achaars"), they really don't belong on a sandwich, for example.
Sweet Or Savory?
Mostly savory, sometimes with a bit of sweet. Usually I don't eat a lot of sweet foods in general.
Do You Cut Your Sandwiches?
It depends on the sandwich and how lazy I'm feeling. For hoagies, I'll cut them in half at a slight angle. Sometimes I'll cut grilled cheeses diagonally. Most of the time I don't bother cutting them, though.
What's The Worst Sandwich Crime?
I judge no sandwich choice. However, my grandfather would eat white bread dipped in milk. I am still mystified as to why he would do that. Apparently he's not unique in this</a>, though.
What's Your Ideal Sandwich-Eating Environment?
I suppose gathered around the TV with family and friends, all watching some movie or other. Haven't done that in years, though. I also enjoy a burger in a good bar-and-grill setting.
Why Sandwiches?
This could be quite the existential question. I choose to interpret it like this: why would you write about sandwiches over some other food? Sandwiches can be interpreted many ways. The idea of putting things on bread is very old and present in almost all culinary cultures on Earth. Given this versatility, there is a huge amount of material to explore. People have written histories about sandwiches</a>. This is my own small take on the subject.

For more photography by Bimo Luki, check out their work on Unsplash</a>. </blockquote>

Linux as daily driver, three months in

2026-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

Back in October of last year, I switched from Windows 11 to Linux on my gaming PC. I noted how well it worked for me</a> compared to previous attempts. Now it's a little over three months later, so let me tell you about how it's going.
I started out with Debian 13</a>. That seemed to work fine, but as I used it more and learned more about why I was encountering the bugs and glitches I saw, I began to understand how poor a match for me Debian 13 was.
The graphical problems were mostly because of Wayland. However, the root cause was that Debian had really old Nvidia drivers and it was difficult to update them without breaking other things. I do a lot of gaming, and the Nvidia drivers were causing me all kinds of issues like bad FPS, flickering, and crashing. Even non-games like Visual Studio Code and Obsidian had graphical glitches that made them almost unusable.
So, I switched to the distribution that I used before, Pop_OS!</a>. This solved a great many problems for me, and I think this is mostly due to the newer drivers that it includes. I was also curious to try System76's new COSMIC desktop environment that Pop_OS! now uses. So far, it's been fine. It definitely works better than Debian did. There are none of the graphical issues that I had before. Some games just seem bound and determined to not work for me, though, despite ProtonDB saying they should work fine.
Some of these include:

The Finals, which has horrible FPS drops on Linux</li>
Overwatch 2, which seems to get some bizarre mouse issues, though has fewer graphical issues than the Finals</li>
Star Trek Online, which just... gods, it runs like I have a Pentium II and no graphics card at all.</li> </ul>
The other major issue that I keep fighting with is the really poor WiFi performance. I have an old Intel built-in WiFi adapter, and while I could get around 400 Mbps on Windows (and I still do on my other non-Linux devices), on Linux it varies widely and seems to stay in the 5-50 Mbps range. I've tried a ton of things to fix this, but nothing has worked.
Other than those issues, though, gaming has actually been pretty good on Linux. Dune: Awakening is my most-played game right now, and it works wonderfully on Linux. I also play modded Minecraft (via the Prism Launcher</a>), which wouldn't run at all on Debian 13 but runs just fine on Pop_OS!. Monster Train 2 also works flawlessly.
I could keep using Pop_OS!, but my desire to tinker and try and fix these issues has started to draw me to CachyOS</a> and the Arch world. At this point in my life, my knowledge of Linux might be good enough to navigate Arch, despite its reputation for fragility.
Alternatively, I might try to replace some of my PC components. This computer is 6 years old now, and it's definitely showing its age in some respects. However, with the price of PC components skyrocketing thanks to generative AI, now is not the best time to buy new ones.
Anyway, in general Linux is going great. Some other time I should write a post about the software and process changes I've made as an indirect result of Linux.

Tech plans for January 2026

2026-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

This is a look into my tech-related plans for January. Originally I considered making this a "tech plans for 2026" post, but I have a feeling my plans are going to change as the year progresses.
Iron Arachne's Huge Update</h2>
Iron Arachne is getting a massive update this month. I've been working on a huge update to the random number generation paradigm across the entire code base, and while I was digging into literally everything, I ended up deciding to make several other sweeping changes.
Among these is a complete rewrite of the dungeon generator. Since the dungeon generator is built out of several subsystems, I have been slowly rewriting each of those in turn. The first was the treasure generator. The new version is much better than the old version, by leaps and bounds. I resisted introducing randomness until I felt I had built enough complexity into the deterministic version. It's still deterministic, but one of the inputs is an alphanumeric seed that the local random number generator uses. It's much easier to test. Because of how I've written it, the treasure generator can be independent. So, it will be, with a new generator page just for treasure.
My next subsystem is equipment. Again, this is sufficiently complex that I imagine it will be its own independent generator page. The underlying item system is another complete rewrite. Other generators rely on the old system and will need to be rewritten to use the new system. For example, the religion generator uses the item system for holy items. The magic weapon generator also uses it. The new item system is both less complex than the old system and more versatile, so I should be able to do much more with it.
After I rewrite the equipment subsystem, I'll need to incorporate that into the treasure generator. Then I'll begin working on the encounter generator. The encounter generator is going to be a big rewrite because it relies on the character generator, which is by far the most complex generator in the entire code base. I will try and resist rewriting the character generator right now, because that would be an enormous task in itself. There is a completely new subsystem, the faction generator, that will be used as an input for the encounter generator. So, once the encounter generator is done, I'll probably work on that.
I won't go into all of the various subsystems here, since there are a lot of them. However, I'll list them out, mentioning whether they're new or a rewrite.

Grid manager (new): for handling the coordinate space of the dungeon, including bounds-checking and such.</li>
Layout architect (new): for deciding where rooms go. This replaces the existing layout function, which is a big mess and inefficient.</li>
Corridor pathbuilder (new): for connecting rooms.</li>
Door and gateway builder (rewrite): for figuring out where walls should be breached, as well as locked, trapped, and secret doors.</li>
Theme applier (new): for applying biomes and other themes to areas of a dungeon.</li>
Lighting and shadow engine (new): for figuring out where lighting goes and what its effects are.</li>
Acoustics generator (new): for figuring out what sounds are present in various rooms, for description purposes mostly.</li>
Faction generator (new): for creating appropriate factions to the dungeon.</li>
Encounter generator (rewrite): for populating the dungeon with characters, creatures, and monsters.</li>
History generator (new): for mutating the dungeon to add, remove, or change various aspects over time.</li>
Treasure generator (rewrite): for generating treasure hoards as well as loot for individual characters.</li>
Trap and hazard generator (new): for adding traps and other environmental hazards to the dungeon.</li>
Lock and key generator (rewrite): for making sure all locked doors and chests have a key in a way that is solvable.</li>
Prop and clutter placer (new): for adding flavor to rooms.</li>
Lore generator (new): for adding details to plaques, books, and so on that are consistent with the history of the dungeon.</li>
Connectivity checker (new): for making sure all rooms are reachable from the entrance.</li> </ul>
I think that's all of them. As you can see, it's a long list, and a big project. It's entirely possible that I won't be able to finish it all in January.
While I've been working on this, I also rewrote a couple other generators or otherwise made big changes to them. The Dungeon Crawl Classics generator got a complete rewrite, though this should be transparent to users, except for a few bugs being fixed. The heraldry generator got a ton more charges and a few other updates and bug fixes.
Switching Away From US-Based Services</h2>
In 2025, I made an effort to migrate away from US-based services. Here's a list of all the changes I made.

Cloudflare DNS to Bunny</a> DNS</li>
Google Drive, iCloud, and Sync to Filen</a></li>
AWS to Scaleway</li>
Crunchyroll, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, and Max just got dropped altogether</li>
Replaced Firefox with Vivaldi</li> </ul>
Now, I'm looking to replace the following.

Google Maps: going to try Here WeGo</a> and Magic Earth</a></li>
Todoist: not sure, maybe I can use Obsidian plus my calendar. I hear good things about Super Productivity</a>, though</li>
GitHub: Codeberg</a> for everything public, and maybe SourceTube</a> for private repos</li>
VS Code: possibly VSCodium</a>, but I'm also considering JetBrains</a>, or maybe Helix</a> if I can set it up like an IDE</li>
DuckDuckGo: not sure, this will require research</li>
Netflix: not sure, maybe Crave</a>? But also more DVDs and Blu-rays</li>
Spotify: moving to mostly Bandcamp</a> and local MP3s</li>
Fastmail: Proton Mail</a> is the obvious choice, but I want to do more research</li>
Fly.io: Probably Scaleway</a>, since I use that anyway</li>
Netlify: maybe Coolify</a>, hosted on a Hetzner VPS?</li> </ul>
Replacing all of these won't happen in just one month. I will probably need to work on this over several months, especially for the things that are connected to more of my life, like Fastmail.

Looking Ahead to 2026

2026-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

2026 is full of promise. A new country, a new lifestyle, a new outlook... I am hopeful. As 2025 was a bit of a disaster for setting new habits, I'm reworking my expectations.
Goals for 2026</h2>
This year, I plan to make some pretty big changes to how I spend my time. None of these goals are new, but some of them are significantly different from previous attempts. I have a set of new habits to form, and a couple of static goals to achieve. To keep track of my progress, I plan on journaling about all of these throughout the year.
New Habit #1: Weekly Art</h3>
Painting is increasingly part of my life, and so in 2026 I'm making it a focus. Every week, I will spend time working on either a painting or a drawing.
New Habit #2: Daily Walks</h3>
For fitness and exploration, I will expand my walking to be a daily activity. No set duration, just getting out and walking outside.
New Habit #3: Mindful Study</h3>
Both as part of my academic studies and as part of an effort to expand my knowledge outside of work or school, I will be spending time every day reading and taking notes on some subject of interest. This will initially be in support of my university work but I expect it to include other subjects too.
Goal #1: Graduate University</h3>
By the end of this year, I want to either have graduated university with my master's or at least applied to graduate. This is partially dependent on external factors, though, like whether the classes I need will be offered on a schedule that supports this.
Goal #2: Stop Drinking Alcohol</h3>
In several previous years I've attempted to reduce my alcohol consumption. This year, I plan to give it up entirely. This one will be easy to track.
Thoughts for 2026</h2>
This year I will be keeping an eye on the political situation in the United States, but my focus will be on our new lives in Canada. Also, I intend to build on my tech migration of last year by continuing to replace US-based tech services with either services based in other countries or analog equivalents. A blog post might result from this effort in the near future.
In addition to my stated goals above, I also plan on expanding the amount of time I spend writing and coding. Making new friends and joining local communities are also important. However, those are not going to be formal goals this year.
This year is not one of reinvention so much as development of existing trends.

2025 Year in Review

2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Well then. 2025 did not go as originally planned. Not even close.
A year of challenges</h2>
We attempted to foster a puppy in January. She was a cute little rescue pit mix named Clover</a>. Unfortunately, I discovered that I'm allergic to dogs. I don't know if this is new or if it's just something I never noticed before. While it seems to be a relatively mild allergy, combined with other factors, it meant we had to stop fostering. Luckily, there was another foster family able to take Clover right away.
The next event of consequence was Trump taking office. We knew it was going to be bad, but even my worst fears paled compared to what he did. In response, we decided I would attempt a different route to immigration. I started applying to as many universities in Canada and Estonia as I could.
In March, one of them accepted my application: Memorial University of Newfoundland</a>. So, we immediately began the planning process to move to Newfoundland. In April, we flew up to St. John's to explore the area and see if we could find a rental that would accept cats. We were shocked to discover that rentals mostly disallow pets, with no possibility of pet rent or anything like that. However, we got lucky, and found a three-bedroom house whose landlord loves cats. So, we signed the lease and started paying for two places at once. While it meant the new house would stand empty for several months before we could move in, we guaranteed that we'd have a place.
It was around this time that I completed the most complex painting I've ever done. It was a painting of my sister's eleven cats, and originally meant as a Christmas gift. Still, a nice achievement, and she ended up loving it.

The painting of Tasha's cats</div> </div>
For the next few months, we watched as Trump ran roughshod over all the rules and rights that normally guide the government and began systematically destroying the United States. Then it came time to give notice at our jobs and prepare for the two-week drive it would take to get to our new home in St. John's, Newfoundland.
The trek northward</h2>
That drive took us to some amazing places with great views. Under other circumstances, it would have been a wonderful experience. However, I had our two cats and a ton of possessions crammed into my Kia Seltos, and the cats hated that drive. I will never put them through that again.
Mojave and Kalahari a few days before we took the trip</div> </div>
Still, we got to our destination safely, with everyone and everything intact. We moved into our new place in mid August. The UHaul U-Box arrived more or less on time, and we got everything that we'd brought with us sorted out. The majority of our stuff is still back in Wilmington, North Carolina, though, in a big storage unit. We can't bring all that up until we get permanent resident status. That won't happen until after I've graduated and we've both spent a year living and working here.
In order to retain access to our US bank accounts and a few other services, we have to retain our US phone numbers. We're using US Mobile for that purpose; it's about $15 USD per month for the two lines on the lowest service level. We have new Canadian numbers at the same time. Surprisingly, it was easy to get Canadian bank accounts and credit cards. Sarah was able to get a remote job to pay the bills, and for the first semester of university, I even got an internship that paid a reasonable amount of money.
Starting grad school</h2>
My first semester was stressful. I had to reacclimate to the university life, and between three classes, an entrepreneurship program, and my internship, I was extremely busy. One of my classes, Applied Algorithms, was really difficult for me. After a ton of studying, consulting my dad, and working with ChatGPT (and, later, Gemini) to understand the concepts, I managed to finish the class with a B, but it was a struggle. If you get less than a B in a class at the graduate level, you fail the class and have to retake it. If you fail two classes (or the same class twice) this way, then you're kicked out of the program. If you're an international student, that immediately invalidates your study permit, and you are required to leave the country. So, you can understand why I was stressed.
In the end, though, it worked out. I got As or Bs in all of my classes, and passed the entrepreneurship program. I finished my internship successfully, with an invitation to come back if I ever want to.
So, about those planned new habits</h2>
With regards to the new habits I originally intended to set this year, the events of 2025 completely derailed everything. I couldn't bring my guitar with me, so the guitar habit died around about May. I was improving quickly, though, and apparently I can borrow a guitar from the local library here in St. John's, so maybe I'll pick that back up now.
The painting habit never took, though I have painted more this year than any other year since art school. I'm improving at that, too, and I now have a basic painting setup in the new place. There's promise here for 2026.
Alcohol... well, quitting alcohol didn't happen. While I didn't drink as much this year as previous years, I still drank way more than I planned to. This will be another thing I address in 2026.
The daily walking habit never formed. However, I did start walking more in St. John's compared to Wilmington, since there are a number of amazing trails</a> here that are really close to our house. It should be easy to establish a walking habit going forward. I can even walk to campus in about an hour and fifteen minutes, which is ambitious but doable.

One of the trails near our house</div> </div>
Books read</h2>
My boss Dwayne at Apiture introduced me to the novel series Dungeon Crawler Carl early in the year, and I adored it. I read everything that was available, and for Christmas I got the latest book in the series, so I intend to start on that early next year.
I also got into the Dune novels after playing the survival MMO Dune: Awakening</a>, and read up to Chapterhouse: Dune, which is the last Dune novel written by Frank Herbert. They were a strange and unusual series of novels. I have no idea how they could make a third Dune movie in the current series without touching on some very weird concepts from the books.
Total books read this year: 20
Music discovered</h2>
A little over a month ago, I started a new habit of discovering and buying a brand new album every Friday. I wanted to expand the collection of music that I actually own, as opposed to just streaming everything. My record player is still in storage in North Carolina along with all of my records, so I'm just buying digital albums. Still, it's led me to discover some fascinating new music that I otherwise would never have heard.
I've discovered that I enjoy thrash metal and black metal. One unusual standout was Bloodywood</a>, a nu metal band from New Delhi with Hindu and English lyrics. They even did a collaboration with Babymetal</a>, a unique Japanese metal group that I used to follow years ago.
Hmm. Maybe I should start an "albums discovered" page in the same vein as my "books read</a>" page.
Yoga progress</h2>
Another unexpected development this year is that I started getting into yoga. I start most mornings now with a basic routine that takes about 5 minutes. My skill level is still "absolute beginner," though. There are classes here in St. John's, but I don't have a lot of spare money for such things. I enjoy the practice, and use yoga workouts on Apple Fitness+ to learn new asanas.
I am interested in the other aspects of yoga, too, and not just the stretching. The world view is worth exploring.
In closing</h2>
That's some of our adventures from 2025. I skipped mentioning a few things, but this post is already quite long enough. 2025 was a year of big changes. One thing is certain: no one will ever say 2025 was boring.
Previous Years</h2>

2024</a></li>
2023</a></li>
2022</a></li>
2021</a></li>
2020</a></li>
2018</a></li>
2016</a></li>
2015</a></li>
2013</a></li> </ul>

Running Linux on my gaming PC again

2025-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

With everything that's going on in the world right now, I am increasingly sensitive to the security and privacy implications of the tech I use. While most of my devices are in the Apple ecosystem, there has been one big hole in my device privacy footprint: my gaming PC.
I have been restricted to the Windows ecosystem on my gaming PC because of the games I regularly play. A few months ago, I reluctantly "upgraded" from Windows 10 to Windows 11. This made me anxious at the time, but then it faded into the background as other things took up my mental bandwidth.
Recently, though, Linux came back into my awareness. This past month, KDE celebrated its 29th birthday. This news was all over Hacker News</a>, Mastodon, and some other online social circles I run in. And with Windows 10 formally being sunset, I decided it was probably time to finally switch. Again.
See, I've tried running a Linux desktop before. Generally it works fine. However, two areas have made me stumble hard in the past: design software and games. I've relied on Affinity Suite for the former, which has no Linux version and no plans to have a Linux version. For the latter, I tend to play games that somehow always have game-breaking bugs on Linux, even with Proton.
This time around, I've tried a mixture of the latest developments in Linux and a willingness to change what software I use and what kinds of games I play in order to permanently break from Windows.
So, here's how it's going.
I chose Debian</a> 13 with Plasma</a> and Wayland</a>. Debian is familiar because I've used Ubuntu a lot in the past, but has none of the bloat of the latter distribution. Wayland solves a lot of problems with some games I play, though it does create new problems with some other software. I'm still working through some of those, like Visual Studio Code having bad flickering unless I use a specific set of startup flags.
Incidentally, here're the options I use to fix the flickering for VSCode on Wayland:
code --use-gl=egl --ignore-gpu-blocklist --enable-gpu-rasterization --ozone-platform=wayland</code></pre>
Choosing new software for old problems has been the bigger jump. Instead of Affinity Photo, I'm trying out GIMP</a>. GIMP is way better than it used to be. There's still a big learning curve, so it's an ongoing challenge. For vector work, I'm using Inkscape, which does what I need it to do. For office software, I've already been using LibreOffice on Windows for a long time, so that wasn't a hurdle.
I discovered that Fastmail has a desktop client for Linux. It's pretty new, apparently, but so far it works really well for me.
For games, well, that's been interesting. A lot of games that didn't work well on X11 now work on Wayland. Some don't. The Finals</a>, which is my primary shooter these days, currently has a shader bug that makes it unplayable. It was just introduced, so I don't know when it will get fixed. Monster Train 2</a>, though, works flawlessly. I'm starting to explore new games that are built for Linux specifically, though, which is where things are getting more interesting. I might write a future post just about that.
Spotify works just fine on Linux, but I'm starting to make use of and grow my MP3 library again. I just discovered KDE's JuK</a> for playing music yesterday, and it's surprisingly awesome. That started me down the path of exploring other KDE tools</a>, and I'm discovering a lot to love.
I think this is just the beginning of a paradigm shift in how I use my gaming PC. My Mac Mini and Macbook Pro feel a lot less necessary now, too. Time will tell how this shakes out.

Becoming a Student Again

2025-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

Early this year, I started applying to universities in Canada for master's degree programs. In March, I was accepted to the Master of Software Engineering program at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland.
From that point forward, we began the planning process for a major life shift. In early July, we gave notice at our jobs, and our long journey to move to Canada became mostly public knowledge. I say "mostly" because I have been very quiet about it online. Until it was a real, for-sure thing and we wouldn't have to pivot, I didn't want to make it known more widely.
Well, on August 8 we crossed the border in Maine and formally got my study permit and Sarah's work permit. We are now officially temporary residents of Canada. Unless something catastrophic happens, we'll be here at least until I finish my degree, which means 2027 at the earliest.
So. That means I will be a university student for the first time since 2007, when I got my bachelor's degree in history at South Dakota State University. This time around, I will be a graduate student.
I'm really excited. I get to reinvent my life and maybe, depending on how I like the academic life, start a new career. At the very least, we get to escape the growing darkness in the United States.

Revisiting the Kingdoms of Stone and Fire

2025-08-05T00:00:00+00:00

I haven't touched tabletop role-playing games in a few months now. In preparation for my upcoming move to Canada, I sold most of my collection. I didn't expect to even think about these games until well after the move.
Then, I found Typst</a>.
Typst is a computer language for laying out books and documents. It's similar in concept to LaTeX</a>, a common tool for academics. In fact, I have been using LaTeX to lay out all of my role-playing games for several years now. However, despite its ubiquity, LaTeX is pretty terrible to work with. It's slow and hard to extend. So, when I saw that a newcomer to the field of layout tools was getting rave reviews on Hacker News, I thought I would give it a try.
So, I chose to rework Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire</a> into Typst instead of LaTeX. The result was awesome, and I adore the toolset. It was much easier to use.
What I didn't expect as a result of this experiment, though, was that it rekindled my interest in working on Kingdoms of Stone and Fire.
With the final death of Silver Gryphon Games last year, I did not expect to ever pick up game design again. Now I'm seeing all kinds of possibilities. I think my mistake was attempting to make a commercially-viable game. All of the different disciplines of marketing, finances, and so forth pulled me away from the thing I actually liked to do - design.
So. The PDF of Kingdoms of Stone and Fire that is on this site now is what it looks like after the conversion to Typst. It's far from complete, though.
The game was originally meant to be an updated version of my original retroclone, Vox Draconis. I think my first mention of it on this blog was back in April of 2021. Since then, I barely talked about it. I suppose this is as good an opportunity as any to explain what the game is about and what I'm trying to do with it.
Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire is a tabletop role-playing game set in a fantasy, pre-iron world filled with dinosaurs, dragons, and warring kingdoms. It's anachronistic and whimsical. While it takes some cues from classic swords-and-sorcery, it's less about fearing the dark and more about carving out a place in the world. It's closer to "noblebright" than it is to "grimdark."
The rules are meant to be simple but not entirely narrative-driven. Many rules-light games out there, like Powered by the Apocalypse, are intended to just give a framework for a story. Kingdoms of Stone and Fire is meant to power a story, yes, but it's also meant to be an interesting game rules-wise. People who enjoy exploring mechanics and game progression should find it fun, if I design it right.
I also want to design the game so that it fits into an hour or two of playtime instead of the four or five hours that some games take. This might be the bigger challenge, and I have a lot of thinking to do here. It has to be more than just combat rules that are interesting and worth spending time playing. As it exists now, it's not there.
Finally, I want the game rules to be relatively short. Too many role-playing games have manuals that are hundreds of pages long. Kingdoms should be short enough that it can be understood and started in half an hour, but have enough content that it can be explored for months or years, if desired. That's also going to be difficult to pull off. I suspect that the crux will be making the main rulebook short and concise, and providing the rest via supplemental works.

Migrated gemlog content into this site

2025-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

I'm in the process of sunsetting my gemlog. I liked the idea of the Gemini protocol, but it never really grew beyond a specific set of niche topics. Further, it's just easier to write in Markdown, which is what I use for writing this site.
As such, I've migrated all of my gemlog posts into this site.
Here's a list of them:

Dune: Awakening - First Impressions</a></li>
Awaiting Dune</a></li>
Old and New Experiences</a></li>
First Day in Dragonflight</a></li>
Return to Blizzard</a></li>
Finished Shadowbringers</a></li>
No Man's Sky</a></li> </ul>

Dune: Awakening - First Impressions

2025-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

Well, I've been playing Dune: Awakening for about a month now. I joined a guild right away and spent the first few hours after launch exploring and doing early quests ("journeys" in Dune parlance). I spent most of that first day in Discord voice chat with my guild.
I love the game. I've sunk many hours into it already. As expected, I spend most of my time building interesting things and then going out and collecting materials to build more interesting things. I haven't participated in PVP yet, though my guild (Dementium) has some very dedicated PVP players.
The crafting system is fun. The gating of crafting certain items behind acquiring particular resources is well done. I would say I wish they had more available for PVE players but it's not that big a deal to be unable to craft the highest-tier items without a guild's support. You don't really need the highest-tier items unless you're participating in the PVP endgame.
It's still early in the game's life, and that shows. Cheaters are rampant right now, especially in the PVP area, the Deep Desert. I have yet to be personally affected, but it's a little worrying. I have hope that the developers will fix the issue before too long.
Two days ago I built my first assault ornithopter. She's a big beast! I haven't taken her out for more than an initial spin, but I think that'll change when I need to go gather resources in a hard-to-reach spot.
That's it for now. We'll see how long Dune keeps my interest, especially with university starting in a couple months.

2025 Mid-Year Review

2025-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Well, 2025 has certainly gone differently than I originally expected on January 1^{st.}
Much and more has been written about the state of the world in general and the United States of America in particular. I won't go into those topics here.
In March of this year, I was accepted into the Master of Applied Science in Software Engineering program at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. I confirmed the acceptance and began the process of applying for a study permit and related logistics. Today I will be giving notice at my current job at Apiture. By the end of this month, I will be temporarily retiring from industry to become a full-time student again. That will feel strange. Good, I imagine, but strange.
I really fell off the fitness wagon for several months. Most of the year, really. I've only just gotten back on in the last few days. Now, though, I'm finally going for a daily morning jog again. It feels good, even if I am clearly in much worse shape than I was last year. Well, have to start somewhere. I still have a gym membership until the end of the month and I intend to use it.
Recently, I've felt that my alcohol consumption has been increasingly deleterious to my health, so I'm easing way off. I did not make quarters 1 and 3 alcohol-free as planned, but I'll make up for it in the latter half of the year.
In terms of my creative hobby plans, I did continue guitar until the end of May. My guitar will go into storage until I finish my studies, but I do plan to pick it up again. Painting was starting to become a more regular thing for me up until we started needing to pack up. I will definitely be picking that back up too, and maybe sooner than guitar. We'll see.
My finances have been doing really well. Paying cash for a master's program will put a significant dent in my savings, though.
Finally... I discovered that I'm allergic to dogs, so I will not be getting a dog. We tried, though. For about a week we fostered a feisty little rescue named Clover. She was some kind of pit mix, and only five months old. Besides being allergic, I couldn't really handle her energy at the time. That made me very sad.

Awaiting Dune

2025-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

I pre-ordered Dune: Awakening at the highest level.
When I first heard that Dune: Awakening was being made by the people who made Conan: Exiles, I was interested but not excited. I thoroughly enjoyed Exiles. My friends were the ones who routinely hunted for larger and more powerful bosses to slay, but my enjoyment focused on taking the resources they would bring back and using them to build interesting structures. In all survival-type games, I tend to do this. I'll venture out and fight monsters, but only in service to acquiring the resources and items I need to build cool things.
The announcement for Dune: Awakening came in August of 2022. I had seen and loved the new Dune movie in 2021, so the new game piqued my interest.
And then... then, I watched an interview with the makers describing what their inspirations were and what features were planned.
They said that one of their primary inspirations was Star Wars: Galaxies.
At this point, my interest changed to rabid fascination. My favorite computer game of all time, Star Wars: Galaxies was the epitome of an open, living world. I sank many hundreds of hours into it before it was shut down in 2011.
To hear, ten years later, that a new game in the style of Conan: Exiles, inspired by Star Wars: Galaxies, and set in the world of Arrakis was being worked on... well, that set my interest on fire.
The second movie being released last year added fuel to that fire.
So of course, as soon as preorders were available, I bought the game's most expensive edition. And I took off two days of work for the early release in May.
Later, I was dismayed to hear that the release was delayed three weeks, to June. I can't take time off of work that particular time period because it coincides with a major work project that I have to lead. However, I will play as much as possible those first days. I may even record myself playing, so I can remember what it was like in the future. We'll see. I don't stream anymore because there are no streaming services outside of American control.
I'm very much looking forward to this.

Old and New Experiences

2025-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The last three years have been quite the experience. I'm not really sure how to differentiate between new (and therefore top-of-mind) and old (and therefore more nostalgic/emotional) recollections.
As I write this I'm listening to the soundtrack for Age of Conan, as replayed on a Jellyfin server in my house.
It reminds me of Conan Exiles, which I've spent way more time in than Age of Conan, but which repurposed the soundtrack because it was cheaper than creating new music.
I have fond memories of Final Fantasy XIV. They are not as vivid, lately. But they're more vivid than my memories of Star Wars: Galaxies. SWG was the only game I've devoted creative enterprise to; my most-viewed YouTube video is a SWG video.
Neither game, though, has garnered my attention lately.
I've been spending more of my attention on a game called Reality Break. It's a Diablo-like action RPG where you play as a starship pilot. It has mechanics that feel rewarding.
This seems disingenuous. Current events make video games and other forms of entertainment seem really pointless.

Small web and self-hosting in a world in crisis

2025-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

As I write this, the new President of the United States is trying to replace the democratic republic form of government with a fascist one. It appears that he's succeeding. Despite the focus on the United States right now though, this trend of far-right groups taking power is not limited to this country. Several countries in Europe, like Italy and Spain, are seeing a resurgence of conservative ideology. The regime change in the USA has been accompanied by an overt shift of Big Tech - that is, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and others - towards fascist policy. This makes the centralized version of the Web that most people are familiar with a hostile place.
There are refuges from this, though. The "small web" - personal websites run independently from the big platforms - is one component of that. The website you're reading this on is an example of the content you can find on the small web. It's built and run by me. Many such sites exist. The trick is in finding them. Following links from other small web sites is one way. Directories exist too. There are even search engines dedicated specifically to indexing the small web. I will put links to some of these at the end of this post.
At the time of writing, this website is hosted on Netlify, which is a platform for static websites. To better safeguard the site, I will move it in the near future to a server I control.
If you don't have the technical knowledge to build and host a website, then you can try using a site like Neocities</a>. It hosts the website for you, much like the old Geocities.
Beyond social media, though, there is still much of the mainstream Internet that we use in our day-to-day life. There are messaging applications like Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, video sites like YouTube, event websites like Meetup, and so on. To replace things like this, we are best served by using federated and decentralized alternatives. For those unfamiliar with the concept, "federation" refers here to multiple different instances of a particular service being run independently of each other but sharing content with each other. In that sense, it's kind of like email; no matter who runs your email service, you can send email to any other email service.
Messenger can be replaced with Matrix. YouTube can be replaced with PeerTube. Meetup can be replaced with Mobilizon. There is a more complete list at the end of this post.
I run a Matrix homeserver for family and friends. It's encrypted end-to-end, so governments and bad actors can't (easily) gain access to it or its data. I also use Signal, but as that is centrally controlled by an American company, I trust it less.
This site and Iron Arachne</a> will be moving to servers I control in the near future, too.
I already run a server at home for videos and music, but that is inaccessible outside a select few devices. I use Tailscale</a> to control access to that.
Other Blog Posts</h2>

The Small Web is Beautiful</a></li>
Introduction to the Small Web Movement</a></li> </ul>
Resources</h2>

Awesome Self-Hosted</a>: a list of self-hosted alternatives</li>
Fedi Tips</a>: more information about what the "Fediverse" and federated services are</li>
Gemini</a>: about the Gemini protocol, an alternative to the Web</li> </ul>
Services</h2>

Jitsi Meet</a>: video calls</li>
Mastodon</a>: social media</li>
Matrix</a>: chat</li>
Mobilizon</a>: event management</li>
Neocities</a>: platform for do-it-yourself websites</li>
PeerTube</a>: video sharing</li>
Pixelfed</a>: image sharing</li>
Tailscale</a>: zero-trust networking</li> </ul>
Discovery Tools</h2>

Marginalia</a>: a search engine that prioritizes non-commercial content</li>
Wiby</a>: a search engine specifically targeting the small web</li> </ul>

Looking Ahead to 2025

2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

This is going to be a year of big changes.
Goals for 2025</h2>
My goals this year will be primarily setting new habits.
I started guitar lessons in December. I plan to continue practicing every day, excepting some holidays or travel.
Also on the creative side, I want to develop a painting habit. This will probably be less frequent than guitar, but I still want to paint at least once a week.
Continuing from last year's success with going alcohol-free, I will expand this to make Q1 and Q3 entirely alcohol-free. I expect this will have positive side effects.
For exercise, I'm getting back on the horse, as it were. I plan on setting a daily walking habit. I also hope to start jogging again, and complete at least one 5K.
Thoughts for 2025</h2>
Politically, the USA is likely to experience some upheaval this year. I hope nothing catastrophic comes of it. We'll see.
While it's not a goal, I'd like to pay more attention to finances this year and end the year with much more savings.
In 2025 I expect my life to change for the better as I devote myself to more physical and creative activities, and I'm very much looking forward to fostering a dog soon.

2024 Year in Review

2024-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

2024 was a year of travel, challenges, endings, and beginnings. I went on five trips, four of which were for recreation and the fifth of which was almost a move to a different state. My fitness and health suffered, and Silver Gryphon Games shut down. However, I began taking music lessons, won an award at work, and regularly ran an RPG campaign for once.
Winning an Award at Apiture</h2>
At my day job, I won an award for my work on Apiture’s hosted sites service. I continued to be the sole infrastructure person for hosted sites, despite their quantity at the end of the year. My automation for them made it much easier for the designers to spin up new sites without requiring work from the platform engineering team.
Collapse of Exercise Habit</h2>
My exercise habit fell apart. I started the year strong, going to the gym regularly and focusing on a bodybuilding routine that was slowly starting to show progress. Then, I went to my annual physical, and the doctor was less than enthusiastic about my chosen exercise path. For some reason, I let that discourage me from exercising at all the rest of the year.
Towards the end of the year, though, I started going for longer walks occasionally. I have it as a daily to-do item, but I'm not consistent in doing it daily yet.
Alcohol-Free Months</h2>
At the beginning of the year I set out to have three full alcohol-free months in 2024. I achieved two full months and two half months. That is sort of a success, I guess, but I think I can do better. Next year will have a more ambitious goal. My interest in going alcohol-free has increased.
I've attempted to completely quit drinking a couple times before. This is not that, not yet. I can see this evolving into that though. Past attempts were not based on a holistic lifestyle change. Now, going without alcohol is an accessory to other changes I have made or am planning to make.
The Death of Silver Gryphon Games</h2>
While we tried to resurrect the company, neither Kevin nor I had the time or motivation to work on it. I formally shuttered the business in December. The second editions of both Aether and Ingenium will never be published, sadly. That’s too bad, because the cover art for both was awesome, and they fixed a lot of the problems with the first editions. However, a business needs sustained work in order to function, and that won’t happen for SGG.
Journaling About Trips</h2>
In 2024 I went on three major trips and I promised to journal about all of them. I wrote about the Cancun trip and the cruise, but I did not write about the eclipse trip. I thought I did, but I can’t find a journal entry for it. Two out of three, but not enough to count this goal achieved.
The journal entries that exist are nice and detailed, though. They'll be a good reminder in days to come.
Journaling Habit</h2>
While I did keep a regular work journal each week, I didn’t write a regular personal journal. Part of the problem is that I never set up the habit like I did with the work journal; there was no specific trigger. This is something I can fix in 2025.
I did start keeping a gaming journal just a few days ago. If I keep up with this, then I will have four different journals that I update: a personal journal, a work journal, a gaming journal, and a spiritual journal. Perhaps if I write regularly for all of them, that will start to bleed through into blogging, and I'll update this site more frequently.
Books Read</h2>
I didn’t read nearly as many books in 2024 as I did in 2023. Also, the variety was less, with 8 different authors in 2024 and 11 in 2023. I’m not sure why, but I imagine losing almost a full month of the year to trips where I didn’t read at all didn’t help.
My queue of books to read is growing. I have quite a few on my shelves. I may hold off on buying any more books until I've worked through that backlog a bit.
RPG Campaign</h2>
In November I started running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in-person for a few random people. It is now the longest-running regular campaign I’ve ever run. It’s also the most difficult to run, as several of the players remember throwaway comments I make about setting flavor and accept that as canon. This means I have to take notes on everything I decide. On the other hand, though, these notes are making it easier to plan sessions and review what happened in past sessions.
The next session will be on January 6, after a several-week break for the holidays.
Beginning of Music Lessons</h2>
In December I began taking guitar lessons. This is the first time since I was a teenager that I’ve taken music lessons. I’ve been good about practicing almost every day, too; the only days I haven’t practiced were Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
I've been practicing the usual beginner songs from a Hal Leonard book. As I get better, I want to try a few different styles, including Spanish guitar. I have a list of songs to attempt once I get good enough.
Previous Years</h2>

2023</a></li>
2022</a></li>
2021</a></li>
2020</a></li>
2018</a></li>
2016</a></li>
2015</a></li>
2013</a></li> </ul>

2024 Midyear Project Update

2024-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

2024 has been a hectic year so far. Most recently, we very nearly moved to western New York, but a series of unfortunate events and observations made us reconsider at the last second and decide to continue renting in Wilmington.
I haven't made any progress on reigniting my morning jogging habit. However, once my leg heals (dermatology thing, don't ask), I intend to start it up again. I completely halted my weight training after my doctor told me "it counts as exercise, I guess." That just took all the wind out of my sails.
My alcohol-free phases are on track. January and March were alcohol-free, and September will be the third for this year.
Silver Gryphon Games has stagnated. I finished the Aether second edition manuscript and got cover art for both it and Ingenium's second edition. However, Aether and Aethermancy are both stalled, waiting on Kevin. Considering how crazy his life is right now - as I'm writing this his hometown is flooded so bad he can't go home - I don't blame him one bit. I'll have to focus on getting Ingenium out the door.
Iron Arachne has had some minor tweaks to the star system and planet generators, and one new generator in the form of a Velgarth gift generator. Other than that, it hasn't had any new sci-fi generator updates. If I want to complete this goal, I'll need to work on something in the latter half of this year.
Two of my three planned trips are behind me. The resort vacation in Cancun was kind of like a light version of "The Hangover," so we'll just leave it at that. The eclipse-viewing party was awesome; I will probably never get to see an eclipse like that again in my lifetime.
The final planned trip for this year is in August. I also drove to New York to look at property and explore in the first half of June, and I will be flying up to Minnesota in late August for 2D Con. That's plenty of trips, I think! I didn't journal about any of them so far.
However, I have been consistent in journaling about my day job every Friday. I intend to turn this into a big year-end review, but that won't be public. At least, not in its entirety, anyway.

Looking Ahead to 2024

2024-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

This year I want to continue my introduction to bodybuilding and round out my fitness regimen with regular cardio. For January and February, I'll finish the "Start From Scratch" series of workouts. I will also start running three days a week again. I'll be taking progress photos. By July, I want to see distinct muscle definition in the mirror. I also want to try and get my VO2 max consistently up to 38 in the same timeframe.
Last year January and November were alcohol-free months. This year, I'll go alcohol-free for three months out of the year. January is one of them. I might make March and August the other two, but I'll leave that up to planning later.
For Silver Gryphon Games, my sole objective this year is to get Aethermancy released. Once that's done, I'll try and get the second editions of Aether and Ingenium out, but those are bonuses.
For Iron Arachne, I want to really push on the sci-fi side of generators. I will expand the details for the planet, star nation, and star system generators.
I have three trips planned for this year so far. One is a trip to Mexico with college friends. The second is an eclipse viewing party. The third is a father-son cruise in the Mediterranean. For each of these I want to make sure I journal about them.
Finally, I'm going to try and set a journaling habit. Some of this will turn into blog posts, but the idea is to record more data about my life and use that for reflection later.

2023 Year in Review

2023-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

2023 was a year of important changes and improvements in my life. My goals for the year according to last year's "Looking Ahead to 2023"</a> post ended up going wide of the mark. I didn't succeed at the SGG goals and I abandoned #dungeon23 early in January. I also didn't keep to my ban on new entertainment. Where I did succeed, though, was in the fitness goals for the year. More on that in a moment.
This year, I'll start including a few notes about what I accomplish at my day job.
Apiture</h2>
At my day job this year the biggest achievement was converting our monitoring stack from New Relic to Prometheus+Grafana. The one gap that remains is the profiling (what New Relic calls "APM"). I also continued to make small improvements in several areas, like the new ECS-based Wordpress architecture.
Iron Arachne</h2>
Iron Arachne had a big year this year. In March, it reached its fifth anniversary. Over the course of the year I made many updates to the code to clean it up and reorganize it. The most important updates, though, were the SvelteKit migration and the rework of the planet generator.
Prior to the SvelteKit migration, Iron Arachne was running as a static site on Netlify. However, when I migrated it, it became a Node.js application running on my own web server. This made it more difficult to manage, but gave me way more freedom in the long run.
The planet generator rework happened in the last quarter of the year. Previously, the images were set up as 3D scenes in THREE.js, with a sphere for the planet, another sphere for clouds if they were present, a plane for the starfield, and camera and light rigging. The rework turned them into a single shader capturing everything. I finally implemented atmospheric scattering and dramatically improved how the various planets looked. I also used this new rendering approach for the star nation and star system generators.
Self Hosting</h2>
Besides Iron Arachne, I also began to self host more things. I bought a mini PC, installed Ubuntu on it, and set up several services on it. It's accessible via our Tailscale network, meaning I can access it from any device that is part of that network. Right now I have the following hosted on it:

Jellyfin: for media</li>
Kavita: for browsing and reading PDFs</li>
IT Tools: for lots of little convenience utilities</li>
Paperless: for scanning and storing important documents</li> </ul>
While Paperless is set up, I didn't really start using it properly in 2023. Same for Jellyfin. I've used Kavita and IT Tools more.
My Old Sites</h2>
I recreated as many of my old websites as I could find archived online and put them online again on a subdomain of my main site. Some of these I'd completely forgotten existed. In the course of this work, I also took inspiration from my old art galleries to rework the art section of my main site. It reminded me of how much I used to love making and sharing art.
Reading Books</h2>
Holy crap. I read 34 books in 2023, which is three times what I read in 2022, and twice my previous record. Granted, a lot of it was light fiction, but I still spent way more time reading this year.
One reason for this is that I decided to create a new fan site for one of the fictional cultures in the Valdemar novels by Mercedes Lackey. Before I can do that, I wanted to refamiliarize myself with them, and so I began the process of reading every single novel that they appear in. I forgot how much I enjoy these books. It's been a delight reading them. Some of them are completely new to me, too, which is awesome.
I also finished the Honor Harrington series of novels by David Weber. Those were a harder read, full of exposition and dense text. I enjoyed them too though.
Health and Fitness</h2>
I started 2023 with a ban on alcohol that ended somewhere near the end of January. Running became a regular routine for me; I ran in the morning on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays before work. My cardio health improved a lot; my VO2 max went from a low of 33.9 in January to a high of 37.4 in April and a more sustained peak of 36.8 in the latter half of the year. My cardio recovery went from 19 BPM in January to 37 BPM by the end of the year.
I stopped running in November when I undertook a self-imposed wellness challenge. For the month of November, I drank no alcohol and began a bodybuilding routine at the gym. Four days of the week I would go to the gym and lift weights. Cardio was limited to only a few minutes of cooldown walking at the end of each workout.
The amount of weight I can lift improved a bit, but what really improved was my confidence and interest in bodybuilding. Now I just need to reincorporate my cardio exercises and I'll have a more complete fitness regimen.
Silver Gryphon Games</h2>
We didn't make nearly as much progress on SGG in 2023 as I expected. I had planned on releasing at least one new book by the end of March. We only released two playtest books later in the summer; the new Aether and Ingenium editions. Despite trying to keep on top of Aethermancy it ended up being a struggle to get the manuscript finished. As of this writing, it's still not done.
Aether and Ingenium's second editions got completed manuscripts. Aether got a lot of editing. The rise of AI art has made it a lot more difficult to find cheap artwork made by real artists.
Previous Years</h2>

2022</a></li>
2021</a></li>
2020</a></li>
2018</a></li>
2016</a></li>
2015</a></li>
2013</a></li> </ul>

Upgrading the star and planet generators on Iron Arachne

2023-12-21T00:00:00+00:00

For over a month I've been working on upgrading the graphics that I generate for stars and planets in the planet, star nation, and star system generators on Iron Arachne</a>.
That work is now done and live.
Instead of setting up a 3D scene, texturing a sphere, and adding cloud layers if appropriate, now I'm doing everything in a single 2D shader. This was a lot of math to learn and apply.
The new shaders have cool additions like atmospheric scattering and much better planetary geographics.
Here's a comparison of the old version and new version for each of the planet types.
The "arid" planet. Meant to be like a Mars or Arrakis world. The new version has a very thin atmosphere that you can just barely see. Clouds are almost nonexistent most of the time.
The "barren" planet. This is basically just a rock spinning in space. The old version had a deformation of the sphere. The new version doesn't. This is the only one that has no atmosphere in the new version.
The "garden" planet. This one is meant to be Earth-like. The old version was honestly really ugly.
The "gas giant" planet. The new version has very slight atmospheric scattering, a much more vibrant surface, and variable rotation.
The "ice" planet. The old one was pretty ugly, though I think the new one could stand to have a bit more "blue" in it. We'll see if I change that in a future pass.
The "jungle" planet. This is something the Predator aliens would love. The new version has a better surface and looks more like a planet.
The "ocean" planet. Mon Calamari is a good example of one. The new version just looks better on all fronts. I gave it some small amount of dry land, too.
The "swamp" planet. You're probably familiar with Dagobah at least. The "oceans" now look shallower, among other things.
The "toxic" planet. This time around, I made it look truly icky, with a sickly green atmosphere.
The "volcanic" planet. Mustafar is an example of one such. I am really happy with how the new version turned out. It looks much more visceral and lava-y.
The above image is a comparison of the star nation system graphic done the old way (above) and the new way (below). This really shows some of the other tweaks, like size variation and the new stars.

Retrospective on November 2023 wellness challenge

2023-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

November's wellness challenge was a success.
I had no alcohol, despite going out with friends and coworkers multiple times. It helps that there are several good non-alcoholic beer options these days. I also kept up the workout regimen. I went to the gym four times a week every week. The only exception was Thanksgiving Day.
Speaking of Thanksgiving, despite eating normal Thanksgiving dinner (twice), I only had a brief bump in weight gain. I'm now the lowest weight I've been since I started tracking in 2019.
I'm planning on continuing the workout regimen and keeping my diet dialed in for muscle gain and fat loss. This morning I weighed in at 219 lbs. I'm hoping to get down to 200 lbs. by mid February, but a more realistic goal is 210 lbs. We'll see where I end up.
I never tried gauging what my one-rep bench press is. I should probably try that next time I'm at the gym.

Wellness challenge halfway point

2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Here we are at November 15, halfway through the wellness challenge that I set for myself this month. I've kept to it, and while progress has been slow, something interesting is happening.
I started this challenge at 226 lbs. I'm now down to 221. Also, I'm now past the "warmup" workout plan and into the first week of the "phase 1" workout plan. This means I'm going to the gym four days a week instead of three, and alternating between two workout regimens.
I've settled into a routine now. Going to the gym in the morning is something to look forward to, rather than a chore to accomplish. That was unexpected.
I may extend the workouts beyond the end of November. This is turning out to be awesome.

First week of wellness challenge

2023-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

The first week of my November 2023 wellness challenge went well! Going without alcohol has given me back a ton of calories I would otherwise have gained, and I'm feeling more energetic every morning, too.
My first workout was on Wednesday morning at 5:00. It took me a bit to figure out where the stations and machines were that I needed for my workout plan. Some things I had to improvise a bit on; there was no cable row, so I just used the rowing machine.
My second workout on Friday morning was better. After blundering my way through the first workout, I took time on Thursday to put together a gym bag. I brought a log book and made sure to note down what weights I used for each exercise. I was still a bit sore from Wednesday's workout, but by Saturday morning the soreness from both sessions was gone.
This week coming up will be the last week of the "warmup plan" specified by my program. The weeks following will be more involved, and will be four days a week instead of three.
I've already started to lose a little weight. I'm looking forward to seeing how far I can get this month.

Wellness challenge for November 2023

2023-10-31T00:00:00+00:00

Last month, I went over my goals for this year to remind myself what they were and see how I'm doing. It was an unpleasant surprise; I'd failed to do any of them. Then, earlier this month, I read Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Be Useful" book. His stories about growing up and getting into bodybuilding made my brain start working.
After a few days of reflection, I decided to do a wellness challenge for myself over the course of November. There are two components to this challenge:

No alcohol</li>
Gym workouts at least four days a week</li> </ol>
The goal with the first is to eliminate a source of empty calories and to give my body a break from the toxic effects.
The goal with the second is threefold - first, to establish a gym habit; second, to lose useless weight; and third, to try out bodybuilding as a hobby.
Giving up alcohol is not new to me. I gave it up for two months last November. I felt pretty great even just a couple weeks into it, so I'm looking forward to this.
For the workouts, I intend to go in the mornings before work. The gym that I go to is empty then, and it might be a good wake-up routine. I've chosen this workout plan</a> from Muscle and Strength. The first couple weeks use this schedule:

Squats, 2 sets, 12 reps</li>
Leg curls, 1 set, 12 reps</li>
Calf raises, 2 sets, 12 reps</li>
Bench press, 2 sets, 12 reps</li>
Pulldowns, 2 sets, 12 reps</li>
Cable rows, 2 sets, 12 reps</li>
Overhead press, 2 sets, 12 reps</li> </ol>
Tomorrow morning I'll need to figure out what weight I should be using for each. I will be logging my workouts so I can figure out how I'm doing over time. I know how to do all of the above exercises except for the overhead press, so I'll need to make sure I get the proper form for that one before I really push it.

State of my projects for October 2023

2023-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

I have a lot of irons in the fire. Here's where everything I'm working on this year is at.
Ingenium Second Edition: The playtest book is out. The cover art is done, and I've started collecting more interior art. Sarah will be editing it in the not-too-distant future. I don't think this will be published until next year.
Aether Second Edition: The playtest book for this is also out. Editing is in progress. It needs both cover art and interior art. I might hire a friend of mine who worked on the Nostalgix TCG to do graphic design and layout for it.
Aethermancy: Kevin is still working on the manuscript for this one. Of all the Silver Gryphon Games projects, this is the one that I wanted to get out the door in 2023, but now I have doubts about that happening. At least all the artwork is done, and the editing is mostly done, except for the chapters Kevin is still writing.
Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire: This guy's been on hold almost the entire year. I've been focusing my RPG-writing efforts on Silver Gryphon projects.
Mysteries of a Broken World: Like Vox Draconis, this game has taken a back seat to SGG products. I won't be working on it this year.
AmigaSource: This one's new. The current maintainer reached out to me asking for assistance in improving the site. I'm in the process of rewriting the site mostly from scratch, but keeping the NCSA Mosaic-friendly HTML.
Tayledras Fan Site: This is another new project this year. I originally planned to just resurrect my old Tayledras Fan Club website, but after nixing all of the "club" content, it was pretty bare bones. So I'm going to make it a knowledge base for the fictional Tayledras culture as presented in the Valdemar novels by Mercedes Lackey. However, I won't begin to write the content for the site until I've finished reading every novel that the Tayledras appear in. At time of writing, I'm working on Arrows of the Queen.
Iron Arachne: This year I started breaking pieces of the site out into their own NPM packages. Some of them are seeing use by other people now. I'm going to expand on this concept as I have time. Someone reached out to me asking if I could turn the dungeon generation and star system generation modules into NPM packages.

Currently

2023-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Last night I was poking around at the Homebrew Website Club</a> and discovered a site with a "/currently" page. It's just a little status update along the lines of the old Livejournal tags. I thought this was clever, so I added something like it to my own site.

Old sites and art galleries

2023-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Someone on Hacker News mentioned that he liked my website's content and that it inspired him to go find his old sites on the Wayback Machine and add their content to his site.
This was a great idea. I did the same and recovered most (but not all) of my sites and content. I put them online at old-sites.benovermyer.com</a>. It stretches back to when I was in high school in the late 90s.

My first website, circa 1997</div> </div>
Seeing my old "art gallery" pages from the early 2000s made me want to rework my "art portfolio" part of my current site. I stopped having an art gallery when I discovered DeviantArt, which made it easy to share artwork and get comments and such. However, I miss having my own art gallery on my site.
So, I converted my "portfolio" (which I don't use as a portfolio anyway) into a full gallery of my art</a>. It contains a lot of the art I had on my old sites, and some newer artwork that I never put online before. It mimicks the layout of my old art galleries, with 64px × 64px thumbnails and direct links to the full image.
I will add more to it over time now that I'm starting to focus on creating things again.

Adding a coding reference section

2023-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

Today I added a section to the knowledge base portion of this website for coding languages</a>. It's meant as a reference for me to refresh my memory when I haven't used a particular language in awhile.
I used ChatGPT to help automate this process so it went faster. It still took me about two hours to add all of the languages. To start with, I've added the languages I'm most familiar with.
More languages might show up in the future if I need them. Each page will expand when and if I need to add a new tidbit of information.

I got a tattoo!

2023-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

I got my first tattoo. The studio was 5th Layer in Wilmington, NC, and the artist was tatdew</a>.
Here it is!

Pivoting back to full-stack developer

2023-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

So we're in the process of immigrating to Canada. As part of that process, I discovered that software engineers in Canada are treated like proper engineers. That is, they are regulated like engineers, and require licensing in order to work. I would need to go back to university and get a degree specifically in software engineering in order to work as a software engineer in Canada.
However, there is another "NOC" - a job code - that fits my experience fairly well, and that's 21234 - "web developers and programmers." In going through the list of job titles contained in that NOC, the one that best suits my years as a "devops engineer" would be back-end developer. However, I've always been interested in all sides of the equation. Before I pivoted to become a devops engineer, I was a full-stack developer. I worked on front end, back end, infrastructure, and design.
Now, I'm reclaiming that title, and pivoting back to my original focus.
I'm still working as a "Senior Platform Engineer" at Apiture. However, now I'm intentionally tailoring my work - as much as I'm able - to exercise all of my development skills and not just my infrastructure ones.
Once it's time to move on to a new employer, I want to get a true full-stack role if possible.
While I'm conversant in Svelte, I imagine I need to get more experience working with React if I want to do any modern front-end work. I'm looking forward to this new chapter in my professional life!

Iron Arachne turns five

2023-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

Last month, Iron Arachne turned five years old. Lately, it has not been seeing much in the way of updates. Several half-finished projects lie in local branches in the git repository, waiting for a time when I spend attention on them again.
A.I. is proliferating in the RPG content generator space. The Discord server that I run for authors of RPG generator websites has been much quieter than before, except for the few people whose work is primarily with A.I. tools like ChatGPT. These tools are capable of tying both written and visual content from A.I. into a fairly cohesive whole. The net effect for me is that a lot of my motivation to work on Iron Arachne has dried up in light of what A.I. is doing.
I know the limitations of A.I. right now. I know the value that human-crafted RPG generation tools have over A.I. tools. However, I'm also aware of the time scale here. It's only a matter of time before A.I. gets clever enough to be able to think on "meta" levels and create more cohesive and internally-consistent content across multiple media. Given this, it's pretty demoralizing to be working on tools that explicitly do not use A.I.
However, the purpose of Iron Arachne has never really been about RPG content generation, specifically. That's the theme, certainly, but the actual point of the site is to be my "forever project." I wrote about forever projects</a> back in 2020. Back then, my interest in Iron Arachne was waning too. It was my consideration of its real role in my life that rekindled my passion for working on it.
With that in mind, here are some of the things I have in various states of completion for Iron Arachne that I might work on in the near future.

An independent name-generation library to be used by both Iron Arachne and MUNA</a></li>
A character generator for Old School Essentials</li>
Name generators independent of character generators</li>
An architecture generator for creating architectural styles</li>
A language generator</li>
A cuisine generator for creating styles of cuisine</li>
Adding maps to the region generator</li> </ul>
With all the work I have on my plate running Silver Gryphon Games</a>, though, I may not be spending a ton of time on Iron Arachne. At least, not until Aether Second Edition, Aethermancy, and Ingenium Second Edition are released. Then I should be able to focus at least a little more on Iron Arachne.

Looking Ahead to 2023

2023-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

This year I don't have to worry about an upcoming move or an expensive vacation, so I can focus on other things.
I'm going to follow up my successful abandonment of alcohol with a reduction in portion sizes at meals. My goal is to reduce body fat percentage. To aid in this and to improve my cardio health, I'm also going to be more regular about going for walks. I'm also going to consider getting a gym membership again after the New Year Resolution folks quit after the first month. I may be able to get away with just our home gym equipment, but it might be good for me to get out of the house more.
Silver Gryphon Games will have a lot of my attention this year. I want to release Aether and Aethermancy in the first quarter. Aethermancy is dependent on Kevin, but Aether is under my control. At the very least, I should be able to get Aether out before the end of March.
Another goal I have for the first quarter is to not buy anything new for entertainment. I'm going to only occupy my free time with things I already have.
Related to both of the previous paragraphs, I'm going to only write content for Aether and Savage Worlds this year. No other RPG systems will have my attention. By doing this, I'm hoping to boost SGG's productivity in its first full year as a returned company.
I'm participating in the #dungeon23 challenge this year. The idea is to design a full megadungeon one room per day, one region per week, and one level per month.
There are fewer goals this year, but a greater chance of accomplishing all of them. Health and SGG are the two focuses for the year. I have other things I want to accomplish, but these are the ones I'm publicly committing to.

2022 Year in Review

2022-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

2022 was a year of big changes. Some were foreseen and others came out of nowhere.
40th birthday trip to Hawai'i</h2>
At the end of February, we went to Hawai'i for my 40th birthday. Our trip was exclusively to the Big Island. We stayed in three different places - a small Bali-themed apartment, a treehouse in the rainforest, and a resort hotel. The treehouse was definitely both the scariest and the most interesting. I say "scariest" because the bottom floor was open and there's a ton of wildlife, including wild pigs. However, it was gorgeous. I would stay there again.
We went on a tour of a coffee plantation. I gained a newfound appreciation for Kona coffee because of that. Sadly, it's hard to get locally here in North Carolina. We also went to some interesting restaurants. My favorite was a sushi restaurant with only three tables that I managed to get a reservation at, despite reservations being hard to come by.
One day when we were staying at the treehouse we went to see a big volcano. It was gorgeous, and the walk was fun. We got a lot of great photos from the trip, and some of the volcano shots were among the best.
Moving to Wilmington, North Carolina</h2>
In January, I spent the month in Wilmington, North Carolina looking for a place to rent. A few days into my stay at my boss's condo on the beach, I found the perfect house and got everything signed and sorted out. I moved out of the condo and into the completely empty house. I bought a few things - really, just enough to survive for the month. Sarah visited for a couple weeks to see the place and explore the area.
Before Sarah visited, I'd had another panic attack in January - my second ever - and it made me nervous. Throughout the first half of 2022, I experienced symptoms that would be near to the start of a panic attack, but I'd learned how to stave them off.
The month of February we spent getting everything ready to move, and taking that trip to Hawai'i.
March was the month we moved from Minneapolis to Wilmington. We packed up the house, and then I took Mojave and Kalahari in my Seltos and drove to our new home. The cats didn't much care for the road trip - they spent the majority of it curled up together behind the center console. The drive took three days. I hope to never make such a long drive again, especially with cats in tow. Sarah drove down after the movers came and hauled away all of our stuff. This was the first time I had personally hired movers for an interstate move. It didn't go as well as I'd hoped, but it also didn't go as badly as I'd feared. The weirdest part was having to pay in cash instead of with a card.
Over the course of the next month or so, we got unpacked and moved in. Exploring Wilmington was not as much of a priority as establishing a sense of normalcy. We didn't go to the beach as much as we perhaps should have this first year in Wilmington. However, I did bike to the beach twice after we got our bicycles. That's a 45 minute bike ride, which is the longest I've ever taken, I think. The climate here on the coast is a welcome change from Minneapolis, especially now in the cold months. As I write this it's 48 degrees Fahrenheit, with the expected high being 66. Not bad for December 30.
Iron Arachne</h2>
Iron Arachne saw a great many updates over the course of the year. In June, I launched a dungeon generator for it. That was a huge project that I'd never quite figured out before and I was pretty proud of what I'd built. It wasn't as full-featured as others around the web, but it was mine. Writing it required a ton of small subsystems like room layout and distributing keys and monsters and whatnot. I added a ton of new sentient species. I rewrote the word generation system from scratch, and added a utility generator to the site to help me come up with new seed patterns for the generator. The region generator, too, saw a bunch of changes - in particular, adding nearby regions, including vassal states; as well as making name set generation for it configurable.
After awhile I noticed that the language generator in the code base wasn't complete and wasn't used anywhere. So, I started expanding that. It's not complete yet, and I haven't touched it in months. I intend to get back to it at some point, but it's not a priority. In November, I changed the build system to use Node.js 18, and then later in the month migrated it to Vite. At the end of November, I also moved all the navigation to a dedicated page. This change was a long time in coming and finally made the site usable on mobile.
At the end of 2021, I wrote that I'd update the culture, heraldry, and region generators. Well, I didn't touch the culture generator much, other than to flesh out some details and swap out the religion generator for it. I did add new charges to the heraldry generator. The region generator really saw the bulk of the changes. In addition to the dungeon generator, I also added an AD&D 2e character generator. That was the first time I'd ever written a complex generator as the result of a poll. I don't think I'll do that again any time soon; I really prefer working on generators of my own interest. In January I'd added a DCC character generator. That was more fun.
Finally, I moved the site from Netlify</a> to Vercel</a>, to give it a little more separation from my personal sites.
Updates to my personal website</h2>
My personal website saw a number of expansions and design changes this year. I redesigned it a bit after learning more about minimal CSS. The whole thing is designed to be quick to load even on much older and slower hardware. I added several books to my "books read" list, several blog posts, a few recipes, and a handful of new knowledge base articles.
I'm increasingly determined to make my site a proper storehouse of information and stories dear to me. It would be nice if someone out there found it useful, or at least interesting. Failing that, it's still useful to me.
Giving up alcohol</h2>
Probably one of the biggest personal changes happened on November 10. Tired of all the negative effects of drinking, I finally gave it up completely. I had become accustomed to drinking every other night, sometimes six or more drinks. Going sober was much easier than I'd expected. The positive effects were much more noticeable than I expected, too. The most noticeable was how much more energy I had all the time after a couple weeks. Also, caffeine's effects on me changed. Instead of needing caffeine to properly function in the morning, now it makes me jittery if I have the same amount that I used to.
I'm also dreaming again for the first time in years. Starting somewhere around 2015 or so, I stopped having dreams except only occasionally. Now I dream almost every night. They're the same kind of dreams I used to have - full of action and strangeness, like little movies that don't make a ton of sense. I'd forgotten how much fun they can be.
From individual contributor to manager to tech lead</h2>
For a brief period early in the year, I was one of two new managers on the Platform Engineering team. However, the higher-ups felt that was unnecessary and a waste of our technical talents, so we got turned into tech leads instead.
I don't handle any of the managerial duties, but I'm responsible for setting technical direction and leading standups. I didn't get a raise to go with the role change. My boss's boss assured me that was just because it fell outside the annual review cycle. I'm skeptical that I'll get a raise in the new year, though. While I make plenty, inflation means that if I don't get at least a raise matching the inflation rate, I'm actually getting a pay deduction each year. That feels kinda bad.
Also, when the legacy (but stable) side of the business merged with the "startup" side that I'd originally joined, my duties changed. I'm working with a lot of legacy tech, including Perl applications. I don't like that at all. It feels like a bait-and-switch; I was hired to work on the latest tech and explore new horizons, but now most of my time is spent modernizing legacy systems and trying to figure out how to use modern tools with ancient technology.
The pay and benefits are good, and I like the people I work with. However, I'm starting to feel stifled by some of the work, and I'm definitely not as engaged as I was before the merger.
AWS Re:invent 2022</h2>
The last time I went to Re:invent was 2016. The conference doubled in size; there was at least 60,000 people there this year. I tried to go to a dozen different sessions, but only got into one. I later made a presentation for my team about that session.
Going sober definitely had a big impact on my Re:invent experience. At Re:invent in 2015 and 2016, I drank a ton and went bar hopping with a bunch of strangers I met at the conference. This time around, I wasn't drinking at all, and a lot of the activities I used to enjoy seemed boring now. I also had a lot more energy for activities in the morning.
Re:invent had special areas and swag for people with AWS certifications, so I used the half-off voucher they gave me beforehand to get certified. This was the first certification I'd ever paid for. It took a couple weeks of studying, but I passed the exam with flying colors and got my certification. It was a very strange experience, studying for an exam. I hadn't done that since university. I didn't care for it at all.
End of my boycott of Blizzard</h2> I wrote at greater length about this earlier this year</a>. Since that post, I've played a ton of Overwatch 2 and World of Warcraft. I didn't play much Diablo 2 and uninstalled it. I did preorder Diablo IV, despite the controversy surrounding its launch date. Blizzard is definitely still having problems. I don't think I'll boycott them again, as it had no material effect on anything. We'll see how things turn out. There's still the Microsoft acquisition to consider... if it goes through.
Silver Gryphon Games comes back</h2>
In August, Kevin and I made the decision to revive Silver Gryphon Games</a>. This time around, though, I was the one to submit all the registration paperwork and manage the company side. I'm hoping that by being the driving force I can avoid the deliverables problems we had before. We committed to fulfilling the Aethermancy Kickstarter that we abandoned years ago. Also, I'm writing the new edition of Aether. This is the first time I've had an active hand in Aether. While I'm much more interested in writing OSR games, Aether reminds me a lot of what the Palladium System could have been if it was... well, good. For the first time in a long time, I'm really excited about writing for a commercial RPG. Kevin's working on Aethermancy while I work on Aether. He's heavily involved in his retail games business, though, so he's much more distracted than I am. Hopefully I can do right with Aether by him.
Summary</h2>
This is by far my longest year-in-review post I've ever made. A ton happened in 2022. I imagine a lot is going to happen in 2023, too. Tomorrow I'll write about all my plans for the new year.
Here's a list of all the year-in-review posts I've made. I have the strange sense that I've written more of these, but they're either lost to time, or in physical journals. I might have to try and find them if that's the case.

2021</a></li>
2020</a></li>
2018</a></li>
2016</a></li>
2015</a></li>
2013</a></li> </ul>

Old School Baroque

2022-12-22T00:00:00+00:00

Lately there have been an increasing number of new tabletop role-playing games coming out that are distinctly different from the Dungeons & Dragons retroclones popularized categorized as Old School Rennaissance or Old School Revival. These games eschew simplicity in favor of complex or complicated rules, and often have remarkable layout and design or gonzo themes. However, they still are directly influenced by rulesets and design themes from several decades ago. I think we can characterize these as "Old School Baroque."
I did not coin this term. The first incidence I can find of it is on a forum post on RPGPub in 2019</a>. A more codified version of it appears in a more recent blog article that carefully examines trends in OSR RPGs</a>. While both the forum post and blog article use the term rather tongue-in-cheek, I think it's appropriate to describe this emerging category of games.
The Baroque period of history was dramatic and a reaction to the Reformation. It leaned heavily into art and sensory exploration. The word "Baroque" is derived from the Italian "barocco" and is roughly equated to an abberation in or avoidance of logic. Where OSR games strive hard to adhere to the rules and themes of 70s and 80s Dungeons & Dragons, Old School Baroque games instead throw caution and tradition to the wind.
One example of these games would be the much-vaunted Mörk Borg</a>. The layout and design are heavily over-the-top and the game's setting is richly, even brutally, apocalyptic. It leans into a death metal aesthetic that cries out to the senses. The rules are clearly influenced by OSR games that came before it, but they're stretched and torn in ways that might offend more delicate OSR sensibilities. It is definitely more rules-light than other games in the Old School Baroque genre, though.
Another game in this vein is Errant</a>, which presents itself as being "rules light, procedure heavy." That latter clause is what really makes it more of an OSB game than an OSR game. Well, that, and the hit-you-in-the-face aesthetic. While the aforementioned "procedures" are explicitly called out as not being rules, they are effectively rules in how to run the game. Even though Errant itself has a unified core mechanic, those procedures generally run all over the place.
This is a fascinating new genre. I'm looking forward to watching its evolution.

Make the world small again

2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The world has gotten too big.
A lot of online services that we've come to rely on are too intent on serving everyone. In the process, they serve no one well. Similarly, governments are trying very hard to generalize and set universal rules and policies that ultimately cause more problems than they solve. I won't talk about that latter issue in this post, though, as that would make this far longer than it needs to be. So, online services.
Media Services</h2>
Streaming services like Spotify, Netflix, and so on have increasingly retired media that I'd really like to continue to have available. The reasons are varied, but usually boil down to licensing changes. For the past decade or so, I've put up with this because I usually only watch a given movie or show once every decade or so. Music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music offer a huge wealth of music, but... even with all of that available, I tend to stick to particular genres or artists. Also, I have some eclectic tastes in music, and some of these songs have never been available on streaming services, or have been retired after licensing changes.
Yesterday, I saw a post on Mastodon that stuck with me. Here it is, reproduced in text form because I hate screenshots of text:

Kids this is a reminder to collect physical copies of your favorite media. Corporations will axe your favorite show/movie/book in front of its family and make it a felony to retrieve it. Have a library. </blockquote>
The author is @lolennui@mstdn.social</a>. It was posted on Dec 14, 2022 at 02:45. Here's a link to the post</a>.
I think I've hit a tipping point where I agree fully with this sentiment. If you don't own something, it can disappear at any time, for any reason, and there's nothing you can do about it. A lot of these streaming services are starting to optimize for "waves" of content, and licensing titles for shorter periods of time.
I still want to digitally access all of this content. I don't really want to have a massive physical library, as that can take up a huge amount of space. My parents had a collection of over 400 VHS tapes and hundreds of books twenty years ago. They filled rooms with that. So that leaves me with building and operating my own private streaming service.
Which... is easier than you might think. I've set up a Jellyfin</a> server and begun loading media that I already own into it. This works really well so far.
Now comes the long haul part, though - I need to build that library. I want to legitimately own all the media I load into that server, too, so piracy is right out. Movies and TV shows are going to have to come through DVDs and Blurays that I buy and rip from. Music, though, can come from all sorts of places, since I can buy MP3s directly. I'm particularly enjoying discovering new artists I like on Bandcamp</a> and buying their albums.
Search Engines and Discovery</h2>
The mainstream search engines - Google, Bing, even DuckDuckGo - are getting worse and worse at finding meaningful and useful content. Twenty years of search engine optimization, clickbait, and design for algorithms has created a morass of content that increasingly looks designed for machines, not humans. The search engines encourage this, exacerbating the problem. When I search for something, the results are often recently "updated," very similar to a dozen other pages, and optimized to death. Trying to find a web page from the early 2000s that you know for a fact is still online? Good luck. The mainstream search engines probably don't even have it indexed anymore. They don't have infinite storage, and in order to limit their expenses, they cull the least popular (read: least algorithm-optimized) links from their indexes.
It's not all bad news. More and more people are beginning to realize this problem exists. New, independent search engines that index specific niches are popping up. They're small, but serve specific needs very well. One such search engine is Wiby</a>, which specifically targets plain pages with no commercial content. It's really good for finding blog articles on topics that interest you. Another is Old'aVista</a>, which indexes old personal websites.
Another thing that's starting to make a comeback is the web directory. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, web directories were the best way to find curated content that was directly relevant to your interests. They mostly disappeared once search engines hit their stride. Now that the web is too big for any one search engine to handle, though, web directories have an important use again.
I run one such web directory. It's called RPGGen</a>, and it's meant for discovering websites that provide content generators for tabletop role-playing games. There are many others out there. For example:

href.cool</a></li>
Indieseek</a></li>
Fauna Top Sites</a></li> </ul>
Incidentally, I discovered all three of these through Wiby.
Social Media</h2>
Oh, social media. You were once so full of promise. Now, though, all social media is good for is sound bites, short videos of people or animals doing stupid things, and text that triggers various parts of our lizard brains.
The original promise of social media - keeping in touch with people you care about - is all but forgotten.
As it turns out, though, we never really lost the tools we need to keep in touch. I've started using email and even physical mail again to reach out to people. If I have exciting news I want to share with people I care about, I do so directly with each person. It's not much more effort than posting on social media, and it's much more rewarding.
I still use social media, but I'm not nearly as active on it as most people are. I have an account on the major social media sites, but I never use those anymore. The accounts are just placeholders, really. I have one friend who insists on using Facebook Messenger still, and that's honestly probably the only reason I still have a Facebook account. Twitter... well, I didn't really use it anymore to begin with, but once Melon Tusk bought it, that killed the whole thing for me. Unfortunately I still have to use Twitter to log in to two services that require social media login. I should probably fix that.
The other use of social media is broadcasting our presence and thoughts to the world in general. There's a better alternative for that too: the personal website. If you don't have the technical skills to maintain a static site like the one I have here, there are options for you - Neocities</a> is one such.
Summary: Solutions for Each</h2>
So to recap, here are my solutions for each of the above three categories of problems.
To replace streaming services, build your own library. Use Jellyfin for media. Consider leaning into a physical library, if you have the space for it.
To replace mainstream search engines, use independent search engines and web directories.
To replace social media, use email, letters, and phone calls. Make a personal website for your web presence.
Let's make the world smaller again. Just for us.

First Day in Dragonflight

2022-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

So after coming home from a business trip, I finally got to play the new World of Warcraft expansion yesterday. It's so much fun! The last time I remember thoroughly enjoying the initial experience of a WoW expansion was Wrath of the Lich King over ten years ago.
The starting area of the Dragon Isles is absolutely gorgeous. That the expansion encourages exploration makes it even better. There are little things to discover all over the place. The new dragonriding mechanic - basically Flight 2.0 - is really enjoyable and dovetails into the exploration. The Dragon Isles are definitely designed with dragonriding in mind, because there are pillars, canyons, towers, and all other manner of interesting obstacles and terrain to fly around, through, and in.
Something that caught me completely by surprise was the changes to professions. They added a level of depth that is on par with Final Fantasy XIV crafting, and may even draw some inspiration from Star Wars: Galaxies in some limited ways. Even the gathering professions got a little bit of depth added to them, though they at least are still not as complex as FFXIV or SWG. It's going to take me awhile to learn the new systems, and I adore that I have to do that. It makes crafting much less boring and much more rewarding.
The story thus far is less cataclysmic than previous expansions' stories. Yes, there's a big bad, and letting them win would be very not-good. But it doesn't feel like I just got done saving the world and now I have to save it again; instead, the villain story is only part of a larger narrative around restoring the dragonflights to their former glory and their former home.
All of this, in one day. I'm really looking forward to playing more.

Regarding social media, web presence, and dumpster fires

2022-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

So, some rich sociopath bought Twitter and seems hell-bent on destroying it.
I haven't used Twitter in years, except to occasionally check the status of a misbehaving SaaS. So, Twitter's implosion doesn't really bother me. It did prompt me to log back into my Mastodon account</a> and start using it actively. So in that sense, Twitter's implosion has affected me.
Tons of other people have migrated to the Fediverse as a direct result of the Twitter dumpster fire. And by tons, I mean hundreds of thousands. I've never seen Mastodon so active. It's causing no end of strain and hardship for Mastodon server administrators. However, it also is having an effect that I've wanted for years - decentralization of social networks is expanding into the mainstream.
The last time I saw anything like this was when Google decided to murder Google+. G+ had been host to a huge and active tabletop role-playing game community, and when the service died, that community scrambled to find a replacement. Back then, the community seemed to divide between just blogging, using Facebook, and using MeWe. The latter two are centralized services, but the first was decentralized, and I was happy to see more people blogging.
Now, with the mass adoption of Mastodon, it seems the needle is moving even futher into decentralization. At least, this is true for the TTRPG community. I love this. I've been blogging since the early 2000s... maybe since the late 90s, if you count sporadic updates to a static home page.
Hopefully this is a trend and not just a one-off event.
Something that still needs to be addressed, though, is the discovery side of things. Modern search engines like Google and Bing are getting worse and worse at actually finding small websites that don't care about SEO. Why should personal websites care about SEO, anyway? Their focus should be on their own identity. Discovery should be a community problem, rather than an individual's. My own contribution to this is a web directory called RPGGen</a>. Given how enormous the tabletop role-playing game web community has gotten, maybe we need a dedicated search engine that only crawls role-playing game sites. That would be an interesting project.

Return to Blizzard

2022-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

A few weeks ago, I made the decision to rescind my ban on playing Blizzard games. In part this was because Overwatch 2 was imminent, and I missed the particular style of gameplay that only Overwatch had. But it was also because I know people who work at Blizzard, and boycotting Blizzard games appears to be wholly ineffective at assisting change.
This unlocking of the gate meant several things. I could play Overwatch 1 for one more day before the launch of the "sequel." Overwatch 2 completely replaced the original game, so the first one is gone now. I also needed to preorder the collector's edition of the next WoW expansion if I could. I own every expansion collector's edition - though not the CE for the original game, sadly. That, to my surprise, I accomplished easily by ordering through Blizzard's online store. I wonder if demand is down further than I expected. Finally, I installed the Diablo 2 remake and played it for several hours. I had preordered it prior to my ban, but the ban went into effect before its release.
Now, I've played Overwatch 2 for many hours, and I'm levelling my main in WoW to get ready for the release of the Dragonflight expansion later this month. I have until November 15 to reach level 60, and I'm level 58 now. Should be doable unless I get distracted by other things.

Checking back in on Blizzard

2022-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

It's been over a year</a> since I swore off of Blizzard games. A lot has changed in that time. Many people have left the company, and they've made several changes that appear on the surface to indicate a better culture. They've also made some questionable decisions. I decided to give Blizzard another chance.
This decision point happened a little over a week ago. I was talking with Sarah about the news of the impending release of Overwatch 2. Despite having avoided Blizzard games for a year, I never stopped checking the headlines on Polygon about what Blizzard Entertainment was up to. Mostly it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The release of Diablo Immortal was somehow worse than anyone could have predicted, with one of the most awful monetization schemes known to man. The last few major leaders for Overwatch left. There was some good, though. World of Warcraft's team actually seemed to be making positive progress.
As I was mulling all this over with Sarah, I realized that enough had changed that I might be willing to give them another shot. It dawned on me, too, that bearing a grudge against a game company may not be the best way to encourage internal change at that game company. So the next day, after giving it a second round of thought, I decided to rescind my personal ban on Blizzard games and give it another go.
I reinstalled Overwatch for the last full day of the game's life before it was shut down to make way for Overwatch 2. I even tried to livestream it, though it was only the next morning that I realized the stream had no sound. Playing Overwatch was like stretching muscles long unused - no game had ever filled that niche for me, though I tried Paladins for awhile. I enjoyed being back in it. It felt like greeting an estranged friend for the first time in a long time.
I even bought the Collector's Edition for the new World of Warcraft expansion, since I own the CEs of every expansion. I only lack the CE for the original game. I'm waiting until later to begin playing that again, though. The expansion releases at the end of November, and while I still have a lot of the Shadowlands content to play through before it, I'm in no hurry.
Diablo 2: Resurrected finally landed on my PC, too. I had preordered it before the ban went into effect, so I never played it. The graphics are impressive and it feels like my memories of the original. I really do hate managing potions, though. That never changed.
Overwatch 2's launch was plagued by server problems, long queues, and a DDoS attack. I got to play it a little, and it seems to have the broad strokes down. There are tons of tiny little issues that irk me, though. Many of the new "legendary" skins are only variations of the basic skins, not complete reimaginings like all of the old legendaries. Further, they're extremely expensive compared to the old skins. I doubt I'll be collecting any of the new skins, or really even participating much in the new cosmetics shop. Too little value for too big of an expense. The gameplay itself, though, is pretty solid. I like the new Push mode.
So, the games are fun enough. But what about the company's culture? For that, I have to reach out to some friends. We'll see what I learn. If the culture is changing then this may not be a temporary return for me.

Word generation in Iron Arachne

2022-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

When I first rewrote Iron Arachne as a static JavaScript website, I quickly hacked together several name generators using different methods. Most assembled pieces from several different chunks into a single word.
That quickly became insufficient. The results were predictable and small in number. After awhile, I wrote a simple module called "invented" which was meant to create words for invented languages, or conlangs. It wasn't a full language generator like previous iterations of Iron Arachne had. That still doesn't exist for the JavaScript version. However, it did have a simple pattern matching algorithm; if you passed it an array of strings, it would pick a random item from that array, and then go through that string character-by-character. Each character was a symbol representing a category of sounds - phonemes - that it would then pick from at random and return that. Most characters were lowercase letters. If a character was uppercase or not a letter, it would be returned unmodified - so a pattern like KONG</code> would always return "kong" and not something with random phonemes.
The result was an invented word generator that worked well enough. I started using it in almost every part of Iron Arachne that needed made-up words.
Recently, though, things changed just a little bit. I was running out of letters of the alphabet to use as symbols representing phoneme categories. I was using two of them - u</code> and d</code> - to represent a doubled vowel and consonant, respectively. I decided to reclaim those letters for other things. To do so, I needed to figure out how to change the system so I could still generate doubled letters but not linearly add new symbols for them.
The solution was to add the first modifier symbol to the invented library. Instead of being a simple iterative lookup, the generate function would now store the last generated phoneme, and if the next symbol was a +</code> it would return that last phoneme instead of looking up a different one.
That, in turn, made me think about a common scenario where I wanted to have a particular type of word use a random list of sounds instead of one of the pre-existing categories of phonemes. How would I do that, though? My existing module only checked each character in turn. Rather than try and continue down that route, I decided it was finally time to build an actual parser.
I'd never written a parser before. Not even in CS, way back in high school and college. I pivoted to a history degree before taking the otherwise-inevitable compilers class. Lexers and parsers were something I used, not something I wrote. Even now, I'm cheating a bit and using regular expressions to handle most of the heavy lifting.
The idea is that I'll be able to write patterns like this:
(K,G)LvNGON</code></pre> And the generator will spit out words like this: Klangon Glingon Glengon Klungon</code></pre> So anytime the parser encounters a series of characters in parenthesis, it returns a random unmodified item from that list instead of a random phoneme from a lookup table. I want the system to be flexible enough that I can add additional workflows later. Perhaps I might want to add a way to return a random phoneme that rhymes with a pattern, for example. I haven't completed the new parser as I'm writing this. However, I imagine it'll be done sometime in the next few weeks.
Iron Arachne Dungeon Generator and future plans 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00 This weekend past, I launched the dungeon generator for Iron Arachne. I've been working on it off and on for a few weeks and I finally got it to the point where it was usable and useful. However, it's by no means complete, and a lot of features were left unfinished. The above is an example of the maps it currently generates. In terms of pathing, there is a pretty linear flow to the dungeon layout - a higher-number room is deeper into the dungeon. This makes it easy to determine where to put goals like boss encounters. However, it also means the dungeon doesn't encourage exploration or reward players who enjoy that activity, and really it gets a little boring. So, one of the first changes is going to be the addition of more loops throughout the layout. This will result in more connections between rooms. Corridors will need to be addressed. Right now, there's no logic for creating even straight corridors between rooms. Angled corridors will require more effort. Another early change will be the addition of non-rectangular rooms. This can include organic-looking caverns, but also different regular rooms, like circular chambers. I plan on adding something else to the terrain, too - "lakes." In this case, lakes can refer to bodies of water, but also pools of lava and bottomless chasms. These will have be carefully generated so that they add character without cutting off sections of the dungeon. Creatures and Characters</h2> Mobs are divided into two types - creatures and characters. Anything that thinks requires creating two resources in the system - a set of naming rules, and a species. Non-sentient things are classified as creatures, and only require the addition of a single resource. The trouble is that most encounters are comprised of characters. For the initial release of the dungeon generator, I added orcs, goblins, and trolls. As far as the underlying system goes, they're equal to PC races like humans and elves. I intend to keep it that way - they're not "monsters," they're just a different kind of thinking being. This makes any added species useful in a wide variety of ways. They're not just for dungeon encounters. They can be used in any system that uses characters. I plan on adding all of the common "monster" species in the near future. This includes, but is not limited to, the following: Bugbears</li> Centaurs</li> Dark elves</li> Deep dwarves (duergar)</li> Deep gnomes</li> Dragons (this one's difficult)</li> Dryads</li> Fairies</li> Firbolgs</li> Gnolls</li> Gorgons</li> Half-celestials (aasimar)</li> Half-elementals (genasi)</li> Hobgoblins</li> Kobolds</li> Lizardfolk</li> Mind flayers</li> Minotaurs</li> Nymphs</li> Ogres</li> Pixies</li> Satyrs</li> Sea elves</li> Serpentfolk (based on Yuan-ti)</li> Troglodytes</li> </ul> In addition, there are currently a few "templates" that can be applied to both creatures and characters. Right now the list only consists of zombies, vampires, and skeletons. However, I plan on adding the following: Ghost</li> Lich</li> Werebear</li> Weretiger</li> Werewolf</li> </ul> Also, the list of creatures is going to expand too. Eventually there will be a great many monsters from a great many sources. Locks, Keys, and Treasure</h2> At the moment, keys are only used for doors. I plan on making keys operate only on locks, and locks be present in doors, chests, and other things. Like the existing keys, they will be populated in places that don't make them unobtainable. Treasure is limited to coins only at the moment. The system that generates treasure needs a rewrite in order to support mixed treasure piles. This won't be too difficult to implement. I already have gemstone support written, even though it's not used yet. Art objects will be fairly straightforward. Magic items, on the other hand, are going to be more difficult to implement. I plan on leaning on the existing magic weapon generator for this. I also will need to build other types of magic item generators. All of these, incidentally, will be as system-neutral as possible. Like the dungeon generator itself though, they'll be heavily informed by old school systems. Closing thoughts and other things</h2> There is a lot of work that could be done that other generators have not yet. I won't promise anything beyond what I've outlined above, but there are some interesting ideas that I want to explore. I'm borrowing from the dungeon generation and population algorithms of roguelikes for some of this. After I finish my entry for /r/rpg_generators' June 2022 challenge</a>, I'll come back to the dungeon generator and iterate more. Thanks for reading. Finished Shadowbringers 2022-05-11T00:00:00+00:00 A few days ago I finished the content for Shadowbringers (the Final Fantasy XIV expansion). Now I'm working on the content that's between that and Endwalker. Well, that's the vague plan, but I'm also doing other types of content completely unrelated to the main story quest. Like fishing. I enjoy fishing in FFXIV, just like fishing was my primary activity in Animal Crossing when I still played that. I'm not sure why. I don't really like fishing in the real world - it squicks me out. Auto Pet Battle released a new expansion yesterday, so I'm playing that too. I'm starting to think I should try my hand at creating a single-player video game in the vein of Auto Pet Battle and Monster Train, where order and combos matter. No Man's Sky 2022-04-30T00:00:00+00:00 I've been playing a lot of No Man's Sky lately. It tends to go in waves - I'll play a lot of it for a short period of time, then I'll stop playing for months or even years. Then the cycle repeats. This time, I'm doing a lot more combat than I used to and not because I seek it out. The recent pirate expansion has increased the number and strength of pirate ships attacking me in space. The addition of a hotkey to automatically follow an enemy has made this a lot less annoying than before - combat is really easy in No Man's Sky, so having a feature to make it take less time is very welcome. Also, I had to do a quest chain that culminated in me fighting a very large army of Sentinels at one of my bases. That was harder, and I almost died a couple times trying to kill the swarm while also whittling away at very large mecha. That this was essentially a required quest in order to unlock certain (non-combat) features of my base was irritating, but eh, it was a one-time deal. With the help of the Internet, I discovered a couple tricks to getting resources. The first is that you can multiply your carbon pretty easily and make a ton of money off of it. You'll need a medium or large refiner, and a lot of oxygen. Then you just refine the carbon with the oxygen, and refine the result with the oxygen too, and just keep doing that until you have a ridiculous amount of carbon products. A quick way to get oxygen is to just buy it off of pilots in space station landing bays. The other trick is getting large quantities of other resources by equipping your ship with a positron ejector and then blasting the bejeesus out of the terrain at slow speed and low altitude. You'll get thousands of units of ferrite dust and other things this way. I discovered a perfect paradise planet. No inclement weather, no Sentinels, no hostile wildlife, a beautiful blue sky with two suns and a ringed planet off in the distance, and a generally lovely aesthetic. I named it Asgard, even if that's rather tired at this point. I'm working on building my largest base there now, though my primary base is still on a bit of a hellworld several star systems away. We'll see how long No Man's Sky keeps my interest. I'm still playing Final Fantasy XIV, and Galactic Civilizations IV launched a couple days ago, so that also has my attention. Upgrading the Iron Arachne planet generator 2022-04-22T00:00:00+00:00 Today I upgraded the graphics for the planet generator on Iron Arachne</a>. It was not a small task, as I taught myself how to do domain warping and rewrote most of the GLSL shaders that are used to create these graphics. But first, the only one that did NOT get changed, because I like it as is: I might end up tweaking the gas giant a bit, but not today. The arid planet is a little more colorful, but still looks bleak. The new cloud shader is a huge improvement. It's less obvious in this particular shot, but the barren planet gained a lot more detail in its surface texture. I still don't care for how I did the vertex displacement, but eh, that can wait for another day. The garden world was the hardest. I'm still not happy with it, but it's better than it was. The jungle world looks much better. It definitely has more of a forested feel. The ice world is much more colorful than it used to be. Originally I was going to go for a color scheme similar to the original, but I liked this version too much and kept it. The ocean world now feels a lot less plastic and has more detail to it. The new clouds help. The new swamp world looks just as unfriendly as the original, but perhaps more colorful now. I might tone down the brighter hues in the future. The toxic world is less cartoony now. It no longer has the neon green oceans and generally looks like an awful place to visit. The new volcanic world is much more volcano-y. Instead of just oceans of lava, there are now rivers too, and the glow is less pronounced. All in all, I think it's a pretty impressive upgrade, though there's still a lot of work to be done. At some point I really want to figure out atmospheric scattering. April 2022 update on my RPG projects 2022-04-01T00:00:00+00:00 It's been quite some time since I last wrote about the tabletop RPG projects I have in the works. For the most part, there have been very few updates over the last year. However, I have been occasionally plinking away at the Ingenium Second Edition manuscript, and lately I've been planning on how to bring a few others closer to completion. Updates on existing projects</h2> Ingenium Second Edition has seen the bulk of the work. Species were renamed to bloodlines. An entire continent was removed from the setting. A lot of things were reworked for the 2d6 core mechanic. A lot of Talents and spells were added. Professions got organizations that you have a relationship with starting out. A languages index was added. All of the remaining Talents were planned out. Most were fleshed out. Wizard marks were made a core part of the magic system instead of a Talent. Mysteries of a Broken World was... just converted to LaTeX. Nothing substantial changed here. Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire similarly had little done to it. A few cosmetic changes and typo fixes. Plans for the future</h2> I'm going to continue to bring Ingenium Second Edition closer to completion. It remains my primary focus. I plan on doing all of the work myself, including layout and illustration. For the immediate future I'm going to focus on writing all of the spells, miracles, spirit tricks, and Talents. Mysteries of a Broken World is going to get the most dramatic change of the three. I'm going to rework it to be purely a solo RPG. The survival theme will get stronger, since there will no longer be other players to worry about. Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire will probably see the least work this year. It's a tight concept and really just needs fleshing out rather than any system development. From time to time I'll add to it, but Ingenium will take up more of my attention. Lastly, I plan on formally adding Ingenium Second Edition to this website. The trademark and copyright are mine now instead of Silver Gryphon Games'. I'll make a bigger post about this later. Looking ahead to 2022 2022-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 2022 promises to be a year of big changes. We're moving to North Carolina sometime in the first quarter. I'm planning on leaning hard into biking and beach culture, which should have the side effect of helping me become fit again. I want to try surfing and snorkeling and other such things. For Iron Arachne, I plan to work on enhancing existing generators over adding more. In particular, I want to make them more customizable and allow better export options. The culture, heraldry, and region generators will see the bulk of the changes here. I will probably try again to write a map generator to go with the region generator. Though I have yet to understand the math behind it, I keep trying. Eventually I'll get it. For fitness, my strategy is fairly simple. I'll spend less of my free time in front of a computer screen and more on running around outside. I hope to make a habit of logging off after work and going for a run or something. On weekends I'll need a different pivot point; maybe before breakfast I'll go out. That I'm less sure on. My doctor continues to recommend cholesterol medication, so I might finally take that advice. I want to rejoin the Society for Creative Anachronism in 2022. I'll be in a brand new area completely devoid of past drama. It'll be a good opportunity to reconnect with more physical hobbies I used to have. I already have a device in review at the society level; hopefully it's accepted, because it's perfect for a cook who likes the beach. Final Fantasy XIV continues to hold my interest, which is rare for an MMO. My free company, the Mystic Exiles, is a great group of people. There are a couple individuals in particular that I have fun playing with. Maybe someday I'll get to meet them all in person. I got the FF14 cookbook for Christmas, and I plan on making several dishes out of it this year. Maybe I'll write about my experiences with it here. Maybe I'll write more about what I do in FF14 in general, actually. That could be fun. For my 40th birthday this year we're going to Hawai'i. I'm really looking forward to that trip. It's only a couple months away now. It gives me another incentive to rock the fitness thing early and hard. It's also possible that we'll be going to Italy with my family this year. Sarah and I are learning Italian, though she's much better about the learning habit than I am. I need to devote more time to it. Assuming we're able to rent a house with no shared walls or at least thick walls, I also want to get back into playing musical instruments. I have a dizi flute that I've only just started to learn how to play. If the stars align, maybe I'll get a piano and start playing that again too. For now though, I'm only committing to learning the dizi. All of the above makes for a pretty action-packed 2022. Hopefully nothing crazy happens that throws all of this out the window. If it does, well, my main goal will still be improving fitness and health. 2021 Year in Review 2021-12-28T00:00:00+00:00 2021 was an eventful year. The global pandemic was still a major problem, though vaccines finally showed up, and treatments started to become available at the end of the year. I quit my job at Solution Design Group after a golden opportunity presented itself, and took a 100% remote job with Apiture. Thus far, it has proven to be a fantastic job with a great group of people. The benefits are amazing. I think I finally gave up on the idea of resurrecting Silver Gryphon Games this year. Kevin doesn't need that distraction and my tendency to change focus for months at a time would make a company with that level of activity difficult to maintain on my own. It's possible that in the future I will consider starting a company with a smaller focus, but that's not likely to happen in 2022. Iron Arachne saw less development in the latter half of the year, but the first half was quite productive. I learned more about how concepts should be structured. In July, I rewrote the entire project in Typescript with Svelte. That was enlightening. I still don't care for Javascript generally, but Typescript at least makes it tolerable. I wish I didn't have to write the site in JS. However, the benefits of having a static site outweigh the drawbacks of writing in JS. I did end up building that planet generator I wrote about at the beginning of the year. I taught myself how to write GLSL shaders in the process. One of the biggest events of 2021 was that I got Lasik surgery in late September. While it has been fantastic to be able to see well without glasses, I'm still experiencing issues due either to healing or to side effects. If I focus on something close up for more than a few seconds, then I'll be unable to re-focus on things farther away for about half a minute. Also, when I'm tired, my distance vision is blurry enough that it's difficult to read signs. Still, absolutely worth it. We abandoned our idea of moving to Estonia for a variety of reasons. At first it was due to the difficulty involved in moving there with two cats. Over the course of the year, however, it became obvious that Russia's aggression in the area makes Estonia unsafe. Our new plan is much less disruptive: we're moving to North Carolina in the next couple months, and then in a few years, we'll move to Maine. I'm in worse shape physically at the end of 2021 than I was at the beginning, I think. I'm not sure because I stopped logging progress a couple years ago. That's changing now. I got an Apple TV for Christmas, and I intend to expand my usage of Fitness+ from occasional workouts using my iPhone to daily workouts using the TV. I'll talk more about that in my "looking forward" post in a few days. In the end, 2021 was a relatively positive year full of changes. The threat of Covid-19 still looms over everything, but I think there is light at the end of the tunnel now. The New HeroQuest 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00 So today I received the new HeroQuest in the mail. Last year, I backed the Hasbro-run crowdfunding campaign to remake it. I backed at the highest level, the "Mythic" tier, which came with quite a few extra goodies. I plan on writing a second blog post after I play it a few times. Opening up the shipping box! The contents of the shipping box. This is what came in the Mythic-exclusive box. What follows is a series of photos comparing my copy of the original game released in the late 80s to the new one. The original box is shorter and wider. The artwork on the new one is a nice tribute to the original. The board in the new one is a bigger scale but otherwise follows the layout of the original. On the left is a goblin from the original, and on the right is the new one. The originals were made of a hard plastic; the new ones are a softer plastic. I'm not sure if they'll hold paint well yet. On the left is the barbarian that I painted when I was a teenager, with the sword partially broken. On the right is the new barbarian. Not shown here is the female barbarian that came in the Mythic box. The gargoyle in the new one is slightly bigger and has an axe instead of a whip. Otherwise it's pretty close to the original. The new dice are bigger and less round. The shield is a different symbol, too. I think these will be easier to roll, honestly. All of the furniture in the new game is full plastic 3D models. The furniture in the original was cardboard with some plastic parts. Not shown here are the rats and skulls that come in the new set. I like the new doors better, though one or two of the ones in my box are slightly warped. The new character sheets are almost identical to the original, but there are a LOT more of them. This is a thick set. The rulebook in the new version is full color on glossy paper. The artwork is much improved. I haven't dug through the rules to see if the layout is changed, though. The Zargon player's screen is the same size as the original, but it has new artwork. The reverse of the Zargon player's screen has mostly the same information, although the names of some of the monsters are different and the text is laid out better. The new quest book is also full color glossy. Again, I haven't flipped through it yet. Each of the original cards is present in the new version, but with new artwork. Also, Chaos Magic has been renamed Dread Magic, and there are new equipment cards, player rule reference cards, and character cards. An Eventful Few Months 2021-10-27T00:00:00+00:00 It's been an eventful few months. Since my last blog post back in August, I've had Lasik surgery, had a house deal fall through, discovered a new hobby, rediscovered an old one, and edged deeper into the Apple ecosystem. That's not even counting all the various developments in my professional life. Lasik was expensive and the procedure was deeply uncomfortable, but worth it. For most of my life I've been near-blind without glasses. For the last month, though, I've had perfect vision. I still catch myself marveling at how awesome it is to have vision like this. The house deal... well, that sucked and was expensive, but it ultimately made me realize the value of renting indefinitely. So that'll keep happening. After abandoning Blizzard forever, I looked around for a new game to devote my lazy hours to. I landed on Final Fantasy XIV. After joining the Free Company "Mystic Exiles," I realized I'd found a new home. The Exiles are a great group of people - really friendly, really helpful, and genuinely caring. It feels like a second family. I have never had an MMORPG guild experience like that before. Plus, the game itself is a ton of fun. At time of writing, I'm barely into the content from the second expansion, and the fourth expansion is only a couple weeks away from launch. This will keep my attention for awhile, I imagine. The old hobby that I rediscovered is Warhammer 40k. A friend of mine invited me to a tournament he's hosting at his game store in Iowa, and I decided to dust off (literally) my boxes of miniatures and re-enter the fold. It's cost quite a lot of money to get all the new rulebooks, miniatures, and equipment I need to participate in the tournament, but I'm excited about the whole hobby again. Almost a month ago I bought a new iPhone 13 Pro and gave my iPhone 11 Pro to my wife. Since she was on Android before, and we chiefly used Facebook Messenger to communicate, this opened up a host of new options for us. Now we use mostly iMessage and avoid Facebook if at all possible. It's a little annoying to not have iMessage on Windows, but at least when I'm using my Mac I can type out messages to her. As for all of the developments in my professional life, well, that could be a whole 'nother blog post all on its own. Suffice it to say that the technology that I spend most of my dayjob hours on has changed dramatically, and I'm addressing some interesting new challenges. I'm really starting to dig Hashicorp Nomad as an alternative to Kubernetes. So that's a bit of what I've been up to the past couple months. Blizzard is dead to me. 2021-08-02T00:00:00+00:00 The last three years has been a slow, awful death spiral for Blizzard. I don't know where all the trouble started, though I suspect Activision played a part in it. I have been playing Blizzard games since the mid-1990s, so with over two decades spent in their creations, I'm pretty sad to let it all go. I still enjoyed playing Overwatch for several hours a day. But now, it's gotten to be too much. The proverbial straw has shattered the camel's spine. I uninstalled Overwatch and the Blizzard launcher. They will never return to my computer unless something truly drastic happens to fix the current state of the company. Off I go to... something else. Not sure what yet. But something. Hrenovuha, the horseradish liquor 2021-05-26T00:00:00+00:00 Hrenovuha, horseradish liquor</div> </div> A few months ago I watched an episode of The Booze Traveller set in Siberia. The show's about a guy from Boston travelling the world and experiencing local, well, booze. In Siberia, he encountered something called hrenovuha, a liquor made from distilling horseradish. It reminded me of horseradish vodka. I first encountered horseradish vodka in a Soviet-themed bar called Hammer and Sickle in Uptown Minneapolis. It was meant as a "punishment" shot as part of their Russian Roulette drinking game. However, I discovered that I loved it. There are some excellent horseradish vodkas available in North America. However, none of them are really hrenovuha, which is much more horseradish-forward. So I decided to try making something akin to hrenovuha at home. Since I couldn't actually distill horseradish - that sort of thing is frowned on by authorities - I did the next closest thing. I took a bunch of fresh horseradish and a lot of 180 proof Everclear and made an infusion. I peeled the horseradish and cut it into several one-inch chunks. Then I added that to about 500 ml of Everclear in a mason jar. I sealed the jar and let it sit on the counter in a dark corner for about a week, then removed the horseradish and strained the result back into the jar and threw it in the fridge. The result is really strong and very horseradish-y. Much more so than horseradish vodka. I doubt it's the same flavor profile as hrenovuha, but I don't have access to the latter, so I can only guess. Open Source North 2021 2021-05-23T00:00:00+00:00 The first session was about neuroaesthetics and user experience. This was a great talk. It went into areas of neuroscience as they apply to user experience design, such as gestalt pattern theory and high and low frequency visuals. I'll need to look into these topics in greater detail later so I don't lose this new information, but it was definitely a rich presentation that was interesting and useful. The speaker was excellent too, not just the topic. If you get the chance to hear Alyssa Pilney present on a topic, take it. The second I thought was going to be a Rust session, but that was moved to 3:00 pm. As a result I had to pick something else. I started with a talk about open source at schools, but that ended up just being a sales pitch for open source in general. I've seen that too often already. So, I switched to a talk on machine learning in music composition by Leif Bjornson. The machine learning session, unfortunately, had some assumptions about audience knowledge levels that precluded me. So I left the machine learning session on in the background and worked on other things, including this blog post. As it happened, I'm glad I left it on, because the session got really interesting after the technical portion. I started paying attention again shortly, and I learned about some really cool tools like Google Magenta and Musetree. I'll have to explore those in more depth sometime. At noon, I dropped into SPS Commerce's chat about running successful tech communities. It seemed more geared for how to build a tech community within a corporation, rather than an unaffiliated tech community. I was hoping for some ideas for running the DevOps learning community in SDG. It was not terribly useful. The one o'clock session was about observability. There were some good nuggets of wisdom in this talk; it was presented by a couple guys from Elastic. They suggested standardizing on a specific time zone (GMT), being careful to use NTP correctly, adding schema on writes instead of reads, and enriching logs with context whenever possible. They mentioned the Elastic Common Schema</a> as a good starting point. The last point I took away from it was that it's rare for a single event to be actionable; context determines action. After this, it went into what was essentially a sales pitch for Elasticsearch and Kibana. Until then, it was really informative. I skipped the OpenTelemetry</a> session I'd planned to attend at 2:00pm. I was starting to get bored at this point. After a review of the other sessions available in that time slot, I decided to spend the time doing something more productive until the final session. The final session I wanted to attend was a Rust adoption journey. However, I discovered that there was an Overwatch 2 developer livestream occurring at the same time, so I decided to catch up on the Rust session in a recording later. I was most excited about the Rust session out of all the sessions I'd planned to attend, but as it was being recorded and the devstream was not, I chose to watch the latter. All in all, it was a great small conference. I'm definitely looking forward to another in-person version in 2022. Next year I'll be more careful in my choice of sessions! Old RPGs of Mine 2021-04-30T00:00:00+00:00 I've been designing games for almost as long as I've been playing them. I made my first board games in my single digits in the late 80s and early 90s. My first role-playing games happened a little later, in my early teens. Thankfully, I kept hard copies of them around. Today I spent some time transcribing them and recreating their original logos. After putting them into my standard LaTeX-based manuscript workflow, I produced PDFs of each of them. Now I've added them to this site. None of them are good, but they might give you a little insight into where I came from, design-wise. Huck Finn: The Role-Playing Game</a>: I made this for an English class a long time ago. Stargazer</a>: This was a weird superhero RPG that gives characters classes based on their jurisdiction. It includes some strange races. Stellar Warfare</a>: Probably my first RPG ever. It was loosely based on Star Wars, and reflects a love of space combat and the Dark Side. Games in progress 2021-04-07T00:00:00+00:00 I'm working on several tabletop RPGs at once right now. This post is meant to keep my thoughts straight on what each one is meant to achieve and how it plays differently from the others. Hopefully, that will prevent them from all blending into variants of each other. Ingenium Second Edition</h2> The digital whiteboard Miro has been invaluable in working on this lately. I have virtual post-it notes all over the thing. Ingenium Second Edition (I2E) is my personal flagship. The system is an evolution away from the swingy, explodey mechanics of the original into a math-flat system that encourages interactions beyond just combat. With twelve attributes, 2d6-based rolls, flexible magic systems, and very limited bonuses, it's a highly controlled system. The setting is influenced by simulationist ideas of injecting realism into the various parts of the game world, but still has many of the same roots of the original implied setting. This includes imminent war, an overarching epic plot, and ancient evil. Mysteries of a Broken World</h2> Mysteries of a Broken World is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game. Originally it was meant to be Silver Gryphon Games's entry into the OSR field. SGG folded before that could manifest, and I later brought MoaBW under my own development. The system is meant to hew closely to the ideals of old-school gaming: there should be few rules, the combat should be lethal, and the stories should be pulpy rather than realistic. However, it adds the wrinkle of throwing in survival game mechanics, to make the environment a deadly adversary also. There may also be an element of base-building involved; this is still very much in the theory phase right now. The setting is post-apocalyptic fantasy. The world-that-was either was modern day Earth or something quite like it, but that was long ago. Now it's rampant with strange forces and stranger creatures. There is no overarching plot and no epic story. Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire</h2> The spiritual sequel to the original Vox Draconis has a new setting and a new game system. The original game was very much a copy of Dungeons & Dragons Basic with the serial numbers filed off. VD:KSF's system is focused on the player characters as heroes who affect the game world. Like I2E, it's less about killing monsters and more about having an impact. Unlike I2E, there are fewer rules and less customization. Most mechanical choices happen at character creation. It uses a d20-based roll-over main dice mechanic and relies heavily on player creativity. The setting is somewhere between the Stone Age and Tolkienesque fantasy. The world is less advanced than average fantasy, includes dinosaurs alongside dragons, and generally favors a whimsical approach to setting blending. It's not grimdark or gritty, and encourages players to imagine the best. Building things slowly, and with feeling 2021-04-02T00:00:00+00:00 Stitch Fix posted an article on their blog yesterday entitled "Move Slow and Make Things</a>." It was meant to be an April Fool's joke, but the basic premise of the first paragraph got me to thinking. Industry has always been obsessed with making as many things as possible as fast as possible. There is usually a monetary incentive behind this. In rare cases, like the Covid-19 vaccines, the incentive is more primal. The majority of the time, however, it's purely a desire for greater wealth. This is why, when you go on Amazon to shop for something, you'll see dozens of bizarrely-named brands selling nearly-identical products. The market - the desire for wealth - has created an optimization for most money earned for least expenditure of resources. An alternative to this is building things slowly and with feeling. If you're building a bookcase, finish the back end that no-one will likely ever see. If you're building an app, make the help screen beautiful, inviting, and rewarding to use, even though most people will never use it. If you're provisioning a server, install and configure your shell of choice rather than relying solely on bash. The artisanal approach is not for everyone. It may not even be for anyone all of the time. But every so often, it can be rewarding to take a step back, take a breath, and take your time. This applies as much to software as it does to physical objects. A new wishlist for Star Wars: Galaxies 2 2021-03-10T00:00:00+00:00 Way back in 2013, I posted an article</a> talking about what I wanted from a hypothetical sequel to Star Wars: Galaxies. A lot has changed in the near-decade since Star Wars: Galaxies went offline for good. Of particular note is the rise of open-world survival games like Ark or Valheim. Games like Star Citizen and No Man's Sky also promise gameplay that would seem at home in the SWG vein. So, this article will go into my thoughts for what a new Star Wars: Galaxies game would look like in the 2020s. Component-Based Building</h2> The original game featured player buildings that were single-piece placements. Modern survival games like Valheim let players craft individual components of a building, such as a wall or floor tile, and then place those in the world to construct their own buildings. That kind of thing would find a strong welcome among the creative community. So, I think, would a blueprint system that allowed less creatively-inclined players to purchase prebuilt buildings from other players. Skill-Based Progression</h2> I said this back in 2013, and I'll say it again - a return to the skill trees of the pre-NGE original game would be ideal. More and deeper skill trees than the original would give us more interesting options and builds. Perhaps there is something to learn from how games like Path of Exile treat progression? Large, Procedurally-Generated Planets</h2> Procedural generation has come a long way since 2001. A sequel to SWG would be fantastic if it took inspiration from the planet generation of No Man's Sky, for example. However, NPC cities would need to be much larger than the small outposts in No Man's Sky, and that would be a challenge. Updates to Building</h2> Zones of control - where a player is able to place building components and so on - would need a big update. There's been plenty of work in this area over the last twenty years. Also, being able to deform the terrain would allow players to flatten areas for building on. Again, this is inspired by Valheim. Seamless Atmospheric Flight</h2> Atmospheric flight in SWG was only turned on in the last few hours of the game's life. It would be nice to see atmospheric flight as implemented in No Man's Sky come to a SWG sequel. That is, a player could enter orbit of a planet and fly down to their home city, all without loading screens. Modern Movement</h2> The original SWG did not allow you to jump over obstacles. A sequel would need full range of motion. Taking a page from Conan: Exiles and allowing for stamina-limited strenuous movement like climbing and running would be a nice addition. Vehicular Combat</h2> We talked about this a lot on the SWG forums back in the day. Now, though, it's been done many times in other games. In my original wishlist, I mentioned that Planetside 2 had done this. I still think that's a good example of balancing infantry combat and vehicle combat. A Post-Rise Setting</h2> The original Star Wars: Galaxies was set between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. As such, there was a lot it couldn't explore, since it had to constrain itself to staying between two major canon events. Setting SWG2 after the Rise of Skywalker would open up a lot of possibilities. With the New Order crippled but not eliminated, the New Republic in a similar situation, and a whole galaxy full of independent systems, there's a lot of leeway for world-building. This is perfect for an open world sandbox game. To conclude...</h2> It is unlikely that we'll ever see another Star Wars: Galaxies. Ubisoft Massive has announced that they're working on an open world Star Wars game</a>, but it's unclear what form that will take. My guess is that it will be more akin to Breath of the Wild or Spider-Man than an MMO. Time will tell. Switching to Zola 2021-03-08T00:00:00+00:00 I switched the static site generator used for this site from Hugo to Zola over the weekend. Hugo is fine, for the most part. Zola hit the front page of Hacker News, so being curious as always, I played with it a bit. Zola's templating language is very similar to Twig. This makes sense, since they're both derived from the same root. Hugo templates are based on Go. This can be obtuse at times, especially since Hugo's documentation leaves a bit to be desired. Besides the templating, front matter is easier to deal with in Zola. Zola has some issues, but so far I'm enjoying working with it more than I did Hugo. So, now this site is built in Zola. As part of that, I decided to change up the look of the site. It's similar but not the same. Another Forgotten Project: Mysteries of a Broken World 2021-02-18T00:00:00+00:00 Three years ago, I was working on the last project I would touch at Silver Gryphon Games. It was an old-school revival game called Mysteries of a Broken World. It was meant to be a fantasy post-apocalyptic game and cleave close to the design paradigms of OSR: Simple rules</li> Pulpy settings</li> Brutal combat</li> </ul> I wrote several blog articles on my now-defunct Accio Inspirante blog about the game. After Silver Gryphon Games met its end, I forgot it even existed. This morning while cleaning up some things in my WordPress.com account I noticed Accio Inspirante and took a look around. On the principle that I'm collecting all of my works in one place, I moved all of the blog posts from there into this site. You can read them here: Designing a New OSR Game</a></li> Designing an OSR Game Part 2: Freeholds and Fatality</a></li> Designing an OSR Game Part 3: Names, Backgrounds, and Playtests</a></li> Designing an OSR Game Part 4: Alignment, Treasure, and Exploration</a></li> </ul> When I took a look at the manuscript for Mysteries of a Broken World, it was in quite the state. I converted it from Markdown to LaTeX, like I've done for Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire and for Ingenium Second Edition. While I was converting it, I saw a lot that I liked about the system. I added Mysteries to my in-progress games. The PDF is available on the RPGs page if you want to see what it's like. I'll continue working on it alongside VD:KSF and I2E. Updating Ingenium: Dusting off the manuscript 2021-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 Silver Gryphon Games shut its doors in 2019. This meant that the second edition of my Ingenium role-playing game was mothballed and it would never see the light of day. Or so I thought. Fast forward to 2021. Earlier this month I cloned the manuscript git repository for the second edition and started digging through it, just for nostalgia's sake. Then I started noticing little corrections I could make. I began writing these up as issues in GitLab for the manuscript's repository. After not too long, I started working on it again. First, I rewrote the whole manuscript from LaTeX-enhanced Markdown to full LaTeX. I then ported the layout definitions from my Vox Draconis: Kingdoms of Stone and Fire project to Ingenium. That all took several hours. Once it was done, then I started hacking on the text itself. Time has not been kind to the manuscript. Since I last touched it in 2014, the world has changed. While the system itself was mostly fine, some of the world description was problematic, and "races" as a mechanic have really fallen out of favor. One of the first changes I made was to replace the original "races" with "species," and then began to rewrite all of the species descriptions to remove anything that implied that species defined culture and behavior. I also reworked several parts of the world description and made note of a large number of sections that just felt rough or awkward. After that, I changed the "Monsters & Challenges" chapter into two chapters - Adversaries & Allies and Bestiary. I moved all of the sentient "monsters" into Adversaries & Allies as non-player races and reworked their descriptions to no longer make them monotone. For example, goblins are no longer uniformly evil thieves, and don't have a single culture. All of the non-sentient "monsters" I changed into entries in the Bestiary chapter and began fleshing them out more as inhabitants of the world and not just things to kill. I also removed the experience point reward for killing things. In its place is just a reward for overcoming challenges, which de-emphasizes killing enemies in favor of finding ways to help allies. The system needs more work, but I plan on adding even more emphasis on the player characters as social members of the world, and not just murderhobo tomb raiders. The world of Eiridia itself needs a lot of fleshing out. What's written already is a decent start, but it's mostly historical information about how each country came to be. I want to add more accessible information to the setting chapters so that players can understand how the various cultures behave, and how their own characters might behave within Eiridia. I also want to write more about how to build interesting stories in the context of Eiridia and how the player characters fit into that world. None of this means that Silver Gryphon Games is coming back from the dead. Kevin and I have discussed that possibility, but at this point, reworking the Ingenium Second Edition manuscript is purely a creative exercise. Looking Ahead to 2021 2021-01-03T00:00:00+00:00 This year will hopefully be much better for humanity than 2020 was. Multiple vaccines are now in play, with general rollout coming within the next few months. A new American president with a better grasp on reality will be taking office in less than three weeks. What follows are my own plans for the new year. Iron Arachne will see continued development this year. The frenzied rewrite in November and December was just an effort to get most of the old functionality implemented as quickly as possible. Now that it's fully launched, the new site can begin to receive new features. I'm kicking around several ideas right now. A planet generator is one of these. The most difficult part of the planet generator is that it will require proper texture generation instead of cheating with SVG filters like the star system generator does. We'll see how well it goes. Preparations for moving to Estonia will ramp up. As the Covid situation improves, we can begin planning our exodus in earnest. My Estonian language learning has been on the back burner, but that changes now. I may begin trying to write portions of this site in Estonian as my command of the language improves. In the last quarter of last year I began digging into more of the details of life in Estonia, like the cost of cat litter and the quality of housing in various areas of Tallinn. I've been reading the only English-language history of the country over the past few months. Sarah has been continuously learning Estonian, and she's starting to get a firm grasp of the fundamentals. That should help me learn, too. Making connections in the Estonian tech community is a vital next step, as it's becoming increasingly likely that we'll need to find Estonian employers rather than American employers willing to let us work from a foreign country. My study of cooking continues to advance. For Christmas my family gave me several books on cooking technique. I plan on making good use of them and learning more about the building blocks of cooking. One of the books is called "The New Professional Chef," and it contains detailed instructions on a wide variety of basic skills a chef should have. I'm greatly looking forward to practicing. Since switching to the Mediterranean diet in early December due to high cholesterol, my eating habits have completely changed. Previously, I would have breakfast burrito bowls every morning and a ton of protein at each meal. Now I'm working on being 90-95% vegetarian. The meals I've been eating so far have leaned heavily on pita bread, hummus, olives, and other elements of a "Naf Naf" concept, since I don't yet have a good grasp on how to be vegetarian. But it's getting easier to explore new recipes as I learn more about different vegetables and their preparation. It's fun and I enjoy the process. Both Sarah and I are enjoying the result, too, as properly cooked vegetarian meals are just as flavorful. Another change I'm looking forward to making this year is becoming more active. It won't be warm for another four months at the very earliest, and a recent blog post I read about embracing winter in Estonia really clicked for me. Rather than hiding out inside and avoiding the cold weather, we should be enjoying what the cold weather brings. What this actually means is that I can't use cold weather as an excuse to stay sedentary. I plan on taking walks when the temperature's above zero and looking into winter activities that don't require close proximity to other people. The rest of 2021 hinges on what happens with Covid-19. It's a given that the first half of the year will be the same or worse than 2020. Summer onward, though, is an open question. So much depends on whether we as a species can put new measures in place to protect ourselves from the virus and its siblings. I suppose time will tell. 2020 Year in Review 2020-12-28T00:00:00+00:00 Last year I didn't write a retrospective. This year I felt it was necessary, given all that's happened. 2020 has been a rough year. Covid-19, George Floyd's murder and the ensuing riots, and Donald Trump's increasingly bizarre behavior are all pretty well known and covered elsewhere. My sister lost three cats this year; two to old age and one small kitten to disease. My wife's grandfather passed away due to Covid. Going fully remote was relatively easy for my wife and me, as we both have professions that mesh well with it. In March just after the coronavirus lockdown began in the USA I changed clients. I have never seen anyone at my current client in person; we have only ever interacted in Teams and Zoom. Video chat is definitely preferable to voice-only, but we still need spatially-aware video chat before it can get close to replicating in-person interaction. Side conversations and awareness of eye contact are sorely lacking. My wife and I went on our first cruise together in late February and early March. This was right after the first cruise ship off East Asia got quarantined, but right before lockdown began. The ship was filled with hand sanitizer stations and we were required to wash our hands before entering the buffet restaurants, but everything was otherwise no different from normal operation. The daily email updates about the increasing number of ports that were off-limits due to Covid-19 were disconcerting, though. Thankfully, the cruise was in the Caribbean, so it was one of the last regions to be affected by Covid-19 directly, and our ship was never infected. Work has been good to me this year. At the end of last year, I won my employer's biggest award, the SDG Award. At the end of this year, I won it again. Throughout the year I got a few smaller awards too. That felt really good, and I've felt very appreciated at Solution Design Group. I joined the Employee Experience Committee and gave a presentation on roguelike development at last year's internal SDG Presents event. The Tabletop Games company community that I lead went quiet for the most part over 2020. I regret that a bit; the events we held for it last year were a lot of fun for everyone. In hindsight, running them virtually would have been a nice change of pace from all the negative events of the year. From a learning perspective, I dove deep into Chef this year. It went so well that not only do I no longer hate Chef, I've become an advocate for it in some scenarios. I also began studying Estonian history and the Estonian language. Estonia is a major focus in my personal life right now as we gear up to move there. Their history is fascinating and so much of it is unknown outside the Baltic region itself. I was blown away when I found out that Estonia is effectively the Silicon Valley of Europe, with services like Skype being born there. More on all of this will come in a future blog post. With dramatically reduced in-person social events this year, I needed to find new ways to interact with people. The Dungeons & Dragons campaign that I played in went virtual, and I stayed with it for several months, but ultimately it was too big for me to play in virtually. For technical reasons we ended up dropping video chat in favor of voice chat, and that meant it was difficult to get attention without interrupting someone else. I ended up leaving that campaign and joining a smaller one, and that is working out much better. I also have attended a handful of virtual happy hours over the year, and those have been fun, but sporadic. An unexpected social outlet came about in the form of the tilde community that I belong to - Tilde Town</a>. I interacted with them much more this year than in any of the previous five years I've been a part of it, and started to make some friends. Discord communities have also provided a social environment to a lesser degree, and I've become more involved in the Royal Manticoran Navy, a fan organization dedicated to David Weber's Honorverse novels. My personal project Iron Arachne has seen a wealth of development in 2020. Near the beginning of the year I started running into limitations of the Golang ecosystem and rewrote the entire project into a Laravel monolith. This worked much better, even if certain operations became much slower. The site expanded to the point where users had accounts and could save their generated results, and the heraldry generator grew and became more useful and complex. Unfortunately, the infrastructure costs to support the site also grew, and in the last couple months I could no longer justify their expense. So I rewrote the site again, this time as a single-page app in Vue.js that I could host for free on Netlify. The site lost a lot of functionality in the process, but it now costs nothing to maintain. In a happy turn of events, the star system generator actually became much faster in the conversion to JavaScript, going from a 3-5 second generation time to under 60ms. I will talk more about my plans for Iron Arachne in my first blog post of 2021. The last big change of 2020 that I'll mention here is my return to the Apple ecosystem. I replaced my Pixel 2 with an iPhone 11 Pro last year, and this year I replaced my custom Windows/Linux PC with a 2019 16" MacBook Pro, and my Fitbit Charge 3 with an Apple Watch. I don't regret this decision at all. While there have been some periods of adjustment, it has been a positive experience overall. Gaming on the MacBook Pro is not as good as it was on my custom rig, but Bootcamp lets me play most of my PC games without issue. I wish the GPU was better but otherwise it works fine. All in all, 2020 has been a lot better than it could have been for me personally. I am deeply grateful for being in a position to weather the storm this way. Hopefully 2021 will be better for the world in general. The vaccines and new American leadership give me hope. Uvinji 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00 As soon as the pre-expansion patch launched, I fired up World of Warcraft with the intent to create my new main character and begin my adventure anew. Well, that first night there was a bit of a hiccup, as everyone else had the same idea. It took a lot longer to unlock the Vulpera allied race than I thought it would, as there was a quest chain for me to complete and it was very buggy. On top of that, I kept getting logged out. Eventually, I gave up for the night and logged back in the next day. Everything went smoothly after that. I created Uvinji, my Vulpera Shaman, and logged in. I expected to start at the new new-player island, but instead it started me off at level 10 and skipped all of that. I was a little disappointed, but oh well. After a little bit of running around Orgrimmar, I went on my way to Northrend to do the Wrath of the Lich King content. It was fun, at first, especially because I started in an area that I'd never actually done before. I made my way through all the quests in the Borean Tundra and ended up in Dragonblight. At this point, I'd leveled up to 31. With the level cap being 50 now, that was quite a bit of progress. However, at this point, I got bored of the grind. The content was familiar, and honestly, I hate the Scourge and all of the undead-filled areas. They're very monotone in color and boring to level through. So, I used my one-time Shadowlands level-up-to-50 token on Uvinji to power him all the way up, and went through the "you're a brand new 50" tutorial. I'm looking forward to the pre-expansion event that starts next Tuesday. Here's hoping it's more exciting than the last time the Scourge event happened... Just More Color 2020-10-30T00:00:00+00:00 Today I reworked my site's CSS a bit to add more color. This is a work in progress. Over time I plan to do more to liven the site up, while still trying to keep the overall size small. Next, I'm considering whether to add more images to some parts of the site. On Forever Projects 2020-10-28T00:00:00+00:00 I just finished reading a blog post entitled The Forever Project</a> by Scott Turner of Here Dragons Abound. It made me reflect on Iron Arachne and what I'm trying to do with it. Lately I've been taking a break from Iron Arachne, and while on that break, I've found that I lack motivation or interest in continuing it. But this blog post made me reconsider that. It's not that I lack motivation or interest in Iron Arachne, but rather that I've been too focused on developing the site as a tool for others to use and not near enough on what I originally started it for. Iron Arachne is my "forever project," as the article calls it. It's an endless creative exploration meant to delve into many, many different topics at the drop of a hat. It's not meant to be complete, or bug-free, or even useful. I had forgotten that. In the context of this revelation, I'm taking a look at what Iron Arachne is currently and where I'd like to take it. I definitely don't want to do another rewrite. However, I think I would like to start exploring more random concepts. To that end, I'm going to follow some of the advice from Scott and write a bunch of new issues in GitLab that are just ideas of things to try - small ones, medium ones, big ones, and pie-in-the-sky ones. I also will need to reinstate my weekly ritual of coding on Sunday mornings, but I think I'll broaden the scope of that a bit to be "work on Iron Arachne" instead of coding. That means anything that falls within that context is fair game - so, I could code, or I could do artwork, or read about geology, or write issues, or write a blog post, or anything else that fits the mold. Now that I'm getting this down in writing, I'm finally getting excited about Iron Arachne again. That's a tremendous sign that I'm on the right track. Leading Up to Shadowlands 2020-09-30T00:00:00+00:00 The Shadowlands expansion for World of Warcraft comes out next month. A lot of things seem to be happening in October this year. I'm opting to focus my gaming time on WoW, given the new expansion. A month ago, I was playing a lot of WoW. The new expansion offers a lot of opportunities for starting new characters, and I wanted to unlock the Vulpera allied race to try something new. Unlocking that race previously required completing a particular story arc and reaching Exalted status with the Vulpera. I'd finished the story arc, but the reputation grind was quite a slog, and I hadn't come close to finishing it. Then, I discovered that the pre-patch for Shadowlands was going to remove the reputation grind from unlocking allied races. This completely killed my interest in playing WoW before the pre-patch hits, and I haven't played since, despite keeping my subscription active. As soon as the pre-patch is live, I'm diving back into the game with a vengeance. My new character will be a Vulpera shaman. I want to play a healer, and the Vulpera shaman's totems are fox-shaped which I love. The new leveling experience takes you from 1 to 50 (the new pre-expansion cap) in a single expansion's content. I'm going to go through Wrath of the Lich King as my choice, since that remains my favorite expansion so far. It remains to be seen if I will blog about this process or not, but it might be fun to journal my experience. I don't think I'll be able to reach level 50 with my Vulpera before the expansion lands, but that's going to be my goal anyway. I don't know if pet battle levels will be rewired too, but if they are, I definitely want to try and bring at least one group of pets up to level cap during my leveling. We'll see how that works out. So yeah. I'll be retiring Exsecratus as my main, which is only the second time I've ever changed mains since I first started playing WoW back in 2004. Here's to new beginnings! On Blogging Versus Social Media 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00 I read Rubenerd's post about seriousness</a>, and it got me to thinking. Most people these days are content to post on social media. Very few have their own blogs, let alone a dedicated personal website. But that's not the web I grew up with. I've had many blogs over the years. They've been powered by different services or software, and had different focuses. But taken as a whole, they've painted a picture remarkably similar to modern social media posts - snapshots of my life at the time. Things that I've been thinking about, things I'm excited about, things I'm angry about. There are two key differences, though. Blog posts tend to run a lot longer than social media posts, and I fully control the platform on which they appear. Also, people who read blogs tend to be more willing to read longer content. On social media, the vast majority of users seem to only be interested in reacting to short sentences and images. There's nothing wrong with that, exactly, but it's not the kind of interaction I'm looking for when I write longer content. The other thing that Rubenerd made me remember is back when I drew cartoon faces for my earliest websites to reflect my mood for any given update. Maybe I should resurrect that practice and give my site a little more playfulness. On right action and American politics 2020-07-20T00:00:00+00:00 We try to do what's right in the best way we can. This is a statement that generally guides human behavior. You can summarize this as "right action." What defines right action differs from person to person, however. In looking at the approaches of Americans to the problem of politics and national leadership, we can observe two primary examples. The first defines the quality of being right as the degree of perceived adherence to one's world view. The second defines the quality of being right as the degree to which a measurable result adheres to the desired outcome. So, when judging the policy of a political figure, someone with the first approach will judge that policy as correct if it conforms to one's value set. Someone with the second approach will judge that policy as correct if it has been measurably proven to be so. These two approaches overlap to varying degrees in a single individual. The policy in question will be judged more dispassionately and in greater alignment with the second approach if the policy has less alignment with an existing identity value of the individual. That is, a person is more likely to be rational about a topic if that topic doesn't matter to them much. However, if the topic impedes or aligns with a core value of the person in question, they are far more likely to be irrational in their reaction to policy on that topic. It should seem reasonable to suggest that an empirical approach to every decision is ideal. The problem is that humans are incapable of being rational about every decision in their lives. However, in striving to be rational about as much as possible, one can approach the ideal even if it remains elusive. Judging a policy based on its measured results or on historical measured data is far preferable to the alternative. When evaluating those measurements, it's important to trust the opinion of experts over the opinion of unqualified individuals. This lends itself to more accurate prediction of results, which in turn allows for more effective policy choice. Further, once a policy has been in place for an amount of time that allows for statistically significant results, that policy can and should be reevaluated to determine its correctness. This reinforces a structure of continual improvement. Too often in American politics, policymakers make value judgments based on personal identity and not on measured results. Voters decide on their representatives the same way. This conflicts with the original philosophical climate</a> that gave birth to the United States of America in the first place. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were all proponents of Enlightenment philosophy. The phrasing of the Declaration of Independence</a> includes language to this effect; in describing the right of people to establish new government, the Declaration states that they lay "... its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." It's not enough to content oneself with baser instincts. Instead of choosing the path of blind acceptance, we must choose to temper our molten feelings with the cool water of empirical logic. Only then can we forge a strong future. Minimal CSS 2020-06-25T00:00:00+00:00 After years of using a CSS framework for my site, I've now dropped it entirely. Inspired by the movement to reduce the filesize and cruft of websites that have no need for graphics or heavy JavaScript, I decided to cut out as much as possible. This started a few months ago with removing my web fonts and replacing them with system fonts. Today, I removed Bulma</a> from my site. I opted instead for the most basic CSS I could. I still write it as SCSS, and I rely on several CSS3 features, but the file size has dropped dramatically. So has the load time. This may be just a phase, but for now, I'm really enjoying the new minimal aesthetic. Generating Worlds: Faking Realism 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00 Note: this was a draft I never completed. However, it's useful enough as notes that I wanted to keep it around, so here it is. </blockquote> Introduction: why I'm interested in this From the ground up: beginning with the ground Why I don't want to model plate tectonics it's hard</li> it's computationally expensive (is this true?)</li> it's not necessary</li> </ul> Creating a heightmap Diamond-Square vs Simplex noise</li> Start with Simplex noise (point out the difference between Simplex and Perlin noise)</li> Tweaking the noise to create more land-like patterns</li> Reworking this by placing areas that should be land, then applying the noise to make it land-like</li> Creating areas of mountains, rolling hills, and flat land</li> Deciding on sea level</li> Classifying cells based on altitude and whether it's underwater or not</li> </ul> Modelling air flow (reference Here Dragons Abound) Hadley Cells and related concepts</li> Wind speed and direction</li> </ul> Generating climates based on air flow, humidity, temperature, and altitude Precipitation as a function of air flow</li> Rain shadows</li> </ul> Generating biomes based on the results Different types of biome models (e.g., Whittaker) I love diversity of classification, so I choose the most complex model</li> </ul> Placing rivers and simulating erosion over time River joins, why rivers never fork, and when that rule is broken</li> </ul> Below the surface: generating soil composition Soil is complicated, so let's only go as far as we need to model interesting areas</li> </ul> Generating mineral resources Meteor strikes are not part of the plan</li> Veins of ore and their size, composition, and placement</li> two primary methods of vein formation - open space filling and crack-seal growth</li> I'm not modelling plate tectonics, so modelling realistic veining is not happening</li> Instead, mimicking the frequency and shape of veins by random line generation and asymmetrical extrusion</li> </ul> Populating regions with flora and fauna Predators and prey</li> How vegetation is chosen</li> </ul> Predictions for 2030 2020-01-03T00:00:00+00:00 This post is inspired by a thread from Hacker News. I posted a comment there with ten predictions for 2030. This is an extrapolation of that. Global Trends and Events</h1> Populism reaches a crescendo globally. Nascent populist governments become more entrenched, especially in North and South America. </li> China supersedes the United States as the preeminent global superpower. </li> A conflict between Russia and China comes seemingly out of nowhere, but is resolved quickly. </li> Electric vehicles become more mainstream, but still do not overtake ICE vehicles in sales or ownership. </li> Cannabis is de-scheduled in the United States. A minor economic boom results. </li> Tech hubs in the Midwest begin to overtake the old tech hubs in activity and population. </li> Housing shortages worsen globally. </li> Australia suffers a series of natural disasters that results in heavy depopulation. </li> Battery technology will see a significant breakthrough that results in much greater life and much lower weight, but it will not be affordable. Yet. </li> An economic "adjustment" occurs as trade between the United States and China is heavily curtailed. </li> </ol> Personal Trends and Events</h1> I finally achieve financial independence. </li> I publish a book, but it's not the one I expect to write. </li> My health improves dramatically. My hobbies change as a result. </li> I start another hobby business, and this time it sticks around. </li> I make the switch to electric vehicle ownership and never look back. </li> My remaining hair disappears. My beard grows to compensate. </li> New friends and stronger relationships with existing ones enrich my life. </li> A personal tragedy changes my outlook on life. </li> My political views change as a result of world events. </li> I buy a house. </li> </ol> Learning to use emacs 2019-12-02T00:00:00+00:00 I've been a vim user for somewhere around 10 years. While I'm comfortable enough in it, my knowledge and practice of it are still relatively amateurish. For a long time now I have heard others sing the praises of emacs, and since I'm trying to expand my horizons, it sounded like a good idea to try and pick it up. I'm writing this blog post in emacs. Where possible, emacs is the first editor that I reach for, even though I know I could accomplish my goals faster and with less pain if I stuck to what I know. It's an interesting experience. I like that emacs is more natural-feeling than vim. The key incantations to do things are relatively intuitive. However, there is a lot of memorization I'm going to need to do in order to be effective with it. This month will be my trial period. By the end of December, I'll have figured out whether I want to continue using emacs, or switch back to vim. News sites in a post-advertisement world 2019-05-29T00:00:00+00:00 This post is a response to "News Websites are Dumpster Fires</a>", which rails against the current business model of most news websites. The problem that faces news websites is not as simple as just a business model change. The purpose of a news website is to provide accurate, current information on topics relevant to the health and progress of society. This is an expensive endeavor. Journalism isn't easy - indeed, sometimes it can be dangerous, depending on the topic covered. It requires training, equipment, and no small amount of social savvy. A news site can't be funded by the government without the appearance of state bias. The ad-driven model currently employed by the majority of news sites is unsustainable. How, then, can these sites be supported in a way that doesn't compromise their core mission? This is a complicated question, and not one I have a solution for. I suspect that the future lies in content producers being funded by the public in some way. The following article may be of interest in this regard: Why isn't there a news organization truly funded by the public</a> Updates to Iron Arachne: The World API and more 2019-05-12T00:00:00+00:00 It's been awhile since I blogged about Iron Arachne</a>. Much has changed since then. The various disparate APIs have been collapsed into a single "World API</a>." This makes it much easier to change, which means I can iterate faster and release more frequently. Also, the front-facing website is no longer a static JavaScript-powered site, but rather a full Laravel application. This lets me do a few clever things which I'll get into later. The culture generator has added appearance generation. Skin colors, hair colors, face shapes, and so forth add to the depth of the output. The region generator has dramatically improved economic traits. The trade goods are derived from the skill of the local artisans, the local agriculture, and the local available raw materials now. They also take into account the culture of the town. Deities created by the pantheon generator now adhere to the culture the religion is from. Also, there are subtle improvements to how deities' domains are generated. No longer will multiple gods have the same domain. The heraldry generator has had a few tweaks, too, though no new fields or charges have been added. Because the app was rewritten in Laravel, I now make use of caching via Redis to deliver consistent images and blazons. For example, here's one I quite like: Per saltire azure and argent, a lion's head erased Or </blockquote> Some of the groundwork has been laid for organizing regions into countries. This is a step into a more difficult part of the world generator, since now I need to take into account location relative to other locations. Inevitably, I'll need to create a map generator. But that's a story for another day. Regarding My Blogs 2019-03-18T00:00:00+00:00 I've been frustrated lately with the writing side of Hugo. It's a great tool for publishing and content transformation. It plays well with CI/CD tools. My static site host, Netlify, makes hosting sites built with Hugo a breeze. However, when it comes to being able to write whenever the mood strikes, Hugo is horrible. Yes, technically, I can just use GitHub's web IDE to write a new post. I don't have to use the git+vim workflow that I often do when writing Markdown. But it feels very… clunky. Inserting images is a slow and manual process. Layout requires messing with the site theme and its CSS, making it unwieldy for individual posts. Hence, all my posts on this blog look the same. I decided to return to the GUI blog engine world. With that decision behind me, I started looking at the options. Having been out of that particular game for awhile, I hoped that some new tool had come along that I could check out. In fact, there was - a blog engine called Write Freely. So it entered the running alongside the usual suspects (Blogger, Ghost, and WordPress). Blogger hasn't changed. It has some new themes since I last looked at it seriously ten years ago, but the interface has not aged well. Ghost charges a ridiculous amount of money for a hosted blog, and the self-hosted version still hasn't acquired some of the quality-of-life features that WordPress has. Write Freely is interesting, especially since it's in the federation space, but it's not yet mature enough for my tastes. This, despite the fact that I contributed code to it. So that leaves WordPress. And rather than deal with hosting it myself, I decided to pay for hosting on wordpress.com. It's not ideal (the Personal version doesn't allow installing plugins), but it works well enough and gives me the GUI features I missed. At time of this writing, I'm still trying to figure out how to migrate all of my Hugo posts to WordPress. No tool exists for that purpose. I'll probably have to write something myself. Update = I did end up writing a tool to handle this. I'll write a blog post about it later. Getting back into MMORPGs 2019-03-06T00:00:00+00:00 As a result of my one-year boycott of Activision-Blizzard, I found myself without any of my usual games to play. I decided to take the opportunity to return to a genre I haven't played much of in the past few years - MMORPGs. Aside from a month where I played World of Warcraft following the new expansion, and about three weeks playing Final Fantasy XIV after that, I haven't played MMOs much in the last three years. With Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen still a long way off, Crowfall still in alpha, and Camelot Unchained in... whatever state it's in, I decided to have a look at games I've played in the past for something to occupy my attention. I settled on four options - Elder Scrolls Online, Black Desert Online, Project Gorgon, and Guild Wars 2. ArenaNet's layoffs killed my enthusiasm for Guild Wars 2, so that dropped off the list. Black Desert Online had some strange bugs with keyboard controls (like erasing all my key binds) that left a sour taste in my mouth. Some friends of mine decided to try playing ESO together, so I decided to join them. But, I also have renewed interest in Project Gorgon because of its influx of Pantheon fans, so I've decided to alternate between those two. I never got very far in either game. In Elder Scrolls Online, my highest character was level eight. My character in Project Gorgon still hasn't left the starter town. Of the two, ESO seems to be holding my attention better. The story is pulling me along. That got me to thinking... what exactly do I want out of an MMORPG? These days twitch shooters usually are my go-to. But with most people obsessed with battle arena games (which I hate) and Overwatch and Destiny 2 in my boycott, there isn't much to play that interests me. So I've decided to take a different angle. What if I actually relax with video games, instead of get a drip-feed of adrenaline? So that's what I'm trying to do with ESO and Project Gorgon: relax. Sit back and enjoy a slower pace. So far it seems to be working. I may write in the future about my adventures as a wood elf nightblade in Elder Scrolls Online. I'm taking to the character's playstyle pretty well. For now, I'll finish with this thought: when's the last time you relaxed with a video game? Setting up a new personal blog 2019-02-06T00:00:00+00:00 Having a blog built using a static site generator was nice from a maintenance perspective, but from a writing perspective, it's a bit of an inconvenience. So now I've created a new blog on this address using WordPress. I already use WordPress for the Silver Gryphon Games</a> website and I maintain the Geek Partnership Society</a> website (which also uses WordPress), so I might as well add a third one to the mix. I will probably migrate all of my existing blog posts to this site. First though I'll need to write a utility to migrate from Hugo to WordPress. That kind of tool doesn't exist yet. Iron Arachne Updates for January 2019-01-30T00:00:00+00:00 It's been a dry spell for Iron Arachne</a> for the past couple months. The holidays and work on Silver Gryphon Games meant that I had no time for coding outside of work. Coming up in February I have a two-week trip to Thailand. I won't be coding during that, either! Yet, I have been spooling up some projects for Iron Arachne. Here are some of the things I'll be doing this half of the year: Fixing a few bugs with the heraldry generator</li> Writing a language description generator</li> Expanding the Æther setting generator (under the Silver Gryphon Games banner)</li> </ul> I plan on doing work to make publishing and discovering these generators easier. That means releasing several of them as Docker images on Docker Hub, among other things. The generator community is a talented group. More links to authors' tools are going to appear on the Iron Arachne website. I'm thinking about what kinds of generators I should be writing for Iron Arachne. Many of the ideas I've been running with so far have been things that've done many times before by other people. This includes name generators, character generators, and so forth. I'd like to cover new territory now that I have more experience with writing these tools. My Spin on the Unix Philosophy 2019-01-22T00:00:00+00:00 The Unix philosophy guides the development of both Unix and its derivatives. It's a good philosophical core to judge new projects by. I'm increasingly using the Unix philosophy in my own works. This is particularly true of new versions of Iron Arachne command line tools. There are multiple versions of the Unix philosophy bouncing around on the web. Some are longer or more stringent than others. What follows is my own interpretation of it. Rule One: Tight Focus</h1> Each program should do one thing well. Corollary: Each program should do only one thing. Rule Two: Predictable Flexibility</h1> Expect each program's output to be the input for some unknown other program. Design for flexibility. Corollary: Also design first for command-line interfaces, and avoid interactive interfaces. Assume machines will use your program more often than humans. Rule Three: Rapid Iteration</h1> Release early and often. Corollary: It's not only OK but desirable to have minimal change between iterations. Rule Four: Automated Development</h1> Write tools to assist development instead of seeking out human help. Corollary: It's fine to ask for help when you've tried the above to no success. Year in Review 2018 2018-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 As 2018 comes to a close, I'm looking back on the year and reflecting. It was a big year for me. On January 1, I proposed to my fiancee, and she accepted. We got married in October. In February, for the first time since 2005, I left the country. My fiancee, a couple friends of hers, and I all went to Punta Cana for a 7-day vacation. In May, I quit my job working for Spok and took a consultant position with Solution Design Group. With encouragement and support from Sarah, I paid off most of my credit cards over the course of 2018. I also paid off one of my loans. I saved up enough to pay cash for our honeymoon to Thailand next year. For the first time ever, I bought a current events book. I haven't been able to read much of it, though, since I normally read at night before bed and this particular book is the opposite of relaxing. I also spent a great deal of time programming generator tools for tabletop role-playing games. This year marked the emergence of my website for such tools, Iron Arachne. Finally, I started to really put normal effort into Silver Gryphon Games again. I've been blogging there regularly and working on multiple new books for the company. Designing an OSR Game Part 4: Alignment, Treasure, and Exploration 2018-12-29T00:00:00+00:00 Over a month has passed since I last posted about Mysteries of a Broken World. Much has changed since the last time I wrote about the game here. The last three posts in this series are below: Designing a New OSR Game</a></li> Designing an OSR Game Part 2: Freeholds and Fatality</a></li> Designing an OSR Game Part 3: Names, Backgrounds, and Playtests</a></li> </ul> The rules are much more solid now. As I mentioned before, you can view the current state of them here: Mysteries of a Broken World Playtest Rules</a> This time around, I'll talk about some changes that have happened as a result of actually digging into the rules. Alignment</h1> Previously, I somehow completely forgot about alignment. I didn't write about it in blogs or even think about it in notes. Then I started to write monster entries. Since I was using the D&D Rules Cyclopedia as a starting reference point, I hit "Alignment" under the monster statistics and it dawned on me. So alignment got added, but it's a little different from other role-playing games. Instead of reflecting your character's outlook on life, it reflects primal outside forces' influence on your character. There are four alignments in the game. They are Chaos, Destiny, Void, and Equilibrium. Chaos is not the anarchic evil of old D&D. It's impulsive and mercurial, sure, but not evil. Destiny is closest to old Lawful, but again, it's not "good" like in the old game. Void emphasizes purity and clarity. Equilibrium enforces a balance between all opposites. Refining Treasure</h1> Treasure in Mysteries of a Broken World is the focus for gaining experience. Monsters have no experience reward, whether for killing or avoiding them. Most monsters, however, will have treasure either on their person or in their nearby lair. Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, treasure is not listed for monsters in abstract classes. Monster entries have a line for "Treasure Type," with values such as "Meager," "All That Glitters," and "Warmonger." Treasure Types still have a table of what they contain, but this named system tries to give Game Masters a better idea at a glance of what the monsters in a given module might possess. Beginning to Rethink Exploration</h1> Now that the core rules are more or less codified, I'm starting to think about where I want to take exploration. Some games make it a core feature, and others try to sweep it under the rug in favor of more visceral action. In Mysteries, I want exploration to be a primary element of the game. This requires developing rules that encourage focus on exploration. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do this yet. Exploration has to be interesting, which means letting players make choices. "We travel by horseback northwest for three days" is pretty boring. Turning that same journey into a game-worthy experience will require thought. My Breakfast: A Recipe and a Ritual 2018-11-28T00:00:00+00:00 I like cooking. I'm not necessarily good at it, but it's fun to experiment and try new variations. This is a breakfast I prepare almost every morning. Each time I make it, I change something about it or try and focus on a specific technique. It's like a cooking kata. The repetition of most of it means that I'm not devoting brain time to anything other than the particular focus of the morning. Scrambling eggs is more of an art than you'd think. The butter is key to making great scrambled eggs. So is the figure-eight pattern. Some people add water or milk to the eggs before scrambling, but this isn't necessary and I feel that it negatively impacts the texture. Ingredients</h1> 2 eggs, scrambled</li> 1 green bell pepper, washed, then julienned or diced</li> 1 large white onion, diced</li> 1 can of black beans, rinsed and drained</li> 1 cup of chunky salsa</li> 2 cloves of garlic, minced</li> 2 Tbsp olive oil</li> 1 Tbsp butter</li> lime juice</li> sea salt</li> various spices</li> </ul> Directions</h1> Step Zero: Prepare all ingredients. Prepare your station. Mise en place</a> is a vital part of this process. Heat a nonstick pan on medium heat</li> Add the olive oil and bring up to temperature. Don't let it smoke.</li> Add the minced garlic. Toast it for just a few moments.</li> Add the onion. Sauté until caramelized.</li> Add the bell pepper. Sauté until slightly browned.</li> Add the black beans. Throw in some spices and lime juice, stir, and let cook for a couple more minutes on medium.</li> Reduce the heat on the veggies to low.</li> Heat a second pan on medium heat.</li> Melt the butter in the second pan. Don't let it brown.</li> Add two generous pinches of sea salt to the eggs and stir.</li> Add the eggs to the pan. Stir continuously in a figure-eight motion.</li> Once the eggs have set, shut off heat to both pans.</li> Plate. Eggs first, then veggies, then salsa.</li> </ol> Interesting variations that I've tried include: garnishing with fresh cilantro</li> using sour cream as a final topping</li> stirring the eggs in a circular pattern instead of figure-eight</li> adding sea salt to the veggies at varying times in the cooking</li> adding fresh spinach to the veggies</li> replacing black beans with chili beans</li> replacing black beans with pinto beans</li> using garam masala for the veggies</li> putting all the ingredients in a flour tortilla instead of a bowl</li> </ul> I'll continue to experiment and explore the possibilities of this dish. Designing an OSR Game Part 3: Names, Backgrounds, and Playtests 2018-11-24T00:00:00+00:00 This is part three in a series of posts about designing a new OSR game. You can find the previous two here: Designing a New OSR Game</a></li> Designing an OSR Game Part 2: Freeholds and Fatality</a></li> </ul> Since the last post, I've been doing a fair amount of work on the OSR game. Enough that it now has a title: Mysteries of a Broken World. The logo above is the official one for the line. That first bit of news is probably the most milestone-y. I've also fleshed out more of the rules, mostly around character creation. While it's going to be a work in progress for quite awhile, you can view the latest playtest version of the rules here: Mysteries of a Broken World</a> The above document is regenerated every time I make a change to the manuscript. It has the generation date in the header, for reference. Everything is still in flux. I have the classes and races roughed out, though I need to work on all of them. I ended up throwing out the magic-via-spellstones idea in favor of a more traditional spell list system. Each magic-using class only has a handful of spell lists that they can access. The lore rationale for this is that some people are attuned to a specific kind of magic, and only those attuned to it can understand and use it. I added "backgrounds" to the game also. It's meant to give a little color to brand-new characters, and can offer some inspiration for a character's non-adventuring abilities. I may add descriptions for each background to the rules for further inspiration, or I may leave it as just a table. That remains to be seen. The method of rolling ability scores is firmly in the game now. They are as follows: Roll 3d6 for each ability, in order.</li> You may: Swap two numbers once, OR</li> Re-roll all six numbers once</li> </ol> </li> </ol> This gives what I feel is an appropriate amount of randomness, while also offering a way out for awful sets. I'm toying with the idea of having an appendix in the rules that lists out several tables for random generation of character attributes like personality traits and so forth. For the last bit of news, I'm going to start looking for people to playtest Mysteries soon (in the first couple weeks of December 2018). For inquiries on that, write to ben@overmyer.net with the subject header "Playtesting Mysteries of a Broken World." Designing an OSR Game Part 2: Freeholds and Fatality 2018-11-09T00:00:00+00:00 This is part two of a series on a new Old School Renaissance tabletop role-playing game that I'm designing. You can read part one over here. Designing a New OSR Game</a></li> </ul> Freeholds: Backdrop For Adventure</h1> I'll get back to character creation in a bit. For a moment, I want to focus on another aspect of gameplay. After creating your characters, your group will need to create your Freehold. In the context of the game, a Freehold is an independent town of moderate size. It's self-sufficient, and large enough to be able to supply plenty of new characters should/when your original characters die. It's also large enough to have multiple concerns beyond simple survival. Freeholds are living communities. When creating your Freehold, you roll for or choose its Assets, Pillars, Authorities, and Tensions. Each of these helps determine the fabric of the community your party is devoted to. They also change over time, not just in reaction to what your party does, but also in accordance with the community's own character and how it interacts with other Freeholds. Assets are things that enhance a Freehold's abilities. They could include things like herds of cattle, skilled artisans, well-trained city guard, and so on. Pillars are things that form the bedrock of the community, and would exist even without the Freehold itself. They could include things like gold mines, permanent magical spells, a calm natural harbor, and so on. Authorities are things that drive the action of the community. They could include things like a major temple, a hereditary dukedom, a merchant guild, and so on. Tensions are things that both drive the action of the community and constantly threaten to change its nature. They could include things like a religious divide, feuding noble families, a quarrel between guilds, and so on. Each of these four facets of your Freehold help determine what is available to your characters at any given time, and what potential adventures your characters might be a part of. They also give your characters a reason to be invested in your community. Fatality: Death Is A Constant</h1> This world is dangerous. While the worst of the apocalyptic chaos is over, your characters will still need to deal with major threats. They may not be able to do it alone. And even when successful, the cost may be high. Like games from the first age of role-playing, death in this one is easy to come by. Characters don't get much more individually powerful over time. This makes banding together far more important. This also drives the necessity for character creation to be quick and painless, so that when a player's character meets an untimely end, he can roll up a new one on the spot. Unlike some popular fantasy role-playing games, death is more than just a speed bump in this game. Resurrections are so rare as to be legendary, and perhaps even feared. Necromancy is more common, but not without a terrible price. On Gryphons and Their Kin 2018-11-03T00:00:00+00:00 As one of the founders of Silver Gryphon Games</a> I have a fondness for gryphons. It seems only natural, then, that I write up a few variations of the standard gryphon (or griffon, griffin, or gryfon, as you like) for OSR uses. Gryphon</h1> Common</h2> Armor Class: 5 Hit Dice: 7 Move: Normal move: 90' (30'); flying: 240' (80') Attacks: 2 claws/1 bite Damage: 1-8/1-8/2-12 No. Appearing: 1 (1-2) Save As: Fighter: 3 Morale: 9 Treasure Type: V Alignment: Neutral Gryfalcon</h2> Armor Class: 5 Hit Dice: 6 Move: Normal move: 90' (30'); flying: 280' (100') Attacks: 2 claws/1 bite Damage: 1-6/1-6/2-8 No. Appearing: 1 (1-2) Save As: Fighter: 3 Morale: 9 Treasure Type: U Alignment: Neutral Opinicus</h2> Armor Class: 5 Hit Dice: 7 Move: Normal move: 120' (40'); flying: 240' (80') Attacks: 2 claws/1 bite Damage: 1-8/1-8/2-12 No. Appearing: 1 (1-2) Save As: Fighter: 3 Morale: 9 Treasure Type: V Alignment: Neutral Demigryph</h2> Armor Class: 5 Hit Dice: 7 Move: 120' (40') Attacks: 2 claws/1 bite Damage: 1-6/1-6/1-10 No. Appearing: 1 (1-2) Save As: Fighter: 3 Morale: 9 Treasure Type: U Alignment: Neutral Hippogriff</h2> Armor Class: 5 Hit Dice: 7 Move: Normal move: 90' (30'); flying: 240' (80') Attacks: 2 claws/1 bite Damage: 1-8/1-8/2-12 No. Appearing: 1 (1-2) Save As: Fighter: 3 Morale: 9 Treasure Type: U Alignment: Neutral Gryphons are powerful predators, but generally avoid fights unless very hungry. They are found in all manner of climates, but tend to prefer mountainous areas. All variations of gryphon except the demigryph will build their nests (called aeries) in high-up places that are easily defended and difficult for non-flyers to reach. Gryphons are social, intelligent creatures and will sometimes be found in small communities of gryphons. They mate for life, and if their mate dies, they will rarely take another mate, instead living the rest of their life alone. Some cultures use gryphons as fighting-beasts or as mounts. Because they are intelligent creatures, gryphons in this capacity are usually willing participants in this arrangement, but not always. A person having a gryphon as a mount will usually have a strong bond with that creature, and vice versa. Common: The common variety have the body, tail and back legs of a lion, and the head, wings, breast, and front legs of an eagle. They stand roughly 6-7' high at the shoulder, making them a little larger than most horses. Gryfalcon: Gryfalcons are very similar to common gryphons, but instead of bearing the likeness of an eagle, resemble a falcon. They are typically smaller and more lithe than their common kin. Opinicus: The opinicus has the full lower body of a lion, including the front legs, and the head and wings of an eagle. Unlike common gryphons, they do not have tufted ears. Opinici tend to be slightly more aggressive than other gryphons. Demigryph: A demigryph (or keythong) looks very similar to a common gryphon, but has no wings. Demigryphs are fonder of plains and hills than their kin, and are more likely to interact with humans and other sentient species. Hippogriff: Hippogriffs have the body, back legs, and tail of a horse instead of a lion. They are otherwise similar to common gryphons. These creatures are rarely seen outside of forested mountains. Designing a New OSR Game 2018-10-31T00:00:00+00:00 So lately I've been delving back into the world of OSR role-playing games. In my past several years of playing only modern games, I'd forgotten what it felt like to play an OSR game. I miss the simplicity and the speed of combat. I especially miss the very real sense of danger that my character would die, and I'd have to start over from scratch. I decided to look at the original source material, a few recent entries into the genre, and some other inspirational material and come up with my own OSR rules. This blog post represents the first part of that journey. Simplicity</h1> One of the core themes of OSR games is simplicity. Character classes have very few details to them, and certainly not a deep progression arc. The game is less about characters becoming more mechanically powerful and more about putting these characters into new situations and seeing what they do. In that sense, at least, it's a role-play heavy style. Another expression of the theme of simplicity is in the resolution mechanic. If you take into account the optional rules from the original game (and here I'm referring specifically to Moldvay Basic), there were attribute tests, but they were simple d20 roll-under-ability-score affairs. There were no bonuses to such rolls. Combat was a little weird with the AC to-hit scheme. I don't miss that part, at least. A New Game Begins</h1> So for this post, let's say that this game of mine will begin with the basics and riff on that. The original game included only a handful of classes, and three races were classes in themselves. In my game, let's make this a little more complex. There are classes, and there are races. Classes remain very simple, with only a couple special abilities to give them a bit of flavor. Races are added to the mix, so that each character has both a race and a class, but they also are very simple. This gives any given character less than half a dozen special abilities from both choices, and this doesn't change beyond first level. "What about spells?" I hear you say. Well, in this system, spells are going to be treated much like equipment. Each spell is a limited-use magic item, probably in the form of a spell-gem or something similar. Magic-using classes will be able to collect and use these in different ways. Non-magic-users won't even be able to hold the things. "Does that go for divine magic too?" No, divine magic - called miracles in this game - uses something much more freeform. A user of divine magic prays to a deity to enact a miracle through them. This will be a unique roll - I'm toying with a few ideas here. Most tests not covered by special abilities or other game rules will be roll-under ability score tests. I'll use the original game's 3d6 ability score generation, and d20 roll-under test. That seems just fine. Saving throws are reduced to a single type. It's basically a hail-Mary play that can save your character from something awful by making it less awful, but still bad. It's also a roll-under target, but it's set, not random. You also only get one per game session. I like weapons all doing the same damage, so we're going back to that. We'll make things more interesting, though, by making all weapons have a special feature. That will keep them from feeling same-y. More on these topics is coming in further blog posts. Playing Characters You Hate 2018-10-26T00:00:00+00:00 When you play a role-playing game, you adopt the persona of someone other than you. In American RPGs, this often just means that you're running a fictional version of yourself with a different race and a lot of swords, spells, or guns. But what if the character you play is intentionally your anathema? For example, what if you personally believe wholeheartedly in giving others second chances, but your character believes that if someone fails, they are irredeemably flawed? For your next character, instead of reaching for your comfort zone, try out something brand new. Imagine the group of people you most hate in the real world. Take the second worst after that, and build your character's defining traits based on them. This is not new advice. But here's where it gets interesting: Figure out why your character genuinely believes they have the best possible outlook. Play them that way. Their defining traits that you hate so much may change in subtle ways. Or they might not. Either way, you might gain an interesting insight into the “other side.” Project Status, August 2018 2018-08-09T00:00:00+00:00 Previously, I was spending most of my attention on the Uncharted Worlds projects that I've been working on. The random character generator and the “Character Creator” in particular were focuses. I was also spending time thinking about the next two projects in that vein, especially the star system generator. However, that's changed. With my renewed interest in Silver Gryphon Games and its wellbeing as a company, I've shifted my focus almost entirely from coding projects for other peoples' games to writing and business projects for my own company. This is probably too long in coming. I've moved away from the “eh, Kevin will deal with it” mindset and towards a “if I don't do it, it won't happen” mindset. This is not to say I don't delegate some things (my fiancée Sarah is a wonderful editor). However, the health of the company is in jeopardy unless I step in and take the helm. Here are some specific actions I've taken or plan on taking to bring SGG back on track: Get atomic units of work onto our Trello kanban board</li> Reignite efforts to have frequent, meaningful updates on our blog</li> Review DriveThruRPG sales figures to plan marketing promotions and product schedules</li> Get all of our files into one central place so everyone in the company has access to them</li> Review the legal documents for the company to refresh my memory of the structure and obligations</li> Review the company's financials to see if a cash injection is needed</li> Plan out product schedules for the next 18 months</li> Look at better, less generic WordPress themes for the SGG website</li> </ul> The above is not an exhaustive list, but it's a start. My Politics, 2018 Edition 2018-07-26T00:00:00+00:00 I've been looking at what's coming up on the ballot for this midterm election. I decided it might be interesting to blog about where I'm at right now with my political views, since they're always in flux. Before I get to my positions, indulge me in a few considerations. First, I have been called a liberal, a conservative, a progressive, a fascist, and a socialist. None of these is true, but all of them have a grain of truth. Second, I'm an American by birth, but have spent a few years living abroad. Specifically, four years in New Zealand. This colors my views a bit. Third, I'm contemptuous of the prevailing American culture of Left versus Right, liberal versus conservative. It's overly reductive and harmful to a broader dialogue about our society. If you don't think enough about your own identity to consider this, then you need to start. Fourth, while I apply labels just as much as the next person, I try to remain cognisant of this fact and avoid dismissing “outsider” views out of hand. Alright, with those things out of the way, let me get into the meat of it. The List</h1> Freedom from involuntary harm is the most sacred right we have. Exceptions must be very carefully considered.</li> Freedom of expression is the second most sacred right we have. Exceptions must be very carefully considered.</li> Charity is not a substitute for social welfare. Charity is based on arbitrary desires, but social welfare is based only on economic means.</li> Religion should never influence public policy. Public policy should not interfere with religion, except where religion interferes with the physical, mental, or emotional well-being of people.</li> The military is an unfortunate necessity and not something to idolize. Military service is akin to moral slavery.</li> Recreational usage of drugs should not be a crime. However, recreational drugs should be regulated just as strictly as alcohol.</li> No one has a right to wealth or power.</li> Sex and gender are two different things. One is biological, and the other is societal. We have the technology to change one. We should have the maturity to let people change or reinterpret the other.</li> There are limits even to freedom. Nothing is inviolate.</li> Cultures other than your own are different, but not automatically wrong.</li> As we age, the more set our beliefs become. Political leadership should come from experience, but not too much experience.</li> No group is uniform. Judging an entire group by the actions of even a simple majority of its members is dangerous at best.</li> No race is inherently better than another.</li> No sex is inherently better than another.</li> Empirical evaluation is far superior to logical evaluation.</li> If you're not questioning your core beliefs occasionally and sincerely, you are not growing as a person.</li> Consenting adults can do whatever the **** they want in private.</li> Business interests by definition must have a narrow scope of interest. They cannot be allowed to set policy for any larger society.</li> Experts in a particular field are always the best people to suggest policy for a given thing. Their advice should not be ignored.</li> The field of politics requires expertise in management of large groups of people. Experience in this regard should not be discarded out of hand.</li> Business should not be dictated solely by politics.</li> Equality at birth is a nice ideal, but a false reality. Social circumstances always skew the scale.</li> Do unto others as you would have done to you.</li> Thoughtful investigation that is broadly distributed should not be considered wholly false because it contradicts the opinions of people in authority.</li> Sometimes, it's necessary to discard something and start from scratch with a new perspective.</li> Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy freedom, which can help build happiness up to a point.</li> You are ultimately responsible for your own actions.</li> Rewarding desired behavior is almost always preferable to punishing unwanted behavior.</li> Those who have lived among a higher diversity of people for a longer period of time are more likely to make leadership decisions that benefit a society.</li> Becoming fluent in more than one language is one of the most important things a person can do in terms of expanding their understanding of humanity.</li> There is no such thing as truth. There is only fact, interpretation of fact, and blatant disregard for the same.</li> Disregarding popular opinion is dangerous.</li> Corrective action is sometimes more important than equal treatment.</li> The ability to adapt quickly is superior to all other abilities.</li> No one has an unbiased, complete view of history. However, sovereign-mandated versions of history should be accorded more suspicion than those of independent people whose lives have been dedicated to the study of history.</li> The study of history is one of the most important aspects of ongoing education. People who stopped studying history after it was no longer a required course in school have stunted their ability to judge long-term consequences.</li> Music is both pointless and vitally important. I don't know why yet.</li> Regulation of weapons in and of itself is of limited value, but it's a conversation worth having often.</li> Putting one's nation over the interests of all other nations is dangerously narrow-minded. Any leader that does this is suspect.</li> Cooperate with others when possible. Listen always. Stand up for yourself always, but don't sacrifice the majority for your benefit.</li> You can be responsible for an area. You can respect the responsibility of others for an area. But if an area is not being used for the longterm benefit of humanity, you have the responsibility to speak up about it.</li> All things are decided by groups, not by individuals.</li> </ul> Heraldry Generation Pt. 3: Animal Charges and Windows Builds 2018-05-05T00:00:00+00:00 Since the last entry, I've made several changes to both the program logic and its features. The main change to the logic is in how charges are rendered. Instead of all of the SVG rendering code being in one file, now the more complex charges each have their own file. This was necessary, since the lines of text required for each complex charge (e.g., animals) is enormous. SVG files lay out pathways as a series of points, and with the large number of points involved in these shapes, the line count gets huge. The main feature update is that now I've added a handful of animal charges. I got the first four (dragon passant, fox passant, gryphon passant, and eagle displayed) from an open source repository by Victor Westmann</a>. The fifth, the lion rampant, is from a vector stock set that I purchased from VectorStock and converted to SVG myself. This last one was an experiment to see if I could do translations myself. Future images will likely come from public domain images, since I don't fully trust the wording of the license VectorStock granted me. Here are some examples of the new charges: Finally, the last update is that I'm now building macOS and Windows executables for the heraldry generator. You can find them here: Heraldry Releases</a> The Nature of DevOps 2018-04-26T00:00:00+00:00 The topic of what “DevOps” is has been a source of contention since the term first arose</a>. This post is my take on what it means, based on about five years of experience in the field at this point. DevOps, literally speaking, is development operations. In the broadest of terms, it means “operations in support of development.” This is in contrast to the popular technical meaning of DevOps, which is “a culture of breaking down silos, especially between development and operations.” Recruiters would have you believe that DevOps is a kind of glorified system administrator who also can write application code. This is both true and false. True, in the sense that “DevOps engineers” have both an understanding of how to write application code and also their relationship to the systems they run in. False, in the sense that the code that DevOps folk write is not exactly application code, but rather system logic geared towards a few key concepts that have more to do with systems than with isolated programs. It would be more accurate to say that modern DevOps engineers are an evolution of systems engineers. Even that, though, is doing both professional disciplines an injustice. As I see it, you are a “DevOps engineer” if your focus is on improving the developer experience of creating software and having that software operate predictably at scale. Automating manual processes, drawing attention to performance gain opportunities, and securing systems against malicious actors are all core practices of this discipline. If I were to describe the various related disciplines, I would do it like this: System Administrator: Infrastructure architect and maintainer. Ensures consistency of systems.</li> Automation Engineer: Infrastructure streamliner. Automates frequently reproducible manual processes.</li> Site Reliability Engineer: Application availability maintainer. Ensures availability of applications.</li> DevOps Engineer: Developer user experience designer, application availability maintainer, and infrastructure architect. Does the job of system administrators, automation engineers, and site reliability engineers.</li> </ul> To put it another way: DevOps engineers are either high-demand generalists with a lot of experience, or miscategorized practitioners of one of the other three roles. There is some crossover between all four regardless, but the focus differs. Heraldry Generation Pt. 2: Go, Divisions, and Charges 2018-03-21T00:00:00+00:00 This iteration had some dramatic changes. Specifically, I rewrote the entire program in Go. That part actually didn't take as much time as I'd thought. The resulting program is a bit messy, though, and I'll talk about that in a minute. First, let me tell you about the heraldry changes. After having just the fess and pale divisions in the last iteration, I added the remainder of the basic ones: bend, bend sinister, saltire, quarterly, and chevron. I also added the most basic of charges - those geometric shapes called “ordinaries.” Not all of the common ordinaries are in there yet, and some of them look a little askew. Since I manually created them through trial and error rather than through calculation, there are a number of problems that I'll need to sort out. For example, here're a couple charges from the current iteration. Notice how they're a little off? The other issue is that many of the designs that pop out of the generator don't look very visually appealing. A possible future iteration will be to add some kind of logic to fix that. With all of that said, it produces some pretty decent results. Here are some of them: OK, so now, let's talk about Go. I had always intended to rewrite the program in Go; I was using PHP as a rapid prototyping language. However, I hit a wall not too far into development. The SVG library I was using ended up not supporting a number of features of SVG that I needed. I was able to work around it by stripping out that library and dealing with the raw XML of SVG, but this was somewhat cumbersome. Then I discovered the excellent SVG Go package called, appropriately enough, SVGo. It had several of the things I needed. So, I just pulled the trigger and spent a morning rewriting the entire codebase. The result is a much faster program that's easy to write code for. It's not without its problems, though. All of the code is in one giant file. Visualization definitions are inline and contained in large switch</code> or if</code> blocks. There are no unit tests (which has bit me a couple times already). Now that I'm going to be adding more complex charges (like animals), I can't keep putting all of that in the same file. That's something I hope to address in the next iteration. Heraldry Generation Pt. 1: Basics 2018-03-12T00:00:00+00:00 Awhile back I noted that I was beginning to work on a random fantasy setting generation project. This is the first piece of that. It represents part of the design philosophy of the setting generator: each piece does one thing, it does it well, and it does it in a way that can be shared amongst the ecosystem. The heraldry generator starts out life, then, with this guiding principle: output an image in a common format that can be programmatically modified, along with the necessary metadata to describe what's in the image for both humans and machines. For the image format, I chose SVG. It's basically just XML, which makes it easy to modify, and it's relatively small. Also, it's a vector format, which makes it trivial to scale without degradation. For rapidity of development, I chose to code the generator in PHP. I may rewrite it in a more performant language later if necessary. For now though, this serves my purposes. Initially, I used a pre-existing library that handles SVG. However, after I got the initial plain-field version working, I discovered that the library doesn't support <mask></code> elements yet, which meant I wouldn't be able to easily generate field divisions and clip them. The second iteration, then, stripped out that library and went straight for raw XML manipulation. This ended up working much better for several other things, including arbitrary attribute manipulation. Heraldry adheres to certain rules. Coats of arms are basically like modern-day road signs; they exist to communicate clearly at a distance. So here are the rules I'm assuming for the generator: If a charge is a metal, its field may not be primarily a metal, and likewise with colors.</li> Only fields and charges common to Continental heraldry in the era between the 10th and 16th centuries will be considered.</li> Tinctures will include colors, metals, and furs common for the era. English “stains” like sanguine will not be included.</li> </ol> I may modify this list later, but it's my guiding set right now. At the moment, the generator only creates coats of arms with basic fields. It's either a single color, or includes per fess or per pale divisions, also in colors. Metals are being reserved for charges at the moment, which are not included yet. Here's a simple example of a plain field: The tincture generation is being done at a higher level so that the program is aware of which tinctures are used in the entire design. This is so it can avoid violating the first rule. However, sometimes the divisions are generated in the same color (e.g., azure next to azure). I'll need to fix this in the next iteration. The below image may look identical to the first one, but it's actually divided, just with both halves being vert. Still, the basic design looks reasonable thus far. Here's a simple per fess example: The source code for the generator is available on GitHub</a>. Generating Fantasy Worlds 2018-02-16T00:00:00+00:00 One of my favorite things to think about is the procedural generation of fantasy settings. There are a few people doing interesting work</a> on procedural generation of components of settings, but no one is really looking at the big picture. Well, that's not quite true; Dwarf Fortress</a> does a great job of simulating the evolution of a fantasy world. However, the area that I'm focused on is on the generation of settings for the purpose of fantasy tabletop gaming. To my knowledge, no one is working on this problem. As part of my exploration of this domain, I'll have to borrow lessons from other types of procedural generation. I once attended a game convention where Ed Greenwood (of Forgotten Realms fame) was a guest speaker. He explained how he starts working on a fantasy setting. He starts with the trade routes between towns, using exports and imports to derive what the culture of a particular area is like. I'm going to take a similar route to get started. You can follow my efforts here</a>. For the moment, it's written in PHP. Once I have the logic solidly in place, I will likely rewrite it in Go or something similar for performance reasons. Regarding Silver Gryphon Games 2018-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 In late 2014, I stepped down from my role at Silver Gryphon Games. I had too much going on in my life to properly pay attention to the company. In early 2017, I felt I had sorted out enough that I could return, and so I did. I hadn't returned with the kind of rigor that a dormant company needs to be successful, though, and 2017 was largely a wash as far as SGG was concerned. Last Tuesday I met with the other co-founder Kevin online. We discussed what was necessary to bring the company back from the dead. I was adamant about getting our undelivered Kickstarter project completed and delivered. We established a weekly recurring meeting and I set up a kanban board in Trello to track work in progress. This is probably more effort than SGG has seen in years as far as planning goes. For the first time since 2014, I feel like SGG has a shot at being successful. Our focus is going to be on clearing our pre-existing backlog. While Kevin and I have always been good at idea generation, we've been less successful at follow-through, and that's where I want us to shine this year. Adding Blog Here 2017-11-27T00:00:00+00:00 I'm starting to use Hugo for blogging now. I might move all of the content currently on Pathfinder</a> over to here, if it works as well as I hope it does. Also, I'm now hosting this site on Netlify, instead of deploying it myself to a VPS. This makes things much easier from a content management perspective. Write Simple Code to Prevent Headaches Later 2017-06-05T00:00:00+00:00 Consider the following code snippet: someVar = false; if ( anotherVar >= 1 ) { someVar = true; }</code></pre> Now, consider this rewrite: someVar = ( anotherVar >= 1 );</code></pre> Both snippets work as designed, so why is the second one better? It comes down to simplicity. The first snippet includes an if block. It would be possible for another programmer to add logic into that block that, while not modifying the final result of someVar, increases the complexity of the code. This makes it harder to maintain in the long run. The second snippet is very clear about what it does, and is more difficult to tack additional logic onto. Looking back on 2016, and forward to 2017 2017-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 2016 was a rough year. We lost a lot of good people; the loss of Carrie Fisher in particular hit me hard. Politically, the year was disappointing. But 2016 was also a good year for me personally. Doors and eyes opened. 2017 should continue that trend, if I read the signs correctly. Victories in 2016</h1> I returned to Silver Gryphon Games. While this has not borne fruit yet, it marked a commitment that's important to me. I lost a lot of weight in the early part of 2016. I followed a paleo diet, practiced parkour, and started to see increased energy levels and a better self image. I learned what it meant to be a manager, but not until later in the year. For the first part of the year, I was a “manager” but didn't fully understand the difference between a technical lead and a manager. In November, it finally clicked: managers focus on the big picture. Technical leads bridge the gap between big picture and technical execution. That realization gave me new energy and a powerful sense of purpose. Challenges in 2016</h1> One of the biggest stressors for me in 2016 was personal finances. I moved out of my old apartment earlier than I should have. For two months, I was paying for two apartments. I misjudged my cash flow and missed payments on some things for the first time in over five years. Weight and diet were also challenges. While in the first quarter of the year I lost over thirty pounds, the last quarter of the year saw a slight reversal. I gained back ten of those pounds. My diet changed from paleo-ish to unrestricted. My drinking became even more of a problem in the latter half of the year. For the first time in my life, I had a couple days where I couldn't remember large chunks of the previous night. It feels like my memory generally has gotten worse, though I don't have data to support that, or even to suggest that the two are connected. Goals for the New Year</h1> I'm going to regain my budgetary sense from early 2016 and put significant effort towards paying down debt. This is my primary goal in 2017. I will return to a controlled diet. I'm cutting back on eating out. I love cooking, so this isn't that difficult for me. It's going to require paying attention, though. The big difficulty here is going to be work lunches, since I don't care for sandwiches or microwaved leftovers. Getting my drinking under control is going to be both simple and difficult. In 2016, I drank most often when at home playing video games. Since those two habits are so intertwined, I will need to find a way to sever the connection. In general, I believe I'll be able to succeed at my goals in 2017. I have great hope for the future. From Developer to DevOps: My Story 2016-11-20T00:00:00+00:00 In late 2014, the sole system administrator for the Star Tribune Digital department (let's call him John) turned in his two-weeks' notice. Thus began a panic as we realized we had no idea how our infrastructure worked. At the time, I was one of two senior software engineers there. I was in the middle of a large refactoring project for the mobile website. John had, thankfully, kept up an internal wiki that at least roughly documented how some of the legacy infrastructure worked. The new infra on AWS was very new and very undocumented, but at least we had a place to start. John's disciple, an eager but more junior developer who had originated as a copy-editor, did what he could to absorb as much knowledge as he could from John before he left. But his heart just wasn't in operations, and he didn't want to fall on that sword. In a one-on-one with my boss, we talked about the dilemma facing us. I mentioned that I had some experience with Linux in production environments. He gently suggested that I take on the system administration role, at least until they could hire someone to replace John. I blanched, knowing enough to know that I knew little about the world of operations. I was reluctant, but in the end he convinced me to at least try and hold down the fort until help arrived. I set the condition that I be immediately removed from all development projects I was assigned to. My boss agreed. At this point, we were about six months from launch of a scratch-built web platform that would replace our proprietary hosted CMS. None of the developers had experience in operational concerns at that scale, including myself. John had written some Chef cookbooks to provision the few things living on the new infrastructure, but only an outside contractor brought in to help in the interim with operations actually knew Chef. We struggled for a short period of time to maintain it. I learned enough of Ruby and Chef to get by, but it was always a battle to get the tool to do what I expected whenever I needed to do something slightly different from the existing process. I forget who originally suggested it, but we started to switch our orchestration code to Ansible. Ansible was far easier for me to wrap my head around, and at a time when I needed to learn as much as possible as fast as possible, that was a lifesaver. At this point, I'd been “the operations guy” for about a month. The hiring ad for a “devops engineer” had been open for a month and a half. We had had only a few interested parties, and none of them were anything close to what we needed. I saw the writing on the wall, and asked my boss for a meeting. I told him I was willing to permanently become the operations engineer for the team. His relief was obvious. Shortly after that, the engineer opening changed from operations to developer, and within a short space of time we had an awesome new junior developer on the team. Meanwhile, I dove headlong into the world of system administration and operations. No longer held back by my own thought of “this is only temporary,” I devoured anything and everything I could find on the subject of what Google would later call Site Reliability Engineering. After a couple short months, all of the Chef code was gone, a lot of our infrastructure had been deployed onto AWS, and we had hired a junior operations engineer to help out. Our on-call rotation was still a manually-maintained forwarded phone line, though, and fighting fires was always a panic moment… since usually, it was a problem that had been happening for hours, and we didn't even know about it until someone from the news floor informed us. But that's a story for another time. It was the launch of our web platform that completely changed operations for us, and for me. In early May 2015, the new website launched. And immediately crashed. And stayed down. We reverted to the old CMS. The next ten days saw both development and operations working feverishly to try and figure out what had gone wrong and how to fix it. We switched from using a clever-but-misleading traffic simulation to using a tool called siege</a> to do load testing, and finally got to a point where we thought we could keep the new site online. At 3:00 AM ten days after the first attempt, the new platform went online again and stayed online. For the next three hours, the launch team (including myself as the sole operations engineer on the team) built and deployed multiple iterations of the new site, and finally at six in the morning, we all left the office. I greeted the post-launch engineering team as we passed each other in the office entrance. After a couple hours' sleep in a downtown hotel, the launch team returned to the office to assess the situation and help out with any problems that might have occurred. Let me be clear. When I was a developer, I pulled my share of sixteen-hour days to meet deadlines. But I never before this launch had experienced a shift this long or this rewarding. Before then, I had never cheered and exchanged high fives with the team as we saw the site working as expected in the wee hours of the morning. At this point, I was invested in operations. It had acquired my interest and not just my attention. Fixing the Ansible 2.1 Temporary File Permissions Issue 2016-06-02T00:00:00+00:00 In Ansible 2.1 and later, Ansible will not allow the creation of world-readable temporary files. It does this for a good reason, but it's a change from how it was before. If you're experiencing this problem, you'll see an error when trying to become_user other than root, and it'll look like this: fatal: [12.34.567.8]: FAILED! => {"failed": true, "msg": "Failed to set permissions on the temporary files Ansible needs to create when becoming an unprivileged user. For information on working around this, see https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/become.html#becoming-an-unprivileged-user"}</code></pre> The documentation offers solutions. The one that worked for me was this: add the installation (and enablement) of ACL as part of your common tasks for a given playbook. Everything else will then work behind the scenes to make sure those temporary files are handled securely and silently. 3 Reasons why I gave up the Ghost 2016-04-25T00:00:00+00:00 This's about why I quit paying $10/month for a hosted Ghost blog and migrated everything back to a self-hosted WordPress blog. It wasn't easy, and I lost all images in the process, but here's why I made that leap. Getting my finances in order</h1> $10.00 USD per month isn't much for someone in my socioeconomic class. It covers two deluxe lattés. However, I recently got hit with the Hammer of Reality, and I'm culling all unnecessary expenses. My definition of "unnecessary" got a big revision. As someone who makes roughly six figures a year, I can afford to spend money on things that have no real bearing on my happiness but satisfy temporary impulses. But I don't want to do that anymore. My family (id est, my dad) has always done that, and I inherited that behavior. But I'm not cool with it anymore. Not when over 30% of my take-home income is spent on debt. So, with the teachings of Dave Ramsey</a> once again firmly in my mind, and the experience of life recently burned in there, I'm improving the efficiency of my expenses. In this case, that means self-hosting my blog, since I already pay for a Digital Ocean droplet</a> to host other sites I manage. WordPress is more mature</h1> Over the past year, not much has changed with Ghost. It's still the same basic Markdown-based blog engine that it was two years ago. Its market share (and, more importantly, developer mind share) has not significantly increased. By comparison, WordPress has seen thousands of new plugins, hundreds of new themes, and unmeasurable numbers of code contributions to plugins, themes, and WordPress core over the same time period. I could hate WordPress. It's written in PHP and follows code practices that are a decade out of date. However, I must recognize the stability of the platform, and the passion and strength of its community. There are a number of people much smarter and more experienced than myself who've made significant contributions to WordPress just over the past year. When it comes to maintaining a system on your own, the predictability and resilience of that system are very important metrics to consider. I am in full control of my content</h1> This is not really so much a dig on Ghost as it is a dig on self-hosting versus hosted blogs. My reason for going with a self-hosted WordPress blog is the same reason I discounted going with WordPress.com hosting. I run the database behind the blog. I am in full control of every byte stored there. Whether it's backed up or not, where it's backed up, how it's backed up, that's all in my realm of control. I determine the version of PHP, the version of MySQL, and the version of Linux that hosts it all. I alone control access to the server, and how incoming (and outgoing) connections are treated. As someone who's spent the last year and a half as a site reliability engineer/manager, that has suddenly become of vital concern to me. And renting a VPS (Virtual Private Server) is much different than trusting someone else to manage your environment for you. The next step up, fully controlling the environment from bare metal on up, is too expensive for someone like me to handle on my own. So, to sum up (or TL/DR)...</h1> I changed back to self-hosted WordPress from Ghost because A) I spend less money, B) I believe that WordPress is more likely to be supported in the future, and C) I like being able to control (almost) every aspect of how my blog exists. Moving back to WordPress. 2016-04-22T00:00:00+00:00 I'm transitioning away from hosted Ghost back to WordPress. More about this later. Switching away from iPhone 2016-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 Yesterday I went on the Google Fi site and signed up for a Nexus 6P and a data plan roughly equivalent to what I spend at Verizon. My iPhone 6 Plus, despite not (yet) being paid off, is going to sit in a drawer collecting dust starting late next week when the Nexus arrives. Am I displeased with the iPhone? No, not especially. Am I unhappy with Verizon? Well yeah, that's kind of a given for any Verizon customer. I have personal reasons for needing a new phone on a new carrier, but I also have a professional interest in Google Fi and the way it handles mobile phones. We'll see where this goes. So, You Want to Leave America 2016-03-14T00:00:00+00:00 Many people (more people than ever before, apparently) are declaring their intention to move away from America permanently if Candidate X wins the election for President of the United States in November. I won't lie, I was one of those. But then I started digging into what that meant. See, I've done it before. In 2000, my parents, sister, and I all moved together to New Zealand when George W. Bush won the election. It was more than a little bit of a political decision. Don't get me wrong, New Zealand was amazing. Most of the best memories of my entire life happened in the four years I lived there. But I also acutely remember the cost. New Zealand was a relatively safe choice. The primary language was English. The legal system was fairly similar to the United States'. Most of the culture was familiar, if a little different. But it was really expensive, and not just in the material cost of goods. New Zealand is a remote island nation at the end of the world. Internet usage at the time was far more expensive than in the USA. My family lost touch with almost everyone we had known. I experienced my first real sense of profound loss as a result. If you choose to leave the United States for political reasons, you need to seriously consider a few things. All of the following assumes that you and yours are leaving because you're appalled at the political situation, and not in immediate physical danger because of the election's result. If you fall into the latter category, this post doesn't apply to you, and you should get your family to safety as soon as possible. If you are leaving because you disagree with the country's choice of leader, then you need to make damn sure that the country you're choosing to emigrate to follows your own political beliefs. If you pick a country that's MORE extreme than the president apparent, then you may as well have just saved yourself the trouble and stayed home, because you're in for a world of hurt. On the other hand, if your host country of choice is politically favorable, you have a ton of other considerations to keep in mind. If you've spent your entire life in one part of the USA, then you're basically f***ed, in terms of culture shock. It will hurt, and it will hurt bad, to discover that everything you're familiar with is either A) extremely different, B) absent, or worse, C) slightly different. Let me elaborate. My sister was brought to tears by all pickles in New Zealand being basically sweet miniature-as-in-quark-sized pickles. The straw that shattered the camel's back, as it were. I saw the same kind of reaction by most of the American ex-pats I met in NZ. Not to pickles, mind you, but to the little things. A relatively small portion of the world has English as its mother tongue. Sure, it's spoken just about everywhere, and you'll get on OK in most developed or even developing nations. But there is a marked difference in communicating with someone in identical preferred languages and in your preferred language but the other person's second language. This is particularly true in countries where English is recognized as a business necessity but not a cultural one, such as eastern Asian countries. Let's say you're able to adapt to the language barrier, and to the availability barrier. Congratulations on defying the two biggest hurdles. Now how are you going to deal with the fact that people in your host country don't understand your pet peeves, or your quirks that you thought were common, or your personal passions that have no support locally? How about the prejudice that the locals feel towards Americans, which is basically universal in all countries that are aware of the USA? Are you ready for that? Are you willing to subject your family to that? OK, so you're still ready to go. You've got your passports, and you've secured your visas. You understand the financial and cultural pitfalls. You still think that leaving the USA is the best choice, given the alternative. OK, that's fine. Before you commit to a particular country, then you better damn well visit each of your prospective host countries for at least a month each (you DO have multiple options, right?) before making the big move. Because I will tell you, as someone who has done it and is considering doing it again, leaving your home country is one of the hardest goddamn things you can do to yourself or your family. On the other hand, you might be of the YOLO type, in which case ignore everything I've warned you about above. It might be the most amazing adventure of your entire life. 2015 Year in Review 2016-01-03T00:00:00+00:00 2015 was a year of big changes for me. The biggest was starting on the path to divorce and moving into my own apartment. For the first time in my life, I'm living completely on my own. That feels very different, and very exciting. I also had my first anxiety attack earlier in the year. Since then, while I haven't had any more, I've definitely felt more anxious and vulnerable than before. This is strange, since prior to the attack, I always felt like I didn't worry about anything. I'm still mystified as to why it happened. Continuing the health-related theme, in December I noticed that I had lost ten pounds since the last time I'd been weighed. I chalked it up to my new method of commuting since moving into the apartment - walking to work. I'm not convinced that was completely the case anymore, but it was probably a big contributor. The holidays erased half of that loss, but eh, I can recover from that. I established a habit of doing push-ups every morning after waking, I'm working on my nutrition, and I joined Bodyspace, a fitness social networking run by Bodybuilding.com. At work, I went from being sole operations engineer on a legacy platform to lead operations engineer on a team that helped launched a brand-new platform to, in October, digital operations manager. Granted, I'm a “working manager,” and still spend a lot of time on the engineering side of things. Starting in November, I began budgeting in earnest. I'm much more aware of where my money is going and for the first time in well over a decade I feel in control of my finances. I've kept it up, and by this point I think budgeting has become a daily habit. 2015 was very stressful. 2016 seems full of promise and I'm very optimistic about the future. Here's to a year of health and personal growth! Kettle, my personal dashboard app 2015-12-29T00:00:00+00:00 Not too long ago, I got fed up with having to use a ton of different apps to do various things online. Also, having to deal with apps that almost-but-not-quite fit the bill for what I was trying to do was a bit frustrating. So, I set out to write my own personal dashboard web app to handle… well, everything. I'm calling it Kettle, mostly because that was the first noun that popped into my head that sounded vaguely appropriate. Does it make sense? Not really. It just sounds right, much like J.R.R. Tolkien loved the sound of the phrase “cellar door.” At the time of this posting, I've just finished the first iteration of the note-taking part of the app. It doesn't yet allow searching or deleting notes, but other than that, it's perfectly usable. You can check it out at the Kettle repository on GitHub</a>. Tutorial: Dealing with Disk Space Errors in Linux 2015-12-10T00:00:00+00:00 If you're seeing errors on a server (say, npm complaining about an ENOSPC error, or apt failing to install something) that suggest the hard disk is full, use this guide to resolve the issue. Troubleshooting</h1> All of the following commands assume you are logged in as a sudo user on a Linux machine. Some of the commands, like df -hT</code>, won't work exactly as advertised on something like, say, Solaris. </blockquote> Checking disk space</h2> First, check the amount of available disk space. df -hT</code></pre> If one of the available drives (such as /dev/xvda1</code>) shows as 100% full, then you'll need to clear some space. The first place to look is /var/log/</code>, especially if nginx is writing log files to disk. Clear out all old logs (anything with a .gz file extension is fair game for deletion). If that doesn't free up enough space, the next place to check is the application directory for whatever app is on the server. If there are more than 3 releases on the server, you can safely delete the oldest ones (until you have at least 2 remaining). You can also remove all the files in /tmp/</code>, although that should be a last resort. Checking inode usage</h2> If you've confirmed that the hard drive isn't full (or cleared enough space that it isn't), and you're still seeing “disk is full” type errors, then you almost certainly have too few inodes available on the server. This means, basically, that there are too many files on the server. Checking inode usage</h3> Run the following command to check inode usage: df -i</code></pre> You'll see something like the following: Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on udev 121K 409 120K 1% /dev tmpfs 125K 479 124K 1% /run /dev/vda1 1.9M 237K 1.7M 13% / tmpfs 125K 2 125K 1% /dev/shm tmpfs 125K 3 125K 1% /run/lock tmpfs 125K 15 125K 1% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 125K 4 125K 1% /run/user/1000</code></pre> The IUse%</code> column is the one you're interested in. If IUse%</code> is at or near 100%, then you have an inode usage problem. Delete old kernels</h3> Often, you can free up a ton of inodes if you delete old kernels. This is done with a pretty simple command: sudo apt-get autoremove -y</code></pre> Try that first. If that doesn't remove the old kernels, this page</a> may help. Script to check for directories with lots of files</h3> This script will help find directories with large numbers of files. Put the following into a file list-files.sh</code> in your home directory: #!/bin/bash # count_em - count files in all subdirectories under current directory. echo 'echo $(ls -a "$1" | wc -l) $1' >/tmp/count_em_$ chmod 700 /tmp/count_em_$ find . -mount -type d -print0 | xargs -0 -n1 /tmp/count_em_$ | sort -n</code></pre> Then make the file executable: chmod +x ./list-files.sh</code></pre> Finally, go to the root directory on the server and run the script: cd / ~/list-files.sh</code></pre> It may take a couple minutes to run, but it will present you with a list of all the directories with a number of files next to each, sorted in ascending order of number of files. Take a look at each of the high ones; that might give you an idea of what you need to clean up. Some notes about good files to delete</h3> Log files are safe to delete. So are old releases. Also check the /tmp/</code> directory; it can often be a hiding place for tons of files. Quick update, and Hugo 2015-11-30T00:00:00+00:00 Well, it's been about two months since my last post, which ironically was about my intention to write more frequently. To be fair, I wrote in my journal a number of times between then and now, but this is my first public post since then. Today I discovered a Go-based static site generator called Hugo</a> that fascinates me with its speed and usability. I'm going to try using it to replace the current structure and content of benovermyer.com</a>. Taking up the writing habit again 2015-09-19T00:00:00+00:00 A few days ago, I migrated all of my blog posts from my last primary blog on WordPress.com to this blog. In the process, I read over a lot of old posts. I noticed something interesting: back in 2007 and 2008, I was writing blog posts with fair regularity. Now, it's a rarity. The blog posts back then were fairly journal-like in character. They told a story of what I was working on, how I felt on certain subjects, and described some of my adventures in games I was playing at the time. The blog posts I wrote in the recent past trend towards the same thing when they're more frequent. When I choose to try and write something useful, like the Laravel on Docker post, it takes a lot longer, a lot more effort, and is a lot more intimidating to start on. So as I sit here sipping on my orange pekoe black tea, listening to relaxing acoustic guitar, and writing these words, I'm thinking that I should allow myself to write journal-style posts again. This, if for no other reason than to ingrain that old writing habit. It'll be easier to write the big, important stuff if the simple stuff - the writing - comes naturally, right? Get Going with Laravel on Docker 2015-09-11T00:00:00+00:00 This post was updated May 14th, 2016 to significantly rework the tutorial. Docker is slowly taking over the world of web infrastructure. It makes working with multiple different services easy, and the problem of “works in dev, not in prod” goes away, since you have the same environment on your local machine as you do in the production infra. It also makes things like trying out web apps without deploying them to servers really easy. Ever wanted to just check out a personal demo of, say, WordPress or Ghost? Docker makes that simple. Docker can be intimidating to start out with. It's a complex beast, but once you've gotten it set up a couple times, it'll become second nature. This article will walk through the entire process of having a completely new and fresh Mac OS X environment all the way to running Docker container with your own Laravel application. It's a long tutorial, so grab a big mug of coffee and put on your favorite track and let's get to work. Note: This tutorial is for OS X. A lot of the pre-req stuff is different for Windows, so if you're running that OS, you might be better off using Docker Toolbox. Until the new Docker App comes out, anyway. Prerequisites</h1> The first step is getting some basic tools installed. OS X comes with git and Ruby installed, but we need to make a slight adjustment to our Ruby environment, and we'll need Homebrew to install some other things. Homebrew</h2> Let's start with Homebrew. Paste this into a terminal prompt: ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"</code></pre> Running that will install Homebrew. Next, we'll need Homebrew Cask: brew install caskroom/cask/brew-cask</code></pre> This is used to install binary applications that otherwise you'd use a GUI for. Virtualbox</h2> Let's install this via Homebrew Cask to make things easy. brew cask install virtualbox</code></pre>Enter Docker</h1> Now we get to the meat of it - installing Docker and the other tools necessary to work with containers. We're going to be using a wrapper called dinghy for this. You could use the official Docker Toolbox</a>, but the default VM that it provides, boot2docker, relies on vboxfs, which makes real-time updates (like gulp watch</code>) really slow. Install Docker Toolbox</h2> When I originally wrote this post, Docker Toolbox made some questionable assumptions about how people were using Docker for development. Those have now been corrected, and it's safe to go ahead and install Docker Toolbox. You can get that here: https://www.docker.com/products/docker-toolbox</a> Docker is installed! Now what?</h2> Now everything is all set up and ready to get container-ing. In the next section, we'll create a basic Laravel app to get a proper Docker workflow going. Getting set up for Laravel</h1> For this tutorial, we're going to use the Laravel framework. This will demonstrate how to use multiple containers while not requiring us to write a ton of code to get started. Install Composer</h2> PHP is installed by default with OS X, but you're going to need Composer also. Thankfully, it's a quick install: curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer</code></pre> Make sure that composer is in your PATH in your bash/zsh profile. Look for this line: ~/.composer/vendor/bin</code> If it's nowhere in the file, you'll need to add something like this near the bottom of the file: export PATH="$PATH:~/.composer/vendor/bin"</code></pre>Install the Laravel CLI tool</h2> This tool makes starting new Laravel projects much easier and faster: composer global require laravel/installer</code></pre>Start a new Laravel project</h2> In a directory that makes sense for you (I use ~/Source/</code> for my code projects), run this shell command: laravel new docker-app</code></pre> This will create a new Laravel project called “docker-app” in a new docker-app directory. You're now ready to Docker-ize this app! Docker-ize!</h1> The next step is to create four files that we'll use to describe our container environment. These files are nginx-vhost.conf</code>, supervisord.conf</code>, Dockerfile</code>, and docker-compose.yml</code>. Each of these is at the root of your project. The contents of each file is as follows: nginx-vhost.conf</h2> We're using nginx as the web server for this app. We could use Apache, but for this exercise, we'll stick with nginx. The below file configures the virtualhost that will expose our Laravel app to the container. server { listen 80; listen [::]:80 default ipv6only=on; root /srv/www/public; index index.php; # Disable sendfile as per https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/synced-folders/virtualbox.html sendfile off; # Add stdout logging error_log /dev/stdout info; access_log /dev/stdout; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args; } location ~ .php$ { try_files $uri =404; fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+.php)(/.+)$; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; } location ~* .(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|css|js|ico|xml)$ { expires 5d; } # deny access to . files, for security location ~ /. { log_not_found off; deny all; } }</code></pre>supervisord.conf</h2> We're using Supervisor to run nginx and PHP-FPM. It makes things a little cleaner and easier. Below is the config file for Supervisor. [supervisord] nodaemon=true [program:php5-fpm] command=/usr/sbin/php5-fpm autostart=true autorestart=true priority=5 [program:nginx] command=/usr/sbin/nginx autostart=true autorestart=true priority=10 stdout_events_enabled=true stderr_events_enabled=true</code></pre>Dockerfile</h2> For a guide to the syntax you see below, check out the official Docker documentation for Dockerfiles</a>. FROM ubuntu:14.04 ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND noninteractive RUN apt-get update -y RUN apt-get install -y software-properties-common RUN add-apt-repository ppa:nginx/development RUN apt-get update -y RUN apt-get upgrade -y RUN apt-get install -y supervisor nginx php5-fpm php5-cli php5-curl php5-gd php5-mysql php5-memcached php5-mcrypt # Clean up to reduce container size RUN apt-get remove --purge -y software-properties-common RUN apt-get autoremove -y RUN apt-get clean RUN apt-get autoclean RUN echo -n > /var/lib/apt/extended_states RUN rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* RUN rm -rf /usr/share/man/?? RUN rm -rf /usr/share/man/??_* # Configure php-fpm to not run as a daemon RUN sed -e 's/;daemonize = yes/daemonize = no/' -i /etc/php5/fpm/php-fpm.conf RUN sed -e 's/;listen.owner/listen.owner/' -i /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf RUN sed -e 's/;listen.group/listen.group/' -i /etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf # Configure nginx to not run as a daemon RUN echo "daemon off;" >> /etc/nginx/nginx.conf # This next line lets nginx write to your working directory RUN usermod -u 1000 www-data # Configure nginx virtualhost RUN rm -Rf /etc/nginx/conf.d/* RUN rm -Rf /etc/nginx/sites-available/default ADD ./nginx-vhost.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.conf RUN ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/default.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default.conf # Add the application code into the container ADD . /srv/www # Configure Supervisor ADD ./supervisord.conf /etc/supervisor/conf.d/supervisor.conf # Fix permissions RUN chown -Rf www-data:www-data /srv/www/ # Set our working directory WORKDIR /srv/www # Expose Ports EXPOSE 80 # And finally, run the command to kickstart everything CMD ["/usr/bin/supervisord"]</code></pre> The above file is telling Docker how to build the container. It includes nginx and PHP-FPM, but it leaves database and cache store to other containers. The container's main job is to serve the Laravel application at /srv/www</code> in the container on port 80 using nginx and PHP-FPM. docker-compose.yml</h2> This file is what Docker Compose will use to build our stack and link up the containers the app needs to function. It defines three containers - web, db, and cache. The “volumes” part of the web container's definition here will map your source code directory on your host to the container's app directory, which will let you update your container by editing files on your host without having to rebuild the container. Under the db container, you'll see the “environment” section. This is a list of environment variables that will be set in the MySQL container. The two blank ones will use the environment variable of the same name on your host to set them inside the container, which is far more secure than putting these values into version control! Just make sure that you set them! That'll happen in your bash/zsh profile, with lines like this: export MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=supersecurepassword1 export MYSQL_PASSWORD=anothersecurepassword2</code></pre> Alright. Without further ado, here's the docker-compose.yml</code> file: web: build: . ports: - "8080:80" volumes: - .:/srv/www links: - db - cache db: image: mysql:5.6 environment: MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: MYSQL_DATABASE: dockerapp MYSQL_USER: dockerapp MYSQL_PASSWORD: cache: image: memcached:latest</code></pre>Configure your Laravel app</h1> Laravel 5.0 and later uses a .env</code> file to configure the app. This is where you'll give your app the settings it needs to talk to the other services (in this case, memcached and MySQL). .env</h2> APP_ENV=local APP_DEBUG=true APP_KEY=dhBKg8eSVZ3tH5yuz6z40j13X13YWTJf DB_HOST=db DB_DATABASE=dockerapp DB_USERNAME=dockerapp DB_PASSWORD=anothersecurepassword2 CACHE_DRIVER=memcached SESSION_DRIVER=memcached QUEUE_DRIVER=sync MEMCACHED_HOST=cache MAIL_DRIVER=smtp MAIL_HOST=mailtrap.io MAIL_PORT=2525 MAIL_USERNAME=null MAIL_PASSWORD=null MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null</code></pre>Run your new application container</h1> Alright, we're just about ready for the finale. First we need to run Docker Compose against our app to get it running. docker-compose build</code></pre> This will build your container and fetch the other two from Docker Hub. It shouldn't take too long - the longest part will be downloading mysql and memcached containers. Then, put your containers online: docker-compose up</code></pre> Now try visiting http://192.168.99.100:8080</a> in your browser of choice. You might have to change the IP address to match that of your Docker machine (docker-machine ip default</code> will give you that). You should see the Laravel welcome screen, and your work here is complete. Note: don't worry that your command prompt didn't come back. This runs in the foreground, so you'll need to use a new tab in your terminal app for other things. Or, you can use the daemon mode instead: docker-compose up -d</code></pre> Congratulations, you're now working with Docker! Making army lists in Age of Sigmar 2015-08-03T00:00:00+00:00 Making an army list in Age of Sigmar is an unusual process for those of us used to the traditional Games Workshop methods. In Warhammer Fantasy you decided on a points value, an army, and then tried to match a unit selection based on force organization rules and a balanced strategy to defeat as many types of opponents as possible. Those opponents would most often be similarly organized. In Age of Sigmar, however, there are only two ways to build for “strength:” by sheer force of numbers, or by maximizing keyword synergies. The sheer-force-of-numbers (a.k.a. pay-to-win) approach will not win you any friends, and may get you banned from games. The keyword synergy approach, though, is as yet an undiscovered country. Everyone is starting to pick up on the idea that you can take certain units to play on their collective strengths. As the community finds its feet in this new game, strong strategies are bound to come out. For example, the Dark Elf Cold One Knights are somewhat lackluster by themselves. However, in the presence of a Dreadlord on Cold One they (and Cold One Chariots) reroll charge rolls and add 1 to Wound rolls for one of their attacks. It's combinations like this that will define Age of Sigmar army lists. While you can make all kinds of interesting setups, it's this system that's going to draw the tactical minds out of its players. I'm reminded heavily of Magic: the Gathering or Hearthstone here. Both of those games encourage players to build winning strategies on specific synergistic themes that amplify their benefits, while not discouraging taking completely odd selections for flavor or for backup strategies. For my part, I intend on running a lot of Dark Elves (or Exiles, as they're now called) as the core of my first army. There's a lot to love there. Age of Sigmar breaks Warhammer Fantasy, but it's worth it 2015-07-19T00:00:00+00:00 Age of Sigmar grabbed the Warhammer Fantasy rulebook, tore it apart, and threw the remains into the fire. I love the game that came out of that, even if there are some significant negatives to this event. From simulationist roots to casual narratives</h1> Warhammer Fantasy has long been the strategy-heavy cousin to the tactical-heavy Warhammer 40,000. The rules up until this point focused on maneuver and regiments, positioning and thinking ahead. Warhammer 40,000, on the other hand, has always been about skirmishes and characterful, tight battles. Where Fantasy relied on its movement trays and slower pace, 40k allowed for a lot of narrative to come through the gameplay. Age of Sigmar one-ups 40k in this regard. Yes, Age of Sigmar has a lot of holes in the rules. Someone who delights in using rules-as-written against his opponent is going to have a field day with Sigmar. But that's not what this iteration of the game is about. Age of Sigmar seeks to bring casual gaming to the fore. The rules explicitly encourage, via its Most Important Rule, house-ruling and collaborating with your opponent to set up the battle. Play any army you come up with</h1> One of my favorite things about the rules is its encouragement of creativity in army building. There are no points or required force organization. While this can obviously be abused by asocial types, for those of us that enjoy narrative battles, it's a godsend. I can mix Seraphons (Lizardmen) in with Stormcast Eternals and Exile Aelfs (Dark Elves), and that's perfectly legitimate. If I really wanted to, the rules allow me to field Chaos Warriors alongside Sylvaneth (Dryads) and Duardin (Dwarfs). I can't imagine the scenario where that would make lore sense, but you could do it. All of this makes for some fantastic battle and lore possibilities. My God, it's beautiful</h1> The miniatures in the starter box set are absolutely gorgeous, and make the collector in me very happy. The Lord Celestant in particular is a beautiful model. With his triumphant pose and intimidating Drakoth mount, he makes a fine addition to any army. The Khorgorath model on the Chaos side is really ****ing creepy. It's made of blood and skulls of its victims are pushing their way through its skin. There's a free app for army building</h1> This is a big one. I bought Army Builder ages ago to help me build 40k armies, but Games Workshop is notorious for never releasing anything for free. Privateer Press released a free app awhile ago for its Warmachine and Hordes games, and while you need to pay for your specific army, it does have the benefit of being a first-party app. Now, GW has released the Age of Sigmar app that includes an army builder and the Warscrolls for all existing models for free. The one thing that pisses me off about this app is that I don't get the Warscrolls for the starter box units, despite having shelled out $125 for said box. There's no way to redeem a product code or anything. The only way to get those Warscrolls in the app is to buy the Age of Sigmar book through it, which would be an additional $50. No thanks. But it's GW, so I'll give them points for the progress they did make. ...tournaments?</h1> Yeah, the Age of Sigmar rules pretty much break any possibility of having tournaments without extensive house-ruling. That's a problem for people who're really into the game. I'll admit to being a little hesitant about this. I've never played in a 40k tournament, but I think it'd be fun to try. I can't imagine playing in an Age of Sigmar tournament, though. The rules aren't geared for that. What about the people who enjoyed the old game?</h1> Games Workshop's move to completely get rid of the old rules and cease supporting it in their stores is a bad one, despite the good game that Age of Sigmar is. The community that built up around WHFB is not so easily dismissed. For some people, their local Games Workshop store is the only place they could play the game they'd put a lot of time and money into, and I've heard rumors that GW stores are disallowing WHFB matches now. That's a terrible policy. Mantic Games</a> has their Kings of War game, which keeps very closely to WHFB's roots. They just released a second edition, and have been inviting WHFB players left out in the cold to join their community. This is a great move on Mantic's part, and I really hope it works out for everyone. From what I've seen, Mantic cares a lot more about community</a> than GW does. So is it worth getting?</h1> Yes. Especially since the rules are free, and the Warscrolls - the rules for individual units - are also free. You can get them on Games Workshop's site</a>. In my opinion, the starter box is also totally worth the $125. It has wonderful minis, and the books are great too. Gamehole Con, Day 1 2014-11-08T00:00:00+00:00 Friday was eventful. I went to a seminar on world building by Ed Greenwood, and it was fascinating to hear the creator of the Forgotten Realms talk about how to construct a game world and how the Realms evolved. The Realms were first born when he was 6. It made me wonder if I should somehow incorporate my first fantasy world, Flodoria, into Eiridia. It would make an interesting addition. I'll have to think about how the two would integrate. NPC Phrasebooks</h1> One of my favorite takeaways from the world building seminar was Ed's description of how he builds short little “phrasebooks” for his NPCs and monsters. He takes common phrases and translates them into how a given type of NPC would say them, whether that's in a different language or just a different dialect. This gives him a way to increase immersion for his players without having to invent entire languages whole-cloth. A Living World</h1> Another thing he emphasized was that the game world must evolve without the players. Powerful agents outside of the PCs' control need to be operating on the world, so that the players get the sense that they're in a living, breathing world and not just a stage for them to play-act upon. Ed himself spends about 3 hours of design time for every hour of play time. Given that he's a prolific writer and the father of one of the most beloved fantasy settings of all time, I'm not surprised. I wonder if I should be spending that much time on my own adventures. Trade Lines as World-Building Anchors</h1> A helpful tip that Ed shared about building out a game world was to figure out what trade lines exist to the players' current location, and start building from there. This makes sense; if the town imports iron ore from the northwest, what kind of people would have a society built around mining? Would merchants from that region be dwarves, or maybe something else? How would they act in a tavern after a long day on the road? What stories might they tell? The Forgotten Realms Seminar</h1> The second seminar I went to was a panel on Forgotten Realms hosted by Chris Perkins and Ed Greenwood. Chris Perkins is the story lead for Wizards of the Coast's D&D division. The two of them talked a lot about the plans for Forgotten Realms and, surprisingly, the incorporation of other settings into the Realms. The first such thing was the Tyranny of Dragons story arc, which borrows heavily from Dragonlance thematic elements. The second story arc they have planned deals with a cult of elemental evil, which is a nod to the Temple of Elemental Evil, done in a Forgotten Realms style. The third and fourth story arcs they have in the works similarly bring new things to the Realms. The third is being produced in consultation with Bob Salvatore (creator of Drizzt Do'Urden) and thematically mimics Alice in Wonderland. The fourth they were very tight-lipped on, but Chris mentioned that the consultant for it was a name we would recognize from the old TSR days. I got a look at the new DM Screen for 5th edition, as well as the new DMG. I got some acceptable shots of the screen. They also talked about brand recognition for D&D and Forgotten Realms, and what they hoped the future was for both. They definitely dream big, though Chris and Ed both are keeping one foot firmly on the ground when it comes to product ideas. A Forgotten Realms movie was mentioned several times as a wish, but it was stated in such a way that I think they're only hoping it comes true, not actually planning for it. Ed's thoughts on Forgotten Realms brand recognition can be summed up in this quote from him: “Being the creator of the Forgotten Realms is like being the champion of downhill skiing in the Saharan desert.” He obviously wishes he had the fame of George R. R. Martin, whom he mentioned in the seminar. Gaming with Ed Greenwood</h1> The final event of the day was an AD&D 2E session run by Ed. I played a human wizard with a penchant for laughing at danger – a trait that got him into trouble more than once during the session. Despite some of the dire circumstances we got ourselves into, we managed to complete the quest and return the missing eyeball to its owner, none the worse for wear. Ed's GMing style reminded me of Kevin Rohan‘s, though the former has decades more experience and isn't shy about using funny voices for each of the NPCs. He definitely runs a game like a story, not a combat simulation. Gamehole Con, Day 0 2014-11-06T00:00:00+00:00 Took off a day early so I could get to Madison, WI at a leisurely pace. I'm sitting in the hotel room writing this. This is my first trip to Madison, and my route took me through an interesting set of neighborhoods. The layout is definitely not as easy to navigate as Minneapolis's, though it had a cozier quality to it. The roads are narrower and twist and turn more. I'm fairly certain I saw Ed Greenwood entering the hotel just after me, but by the time I got checked in and looked around for him, he was gone. Ah well, I'll see him tomorrow. I plan on blogging every day of the con. We'll see what adventures are in store. Star Wars Galaxies: A Community to Remember 2014-08-20T00:00:00+00:00 In June of 2003, I began a journey in a galaxy far, far away. Star Wars: Galaxies was a massively multiplayer online RPG set in the Star Wars universe, roughly between episodes IV and V. But really, the timing wasn't all that important. All that mattered was that the Galactic Empire was at war with the Alliance to Restore the Republic, and that you as a player could either ignore the war or embrace it. Almost exactly one year prior to the retail release of the game, I joined a “Player Association” called the Galactic Conglomerate. We gushed about what the game would be like, and how much it would conform to canon, and what we would do once we logged in. Most of us didn't have beta access. At the time, I was living in New Zealand, so I wasn't officially supported. The game wasn't available when it was released, so one of my Galactic Conglomerate friends bought it and mailed it to me. To my shame, I don't remember his name, though I did pay him back for it immediately with New Zealand Dollars. Regardless, come launch day, I was in the game and playing. It was an experience to be remembered. My character was created as an Artisan, the prototypical crafter from the game. In those days, the game was based around a freeform skill system that allowed you to combine a variety of different “professions” to create your character. I strongly remember specializing in weaponsmithing and carbine use, a combination that wasn't very popular at the time. I spent many hours speculating with my low-level mineral discovery devices so that I could gather enough materials to build the newest type of weapons and armor. Over the next few months of release, I spent a lot of time building weapons and armor for my guild, and participating in guild hunts as a carbineer. I used my self-crafted automatic blaster weapons both as my own weapons and as those of my squadmates to take down such worthy enemies as Sharnaffs, which at the time were powerful NPC monsters. When the day came that player cities were added to the game, I was ecstatic. I was the architect for my Player Association, so I was charged with building the City Hall that would allow us to create a city on Chilastra, our chosen capital. It was a long, arduous process. When I finally hit the button that would complete our City Hall, I was greeted with a message that caused the bottom to drop out of my stomach: “Critical Failure: Assembly has Failed.” Normally, with any other crafting, this would mean that all the materials — including the sub-components — involved the crafting were lost. Due to an early bug in the city-crafting process, though, I was able to bypass the critical failure and complete our City Hall. Sadly, we weren't in time to claim one of the ten city slots for Chilastra. In a panic, we hurriedly rushed to Talus</a>, one of the moons of Chilastra. We succeeded in placing our city there, and for the rest of the life of Star Wars: Galaxies, I would occasionally return to that fateful point and reminisce. To this day, I think of that first city with a mixture of sadness and happiness. On December 15th, 2011, Star Wars: Galaxies' servers were shut down for the last time. I produced a video</a> on YouTube to commemorate the occasion, but it didn't really do justice to the memories I had of the game. No MMORPG since then has ever filled the same purpose, and despite the hardships and drama I suffered during the game's life, or maybe because of it, I have never found a community that shares the same kind of experience. Last year, John Smedley — the producer of Sony Online Entertainment, the company that made Star Wars: Galaxies — hinted that they were working on something</a> that would make SWG fans proud. I hope that he's right. Star Wars: Galaxies, for all its myriad flaws, was the best online community I have ever been proud to take part in. Getting Ready for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition 2014-07-11T00:00:00+00:00 Despite being a game author with my own system to enjoy, I still love Dungeons & Dragons. It was the first RPG I ever encountered, and I own a copy of almost every edition ever released. I enjoy every edition, too, from the simple 0E/Basic all the way through to the tactically-minded 4E. I'm really excited for the new fifth edition. My wife agreed to run a campaign based on at least the Starter Set adventure. Normally I'm the GM, so not only getting to play a new edition of my second favorite RPG of all time (the first being my own Ingenium, of course) but actually being a player instead of the ref is a big change. The new Starter Set has a rule book, an adventure, a set of dice, and some pregenerated character sheets in the box. The box's contents have been covered in depth elsewhere, so I'll focus primarily on how I feel about the fifth edition rules themselves. Attributes, Skills, and Proficiencies</h1> One of the most interesting changes is in this area. Much like my own Ingenium, 5E now uses attribute checks for most everything that isn't covered by a specific skill. Want to try something related to Dexterity? Just roll a d20 and add your Dex bonus. Skills are a simple extension of that. They just add a small modifier to that roll. Same with Proficiencies. Proficiencies in 5E are particularly interesting, though, compared to previous editions. They can now apply to things other than weapons, such as Thieves' Tools. That reinforces a reoccurring theme with 5E: combat is no longer the sole focus of the rules. Classes</h1> In 5E classes got more streamlined than in 3E, and less crunchy than 4E. The loss of the powers mechanic from 4E is an interesting choice, and I feel that it opens the game up to more of a narrative experience. I can see where balancing classes for 5E could get problematic since it's less formula-friendly, but really, balancing a tabletop RPG is always problematic when it comes to clever players. Races</h1> Races are a lot simpler than in 3E or 4E, but they also feel a lot more “fluffy.” Building new races for 5E feels like building races for 2E, though a little more polished. I love this! Spells and Spellcasting</h1> Cantrips are at-will, whenever-you-feel-like-it spells. They don't take up a spell slot and don't count against the number of spells you can cast per day. This makes casters feel really useful, even when they're out of spells for the day. The spell lists feel a lot like AD&D 2nd Edition spell lists. The spells have a name, a component cost (verbal, somatic, and material), and a description, and that's about it. It's really flexible. While it does open the system to potential abuse, it feels a lot like AD&D, and that's a good thing in my book! Advantage and Disadvantage</h1> Probably the coolest core change is the addition of advantage/disadvantage. Instead of being a direct modifier to the roll, Advantage lets you roll a second d20 and take the higher of the two. Similarly, Disadvantage makes you roll a second d20 and take the lower of the two. This is roughly equivalent to a bonus (or penalty) of 3, but in terms of feel, the addition of a second die makes it just seem more dramatic. Overall Thoughts</h1> I love fifth edition. It reminds me of what got me into role-playing in the first place. I've already started converting content from Eiridia to 5E rules, and it just feels right. If you're on the fence, download the rules from the Wizards of the Coast website; they're free and unrestricted. It'll be worth your time, I promise! Contact Lost on Asherth 2014-06-08T00:00:00+00:00 Asherth. A frozen rock on the fringe of Imperial space. And, as it happened, a world of sudden importance to the Salamanders. The loss of a sacred Land Raider in a battle only weeks prior stung deeply. Imperial Guard corrupted by Chaos had extinguished its fire forever, and the Salamanders of Third Company keenly felt its loss. To replace it, they needed a new source of ferranite, a mineral integral to Land Raider construction. Third Company found such a source in Asherth. The icy death world in the far reaches of space was rich in ferranite. The Chapter Master ordered Third Company there to secure the world, and this proved no easy task. Besides the deadly ice storms and fierce native predators, the Salamanders discovered another threat: the world was held by a large force of Orks. They bore the bright yellow of the Bad Moons, and seemed hellbent on keeping Asherth for themselves. The Orks had destroyed a contingent of Imperial Guard that was sent in ahead of the Salamanders to establish a foothold. First priority for the sons of Nocturne was to recover what they could of the Imperial Guard's supplies and retake the fortress overrun by the Orks. The First Battle of Asherth: Contact Lost</h1> Initial deployment saw the Orks scattered and the Guard utterly annihilated. The Salamanders touched down in their Thunderhawks and proceeded to advance towards the last known position of the Guard supply transports. As the mighty Astartes marched forward, one of Asherth's terrible ice storms moved in, and all contact with the battle cruiser in orbit was lost. Nonplussed, the Salamanders took sight of Ork vehicles and began their assault. The battle was long and fierce. Early in the engagement, Third Company's last remaining Land Raider Redeemer was laid low by Ork Tankbustas. If not for the Astartes' destruction of two massive Ork vehicles, the battle may have ended right there. An Ork Deff Dred carved a bloody swath through the Salamanders' lines, dividing them into two forces cut off from each other. With no support or reinforcements forthcoming from orbit, the two forces were in dire straits. As the battle progressed, the Deff Dred destroyed a full squad of Centurions that tried to reunite the two halves of the Salamanders' army. The Orks' trukks moved in and claimed much of the supplies left behind by the Imperial Guard. The Ork boyz laid down a withering hail of gunfire to protect their trukks and gleefully charged the Salamanders. In response, Captain Adrax Agatone rushed into battle with the Ork warlord, a full squad of Assault Marines by his side. Though badly injured by Ork heavy weapons, Adrax cut down the Ork warlord with his relic blade. Sensing the tide of battle was turning against them, the Orks gathered up their forces and retreated into the tunnels beneath Asherth's surface, descending deep into the bowels of the ice world. The ice storm passed and the Salamanders regained contact with their battle cruiser. With reinforcements sent down to repair the Redeemer and fortify the Imperial Guard facility, Adrax and his battle brothers regrouped and followed the Orks into the depths. The Salamanders take on Chaos Imperial Guard 2014-06-01T00:00:00+00:00 This game took place on Thursday, May 29th at the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center in Roseville, MN. It was a 1500 point battle between my Third Company Salamanders Space Marines and Eric's Chaos Imperial Guard. The Salamanders</h1> I fielded four ten-man squads of Tactical Marines, a ten-man squad of Assault Marines, a Captain, and a three-man squad of Centurions. The Centurions were in a Land Raider Redeemer, one of the Tac squads was in a Rhino, and another was in a Drop Pod. The Chaos Imperial Guard</h1> Eric took two Basilisks, a Leman Russ with three plasma cannons, a psyker, three lascannon artillery units, and a ton of troops. The Battle</h1> This was our first 7th Edition game, and we tried out one of the new missions with Tactical Objectives. I deployed and went first, and we had the Night Fighting special rule in effect. Initially, I thought that that would save me from the Basilisks, but I was wrong. Salamanders Turn One</h2> The Land Raider and Rhino roared across the battlefield, the Rhino taking the north end across a bridge and the Land Raider taking the south end through a sparse forest. The Captain laid claim to a ruined tower that had been shelled into oblivion by a previous battle. A mysterious objective there gave him a boost to his cover save, and with the cover save for being hidden in ruins, he was pretty safe from enemy artillery fire. The unit of Tactical Marines without transport and the Assault Marines started running across the battlefield. The Assault Marines darted in and out of the forest alongside the Land Raider, using the trees to mask their advance. The Tactical squad instead opted to charge directly at the Chaos front lines, hoping to put the fear of the Emperor in the traitorous Guard. The Land Raider took a shot at the Leman Russ with its Hunter-Killer missile, but the missile's guidance system failed and it went spiraling off into the darkness. Chaos Imperial Guard Turn One</h2> Since the traitors had dug in with an Aegis line in one corner of the Imperial Guard deployment area, they had no interest in moving this turn. Instead, they opened up on the Salamanders advancing on their position. A storm of lasgun fire rained down on the Salamanders, but not a single Marine fell to the onslaught. Then, the Chaos artillery opened up. The lascannon crews dealt a glancing blow to the Land Raider, and the Basilisks had some difficulty in the darkness and couldn't quite hit their targets. Sadly, this was the last turn in which this was the case. Salamanders Turn Two</h2> The Salamanders' Drop Pod full of Tactical Marines landed next to the enemy Aegis line, right between that and the Leman Russ. The Tactical squad disembarked and prepared to wreak havoc. The Land Raider rumbled through a river and disgorged its Centurions on the opposing bank. The Assault Marines ran ahead of it, claiming an objective but just outside of assault range of the Leman Russ. The Tactical Squad out in the open fired at the Chaos defenders, hoping to thin their ranks. Unfortunately, only a handful died, the Aegis line protecting them from the majority of the bolter fire. The Rhino advanced further, getting within range of the Aegis line's north end. Sadly, this was to be its last turn in the service of the Emperor, and it did nothing useful. The Centurions attempted to destroy the Leman Russ with their lascannons and krak missiles, but their shots glanced off the tank's heavy ceramite plating, doing no damage. The Tactical squad that had disembarked from the Drop Pod launched an offensive against the nearest Imperial Guard, but sadly failed in their strike and wasn't able to assault. Meanwhile, back in the ruins, the Salamanders Captain watched his battle-brothers through the darkened windows. A feeling of dread creeped over him. Chaos Imperial Guard Turn Two</h2> The Leman Russ opened fire on the Assault Marines closing on its position, and together with lascannon fire from the artillery crews north of it, wiped out the entire squad. The Basilisks fired a barrage at the Tactical Marines out in the open, and erased that squad, too. Several squads of Imperial Guard hiding behind the Aegis line worked in concert, and their lasguns brought down all but one of the Tactical Marines bearing down on them from the Drop Pod. Concentrated fire from the other Imperial Guard blew up the Rhino, scattering its passengers. Thankfully, none of them were injured in the blast. Lasgun fire tried to eliminate the Centurions, but to no effect. The gigantic Marines marched on with grim purpose. Salamanders Turn Three</h2> The survivors of the Rhino's destruction opened fire on the Imperial Guard, hoping to get into melee combat and avoid the guns of the Basilisks. Bad luck meant they were just out of range, and though they dealt massive casualties to the traitors in front of them, they were squarely in the sights of the enemy. The last survivor of the squad from the Drop Pod bravely charged into the enemy. Sadly, his heroic assault only earned him a few more kills before he was slain. The Centurions attempted to destroy the Leman Russ again, and again failed to penetrate its armor. The Land Raider similarly tried and failed. The Drop Pod opened fire with its Deathwind missile launcher, but only caught a few unlucky Imperial Guard in the blast. Chaos Imperial Guard Turn Three</h2> The lascannon artillery crews destroyed the Drop Pod, and troops began to pour out from behind the Aegis line to press their advantage. Heavy lasgun fire brought down the last remnants of the survivors from the Rhino. The Leman Russ traded shots with the Land Raider, finally scoring a hit and destroying one of the flamestorm cannons. The Basilisks had run out of targets and turned their guns on the Centurions, to no effect. Salamanders Turn Four</h2> The Captain watching the battle from the ruins called his battle-brothers back, seeing no victory here this day. The Centurions climbed into the Land Raider and the Salamanders fled the field of battle. There had been many losses that day. Thankfully, the traitors were content to engage in Chaos-tainted debauchery celebrating their victory the following night, and the Salamanders were able to retrieve their fallen battle-brothers' gene-seed under the cover of darkness. Victory: Chaos Imperial Guard Post Mortem</h1> The biggest tactical error I made was in not giving one of my Tactical Squads a transport. As a result, I effectively wasted 150 points as that squad was gunned down by Eric's Basilisks. The biggest strategic error I made, however, was in focusing on attacking the enemy rather than going for Tactical Objectives. Even if I had suffered severe losses, I should have been able to pull off a victory with the points from those. Because Eric was deployed only in one corner of the map, I could easily have claimed and held the majority of the objective points. The Basilisks and the plasma-toting Leman Russ were my most dangerous opponents. Eric's psyker was completely ineffective, never getting the powers he needed at the right times. Even his lascannon crews, while dangerous, presented no major threat. I couldn't punch through the Leman Russ's 14 strength armor, though, no matter how much fire I threw his way. The Basilisks never even got hit, and for that, I'm going to need a better weapon. So, lessons learned, at a heavy cost. First Node.js Hackathon 2014-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 My employer is hosting an internal Node.js hackathon. I'm organizing it, but I'll also be participating since it's small enough that the logistics side is not going to take up all of my time. Everyone is charged with producing a Node app within 11 hours, and presenting to the group after that. For my project, here's what I've decided to go with. There are a few options out there for external commenting systems. You've probably heard of the big ones - Disqus and Livefyre. There are a handful of others, including Viafoura, Vicomi, and Instant Debate, but it's a space that doesn't see a lot of differentiation between the players. I propose, as my project, a commenting system that doesn't just facilitate discussion about a particular page, it uses meta information about that page to suggest similar discussions going on elsewhere on the site. Yeah, it's a little bit of a walled garden in that it focuses on only one particular site, but for commercial applications that seems ideal. Things that I'll need to account for:</h1> User authentication. I think I'll skip this entirely for the Hackathon, and just let users post anonymously.</li> Retrieving meta information. I'll need to automatically populate a datastore with information on other pages. Since I only need to worry about pages that have discussion on them, this can happen when the first comment is submitted for a given URL.</li> A rapid datastore. Commenting systems generate a lot of content very quickly, and speed is more important than integrity.</li> A real-time widget. The front end for this needs to be real-time, but gracefully so. Websockets are necessary.</li> Standard interactions. The widget needs to account for what are now standard interactions for commenting - replying to a previous comment, flagging a post as spam, upvoting, and downvoting.</li> A moderation back end. An admin interface, initially accessible without authentication, needs to let admins review posts held for moderation… and approve or deny them in real time. It also needs to let admins know if a particular page is missing meta tags. Again, websockets are necessary. Planned Components</li> </ol> Datastore</h1> I decided to go with RethinkDB as my datastore of choice. It's very new and hence not production-ready, but its ease of use and blazing fast interaction suit this project well. The big problem to watch out for here is that Rethink loves eating up RAM with the current cache manager. Frontend Framework</h1> My focus lately has been on ReactJS by the Facebook team. It's documented better than AngularJS, which was my go-to framework before this. It also has a more granular way of handling data binding that speeds up everything when dealing with a lot of elements on one page. WebSockets</h1> Definitely going to be using SockJS. Socket.io's on its way out. Web Framework</h1> Express.js. I would love to use the newer, promise-driven Koa.js, but it relies on an unstable version of Node. Task Running</h1> Since the advent of Gulp, I have completely ceased to use Grunt. Gulp is just a better system, period. The only reason I've found to still use Grunt is if you need to use Yeoman to scaffold a project. So, with all that in mind, I'm using Gulp for this project. Package Management</h1> I use Bower. It has its issues (security?), but I've never used anything else and have no real reason to find another option. Stylesheet Preprocessor</h1> Sass. I've used both LESS and Sass, and Sass seems more reliable and predictable to me. Unit Testing</h1> If I have time to do unit testing (yes, yes, I know), I'll be using Mocha. For assertions, I'll use Chai. To handle checking test coverage, I'll use CoverJS. Other Components</h1> I'll be using RequireJS for sane modularization, Uglify for minification, and Twitter Bootstrap to style the whole thing quickly. Conquering 2014: Goals for the New Year 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 This year will be the year of connections, if everything goes according to plan. I hope to really strengthen my relationships with my friends, family, and the communities I care about. Since I had so much trouble with six goals last year, this time around I'm dropping down to just three big ones. Goal #1 - Get Fit</h1> I'm going to several conventions this year where I'll be cosplaying as a Red Lantern (Denver Comic Con, Minneapolis Comic Con, and Convergence). If I'm going to be in a skin-tight outfit, the gut has to go. Toward that end, I'm going to make two major changes in my lifestyle. The first will be to make 50% of most meals I eat vegetables. That change alone should have a dramatic effect on my health, even if it doesn't give me the physique I'm looking for. The second change will be to devote a portion of every day to strenuous physical activity. I'm going to be looking to the paleo community for help on this. These two changes will be very difficult for me, so I will need all the moral support I can get. Goal #2 - Connect with Family</h1> Maintaining contact with people I don't see on a daily basis has always been hard for me. I don't know why, exactly, but I guess it's just a matter of tunnel vision. So this year, I'm going to focus on keeping in touch with my family at a minimum. To do that, I'm planning on making three changes in my life. The first is to call my sister and parents every week. The second is to make a habit of updating Facebook every day with the highlights of that day, or maybe the plans for the next day. The third is to carve out at least an hour every weekday and half the day on weekends for spending time with my awesome wife Treasure, whom I sadly had not been spending enough time with in 2013. Goal #3 - Draw Daily</h1> Since college, I haven't drawn much at all. Sure, I do color work for Silver Gryphon Games on a regular basis, but my other art skills have been neglected. So, in 2014 I'm going to make it a habit to draw for at least ten minutes every day. It doesn't matter whether that's practicing life drawing, sketching random things, or doing full-on finished renderings. As long as I draw for ten minutes, that day will be considered a success, even if the end product is awful. It would be nice to document this by posting the result on Tumblr, but I'm not going to commit to that. 2013 Year in Review 2013-12-29T00:00:00+00:00 A great deal happened in 2013 for me and my family. Sadly, though, I missed the mark on all six of my goals for the year. Despite that, I think 2013 can be counted a success in general. My Goals for 2013</h1> My first goal for 2013 was to release a computer game. For a variety of reasons, this never came close to completion. I overestimated my free time and, to be honest, my motivation. I ended up spending far more time developing tabletop games. I'll get into that in a second. My second goal was to join a local developer group. Technically, I succeeded at this, since I started going to MNPHP meetups for awhile. However, because I didn't sustain my attendance, I'm counting this one failed. There is promise here, though. My third goal was ambitious - take a vacation to Hawaii. Saving up the money to do so, especially amidst changing jobs, proved too difficult for me. My fourth goal, lead a yoga class, failed for more than just inability to do so. Most yoga schools these days seem to focus solely on the physical side of yoga, with no thought for the spiritual side. I had a moment of clarity when I realized that I couldn't get to the level of proficiency in just a year to be qualified to teach both the physical and spiritual sides. I may revisit this goal some year in the future, but not in the near tense. My fifth goal was well on its way to success when I sabotaged it by re-incorporating Dicejockey into my main site. Though I wanted to reach 1,000 visitors per month for at least one month in 2013, my desire to pull in everything to one destination representing me was greater than my desire to continue a blog dedicated solely to MMORPGs and tabletop RPGs. My sixth and final goal for 2013, to collaborate on a project with my sister Tasha, went fairly well for the first half of the year. Unfortunately, I think I was too ambitious in the project we chose to work on, because my contribution would have been a large number of artworks that my skill level and free time did not allow for. Still, this goal was inspiring, and I'll do something along these lines in 2014. Major Happenings of 2013</h1> I changed jobs twice this past year. The first time, I left Group 3 Marketing because I felt I was stagnating as a developer. I joined a startup called Sportsdigita and worked heavily on Symfony2 projects. While I certainly grew as a developer at Sportsdigita, the culture was damaging everything else about my life. In August, then, I left that company to work for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the largest newspaper in Minnesota (and, possibly, the Midwest). The Star Tribune has proved to be a wonderful balance between interesting projects and good culture, and it doesn't hurt that it pays well, too. My contributions to Silver Gryphon Games grew this year. My efforts on the web side increased, and my interest in this side of the business is definitely heating up. I released the first web tool for Ingenium, and it's proved very useful - internally, anyway. I did more writing this year in previous years, releasing no less than three adventures for Ingenium. Two of those I did all the writing for, and the third I contributed a third of the final word count to. This also marked the first year where I managed a convention on my own, using the newly-minted “Booth 2.” All in all, 2013 was a successful year for me. I got back into tabletop gaming in a big way this year. I started what has become my longest-running D&D campaign ever. I started playing Warhammer 40k and Warmachine on a weekly basis with some good friends. I did a lot of miniature painting, and produced some works that I'm actually proud of, which hasn't happened before. I also began writing the rules for my own war game, and that could bode well for Silver Gryphon Games, based on early playtest feedback. I met several new friends and strengthened relationships with others. I've been more social-minded this year than the past couple years. I've definitely gone to more conventions this year than in past years, also. Closing Thoughts</h1> Many positive things happened this year, but I'm disappointed that I wasn't able to follow through with a single one of my goals. I grew as a developer, a gamer, and a person in general in 2013. Overall, despite the lack of goal completion, I think 2013 was a win for me. Here's to an even better 2014! My Dimension in Rift 2013-11-27T00:00:00+00:00 I started playing Rift again, after trying out Everquest 2 and Guild Wars 2 also. Until Everquest Next Landmark comes out, Rift may be my fantasy MMO of choice. We'll see. My wishlist for a Star Wars Galaxies 2 2013-10-20T00:00:00+00:00 Star Wars Galaxies 2 will most likely never happen, owing to the fact that SOE has publicly stated that it will never work on an MMO based on an external IP again. Whether that's true or not, if somehow this project were to be conceived, here are the changes from the original that I'd personally want to see in a sequel. Modern Graphics Engine</h1> This is the most obvious one. My personal choice for SWG2's engine would be Unreal Engine 4, owing to its extremely impressive technology. The “Infiltrator” demo video for UE4 shows that it would be perfect for the realistic art style of the Star Wars: Galaxies franchise, as compared to the more stylized art direction of Star Wars: The Old Republic. A Return to Skill-Based Character Progression</h1> Like most SWG veterans, I lamented the loss of the skill tree progression system when the New Game Experience took over. With SWG2, I'd want to see it return with a vengeance. Particularly, I'd like to see the depth and breadth of trees expand, allowing for greater freedom than even the original. Several aspects of the Star Wars universe were never fully explored in the first game, or were only given light treatment, such as slicing or smuggling. More Player Races</h1> The selection of available races in the original was good, allowing for most of the popular choices. I would like to see the Togruta, Chiss, and Devaronian races make a core appearance in SWG2. I'd also like to see droids as a player race, though that might be too complicated to balance against other races' gameplay. Bigger Worlds</h1> The original SWG planets were pretty big, but they frequently felt empty. The expansion worlds had stronger design, but felt smaller. I'd want to see planets in SWG2 be more expansive than the original SWG planets, but have more points of interest throughout each. For example, the planets in the first SWG felt a lot like the same planet given a different skin each time. While I don't want quests to provide a meta plot, I would like to see localized content that gives each world its own character. Greater Freedom of Movement</h1> Let's face it, movement was pretty horrible in the original SWG. You couldn't jump or fly over obstacles, and it was completely possible to walk straight up a sheer cliff face. While we don't necessarily need the full parkour aspects of EverQuest Next, I do want the ability to jump over things, be prevented from walking up impossible surfaces, and be able to climb, swim, and otherwise move as a person should be able to move. Atmospheric Vehicles</h1> I know these were added to the original SWG, but it came only in the last few months of the game's life. Given how important they are to the Star Wars universe in general, it would be a crime not to include these from the beginning in SWG2. I want to be able to bullseye womp rats in a T-16, over take a cruise over the highlands of Corellia in my own YT-1300. I also want shuttle transports to actually have real transit time, and not be a wait-and-teleport affair like they were in the original. Player Factions</h1> While it was great to have Imperial and Rebel affiliations in the original, to really ramp up the sandboxy nature of Star Wars Galaxies, the sequel would need to have player factions. This is particularly important if the game is set in a time period after the fall of the Empire, where a billion new factions would be vying for power. I see player factions being akin to massive alliances of Player Associations, rather than just an enormous PA. They'd also have to be able to influence planetary politics, like how Imperial and Rebel players were able to influence things towards the end of the original SWG. A Player Exchange</h1> Unlike the auction house format of current MMORPGs, I'd like to see something closer to the original vendor system in SWG. You'd be able to search available items on a local, planetary, or galactic level, as well as purchase them, but you'd need to physically travel to the vendor in order to pick up the item or items. This is important for two reasons: to encourage exploration and travel, and to support the possibility of player deliverymen - “FedEx” quests that actually matter. I want to have to travel to Tosche station to pick up some power converters. Greater Visual Customization of Crafted Items</h1> I liked that crafters could dye armor in SWG, but a sequel would need to take it to a new level. Item appearance should be further separated from item game mechanics than in the original. There is a vast variety of armor appearances in Star Wars, for example, and that should be reflected in SWG2. I don't want just a dozen different kinds of armor in different colors. I want several dozen, if not more. If World of Warcraft can do it, so can SWG2. Involving the Player Studio could help defray the cost of developing new models and textures for components of items. Vehicular Combat</h1> If we can fly in the atmosphere, we should be able to fight in it also. I'd want to see hover tanks finally make an appearance, among other things. If PlanetSide 2 can balance heavy armor against infantry, Star Wars Galaxies can do it too. This list could be even longer, but the above are my biggest wishes for a Star Wars Galaxies 2. How about yours? What would you want to see in a sequel? EverQuest Next Revealed 2013-08-03T00:00:00+00:00 I'm writing this just a couple minutes after watching the EverQuest Next reveal video on Twitch. I couldn't watch it live yesterday, but it was totally worth the wait. For an hour and a half, I was on the edge of my chair. The introduction was a beautiful piece of sand performance art, which I otherwise won't talk about. The rest of the video was an introduction into what will probably be the single most revolutionary MMORPG to come out since 2003. Dave Georgeson, director of development for EverQuest Next, started things off with a reveal of the art style. Let me tell you, this is a gorgeous game. The whole thing is very painterly, and is rendered using a modified version of the engine powering Planetside 2. All of the races have been redone, and we were treated to concept art for several: the High Elf, the Dark Elf, the Human, the Dwarf, and the Kerran. The Dark Elf and the Kerran were probably the biggest departure from previous EQ designs. Kerrans are distinctly more lionesque, with pronounced lion's heads instead of the old cat faces and huge builds. Dark elves look like standard dark elves, except they have draconic eyes and short horns. There's a story behind that that I really want to hear. The art style for characters is exaggerated, even slightly cartoony. I'm really OK with that, especially since they're building SOEmote into the game from the beginning. It's easy to see the expressions of the players themselves on their characters, and that's marvelous for a roleplayer, but also for immersion and socializing in general. Movement is fantastic. Characters slide, leap, vault, grab, and otherwise interact with the terrain in a very natural way. With EQN's “active movement system,” players are free to really enjoy moving around in the world. There are items and spells that allow additional ways to move, like the Boots of the Zephyr in the video that allowed the players to float gently downward. Brilliant stuff. Then, we got into the Four Grails, as Dave put it. The Core Game</h1> Grail 1 is the “Core Game.” This was the least impressive of the Grails, but it was still nice to see. Character evolution from a mechanical standpoint is based on collecting classes from around the world and mixing and matching abilities from them. It sounds like a hybrid of Guild Wars 2's system and Rift's system. Weapon choice matters, like it does in GW2. Destructibility</h1> Grail 2 is “Destructibility,” and this was the first mind-blowing revelation. The entire game world is built of voxels, despite looking natural and perfectly designed. It's fully destructible, even though it heals over time. It's like if SOE took a look at Minecraft and applied that on a grand scale. The way it works, too, is gorgeous. You can definitely see the aftermath of epic battles in the environment that it occurred in. A Life of Consequence</h1> Grail 3 is “A Life of Consequence.” Besides the standard “every action you take matters” spiel, we were introduced to the idea of emergent AI in an MMO. SOE will create mob behavioral patterns - likes, dislikes, etc. - and then release mobs of that type into the world. They will live, react, and die according to how they're programmed to behave. This means it's entirely possible to have roving bands of orcs that actually decide to set up camp in a particular area - choose their own spawn point, as it were. It's also possible to drive them out. Permanent Change</h1> Grail 4 is “Permanent Change.” For the most part, Dave talked about the Rallying Cry system, which is a little like a server-wide public quest that lasts 2-3 months each… and has permanent effect on the game world. These Rallying Cries are promised to be different on every server, and that along with the Life of Consequence and Destructibility Grails ensure that no two servers will have the same environment and history, let alone community. EverQuest Next Landmark</h1> As if all this wasn't enough, then they got into the EverQuest Next Landmark game that's coming out later in 2013. Landmark sounds basically like Minecraft on an epic scale, except that one continent in each Landmark server will have EverQuest Next art direction enforced… and creations from those areas will make it into EverQuest Next as real, lasting landmarks. Player Studio</h1> On top of that, SOE's Player Studio will find a very interesting real money economy implementation for people who enjoy building things in Landmark; you'll be able to sell not only finished works, but components. The example that Dave gave was of a player creating a nice crenelated tower. People could buy that tower, then make castles from it and sell those castles, and the player who created the tower would get royalties based on how many of that tower were used in the castle design for every castle sold. It's a fascinating system. Basically, EverQuest Next sounds like the game I've been waiting for my entire gaming life. I really want to hear about how the crafting system works, and more about all the races, but… it sounds awe-inspiring. EverQuest Next takes player involvement in the game to a level never before seen. Related articles</h1> EverQuest Next - Landmark Focuses on Construction and Exploration, Is Free-to-Play EverQuest Next + Jeremy Soule = Geek Delight EverQuest Next Redefines Next-Gen MMOs Enhanced by Zemanta Reawakening the Starborn 2013-07-27T00:00:00+00:00 About a year and a half ago, I started a project to create a sci-fantasy sandbox MMORPG. It was called Starborn: Universe. I went through the trouble of getting a HeroEngine/HeroCloud environment and began learning the toolset. Design documents popped up in my Documents folder and on the dev blog I started for the project. Then, I got busy with other things, and Starborn: Universe went dark. Until now. I'm dusting off the design documents, but Starborn: Universe is as much of an experiment as it is a game. See, my theory is that online player-driven games can start with very little and grow over time. The idea of the “Lean Startup” can apply just as much to an MMORPG as it can to an iOS app. The trick is that MMORPGs are hard to produce. They have a lot of moving parts and require a lot of resources on the part of the developer and operator. So how does one or two people accomplish this monumental feat? By starting small, and iterating quickly. If you're curious as to what I have in mind, head over to the Starborn: Universe devlog</a>. That's where I'll be writing about Starborn. Returning to Skyrim 2013-07-20T00:00:00+00:00 The last time I posted about Skyrim, it was shortly after release. You can read the first in the series here. At the time, I was playing on the Xbox 360 version. This time around, I've purchased the Legendary Edition for PC. I'm also playing a Destruction mage instead of the heavily armed and armored warrior I focused on in the 360 version. Besides taking a completely different character route this time around, I'm also focusing much more on quests other than the main line. I own a small house that I've built but not yet furnished, gotten a fair ways through the College of Winterhold quest line, and continue to light up vampires that seem to crop up all the time in areas I'm traveling to. I heard so many awesome things about mods for the game that I just had to get the PC version. That, and I couldn't take screenshots in the 360 version, which was infuriating for someone who blogs about games. Today, I read an article someone reblogged on Reddit about a mod called Falskaar</a>. Falskaar is unique in that it was produced chiefly by a 19 year old who declined to go to university in order to produce the mod. It took him a full year, and he's aiming to get a job at Bethesda by proving his dedication. By all accounts, it's a damned good mod. I look forward to installing it when I finish with vanilla Skyrim. If you're interested in hearing further about my adventures in Skyrim, by all means, let me know in the comments. Otherwise, next week I'll be writing about a topic near and dear to my heart…. sci-fantasy sandbox MMORPGs. 10 Years Ago, in an MMO far, far away 2013-06-29T00:00:00+00:00 Ten years ago nearly to the day, Star Wars: Galaxies launched to the world. As a remembrance of the adventures I had there, I'm writing now about the game as it was in those days and the community that surrounded it. As you read this, you may wish to listen to the playlist on YouTube that starts with the above video. It's a wonderful collection of the music from the game, familiar audio glitches included. The features page for the first SWG website</div> </div> One of the things I remember reading first about Star Wars: Galaxies was an interview with lead world artist John Roy about procedural planet generation, and how he would discover features of the landscape that were new even to the designers. That got me really excited about exploring these worlds that I'd only read about or seen on the big screen. I'm not sure how often this technique is employed in modern MMORPGs. My impression is that the vast majority of current worlds are slowly crafted by hand by artists, which is why we have so many beautiful vistas but so few boring areas to contrast them with. If all we ever see is beauty, we start to tire of it and look for something better. I miss the rolling hills of Corellia where my first SWG toon “grew up.” Another thing that I truly miss about Star Wars: Galaxies is the wait times at the starports. You could only travel to another planet if you bought a ticket for a starship and waited at a starport for one. They arrived in ten minute intervals, which means frequently large groups of players would congregate at the main starports while waiting to travel to another planet. It made for some great conversations, and new friends. A starport in Star Wars: Galaxies</div> </div> Something else I miss about Star Wars: Galaxies was the grind. As a crafter who played before the concept of “practice mode” was introduced, I would sit there and grind out components to level up my skill for hours. When I ran out of materials or empty space in my inventory, I'd make a backpack, shove the extra items in there, and head out to my personal harvesters for more materials. This was before anyone was able to build medium or heavy harvesters, so there were still vast fields of personal harvesters dotting the landscape. A personal mineral extractor</div> </div> The grind, at least for SWG crafting, meant long periods of sitting there doing the exact same motions over and over again. This sounds really boring, but frequently after about five minutes of doing this, I would hit a kind of altered state of mind - a vaguely pleasant feeling of just “being.” The only other time I've ever felt that is when practicing Zen meditation, and I sorely miss it. Before vehicles were introduced, everyone had to walk everywhere. Shuttles and starports were jammed full of players on their way someplace. Player cities didn't exist yet, but there were always massive collections of player houses exactly 1 km outside of every major NPC city. It made those cities feel a lot like real cities - you would always be passing by other players on your way either into the city core for transport, into the suburbs for shopping or socializing, or out into the wilderness for adventuring and hunting. Every city had its own distinctive feel, too, on my home server of Chilastra. Corellia had some beautiful vistas</div> </div> Coronet on Corellia was where I first landed, and it's where I spent the first few months of the game. It felt very rugged, like a city on the fringe. Theed, on Naboo, was where the entertainers and image designers hung out. It was definitely a “pretty” city. Mos Eisley was… well, a desert city. Because of all the difficult, unbuildable terrain surrounding Mos Eisley, it wasn't nearly as dense as the others. I think the players more nostalgic for A New Hope landed there. The other cities, like Restuss on Rori and the Imperial Outpost on Talus, had much smaller and more focused populations. Later, when they allowed players to build on some of the more advanced planets like Dantooine and Lok, more interesting communities started springing up. In the end, Star Wars: Galaxies really was the best MMORPG experience I've ever had. The early months, even with all the bugs, network issues, and missing content (capes!?), are permanently etched in my memory as a wonderful time. Rest in peace, SWG. Build a Better Warrior in Rift 2013-06-08T00:00:00+00:00 I've been playing Rift a lot lately, and the more I play, the better I understand the ins and outs of being a Warrior. This post has a few of my thoughts on the subject of tuning warrior builds. The class is really versatile, but focuses heavily on two aspects - tanking and dealing damage. That much is obvious. What is less obvious is that there are several ways to do each of these. My personal preference is for dealing respectable amounts of damage to multiple enemies while being able to take a lot of punishment before going down. My favorite ability for staying in the fight is No Permission to Die. It's in the fifth tier of the Warlord soul, and it can be a godsend. If you die within ten seconds of triggering it, you are resurrected at 50% of your maximum health. Properly timed, it can really save your bacon. Also, it's not on global cooldown, so it's really hard to NOT time it right if you have a good sense of your combat situation. My next favorite ability is Cornered Beast, which is the 32 point unlock for the Champion soul. It hits up to 6 enemies for a ton of damage over time AND generates Attack Points over time, making it a powerful threat-building ability. Awesome for tanks, and for area effect damage. Along with Warlord and Champion, picking the Reaver soul allows for a ridiculous amount of survivability. It has a number of abilities that boost armor, endurance, and resistances. A balanced mix of the three souls, like the build linked here (Champion (32) / Warlord (23) / Reaver (21))</a>, will give you a decent AoE tanking playstyle. You won't win any DPS races, but it will keep you in the fight for a good long time. Create Better Villains for your Adventure 2013-04-20T00:00:00+00:00 Villains are the mainstay of any good adventure. With very few exceptions, there is always some form of evil mind plotting dark things in the background. Whether this is a mindless mob of creatures that just happens to be devouring the locals, or a masterfully devious court magician manipulating a king to sinister ends, you can't get away from the guys. This blog post aims to assist you in building memorable villains that are more than just numbers on a sheet of paper. If you're a player and not a game master, the character building advice in here might help you too, but this is specifically geared towards the folks weaving the story behind the encounters. The Nature of a Villain</h1> While it's fairly obvious that a villain exists to ruin the lives of good people, a truly memorable villain has much more than that going on. He has his own motives and desires. He may be acting in accordance with his own morals, or he might not care at all. Most frequently, a villain's goals shouldn't be an end, but a way to reach some other starting point. The kobold king isn't sending raiding parties out to nearby villages because he feels like it; he's weakening the nearby human presence so his people can expand outward from their all-too-small cave system. The depth of a villain's forward thinking depends on how intelligent you want him to be. Don't restrict a villain's planning just because he's a minor NPC in your adventure. Players will inevitably do something you don't expect, and if they just happen to latch onto your minor villain, you'll then have a direction to take that in. Journey of the Hero</h1> The player characters will only grow stronger as a result of having a characterful villain as their foil. You can consider your adventure a success when not only does it give your PCs the magical loot of awesomeness they've been waiting for, but it also encourages them to reconsider their characters' actions and motives. Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces is a fantastic guide to setting up an epic story. His writings on the “road of trials” in particular are relevant to creating worthwhile villains for the players. </blockquote> A player character that's just starting out usually has weak stats, basic equipment, and almost zero personality. She might have a single personality quirk or cliché that her player jots down to guide her role-playing, but rarely will players take the time to build a full story for their characters. After all, that's what they're hoping you will do. As the PC encounters and interacts with your adventure's many challenges, locations, and characters, she will grow in both power and personality. If her player is into role-playing, this will happen sooner rather than later, and with more depth. She will need a good villain, though, to balance that development against. Brainstorming</h1> Creating a villain should start with looking at what you want to achieve with the adventure and with the campaign at large. An adventure isn't a set narrative that you can just write and expect to stay the way you wrote it. The players will do things you don't expect and interact with the environment in ways that force you to adapt the adventure to fit their actions. As such, your villain should support your goal with the adventure, rather than just play to the script. Jot down a few notes about your adventure's premise. Is it a classic battle of good versus evil? Is it a day in the life of an adventurer? Is it an exploration of the unknown? Think about your favorite movies or books that fit the theme you're going for. What twists in those stories really got your blood pumping? Potential for Loss</h2> Think about what would really hurt the player characters. I don't mean in terms of hit points lost or character sheets thrown away – I mean tragedies that specifically target each PC's hopes, dreams, and beliefs. Whether the players are into role-playing or not only determines whether you have more or less fodder for this; it's still possible to make a tactical gamer sit back in his chair with a thud when his character loses something dear to him. It usually just changes the context. Build something of that potential loss into each villain of the adventure. You don't need to include every player character in every adventure, but you shouldn't focus on only one player character either. Also, choose a handful of NPCs and target their potential for loss also. It helps build a living world when you include characters other than the players' in your adventures. Potential for Gain</h2> Saruman was originally a hero, but gave in to temptation. </blockquote> Now think about what the villain can offer the player characters. Temptation plays on base emotions; use it. For tactical gamers, this could be a particular piece of loot that they want desperately. For role-players, it might be a bit of information about a relative they've been searching for. For every player, write down at least one thing that the villain might have the ability to provide. As with the potential for loss, also make sure that some of your NPCs stand to gain something by working with the villain. Even if that incorruptible priest of all that is good can't possibly be turned to the dark side, the players might not know that, and that creates tension. Tension is what every great story (and adventure) is built on. Villains are Story Generators</h1> Other than trying to provoke emotional tension from players through the potential for loss or gain, a good villain should also act as a way to move the story along. The best stories, whether they're explosion-ridden Hollywood blockbusters or 1500-page literary masterpieces, are about the heroes changing in some way over the course of the story. Villains are almost always the catalyst for that change. If your players are craving action, send a wave of minor baddies against them. Let them know that the villain made this happen, whether directly or indirectly. Weave a spider's web with your villain at the center. Even if he is not of the evil genius persuasion, he's still fully capable of planning ahead. Summary / TL;DR Version</h1> Keep your villains close to your players' hearts. Tension is a great story device, so use it. Tempt the PCs. Hurt the PCs. Make a list of the villain's goals and aspirations. And, above all else, remember: villains are not just stat blocks, they're people too. Profession Talents for Ingenium 2013-04-06T00:00:00+00:00 This post presents a prototype profession mechanic we're working on for Ingenium 2nd Edition. We're looking at giving each profession its own Profession Talent to add a little more variety to the game. The Priest profession from first edition was pretty…. plain, and there was nothing priestly about her, other than role-playing ques. So with this new mechanic, she gets a Talent that reinforces her role as a messenger of the gods. The priest profession from first edition was presented like this: Priest</h1> Starting Talent Pool: Mystic Attributes: +1 Magical Aptitude Speed: 3 Hit Points: 1d8 Advancement: Healing Arts Starting Gold: 1d4 x 5 Priests are those divine focal points who channel their gods' will into physical manifestations. Their magic is not based on arcane rules and laws; rather, they are blessed as Chosen and receive gifts of power for as long as they serve their gods. The flavor text stands in Second Edition, but there are a number of changes. Here's the new Priest block: Starting Talent Pool: White Magic Attribute Bonus: +1 Magical Aptitude Hit Die: d6 Talent: Exorcism Exorcism</h2> The Priest has the divine gift and knowledge to pull a demon out of a possession victim. She makes a Willpower roll against the demon's Challenge Level, and if the total is higher, the demon vacates the possessed body as a cloud of roiling black smoke. The victim then returns to his original stats, and if this causes any damage he has sustained to exceed his normal maximum Hit Points, he dies instantly. If his Willpower was at least half of the demon's, he remembers everything he did while possessed. A failed exorcism increases the Challenge Level of the target demon by 1. About Profession Talents</h1> Every profession gets a unique Talent with this mechanic, and one that scales with the character's power. She will never out-level her profession Talent. Also, by adding “Profession Talents,” we add another option for expansion down the road. Being Defiant: Finishing Out Rift's Free Tier 2013-03-31T00:00:00+00:00 Today is the last day of March and the last day I'll be writing about the MMORPG Rift as it applies to tabletop RPGs. If you've missed any of these posts, you might want to check them out. Go ahead, I'll wait. This post is a retrospective and has little to do with tabletop RPGs. If you're just looking for new ways to experience your favorite RPG, come back next week – I've got something very interesting planned! Generally, it takes me about one month to get bored of an MMORPG. I'll steep myself in the lore, powerlevel up to about 75-90% of endgame, get involved in crafting, and then… burn out. The novelty factor wears off, and I stop playing. Most of the time, it's not a conscious decision to stop playing. I'll just go a day without playing the game, since I find something else I want to do more that one day. Then two days go by. Then three. Before I realize it, it's been over a week since I last logged in, and I have no intention of going back. A rare handful of MMORPGs keep my interest for longer than that. The list so far has been Star Wars: Galaxies and World of Warcraft. Now, I'm adding Rift to the list. I originally reinstalled the game because it was going to be free and I'd heard good things about Dimensions. So, I did, and started this blog series to tie the game to tabletop gaming. It just clicked. The novelty factor has worn off, and I'm still playing. That bodes well for its longevity, and I'm going to resubscribe. The Dimensions are awesome. The fishing is weirdly addictive. And playing an MMO with a great and friendly community is refreshing. If you're interested in trying it out, jump on the Faeblight server and look me up. I'll be playing either my Eth cleric Amun or my Kelari mage Sidious. Being Defiant: Currencies Beyond Gold and Silver 2013-03-24T00:00:00+00:00 In Rift, there are five ways to acquire new armor and weapons. You can take it from the corpses of monsters you kill. You can run through dungeons, collecting new pieces from the tougher monsters and bosses. You can run from rift to rift, defeating the planar invaders and getting new gear from the rift rewards. You can craft it or purchase it from other players who craft gear. You can also use special currencies earned through various means to purchase new gear from special NPC merchants. In existing tabletop RPGs, there are really only three ways to get gear – buying it from merchants, looting bodies, and finding it lying around in dungeons. Many MMORPG loot mechanics won't work in a tabletop RPG because the gear just appears in the player's inventory when certain conditions are met. In a tabletop game, gear rarely just appears. I've touched on crafting in tabletop RPGs before, so this time around I'll focus on special currencies. Rift's Currency for Planar Invasions</h1> In games like Rift and World of Warcraft, you receive units of these currencies for achieving feats of excellence. For example, in Rift, you earn “planarite” and “sourcestone” for defeating planar invaders. Sourcestone is much rarer than planarite, each unit of its most common version being worth 50 planarite. It's only awarded for helping defeat special rift events like full invasions. While there's only one version of planarite, there are multiple types of sourcestone, each being dropped by progressively more difficult planar invaders. In order to get the higher sourcestones, you must defeat higher-level invaders. All of these can be traded in for impressive, rare gear. The best items cost a combination of sourcestone and planarite. How to Deal with Special Currencies in Tabletop Games</h1> In tabletop RPGs, by comparison, you're looking at a single currency – gold, credits, silver, whatever. In some games there are multiple types of currency but only one “track.” For example, in Dungeons & Dragons, you have copper, silver, electrum, gold, and platinum, but they're all just higher denominations of each other. This currency is accepted everywhere from all merchants. To make sense, a unique currency needs to be widespread in use and creation, and to make sense in a setting, the powers-that-be need to allow that currency to exist alongside the official currency of the realm. That last part is historically difficult to come by, but in fictional worlds, we can gloss over that fact. The best reason to include a currency like this is to gate powerful gear behind difficult tasks. It also provides a way to uniquely theme gear and work in factional alliances and reputation. You could make up a large order dedicated to service to a particular god, for example. Instead of just being all priests or all paladins, this order could include a variety of skilled craftsmen who produce special gear. The craftsmen may only part with the gear in exchange for a special currency that only the order uses. Higher-ranking members of this order may be giving the PCs quests, and in gratitude for their help, rewards them with some of the order's currency. This also offers role-playing opportunities, oddly enough. Possession of particular currencies could trigger interesting reactions from NPCs. Maybe they're associated with the producer of the currency. Maybe they're afraid of the producer. Maybe it's more complicated than that. If it makes sense for your setting, try adding a special currency and unique rewards for that currency to your next adventure. It just might take your campaign in a very interesting direction. World of Warcraft, Modern RPGs, and the Gear Grind 2013-02-10T00:00:00+00:00 After a full year of not playing, yesterday I jumped back into World of Warcraft. I'd heard enough good things about the latest changes that I decided to give it another shot. It remains to be seen whether that'll last or not. Something that did make me pause, though, is the obvious reminder that WoW is based on a gear grind. As soon as my character, a worgen warlock named Exsecratus</a>, made it to the new continent, I almost immediately replaced my raid epic gear from the Cataclysm days with greens. Today's junk is better than yesterday's hard-won treasure. That theme carries across many modern MMORPGs, but in all honesty, it's also present in tabletop RPGs these days. Dungeons & Dragons is one of the worst culprits, but there are plenty of others. That got me to thinking. Is the gear grind necessarily bad? The perpetual need to have better equipment may seem like a thin excuse to keep people playing a game, but taken as a component of a larger and more complex system, it's a reliable foundation to build on. In a game like my own Ingenium</a>, where if you have too many static modifiers it makes the randomization provided by the dice useless, a gear grind based on incremental bonus increases wouldn't make much sense. However, if there were a game out there that had more complex calculation involved with point bonuses, then having a Sword +513 wouldn't necessarily be any more unbalanced than a Sword +3. The trick is that to get to that level, you need to involve multiplication and division in the core mechanic, and that's the real holdup for a tabletop RPG. Let's face it - most tabletop gamers don't want to sit and recalculate their stats every time they pick up a new item. In video games it's possible because the game itself handles it automatically in the background without the player even being aware of the math. To introduce infinitely-scaling item stats into a tabletop RPG, you would have to do one of two things - either create a phone/tablet app to handle the math for you, or make the math so simplified that it would be possible to calculate quickly. Being a web developer by profession, I'm partial to the first one. These days it's not unreasonable to expect gamers to have a smartphone. How would you handle bringing the gear grind into a tabletop game? Crafting in Tabletop RPGs 2013-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 One of the systems near and dear to my heart in MMORPGs is crafting. I love being able to make things from materials that I've collected myself, and in so doing improve my own capabilities without having to rely on an external source (e.g., loot, or vendors). Very few tabletop RPGs have ever attempted to include a crafting system, and those that have (Dungeons & Dragons, I'm looking at you) focus primarily on high-cost, high-powered magical items. Here, I explain how a crafting system for a tabletop RPG might work, taking several cues from MMORPGs. Crafting in MMORPGs has three primary component systems - gathering, refining, and building finished items. Gathering is the collection of raw resources from the world. This usually takes the form of withdrawing units of resources from a resource node that randomly spawns in the world. Refining takes those raw materials and works them into usable forms. For example, smelting iron ore into iron bars is one such process. This step is sometimes optional. Building finished items takes resources and puts them together into a final usable form. In MMORPGs, the process of actually crafting the item is abstracted away such that the player doesn't need to worry about things like quenching steel in the proper temperature of liquid. Tabletop RPGs generally can't follow MMORPG mechanics, since a lot of the latter is based on intensive calculation behind the scenes. With crafting, my perception is that it's not popular because it's not a story component - in a tabletop gaming session, anything that smacks of busywork is not going to go over well. To address that concern, there are two possibilities: Make the whole crafting process fun and exciting, or</li> Make the crafting process something that happens between adventures.</li> </ul> Personally, I think a mix of the two is ideal. The gathering process should be divided into two parts - acquiring rare raw materials through normal adventuring, and acquiring mundane raw materials in a quick process that occurs between gaming sessions. The refining process should be purely between sessions, unless it's something story-bound like imbuing a raw material with a specific magical aura that can only be done by a powerful hermit-mage that lives in the…. you get the picture. The crafting of the final item could go either way, though I'd tend to put it at the very beginning of a game session before the actual adventure starts to “prime” players' minds. A big component of crafting, and one of its greatest variables, is time. In real life, it takes a long time to smith a sword. In World of Warcraft, it takes seconds. Crafting in tabletop RPGs, as a character activity, should take little time. Crafting is a secondary system, and it's not epic to say that your character spent a month of in-game down time smithing a new longsword in a borrowed forge while the other members of the party twiddled their thumbs. This problem can be explained away in two ways: Give the character NPC assistants to do the crafting for him, or</li> Make the crafting process itself something magical that takes little time.</li> </ul> I prefer the first option, since it involves more story hooks and feels less like a deus ex machina. If a player discovers he has the materials to make an upgraded suit of armor just as a session is about to begin, you can allow him to do that and retcon that he contracted the work out while he was adventuring in the last session. This can tend to make retconning a standard, accepted practice for crafting, but I think that's of minor concern in this case. The other consideration when designing a crafting system for use in a tabletop RPG is the effect this can have on player equipment and expectations of loot. As such, it can't be designed in a vacuum - it needs to be part of the system from the beginning, or you risk turning a game into a Monty Haul campaign inadvertently. The secret here is in the timing - you can gate the frequency of crafting more powerful items by introducing a crafting skill advancement system and making it as restrictive as you like, thereby keeping crafted items in line with looted items (or not, if that's what you prefer). The Dungeons & Dragons system of spending experience to craft powerful items is one way to gate the acquisition of crafted items, but I think it's fundamentally flawed in that it makes little sense from a story point of view. Sauron didn't lose part of his essence to craft the One Ring - he just lost time and resources. To make something, a player has three resources available to him - Time, Money, and Effort. The ratio can vary between those three, but if you abstract out those concepts, you can arrive at a more sensible requirement ladder than Dungeons & Dragons'. In the end, crafting is a perfectly viable addition to a gaming system, as long as it's well-integrated with the rest of the game. I'm working on one such system for inclusion in a game of mine, and I like to think the players will love it. Conquering 2013: Goals for the Year 2013-01-05T00:00:00+00:00 I'm joining the vast numbers of bloggers who are publicly declaring their goals for the new year right now. Scott Dinsmore of Live Your Legend fame has challenged people to, well, Live Your Legend in 2013, and offers a Goal Setting & Action Workbook</a> to help achieve that. I took four hours this morning to fill it out and plan my goals for the year, and this blog post summarizes the results of that. Two of my six big goals for the year have to do with gaming, but the rest are personal goals. I'll share all of them with you after the jump. Goal #1) Release a Computer Game</h1> I've worked, briefly, in the computer game industry. I've started numerous game projects. But I've never actually released a finished game. 2013 is the year to change that. While I won't be releasing my dream game this year (the MMORPG tentatively called Starborn: Universe</a>), I'm going to fire off a single-player action sandbox game called Starborn: Genesis. My release goal is by December 1, 2013. Future blog posts will detail this, my most difficult goal of 2013, as I work on it. Goal #2) Join a Local Developer Group</h1> This goal is much smaller than #1. The purpose, though, is no less important; it has been said that you are an average of the five people you spend the most time with, and all of the five people I hang out with most are at best only tangentially related to computer game development. I want to connect with people more, and I especially want to connect with others who are passionate about computer game development. Joining a local developer group is an important part of that. Goal #3) Take a Vacation with Treasure to Hawaii</h1> My wife Treasure and I have not yet taken a vacation outside of the Midwest. As both of us have traveled the world and love new places, this is a problem. This year, I'm committing to getting us both to Hawaii for a week in June, near or on our 4th anniversary. It will be an event to remember, I'm sure! Now I just need to figure out how to pay for it… Goal #4) Lead a Yoga Class</h1> I don't know a thing about yoga. I've never taken a class and know only a few movements from Wii Fit. So why would I make a goal to lead a class? Because I'm interested in it, and no one ever achieved anything meaningful by aiming low. I'll need to join a class and become proficient enough over the coming year to teach a community class by the end of December. I've already picked out the location and instructor to help me achieve that. It's just a matter of getting it done. Goal #5) Reach 1,000 Visitors Per Month On Dicejockey</h1> Yep, my blog wasn't going to slide by without a major goal this year. Dicejockey's not about Top Ten lists or Five Steps to Success, but I like to think I say things worth talking about, and that's worth pushing harder on. My life is my passion, and Dicejockey is a window to that passion. With a little luck and an extra dose of hard work, I hope to make Dicejockey a popular choice for gaming geeks. Goal #6) Collaborate on Something With Tasha</h1> My sister Tasha and I don't talk very frequently. This isn't because we're not on speaking terms; it's just because we don't have much in common. This year I want to change that. We're both very passionate about a wide variety of topics, and I'm sure we can find something to truly connect on. I've got a tentative plan on how to achieve this goal, and I really want to get closer to my family, so I know I'll meet this goal by year's end. So those are my goals for 2013. How about you? What are you looking to achieve this year? Succeeding Star Wars: Galaxies 2012-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 The Repopulation may be the science fiction sandbox MMORPG that we've all been waiting for. That's a very grandiose statement to make, I know. Hear me out, though, and you'll see why this may just be Star Wars: Galaxies 2. First, a little background on the team behind this upcoming MMORPG. The company Above and Beyond Technologies is headed up by Joshua Halls</a> and J.C. Smith</a>. Joshua Halls seems to be a relative newcomer to professional game development, but J.C. Smith has been involved with Nintendo for several years. The rest of the team is an amalgamation of professionals and amateurs with aims to become professionals, and the quality of the game even in its alpha state is testament to their collective skill. Regardless of what happens with Repopulation, I see great things in store for this team. Back in June, A&B ran a Kickstarter for The Repopulation that asked for the very modest sum of $25,000</a> to finish the game by mid 2013. Considering that Star Citizen earned itself seven million dollars through crowdfunding, and that The Repopulation itself earned just over $50,000 in its Kickstarter, I think they were selling themselves a little short. They would have been better served by paying more attention to their Kickstarter campaign at this time. That said, the influx of cash certainly has added a lot of polish to an already-polished game. Spiritual Successor to Galaxies</h1> Even just watching the few videos on Youtube that A&B has released will get you excited about the game if you're a fan of SWG. While the crafting system is certainly different from how SOE did it, preferring to use an overall grading system ranging from F0 to A9 instead of Galaxies' 1-1000 resource attribute system, the feel is similarly complex. Your skill at crafting improves on a per-recipe basis, not just a per-category one, as with SWG. You may be fantastic at producing light weapon components but abysmal at medium weapon components. This kind of system provides for a lot of variety in crafted items, and bodes well for a player economy. Also, The Repopulation has a unique item decay system. Items have a Minor and Major condition, which decrease over usage. They can be increased by repairing an item, but repairing reduces the item's durability. Eventually, you will either wear out or repair your item into oblivion, requiring a replacement in much the same fashion as SWG had. The Fittings System</h1> Interestingly, The Repopulation has an item customization system which completely separates visuals from mechanics. You choose the appearance of items using molds, and then you can give the items stats by adding various Fittings. Fittings wear out just like items, and come in the same F0 to A9 grades. There's a lot of complexity here, and a lot of opportunity for customization. Now, that does mean that inevitably there will appear Flavor of the Month item Fitting combinations, but no game is safe from that. Fittings first appeared in conceptual form in the now-defunct Hero's Journey, the very first MMORPG built on Simutronics' Hero Engine. Hero Engine, made famous by Star Wars: The Old Republic, has a special place in my heart. I worked as a world builder GM for Hero's Journey prior to its cancellation, and the engine was so easy and fun to work with that I was giddy with anticipation on what HJ would amount to. While that game never materialized, Fittings have seemed to survive through The Repopulation, which also uses Hero Engine. That makes me very happy. These Graphics Don't Suck</h1> Generally, indie games tend to fall into one of two categories - either they're artsy, or they're just bad. On rare occasions you'll find one that hits a very high-quality mark that competes with AAA titles. The Repopulation is one of those that has great visual appeal without catering to a niche audience. Some of the visual feel is comparable to Star Wars: The Old Republic, in terms of animation flow and physics determination. However, most of it has its own particular theme that suits the game's premise very well. The GUI is well presented and clean. In essence, The Repopulation's UI looks a lot like how I'd imagine SWG would look, if given ten years to advance. The spiritual succession remains intact there. The icons being 2D instead of 3D is a departure, but a lot of the flavor is still present. Creature Handlers Rejoice</h1> The Repopulation features a pet taming system comparable to SWG's. You find juvenile creatures and tame them, then teach them abilities they can use in combat. Also like SWG and other games since, you can harvest creatures for their parts. However, The Repopulation's creature-harvesting system is even more complex than SWG's. Like with item crafting, you gain skill in harvesting from specific types of animals, so while you might be excellent at fetching skins from the six-legged scorpion-like beasties, you might suck at getting bone from others. Oh, and Entertainers Too</h1> Yes, The Repopulation will have entertainers. And yes, they're a lot like SWG entertainers, being able to buff other players at campsites by dancing or playing music. But they're a lot more, too - they can weave stories, tell jokes, and customize buffs to a degree Galaxies players opined for. Nation Building: Beyond Galaxies</h1> In SWG, player cities were a much-anticipated and enjoyed feature. However, The Repopulation goes a step beyond even this. Not only can players build out cities using buildings, furniture, city walls, and other decorative goodies, but they can populate those cities with NPCs, manage the NPC populace, declare war or allegiance with other player nations, and command player militaries with custom ranks and titles. The nation system provides the third faction that SOE never got around to developing in SWG. If you choose to align yourself with a player nation instead of one of the two NPC nations, you have access to a host of customizations that are currently only touched on in EVE Online. The One Failure</h1> No game company, especially an indie company, is immune to failure. In this case, Above and Beyond's big failure is in its marketing. Only through word of mouth is hype spread about this game. While A&B does have a presence at a few major industry conventions, they have no advertising to speak of, and no marketing strategy. As a result, the player population could be devastatingly small at release for such a player-centric game. This may spell disaster for A&B unless they have help. So, if you're at all interested in the kind of sandbox MMORPG that Star Wars: Galaxies presented, give The Repopulation a look! I know I'll be following its development very closely over the next year. There's a lot more about the game that's similar to SWG, so head over to their website and check it out. Star Wars: Galaxies Crafting 2012-12-09T00:00:00+00:00 Crafting in MMORPGs is a troublesome, complex issue. The ability for players to create things with which to equip, clothe, and house themselves is difficult for developers to implement, and many companies have tried a variety of ways to try and address this feature. My first real experience with crafting in MMORPGs was in Star Wars: Galaxies, and that has colored my view on crafting ever since. This is not to say that SWG had a perfect system, but it came closest out of all the MMOs I've played. This is chiefly due to the following eight factors. This is a fairly long read, so grab a cup of coffee, put on your bunny slippers, and sit back in your favorite chair. I: Item Decay</h1> In early Star Wars: Galaxies, items decayed over time and would eventually become unusable. If an item ever became unusable, it was done - you couldn't repair it, like in other games since. Even if you repaired items before they became unusable, you were never able to bring it back to full durability. The item's maximum durability decreased every time you repaired it. The effect this had on the player economy was to keep crafters in business perpetually. There was always a demand for things like weapons and armor, because those players who engaged in combat were always wearing out their gear. Vehicles, after they were added to the game, similarly decayed and could be outright destroyed. I remember distinctly being very upset whenever I lost a swoop, since that meant a long walk back to town and around 20,000 credits spent to replace it. This system of item decay has never been replicated in any other game. II: Customization</h1> When crafting an item in SWG, you were able to choose its final appearance in a few ways. Clothing was the most customizable, with a variety of colors available. Weapons could have different models with different barrels (in the case of blasters). Armor, similarly, could have multiple colors. The skill level of the crafter determined to what degree the item could be customized. This meant that high-level crafters were in high demand for those players who cared about appearances, and could charge more for their services. Oddly enough, item customization as far as appearance goes has never been done very well in MMORPGs. That crown goes to Blacklight: Retribution, a free-to-play online FPS with excellent weapon customization. The game lets you change barrels, stocks, triggers, bodies, accessories, and colors of all of the above. III: Experimentation</h1> Part of the crafting process in Star Wars: Galaxies allowed you to improve the quality of a crafted item before finishing it. You could choose multiple areas to try and improve; in the case of blasters, for example, you could experiment on increasing damage, range, or accuracy. Depending on the crafter's skill and the materials used to create the item, experimentation could greatly enhance, marginalize, or utterly wreck a crafted item's stats. No other game since has implemented an item-modification system quite like this. IV: Resource Variation</h1> Every resource in Star Wars: Galaxies had a unique set of statistics. Different kinds of item recipes used different sets of these statistics to determine the item's qualities. Additionally, resource spawns in the game universe varied by planet and were in limited areas and densities. Every week, a new set of resources would spawn throughout the universe, and the old spawn areas were gone forever. This meant no resource would ever appear more than once, and really good resources thus became very precious. Because of this system, harvesting itself became a lucrative business. Some players devoted multiple accounts just to collecting the best resources and selling them to other players. Some games have come close to this kind of variation. Oddly, the one that has nearly replicated SWG's resource variation is an MMOFPS rather than an MMORPG - Firefall. Like SWG, Firefall's resources appear for a limited time, have multiple statistics that are randomly generated, and never appear twice. V: Automated Harvesting</h1> This feature made a world of difference to the crafting economy. Players could craft automated harvesters and place them in the world. Then, the player that placed the harvester chose one of the resources available in that area from the harvester's command panel, and it would steadily recover a certain amount of that resource every minute or so. Harvesters required fuel to operate, which itself was a resource that could be harvested. Harvesters could be experimented on and improved in multiple areas, just like other items, and so a niche market existed just for harvesters. Harvesters had an administration list that allowed the owner to designate other players as being able to turn on, fuel, and change the target resource for them. Since every character only had 10 plots, and each harvester took 1 plot, in order to field large numbers of harvesters a player would need to either have multiple accounts or engage the services of other players. This further supported a niche market for harvesting. No other game has ever had automated harvesting, although the idea of harvesting as a lucrative in-game “profession” has been done also by EVE Online. VI: Mass Production</h1> In addition to automated harvesters, players could craft and place factories. These buildings took power and maintenance credits like harvesters. They also had a hopper of limited space for ingredients and for generated items. At the end of the crafting process, players had the option of creating a blueprint instead of a finished item. They could take that blueprint, and stacks of the ingredients used to produce the item, and place them in a factory. Once the factory was turned on, it would generate copies of that item until it ran out of power, maintenance credits, ingredients, or available space in the output hopper. Not only was this a godsend for crafters looking to mass produce items for sale, it also was a requirement to create certain items. Many of the higher-end crafted items required “identical” components - that is, stacks of items created by a factory from a blueprint. No other game has ever done this. While not a requirement for a good crafting system, it's necessary to support sandbox games that rely on player crafted items, since small populations can still create large numbers of items. VII: Loot Sucks</h1> Players that chose to engage in PvE gameplay in SWG relied heavily on the crafters. Items looted from humanoid NPCs were never very good, and creatures had no loot at all until later in SWG's life. This meant that player-crafted gear was the only option for combatants, and required players to work together in order to play the game. Lone wolves rarely did well. No MMORPG other than early SWG has ever done this again. Even SWG itself later did away with this, preferring to give players vendor trash, crafting components, and crafting blueprints. VIII: Non-Instanced Housing</h1> Non-instanced housing itself is not particularly relevant to crafting. However, the way it was implemented in SWG makes it vital to that ecosystem. All player-owned buildings were player-crafted. Harvesters, factories, houses, guild halls, city halls, shuttleports, med centers, and taverns were all created by players. And they were very expensive to build, at least at first. When player cities were first added to the game, I was my guild's Architect (an in-game profession dedicated solely to crafting buildings). Leading up to the release of player cities, we stockpiled large quantities of the resources needed to build the various city buildings. As soon as the update went live, I sat at my structure crafting station and put together a city hall deed, and we rushed to be one of the player cities on our planet. At the time, only ten cities could be established on any given planet. We were too late to be one of the cities on Corellia, so we hurriedly traveled to its moon, Tarus, and set down roots a kilometer northwest of the Imperial outpost there. In order to craft that city hall, and any high-end items, I need a personal crafting station of the appropriate type for the item. Public crafting stations couldn't stand in for them. Personal crafting stations needed to be placed in a player house, and they took a number of advanced components. They had a direct impact on the final quality of items, so all serious crafters absolutely had to have access to a house with all the different types of personal crafting stations. This led to most guilds having dedicated “crafting houses” that were so equipped, with backpacks placed in them with large quantities of the various resources needed for crafting. No other game has ever had non-instanced housing with such a rich connection to player crafting - both in the building and usage of them. That brings me to the end of my list. I wish I could find a game that had all of these features. SOE may be bringing all of this back with EQ Next, but until we get a science-fiction MMORPG that has all of the above, I don't think we'll ever come close to what Star Wars: Galaxies had. Here's to hoping, though! Why I left Guild Wars 2 for EverQuest 2 2012-11-18T00:00:00+00:00 Last week, I left the Guild Wars 2 guild that I'd been in since before launch. There are a number of reasons why, but the primary catalyst was that I just wasn't playing as often as I used to, or engaging in the community as much as I had been. Prior to release, I was very active on the guild forums, wrote a couple blog posts for the guild's blog, and was generally very excited for the launch of the game we were so highly anticipating. After release, that level of excitement stayed steady for a little while, then began a slow but steady decline. The “new car smell” had left Guild Wars 2 for me, and while it was still fun, I wasn't as dedicated to it as I had been. My guild found my level of inactivity unacceptable, and I decided to leave rather than attempt to force myself to spend time in an area I no longer had interest in. As a result, I found myself once again drifting between MMOs. I played Planetside 2's beta for a bit, Wizardry Online's beta, DC Universe Online, Star Trek Online, and finally, Everquest 2. It was Everquest 2 that finally brought me back into the fold as a regular player, and the bugs in Guild Wars 2's Lost Coast event that put the final nail in that game's coffin for me. Growing in a New Direction: Player Housing</h1> Since I quit playing Everquest 2 in 2010, SOE has quietly added a TON of content to EQ2. They even have technology that lets your avatar's face mimic your face's movements, so your character will literally laugh as you laugh, and frown as you frown. While all of that is awesome, it was the player housing that got me to stay. When I played Star Wars: Galaxies, one of the things that always held my interest was the player housing. I loved creating unusual setups in my houses, and the new buildings they started to add in the last couple years of the game really scratched my interior design itch. Unfortunately, SWG folded at the end of 2011. You can view my music video of the last few hours of the game's life on YouTube. So, I was left to find a new game that offered something similar. Vanguard: Saga of Heroes had promise, but it doesn't have nearly as robust a system or as active a community as Everquest 2. My characters in EQ2 that I'd abandoned for greener pastures years ago were higher level than my Vanguard characters, and that helped the situation, since I could jump right into affording new furniture and other decorations for my house. The controls for decorating are more user-friendly than SWG's, allowing me to raise, lower, move, and rotate items. I can't control pitch and yaw, but I've heard those are coming. My dwarf paladin, Himbri, still lives in an acorn. I would trade up for a bigger house with a bind point in Qeynos, but I honestly don't use all the space in my acorn, so that'd be a bit of a waste at this point. Player Studio: Player-made Content</h1> The other thing that made me choose Everquest 2 is the Player Studio. This awesome feature lets players submit new models and textures for inclusion in the game itself. They are sold in the EQ2 Marketplace for Station Cash, of which the player that made them gets a sizable portion. Since I have some ability in the 3D modeling and texturing arenas, this has me excited for the possibilities. I may not ever get the chance to work on an MMORPG, but this at least lets me contribute to one in a lasting and meaningful way. Guildfinder: An App for Windows 8</h1> Last but not least, my newfound interest in EQ2 is well-timed with the release of Windows 8. I'm an early adopter, and a developer by profession, so it seemed only natural that I'd try and make an app for the game that I'd recently adopted. As it happens, EQ2 offers an API now that's just as robust as World of Warcraft's, if not more so. So, I'm in the process of creating an app for Win8 that lets the user find, view, and share guild information for Everquest 2 guilds. I'll post updates about it occasionally here, so keep coming back! Guild Wars 2 is here! 2012-08-26T00:00:00+00:00 The reason this post is a day late is the same reason this post is being written: the Guild Wars 2 Head Start has begun. For the first time ever, I got up before 2 AM to play a new game. My guild, so active and loud in Ventrilo the night before, were all in Vent‚ but dead silent. The servers had come online three hours before the announced hour, and everyone was in game. Guild Wars 2 is, bar none, the best MMO I've ever played. Jumping into the game, I decided against trying to claim a bunch of names, and instead created my main character - Kolbrandr Ulffson, the Norn Ranger - and logged in. Since I played in the beta weekend events prior to this, I was ready to go and knew exactly what to do first. I went through the early part of my personal story, but after reaching a certain point in that (involving havrouns, if you're familiar with the story), I left off and started exploring. If nothing else, Guild Wars 2 is absolutely gorgeous. I fully explored the Norn starting area, and then the Norn city of Hoelbrak, getting the full-clear Achievement Chest for that area. Yes, you get boxes of awesome loot just for exploring and doing incidental side quests! The weapon-based skill system works beautifully. In no time at all, I was happily switching on the fly between my axe+torch skills and my longbow skills, lighting things on fire, chopping them up, and most satisfyingly, knocking them backward several yards with a well-placed arrow. Sadly, you can't use the arrow knockback to send mobs off cliffs, but ah well. Can't have everything, I guess. The jumping puzzles (called "undiscovered vistas" in the game) are just hard enough to be a challenge without being frustrating. There was only one that I did where I fell four or five times before completing it. I think the most striking thing about Guild Wars 2 is how the gameplay encourages strangers to work together. For most of my playtime yesterday, I was constantly running around with groups of people I didn't know, cooperatively completing events and earning tons of experience, loot, and karma. It works wonderfully! And on that note, I'm going to jump back into the game. See you next week, on Saturday as usual. Anticipating Guild Wars 2 2012-08-11T00:00:00+00:00 In two weeks from today, the head start for Guild Wars 2 begins. My feelings right now are mixed. I have never been a very excitable person, and tend to just keep busy rather than think about an upcoming event. However, this time is different. I find myself waiting with baited breath as the days tick by, bringing us ever closer to launch. I can feel the anticipation building. My guild is humming with activity, and the energy is contagious. As a way to greet the game that may become the greatest MMORPG I have ever played, I committed to drawing one Guild Wars 2-themed sketch per day and posting it to my guild's forums. Each day's sketch is unplanned, other than that I want to stick to the rough ink style I've been using lately. I may use deviantART's Muro, or I might draw by hand. Either way, the drawing will be guided by listening to the Guild Wars 2 soundtrack (courtesy of YouTube). I bought the Digital Deluxe edition rather than the Collector's Edition, and I don't regret that choice. I do wish I could get a copy of the soundtrack legitimately in MP3 form, though, and for that I hope to turn to one of the music services - Amazon, Zune, or Google Play. Each of the posts to Dicejockey for the next few weeks is likely to be GW2-themed. If you're here for Ingenium news, keep an eye on the Silver Gryphon Games website; that's where I'll be posting about 2nd Edition and Eiridia. Guild Wars 2 Final Beta Weekend 2012-07-21T00:00:00+00:00 So last night was the first time I got to play Guild Wars 2. I've already preordered the Digital Deluxe Edition, and based on last night's experience, it was money well spent. My first character I rolled up was a Norn Ranger. I loved the “My Story” portion of character creation, and it was seamlessly integrated into the rest of the process. The Norn are huge, hulking giants with an extremely Norse flavor to them. The word “norn” itself is directly lifted from Norse mythology. That had my attention from before I even played the game, but it was greatly evident once I logged in that Norse mythology has influenced every facet of the Norn race. It was a great experience. The Ranger class proved to be a lot of fun. I started the game with an alpine wolf companion, and tamed a raven and an ice drake later on. I encountered a bug where, once I'd tamed a third creature, it took the name I'd given to my first. Switching them around fixed that (I LOVE being able to hot-swap pets). I tried three different weapon types with the Ranger - longbow, shortbow, and axe. Of the three, longbow was definitely my favorite, and the Barrage skill was far and away my favorite of the longbow set of skills. An AoE storm of arrows falling from the sky? Yes please. After doing several tasks (quests) and participating in a number of Events (kind of like public quests from Warhammer Online), I veered off into the realm of exploration. Guild Wars 2 actively rewards exploration, by placing “Undiscovered Vistas” throughout the game world. These Vistas are jumping puzzles that reward completion with XP and a cinematic pan around the area. During my exploration of the Norn areas, I stumbled on something that stole my attention for a good half hour - Keg Brawl. It's a little like football meets soccer meets a tavern brawl, where the “ball” is a keg of ale. It has rounds, but the players can drop in and out at any time, and it tries to balance the teams. Keg Brawl was a little frustrating at first, but once I figured out the abilities, it got to be fun. I also tried out an Asura Elementalist and a Charr Thief for a little bit, but I didn't really play them long enough to evaluate them properly. Unlike with my Norn character, I blew through character creation and just got into the game, ignoring the Story choices. I've already decided that my main at launch will be a Norn, so I didn't really want to know much about the other races' stories. The experience was pretty smooth, with very few glitches. However, there was one bug that proved very irritating. Every so often, I would try and interact with the login server (either to create a new character or to attempt to logout), and it would fail to connect to it. That in itself would have been fine, but then I would be unable to logout, unable to quit the program, and whenever I opened the Windows Task Manager to try and kill GW2, the entire computer would lock up. Only a hard reset would fix the issue. They really need to fix that problem, and I'm sure they will. But the game itself is a blast so far. On Game Launches 2012-06-30T00:00:00+00:00 The release date for Guild Wars 2 was announced a few days ago, and the Internet exploded. I joined a guild for it, and prepurchased the game so I could participate in the Head Start on August 25th. We're making plans for the three-day period before the game is released to everyone else, and the air is thick with excitement. Shopping lists, arrangements for sitters, usage of vacation time at work, and so forth are all being discussed and implemented. This is a fairly common occurrence in the video and computer game world. When a major new game is about to be released, launch parties are organized, people take time off work, and the atmosphere is charged with anticipation. In my experience, this has never happened in the tabletop gaming world. There have never been launch parties planned around when a particular product is released. Even Dungeons & Dragons, which managed to plan a few launch events surrounding its 3rd and 4th editions, has never managed to grab the attention of its target audience in the same way that Blizzard, NCSoft, and other purveyors of electronic entertainment have. Why is this? Is it that roleplayers are less passionate about their games than computer gamers? Is it that the companies are less able to support such events? Or perhaps is it that no tabletop company has really tried? When Silver Gryphon Games finally releases the fantasy campaign setting Eiridia, we will have a launch event. We're a small company with a small fan base, but our fans are awesome and passionate about our games. As Eiridia develops I'll chronicle its journey here from time to time, and when we're gearing up for release, I'll post about the official launch party here. Because really, tabletop games are just as much cause for excitement as computer games. Rediscovering Guild Wars 2012-06-16T00:00:00+00:00 Years ago, my wife and I picked up Guild Wars on a whim. We played a little bit, maybe a few hours, over the course of a week… and then abandoned it to return to World of Warcraft or Everquest II or something along those lines. With all the fervor surrounding Guild Wars 2, and my reignited interest in that game, I decided to reinstall my copy of Guild Wars and see what I had missed. And, with all honesty, I can't believe I didn't buy heavily into this in the first place. I have two characters I'm switching between at the moment - a Necromancer/Ranger, and a Warrior who I'll probably mix with a Mesmer or Ranger. The way the game mixes classes and skills, and enables you to further mix that up by choosing your set of active skills whenever you're in town. I have not yet had a chance to get deep into the lore, but I recognized the attacking Charr immediately in the initial cutscene for Guild Wars. I'm greatly looking forward to exploring the original game before being able to afford jumping into its sequel. While usually I go for sandbox MMORPGs, I think in this case I'm most interested in exploring the character-centric nature of GW2, and in Guild Wars 1 by going through the many available stories. I would love to find a group of folks to game with, if any of you reading this play Guild Wars! The Lore of Starsiege: Tribes 2012-06-06T00:00:00+00:00 One of the computer games I play most often these days is Tribes: Ascend, the latest descendent of the 1998 classic Starsiege: Tribes. Great gameplay aside, the lore of the Tribes universe is fascinating. The story is derived from an even older game called Starsiege. At the end of a war between humans and cybernetic organisms called Cybrids, the humans emerged victorious and chased the Cybrid survivors deep out into space. They discovered a network of "jumpgates" not unlike Stargate's network, and rapidly expanded out into the universe. The settlers, far from the Terran Imperium, grew into large tribal civilizations entirely separate from Earth. These became known generally as the Children of Phoenix. The Empire sent a group of Imperial Knights, the Order of the Blood Eagle, to pacify these errant tribes. The conflict splinters the Children of Phoenix, but the war continues unabated. A group calling itself the Diamond Sword, knights under the tutelage of a Buddhist-like Enlightened Master, enters onto the scene and starts gaining followers. Another tribe, the Starwolf, also appears - apparently a merging of Blood Eagle and Children of Phoenix deserters. When attacks from the Empire slow and then stop, the four major tribes - Blood Eagle, Starwolf, Children of Phoenix, and Diamond Sword - escalate their conflict. Minor tribes break away from the major ones, and things just get worse from there. If you want to read the full timeline developed for Tribes, and download some documents going into wonderful detail on the Tribes universe - including technology, cultures, even slang - go here: http://tribes.wikia.com/wiki/Backstory_timeline</a> I'm considering approaching Hi-Rez Studios, the current holders of the intellectual property rights, to see if Silver Gryphon Games can produce a tabletop RPG based on the Tribes universe. Lime Odyssey: Nostalgia 2012-03-06T00:00:00+00:00 Character select in Lime Odyssey</div> </div> So the past couple nights I've been playing the alpha test of Lime Odyssey. This game has been in MMO news for a couple of reasons lately; first because the music composer is Yasunori Matsuda, the same composer responsible for my favorite CRPG of all time, Chrono Trigger. Secondly, Lime Odyssey recently announced that its Korean version (its progenitor) is shutting down due to irreparable bugs. The latter is pretty ominous, but the North American developer that is localizing it for us here in the USA is still going strong. And with the state of the game as it is, I have to say, it's worth a good hard look. Lime Odyssey may appear at first blush to be a standard Asian MMO, but it's got a few features that set it apart. It's really well polished for a game supposedly in alpha. The translation is fantastic, and I encountered very few bugs. My only complaint in the sub-level 10 bracket is the repetitive voice acting for your character's attacks, which isn't really a major thing. Crafting trainer NPCs</div> </div> The music, as expected, is easily the most memorable I've seen in an Asian MMO. It really harkens back to the heyday of Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III, which makes me as a 90s-era roleplayer very happy. The grind is pretty light in Lime so far, and I'm at about level 8 for my battle class. Usually in Asian MMOs, the grind sets in almost immediately, so this is a welcome change. Notice how I specifically mentioned “battle class?” That's because Lime Odyssey has separate progression for your Battle Class and your Trade Class. It's possible to level one completely independently of the other, marking a distinctly Western flavor to this MMO. My Trade Class, Tailor, is higher than my Battle Class, cleric. Harvesting in Lime Odyssey</div> </div> Little tip if you get to try out the alpha: use your initial talent point to get a special attack before engaging in combat, otherwise combat lasts forever. It's worth trying out, if you're not yet burned out on Asian MMOs and have a soft spot for Chrono Trigger or Xenosaga in your heart. Blacklight: Retribution First Impressions 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00 </div> So I jumped into the open beta for this game tonight. It plays like a sci-fi version of Alliance of Valiant Arms, with its customizable (cash shop) equipment and multiple game modes. The GUI is a lot slicker though, with lots of flashy effects and smooth transitions that make it feel more polished. I enjoy it more. With that said, it's definitely a beta. The gameplay feels faster and like less of a meat grinder than Alliance of Valiant Arms. Where AVA focuses a lot on high body count and small maps, Blacklight is primarily a "maze" game, with many pathways to any given point. Many times I was able to get around an enemy trying to take a point and hit them from a side passage. The game modes that I encountered were Domination, Team Deathmatch, and Team King of the Hill. Domination is a standard take-and-hold affair, but it's made slicker by having two ways to capture a point - the slow but safer method of just sitting around the point until it becomes yours, or the faster method of doing a quick "combination lock" minigame that completely prevents any other action until you complete it, fail it, or get killed. The minigame doesn't take but a few seconds, but you're defenseless until it finishes. Team Deathmatch was straightforward and bog standard for the mode. Team King of the Hill was interesting and the most unique of the bunch - a beacon will spawn randomly around the map, and the two teams try to capture it first by standing around it until a meter fills up. Once it's captured, a new beacon spawns elsewhere in the map. It's very much a heated battle between big groups of sprinting players. Headshots deserve a special mention here, because they're particularly gory. Any headshot will cleave the top half of a player's head off with a fountain of blood, leaving the esophagus's ragged edge hanging above the ruins of his jaw. Not a game to share with young kids. Headshots are... brutal</div> </div> The game includes its share of interesting weapons, including a flamethrower with about triple the range of the TF2 Pyro's flamethrower, a rocket launcher, the standard array of assault rifle, sniper rifle, and pistols, and so on. It also includes a small mecha you can pilot called a Hardsuit, which is equipped with a railgun and a minigun. The mecha is not overpowered, though, because while it's heavily armed and armored, it's ridiculously slow. The safest way I found to take one out was to just run up to melee range and circle around it, always keeping behind it. The most interesting mechanic related to the weapons is the depot system, whereby you can stop by a depot station in game to purchase things like the Hardsuit deployer, the flamethrower, and such. It takes a second to get them, and you must accumulate an in-game currency to buy them with, but the depot equipment is usually worth the effort and danger to acquire them. The beta problems I spoke of were minor - my primary complaint in this regard was the occasional spots of server lag that caused magic damage and Matrix-like evasion. Nothing to make the game unplayable by any means. I haven't yet played long enough to determine whether the equipment upgrades you can buy with in-game or real currency have any unbalancing effect, but in the few rounds I played, I was able to hold my own against players over ten levels above me with much better gear. I killed Deathwing. Then, WoW died. 2012-02-23T00:00:00+00:00 Last Sunday, I jumped into Raid Finder for the very first time and joined up with a group doing the Fall of Deathwing. After a wipe-less and heavily cinematic raid, we took out the former Aspect of Earth. And… then WoW died for me. Killing the biggest, baddest villain in all of Warcraft lore (excepting Sargeras) made me feel like I'd “won” WoW. The story seemed to wrap itself up nicely, and the game felt complete at that point. It's not that I hate WoW. Far from it; despite its “theme park” nature and rampant immaturity in general chat channels, World of Warcraft is actually a pretty fun game. It has a very immersive story if you're willing to put in the time to discover it, and the basic gameplay isn't bad at all. Of all the MMOs I've played, only WoW and SWG have managed to keep me coming back after years of playing and burning out. However, I also am not one to replay a game after I've beat it. There are a couple exceptions to this, but not many. I fully intend to be playing WoW when Pandaria is released. It has too much awesomeness promised. But until then, what's the point? I've never been fully into the “hard mode” aspect of it, or the gear grind. Really, I don't care what my item level is, as long as I can access the content I like. Is there something about WoW that should bring me back in, now that the story is finished? I don't know. If you have a thought, let me know in the comments. Whatever happened to benovermyer.com and manatrance.com? 2012-02-12T00:00:00+00:00 Recently I canceled my paid hosting and relinquished control of benovermyer.com and manatrance.com, my two domain names. Up until now, these served as the primary way to reach me on the web. Once I decided to relinquish all control of my finances, however, I purged everything I had a subscription or recurring payment to. The only exceptions to this were necessary services like electricity, water, phone service, and so on, and also the World of Warcraft Annual Passes that we contracted into. This move was in no small part motivated by my increasing adoption of the world view of Leo Babauta over at Zen Habits</a>. By removing my ability to impulse-buy, I get rid of a major distraction. This is just the first step in a plan to greatly increase my hummingbird-like attention span. Every so often, I'll post an update on this process. Skyrim: A Nord's Tale, Part 4 2011-11-25T00:00:00+00:00 I formally joined the Companions, and learned that the Circle, that group that is the central leadership of the Companions, all are werewolves. I heard through the grapevine that players who join the Circle can also become werewolves. Since I've committed to the Companion track, I think I'll gun for that. I also took down two more dragons and learned a little more about that storyline. It looks like there's a big master dragon that's resurrecting other dragons. I forget his name, but he mocked (pitied?) me when he resurrected another dragon in front of me. Curious. I need to explore that more. In light of the limitation on how many skills you can master, I've stopped exploring alchemy and magic in favor of my skill focuses - Heavy Armor, Two-Handed Weapons, Smithing, and to a lesser degree, Enchanting. I may drop Enchanting, depending on how easily I can acquire magical items in the future. I like the idea of smithing magical jewelry, and I'm starting to amass quite a collection of components for that. My most recent perk acquisition is Dwarven Smithing. Dwarven armor seems to be just a little better than steel armor, so I'll be upgrading my armor as soon as I can to that standard. Skyrim: A Nord's Tale, Part 3 2011-11-18T00:00:00+00:00 So I finally solved the Sapphire Claw dungeon... something Shroud Barrow. Ended up being a Draugr corpse blocking my ability to depress a button to lower the drawbridge. I had to use my Unrelenting Force Shout to move it aside so I could lower the bridge. Once that happened, though, things got awesome. I fought more Draugr, took out a new Draugr Overlord, and learned a new Shout… which I haven't yet tested out. On the way back, I found a bandit hideout with an AMAZING view of Whiterun. I may run that dungeon again just to see the view. It's simply awesome. I went out looking for iron ore deposits, because I was excited to try out mining. I found a few, but the highlight of that particular adventure was when I was wandering along a path and, all of a sudden, a dragon dropped out of the sky right on top of me. Scared the crap out of me! I dodged out of the way and let Lydia shoot it with her bow while I hammered away at the thing with my Whiterun Axe. Eventually it went the way of its predecessor (Dragon Kill Count: 2), but that certainly was not something I was expecting. The long run to Whiterun hauling massive amounts of dragonbone was a very anticlimactic aftermath. I'm getting closer to my goal of owning a house in Whiterun. 3,000 gold down, 2,000 to go. I'm trying to level my smithing and enchanting skills too, but those are expensive, since I don't always have the ingredients I need to craft things. Enchanting in particular is pricey. The Big Story wants me to head northwest to a far-away town. Eventually, I will go that way, but for now I'm concentrating on exploring the area around Whiterun. Skyrim: A Nord's Tale, Part 2 2011-11-15T00:00:00+00:00 Alchemy in Skyrim is vaguely unpleasant at first, since in order to discover the first alchemical property of something, you must taste it. This is all fine and good, but some of these ingredients are less than appetizing - skreevers' tails, for example. On the other hand, blacksmithing is a real gem. I've learned how to create steel items now, though I don't yet have steel ingots. I discovered something interesting - iron ore deposits. I didn't have a pickaxe with me at the time, and apparently that's required to mine ore. I'm excited about this development, though - it means I don't have to buy ingots or ore! I became a Thane of Whiterun by helping defeat a dragon, and the Jarl assigned Lydia to me as my own housecarl. She's come in very handy, though her pathing AI has been very irritating at times. She was probably the only reason I survived an encounter with an ice troll, though she herself didn't remain conscious for the entire event. Trolls are brutal, especially if left to heal for a few seconds. After ascending the Throat of the World to meet with the Greybeards, they gave me additional Words of Power to give me one new Shout and beef up my existing one. I like the Norse feel of the draconic language; very different from the usual Elvish/Latin draconic languages. Returning from Hrothgar, I solved the mystery of a ghost in a nearby barrow, only to discover a very complex dungeon hidden beneath it. As of this writing, I'm stuck on a puzzle in its depths. Supposedly, I should be able to rotate four stone pillars to lower a wooden bridge, but despite doing what I thought was the correct pattern based on clues in an adjacent room, the bridge remains stubbornly vertical. No idea how I'm going to fix this one. Skyrim: A Nord's Tale, Part 1 2011-11-12T00:00:00+00:00 Last night at midnight, I purchased Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for Xbox 360. This morning I got up at my usual 5:30 and went straight down to the living room to play. The next few blog posts will be brief updates on my adventures in Skyrim. They'll be out of character, more a log than a story. After a dragon's attack conveniently freed me from captivity and nuked my captors, I was spirited away to a Nord village by a fellow survivor. As a Nord myself, it was interesting to see the culture surrounding the village, and how the villagers reacted to my chosen race as a familiar stranger. Of the massive arsenal I acquired in the hour or so of play this morning, the weapon I've used the most has been a two-handed battle axe. I loved that I could, straightaway, put the axe on the grindstone and use an iron ingot to turn it into a [Fine] Battle Axe</code>. Crafting systems ROCK! I'm a little overwhelmed by all there is to do. With so many choices and quest givers practically throwing themselves at me, I just shut down and ignored the quests, opting instead to do some exploring. I plan on delving into the inventory/item system next, checking out what I can do in that arena. I want to see if there's something to these spider eggs I picked up on my flight from the dragon... Dungeons & Delectibles 2009-01-16T00:00:00+00:00 Food and the culture surrounding it is probably one of the things least thought about when game designers sit down to create a fictional world. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one popular fantasy world that ever dove into this oft-neglected cultural facet – that of Krynn, the setting of Dragonlance. Even then, it wasn't until deep into the product run that recipes of Krynn started popping up. Food and culinary culture don't serve much purpose in a game, generally. It's hard to write a compelling adventure centering around an exquisite (or godawful) dish. With that said, it is possible – imagine the players being charged by a royal chef (whom they owe a favor to) to collect exotic ingredients for a culinary masterpiece. Perhaps one of those ingredients is meat from some dangerous beast…. even a dragon, if the chef is eccentric enough. More than that, though, food can provide an occasional dressing for a dungeon or tavern that really helps ground the players in the setting. For example, the smell of heavily roasted meat sizzling over a campfire in the wilderness could draw the players into an ambush, or perhaps into an encounter with an NPC they will later find invaluable. Beverages, too, can help set a mood. A fine, aged wine from the personal stores of a wealthy merchant could be just as welcome a reward for a job well done as a pouch of gold coins… or maybe a thick local brew could provide the players with some unplanned-for entertainment. So the next time you're designing a dungeon for your players, or perhaps a level or map for a computer game, try including a bit of flavor in the way of culinary culture. You might be surprised by the emotional reaction you get. Learning to let go 2008-09-09T00:00:00+00:00 Two months later, I'm no longer playing Age of Conan or Star Wars Galaxies. Several months ago, I posted on the RPG.net forum asking for advice on what MMORPG to try. I was bored, and posted a list of the MMORPGs I had played and decided I didn't like. It was very lengthy, being at least two dozen entries long. One of the replies I received was something to the effect of “you obviously don't enjoy MMOs, so quit trying and find something else.” At the time, I brushed it off as a snide remark. Now, though, after playing World of Warcraft again for the past few weeks, I've come to realize there was some truth in that statement. It wasn't that I don't enjoy MMORPGs, but rather, that I wasn't playing them for the right reasons. I was trying MMO after MMO in an attempt to recover the same feeling I had when I first played Star Wars: Galaxies. I erroneously believed that if I could just find an MMO with a good feature set that closely matched SWG's, I would relive those days. Now, though, I'm playing WoW and actually enjoying it. Why? Because I'm doing the two things I haven't done since the Old Days of SWG - I'm A) talking and questing with other players because of a shared interest, and B) I'm judging WoW on its own merits, rather than compared to any other game. Specifically, I'm enjoying just questing and not worrying about grinding to maximum level. Now, my acquisition of Spore two days ago has eaten significantly into my free time. It's a fantastic game, and everything I'd hoped for when I first learned about it two years ago. Not since Galaxies had I had so much anticipation for a game. However, despite this, it's so different from MMORPGs or FPSes - both intensely multiplayer experiences - that I doubt I'll play it as anything more than an occasional curiosity. At the end of the day, it seems that what I really want out of an MMO is to have fun with others. Ironic, that. Age of Conan 2008-07-01T00:00:00+00:00 So I purchased Age of Conan, despite the numerous reviews saying that the game is heavily broken. So far, it's not bad. I haven't reached the magical level 20 yet, where according to reviews all content dries up and disappears. I hear that crafting is completely broken and unusable. However, for the time being, I'm enjoying beating the snot out of lots of things…and I especially like switching between solo-instance and multiplayer-open areas. I look forward to the PvP. I'm also subscribed now to EverQuest II. EQ2 ran a promotion where I was given two months access to the game, with a trial of all released expansions and adventure packs to date. The kicker, and what made me subscribe again, is that I get to KEEP all those things if I subscribed within the trial period. I'll maintain my subscription for awhile and probably cancel it later, but at least I'll have gotten all that extra content…for only the price of a single month's subscription. In Star Wars Galaxies, the Fifth Anniversary event is going on. I acquired the items, but I'm slightly irritated at the way the badge and title for the event are being handed out. Only 24 players - one for every hour - each day are given the Hero of Empire Day reward, and the event only lasts until July 22nd, so a large majority of players will never receive it despite trying for it. I suppose this gives some value to the reward, then, for being scarce. I think a quest would have been a better dispersal mechanism, though. Back to the World of Warcraft, and... 2008-05-26T00:00:00+00:00 I spent the past month playing World of Warcraft with my fiancée and Star Wars Galaxies with the IA. WoW is actually fun now that I've stopped trying to just gain levels. I think the QuestHelper add-on helps... it makes questing a lot easier, and reduces the amount of down time I have. That, and my fiancee's advice to only do yellow quests and to abandon green ones immediately. However, as of Friday I've started a month-long experiment in fitness and finance, and part of it is the temporary cancellation of both of my MMO subscriptions. Catch you in 30! What do I do? 2008-04-25T00:00:00+00:00 Today's post is inspired by a challenge from IttyBiz. The author, Naomi Dunford, reflected on how many readers aren't aware - through no fault of their own - of what we blog writers actually do for a living. So, the challenge was to answer five questions to introduce ourselves (again) to our readers: What's your game? What do you do?</h1> By day, I'm a web developer working for a major government contractor. By night, I'm a freelance web designer, artist, and writer. Why do you do it? Do you love it, or do you just have one of those creepy knacks?</h1> I love web design. It's the perfect melding of programming, art, and writing. Who are your customers? What kind of people would need or want what you offer?</h1> Most of my clients are game companies. I've done artwork or websites for a fair few people as individual commissions too. Usually, the people interested in my services are those looking for a friendly face and an understanding of the game industry that just isn't there for the majority of web design companies. What's your marketing USP? Why should I buy from you instead of the other losers?</h1> I don't know what a USP is, but I'll say this - I'm the guy who knows what I'm doing, and I know what my clients are doing too. At the end of the day, I'm a gamer as well as a designer! What's next for you? Whats the big plan?</h1> Right now, Mana Trance Creative - the name I do business as a freelancer under - is pretty low on my list of priorities. I take a new client once every three months or so, much reduced from when I was just out of college (and unemployed). However, over the next year I'll be slowly building up MTC. My goal is to be self-employed at roughly the same standard of living I have now by December of 2009. So, if any of you reading this needs a website (or art) or knows someone who does, shoot me an email! What the client wants isn't always what they need 2008-04-24T00:00:00+00:00 Guest Post by Monica O'Brien of Twenty Set</a> I've recently noticed a trend in software development that is along the lines of "If we build it they will come." This is a problem in any type of product development, but it seems to happen more often in software development because there are fewer entry barriers to start a technology-based company. The problem with "building things" is there are no limits to technology in terms of virtual products. If you can dream it, you can find a way to make it virtual. Which means there are a lot of people trying to make money off of products or enhancements that are missing one thing: a customer need. What technology companies need most when developing a new product or enhancing an existing product is marketing research. Unfortunately, research is thought to be costly to be hired out, so many companies do an ad hoc version of marketing research which comes down to implementation managers asking customers what they want and reporting back to the company. This methodology is inherently flawed, however. The first rule of marketing research is you don't ask your customers what they want. If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me "A faster horse." ~ Henry Ford </blockquote> Customers are good at identifying solutions, not needs. In this example the user needs to get to places faster and comes up with a solution based on previous experience. But where's the innovation in something a customer has already experienced? Most customers don't understand technology the way a software developer would, and the solutions a customer presents cannot be new or different because they are solutions someone else has already created. A company that uses solutions to determine what to build next will become an aggregator rather than an innovator; and while aggregators can be useful, they are certainly not original, cutting-edge, or exciting. Aggregation leads to other problems, namely complicated or unnecessary functionality. Which is why most software becomes too expensive, too slow, or too buggy. Some advice for companies developing software - if you want to be an industry leader, learn how to extracts needs vs. solutions. There is an entire science built around how to do this, and in my experience people without formal training in marketing research are absolutely horrible at understanding the voice of their customer. So maybe hire someone instead - the cost incurred will return tenfold in profits. Earth Day 2008 2008-04-22T00:00:00+00:00 Today is Earth Day. To celebrate, today I'm going to post a short list of some great links in the spirit of the holiday that are relevant to the Millennial. My favorite is the solar-powered iPod, but check them all out! Reegle</a> - A renewable energy search engine that tries to bill itself as Web 2.0. Technologically speaking, it's not particularly advanced - no social media, the web design itself is a little off in places, and it appears to be trying to model itself after Google but doesn't come close. However, as a resource for renewable energy information and news related to that topic, it does a good job. There IS a blog, too, and though it clearly needs an editor, the content is in the right place and well-informed. EcoWorld</a> - This site has a wealth of content. Don't let the ugly design put you off - everything is fairly well organized, and there's a few fun things in there, like this biofuel land calculator. I'm no scientist though, so take this - as with all things - with a grain of salt. Solar-powered iPod charger</a> - With this and an iPod Touch or iPhone, you can take your mobile computing into the bush and not worry about powering the thing. Also, because it's solar power, it's greener than the alternative. GreenTechnoLog</a> - One of the better green tech blogs I've found. Multiple good articles with great information! Dumb Little Man has an excellent post on reducing your carbon footprint</a>. I can't recommend this blog enough, and it turns out he had a perfect post for this topic! GreatGreenGadgets</a> has a blog post about... well, a whole lot of green gadgets, tricks, and websites. Lots. Check it out! Moving to mobile: how to work from any computer 2008-04-17T00:00:00+00:00 Lately, working on multiple computers has started to take its toll on my time and productivity. I regularly use my work computer, my laptop, and my home computer, and occasionally use university computers and conference room computers. That's five different machines on a fairly frequent basis. It's hard to keep track of everything - especially if I need a file that's on machine X, or a password that's in the Firefox password manager on machine Y. So, to fix that, I'm going full mobile. I'm moving everything that can be securely moved (i.e., nothing proprietary from work) into the cloud. Here's a few of the things I'm doing to accomplish this: KeePass</a> - I'm moving all my passwords and login names into the freely-available KeePass password manager. It's portable and very secure, as well as able to generate some really nice passwords for you - and all you need to know is one password to unlock the database. No more having to remember dozens of different passwords and logins.</li> Google Docs</a> - Documents that I don't use often I'm archiving to DVD. Everything else, which isn't much, I'm moving into Google Docs - both for ease of access and for the unique collaborative quality of document editing in the cloud.</li> Google Reader</a> - Though I love the Flock browser's social media functions, I'm moving to just using Google Reader for all my feeds. That way I can keep up without having to worry about logging on the right machine, and feeds that aren't allowed at work - like the Wizards of the Coast feed - I just keep in a separate, closed folder that doesn't trip the firewall.</li> Google Notebook</a> - No need to keep track of all my favorites/bookmarks separately. Notebook does this for me. It even integrates with Firefox with a nifty toolbar.</li> Portable Apps</a> - For those times when I really need a specific application, I'll just load up Portable Apps on my flash drive. GAIM, OpenOffice, 7zip, Notepad++, it's all there and all portable.</li> </ul> The only applications which I can't transport easily are Photoshop and Star Wars Galaxies, but seeing as Adobe just released a web-based version of Photoshop that's freely available, the former's not going to be a problem. And I really don't need to be playing Galaxies at work, so that's not an issue either, heh. I'm taking my first steps toward being fully mobile. If you have any suggestions for additional ways to do this, let us know in the comments! Do you really need that? 2008-04-16T00:00:00+00:00 In the digital age, we are bombarded from all directions with social links, RSS feeds, tweets, and all manner of other social media gizmos. We are constantly plugged into the world of Look What Just Came Out That You Need Now messages from friends and colleagues. Oddly, we never stop to think whether we really need that new gadget. Lately, I've been feeling pressure to buy an iPod Touch. A thousand little voices tell me I need it, I can afford it, what will it hurt to just buy the lowest-storage model… but they rarely, if ever, touch on the most important topic: do I need it? As a web worker and an erstwhile member of the “coworking coffee crowd,” I experience near-continual exposure to the Benefits and Advantages of Switching to Mac. I own a first-gen iPod Nano that I almost never use, and that's about the extent of my Apple-ness. So, one voice is telling me to get the Touch because, hey, it's an upgrade over my ancient Nano. Another voice, from the people in the coffee shop, is telling me - sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly - that Apple is what all the Cool Kids have. I try and rationalize it. The iPod Touch can store contacts. It can access the Web via wifi for free. It lets me view the weather forecast wherever I find a hotspot. It plays music - and doesn't need to be connected to my computer to get new songs. It plays video, and if the rumors are true, Quake III Arena. All things that, as a web worker, I Need. …but do I really? Will my life be any more complete after buying a Touch? I tend to think not. After all, most purchases we make in our lifetimes should satisfy a genuine need. Entertainment, personal growth, and other less tangible concepts can easily be obtained through non-material means. Hiking every month, for example, is a lot cheaper than buying a new video game every month... and a lot better for you, too. So the next time you're tempted to buy that new gadget that just came out, think long and hard about WHY you need it. The decision may make you a better person. If you have a story about a time when you passed up (or bought!) a gadget you didn't really need, go ahead and share it! Choice in the workplace? What will they think of next? 2008-04-15T00:00:00+00:00 It seems that lately more companies are veering towards non-uniformity in system design. Employees are allowed to use any computer they want, as long as certain key criteria (e.g., ability to get onto the company intranet) are met. Google has taken this approach</a>, and I imagine it'd be a good thing for Gen Y to universally follow Google's lead. With the creep towards distributed computing once again, we could even have “mobile dumb terminals</a>” without too much effort or complication. So, with all that in mind, let's hear what you think about this. Should companies allow their employees to use whatever computer they want? Fear and aggression; the dark side, are they? 2008-04-09T00:00:00+00:00 Recently I read a blog post</a> railing against the lack of willingness to stand up for others in modern society. Too often, this observation proves widespread. I myself experienced something similar a long time ago, and regret not acting to this day. Most of this, I speculate, comes from a culture of individualism... and a lack of confrontation. We are sorely lacking in aggressive quality these days. This is not to say we should have more anger and violence; rather, we need to improve everyone's quality of life by introducing a little bit of healthy fear into the mix. For example, I avoid cobras when possible, as they tend to strike fatally when provoked. This is not a crippling fear, but rather a fear that guides my behavior for my (and the cobra's) safety. Not all fear is bad, no matter what our illustrious long-lost President said. We must be willing to step in and do what's right, and aggression is necessary for that. Pacifism only works when everyone is pacifist. This isn't just walking around the streets defending little girls from thugs, either - standing up for someone's idea in the office when the office bull-head is beating it down for no good reason is JUST as relevant. So next time you find yourself in a position to save someone, do it. Don't think about it. Just do it. Wake up with the sun and regain control of your life 2008-04-03T00:00:00+00:00 Most people in college and just out of it are night owls. I even know one or two who regularly sleep until noon. This behavior is reinforced by a student culture that emphasizes socializing at night as the highest priority. As a wise man once said, that's no way to go through life, son. I wake up every morning at 6:00 AM on the dot. Sometimes I use my alarm clock. Sometimes I don't. Either way, during winter I'm up before the sun and during summer I wake with the sun. As a result, my days are more productive, more active, and healthier. Ben Franklin had it right when he wrote “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” More Productive. Since I wake up earlier, when fewer people are active, there are fewer distractions. I take a few minutes to just relax and collect my thoughts. Sometimes I'll make a rough plan for the day, though usually I just identify a few key goals I want to accomplish.</li> More Active. Waking up earlier, for whatever reason, gives me more energy than sleeping late. The difference between sleeping from 12:30-8 and 10:30-6, though both give my optimal 7.5 hours, is remarkable. By waking up before everything starts happening, I'm able to set a plan of attack instead of having to react to all the late-morning stimuli exploding around me. As a result, I don't tire as easily later in the day.</li> Healthier. There are two main health benefits to waking up earlier. First and most obvious is lower stress. I lead a life that is almost completely free from long-lasting distress (as opposed to eustress, or good stress). I'm positive that waking up early helps with that, since as I stated before, I don't have to react to anything right away. I can just chill for a good hour or so. The second health benefit is a greater duration of exposure to sun - one of the few places you can get vitamin D. Vitamin D is your friend. Vitamin D is important. Get more vitamin D. Wake up early!</li> </ul> Extra Reading</h1> Here are a few links which go into greater depth on this topic, and which offer some tips as to how to get up earlier painlessly: Zen Habits - Ten Benefits of Waking Up Early and How to Do It</a> Wikihow - Wake Up Without an Alarm Clock</a> How to Wake Up Early</a> Finally, at long last... 2008-03-31T00:00:00+00:00 Scin Karetyr, CL90 Commando. Finally. The long grind is over... and I can't help but think, now what? So, let's review those goals: Goal Update</h1> Major Goal #1: Hit CL90 with Scin. Done! Major Goal #2: Acquire a Vigo. No progress. Major Goal #3: Imperial Army space wing. No new progress. Minor Goal #1: Finish the Rare Weapons Collections. Got two new items for the Rare Melee Weapons III collection. Minor Goal #2: Fuura Hengwen, Shipwright. No progress, and I'm seriously considering just staying a Domestics trader. So. Now Major Goals #2 and #3 become #1 and #2, and Minor Goal #2 is scrapped in light of the fact that I'm just enjoying Domestics too much. I'll have to work more on my major goals, it seems. I should also mention that I'm working on a machinima movie for my guild, the Imperial Army. That could be considered a Major Project rather than a goal, as it's an ongoing and very long-term process. Once in awhile: a recipe 2008-03-27T00:00:00+00:00 Today, I'm going to do something a little different. I had a post about chivalry and conscience nearly complete, but instead I think I'll present something a little lighter….a recipe, and its origins. Called “Watergate Salad,” it's not really a salad in the traditional sense. Since I'm not feeling too well, my girlfriend made up a batch for me. It's not healthy in any sense, but it does indulge my sweet tooth! Here's the recipe: Watergate Salad</h1> 1 can (15.5-20 oz) crushed pineapple</li> 1⁄2 bag mini-marshmallows</li> 1⁄2 tub light Cool Whip (or similar)</li> 1 package instant pistachio pudding (I prefer Jello brand)</li> </ul> Just mix all ingredients together and serve! Must be refrigerated and covered for storage. Watergate salad is a variation on “ambrosia salad,” a dessert dish that appears to have originated sometime during the 19th century in southern America. Some sources place its starting point at somewhere around 1830, although given the wildly divergent recipes floating around both then and now, it's likely that it never had any single inventor or point of origin. Another blogger who has posted this recipe</a>, Dorcas Walker, has some more information and, in her comments, some variations you can try. This recipe is great for parties. The next time you drop by SXSW</a>, bring a carload of it and you'll be an instant celebrity! Forget the rules and tell a story 2008-03-25T00:00:00+00:00 Writing has taken on new meaning as I've gotten a little older and a little wiser. Grammar and spelling, in particular, are not the twin unbreakable pillars they once appeared to be when I was in high school or earlier. Reading Tolkien, and considering his status within the literary world, is evidence of that; though his grammar completely defies the Laws of English Class in several ways (particularly in the Silmarillion), he is held up to be one of the greatest writers of fiction. Originally, I believed there was only one way to write - the Correct Way, in which the form of the language matched the textbooks perfectly. Now, though, I have come to believe that not only are there multiple ways to write, but different forms of writing must be used in different contexts. The Correct Way is appropriate only in certain situations. One of those situations is in business letters, resumés, and other formal career-related communication. The purpose of the language used is to impart a sense of your competence and professionalism. For us twenty-somethings, this is the area that is most often lacking. In college, a scant two years ago, I proofread some classmates' papers in upper division courses and was appalled by the errors in what should have been fundamental form. Run ons, fragments, and similar literary atrocities abounded. This is no way to demonstrate our competence in the workplace, particularly for those of us who work as freelancers outside the relatively safe cubicle world. Our communication style is vital. Now, while that professional Correct Way is appropriate and even necessary in the corporate world, it is often inappropriate for the world of fiction and narrative writing. As per Tolkien's example, there is a different kind of focus for narrative form - the telling of the story. Flowery language makes it more difficult to read, certainly, but using unusual words and sentence structures forces our brains to creatively interpret. Once we engage that half of our brain, suddenly these worlds that the authors are weaving for us take on a life of their own. This kind of writing is also necessary for our development as individuals, though many people don't allow it to flourish…or even practice it. Flowery writing makes us think and produces new pathways in our still-growing brain patterns, something ever so vital for a twenty-something newly recovering from the culture of university. Storytelling is an important skill, and being able to forget the Correct Way for awhile and forge new trails helps us become more rounded people. So, the next time you find yourself free for fifteen minutes with nothing in mind to do, grab a sheet of paper or a word processor and tell a story. Forget the grammar…show us your world. Connect and prosper 2008-03-20T00:00:00+00:00 Something missing in a lot of big companies - whether office, factory, or what-have-you - is a sense of community and connectedness. There is frequently no connection between You and the Team. In the case of freelancers, it's between You and the Client. What do I mean by connection? I mean empathy. I mean that feeling you get when you really understand someone, and they understand you. There's way too much focus on Lone Wolf, out-for-number-one tactics out there. I recently read Connection Culture by Michael Lee Stallard</a> and found myself nodding at every third paragraph. Michael's research is impeccable and his findings are both simple and profound. He goes into great detail about the hows and whys of connecting at the workplace. His conclusions are: connections at work make that company a great place to work for, and</li> in the case of customers and clients, that company becomes a great one to do business with.</li> </ol> People are happier when they're connected. Michael doesn't go too much into scale and volume, but he does make notable mention of the fact that big companies that encourage communication and connection do demonstrably better work, backed up by trustworthy data. According to his research and my own personal experiences, people who make connections are happier, healthier, more optimistic, and generally more energetic than those who do not. So. When's the last time you made an effort to make connections in your workplace? Do you know the name of the guy in the cubicle across the way? If not, introduce yourself. Get to know the people you work with, for, and above, and you will find that the rewards greatly outweigh any remotely possible cost to yourself. Three lists that will save you time and keep you sane 2008-03-18T00:00:00+00:00 In today's online culture of GTD, productivity, time management, and so on, we are focused on getting more done in less time. We are told that quantity is generally preferable to quality. What this mindset doesn't take into account is another important aspect of life - happiness. Too often, I find myself thinking that line from Jurassic Park, “[they] were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” Time is valuable, yes. The most valuable currency in the world. Now think to yourself - do you spend all your money? Do you have a plan for every dime you will ever earn? When you get right down to it, you have a finite amount of time available to you during your lifetime. There is no chance you will receive more, but frequent opportunities to get your supply shortened or even cut off permanently. So, you must spend your time wisely…and that includes leaving some flexible time so you can catch a breather and just relax! To that end, here's a few lists of things to think about when you plan for the future. Wants</h1> One day every week (Sunday works for me), write down a list of three goals you want to accomplish over the next week. These goals don't have to be work-related; rather, they should be things that you really want to do. For example, my weekly list might read: Ride 5 miles on my bike (Biking)</li> Draw 5 new illustrations for my game (Art)</li> Complete a perfect back-spin kick (Taekwon-do)</li> </ul> Needs</h1> Your second priority (never, ever your first) should be to make a list of three goals you need to accomplish over the next week. This list is of things that need to get done, but that you don't necessarily enjoy. For example: Pay gas bill (Bills)</li> Shovel sidewalk (Chores)</li> Turn in P3 report (Work)</li> </ul> Shoulds</h1> Finally, make a list of three goals to meet for the next week that you should accomplish. These can be just about anything. For me, the list might look like this: Find a good local dietician (Health)</li> Finish my current novel (Reading)</li> Spend half an hour learning about leadership (Education)</li> </ul> Keep in mind that all of these things should only make up a PART of your time. The rest can and should be fluid, allowing for sudden shifts in schedule and just plain old relaxation. Personally, I try and incorporate some daily rituals into my life, but that's just what works for me. Experiment to see the best solution for you. The art of eating M&Ms 2008-03-13T00:00:00+00:00 When you rip open a bag of M&Ms, how do you eat 'em? Pop one at a time, rapid-fire? Pour handfuls into your waiting maw? Or do you slide a single one into your mouth, suck on it for awhile, then finally swallow and consider, possibly, having another? The way you answer that question could have remarkable ramifications for how you approach life in general. Are you the type of person who consumes new experiences at a phenomenal rate? Do you let everything go by in a rush as you focus on something else? Or, perhaps, do you savor each experience one at a time? Interestingly, conventional wisdom might be right for once. Savoring one experience at a time lets you take in more, and more importantly, understand more. I once met a maharaja who visited my cultural anthropology class in New Zealand. He insisted that it would take many years to learn what he was about to try and teach us in an hour. Being young and inexperienced, after the lesson was over I privately scoffed at the seeming simplicity and easiness of the concepts. How could it possibly take years to learn this? Now, eight years later, I understand. Some things, like the meditative world view the maharaja tried to teach us, are intellectually very easy to disassemble... but very difficult to actually understand. Learning and understanding are two very different, though interrelated, concepts. In order to fully understand a lot of the seemingly simple productivity and personal growth concepts floating around the Web these days, you must experience them over an extended period of time instead of merely seeing them, analyzing them, and casting them aside. So the next time you open up a bag of those metaphorical candy-coated chocolates, try savoring them one at a time. You might be surprised at how much more you enjoy them. Another clash of the generations 2008-03-11T00:00:00+00:00 Recently, a student at Ryerson University</a> in Toronto was charged with over a hundred counts of academic misconduct. His crime? Running a chemistry study group on Facebook. Now, while I'm sure there is more to this story than what the article states, the case seems fairly clear: a professor considers online communities different from offline ones. This is despite the differences being negligible for the purpose it was intended for. Though I graduated university last May (‘07), I still live two blocks from campus. I'm plugged into the college community there, and it's definitely not the pure-offline world that a lot of the older professors seem to think it is. The majority of students at SDSU seem to have a Facebook account at the very least. Even some professors do, though they're almost entirely the younger ones. This is not the first clash between old and new ways of thinking about human interaction, and I guarantee it won't be the last. However, we as young adults need to work with the older generations to demonstrate three things: Technology is not a replacement for traditional forms of communication, it's an enhancement of it.</li> The Internet is not lawless, despite it being unregulated. There are rules of behavior online just as there are ones offline.</li> Education is more and more becoming inseparable from the Internet, and things such as online study groups are inevitable evolutions of that paradigm.</li> </ul> Ranting, raving, and threatening is most definitely NOT the way to prove to the older generations that our way of thinking on this issue is correct. Instead, we need to approach this on their level - and with their tools. We are one society, not two separate ones. Personally, I think Ryerson University's wording of their academic dishonesty policy could use some updating. “Any academic advantage” being made illegal would seem to me to disallow reading textbooks. The workplace? Nah, we need the lifeplace. 2008-03-06T00:00:00+00:00 Too often I hear people complaining about the workplace or chattering about the differences between the workplace and the home. Many people seem to enjoy making tremendous separations between Work and Play. Wrong, wrong, wrong. See, life's about three key concepts - Production, Play, and Provision. All three are necessary for all aspects of life, and cutting one out of any part of it makes life less fun, less whole. Production. The art of giving something back to society. If you want your life to mean something, you produce. Writers write, engineers engineer, and artists….art? If you spend a good deal of your life dedicated to one thing, you will become good at that one thing. People who are happy with their jobs almost always have combined their favorite productive activity into their working life. Play. The art of doing something just for the hell of it, with no obvious return. While this doesn't directly create New and Better Stuff for society, it improves you and those around you as a person. It's a social activity. While Me Time has its place and is necessary for mental health, playing with others is a vital aspect of a healthy society and can really be refreshing for the mind, body, and soul. From a working standpoint, it encourages teamwork, communication, and energy, all very important concepts for Good Workers. Provision. The art of keeping oneself and one's dear ones alive and happy. Feeding yourself and your kids (if you have them) is only part of the equation. In your working life, the ideal worker is one who cares about his colleagues, his projects, and yes, even his managers. Japan partially got this right in the Old Days before the bubble economy and after the Occupation, where every employee of a company was a member of a “family” of sorts. Caring employees are happy, more productive, and more fun to be around. Think about it. In the perfect job, you'd have fun, have a recurring sense of accomplishment, and be a proud member of The Team, right? Everyone else would think the same too. This is much easier to do with startups, ala Silicon Valley, than it is with larger established companies, but it's still possible. Be proactive, and set up the change. You don't have to fight management to make this happen. Make it all part of your life, who you are, who you will be. Change your workplace into a lifeplace, something that you are happy to include as part of your existence on this Earth. You'll find that everyone is happier, is more productive, and generally better people when it happens. On leveling and collections in Star Wars Galaxies 2008-03-05T00:00:00+00:00 Recently I hit level 88 with Scin. One of my guildies promptly gave me an AK-Prime rocket launcher, the most powerful Commando weapon in the game, just because he had one lying around. The IA, to put it mildly, rocks. I've taken part in some PvP and instances since then, and I have to say that my damage output has skyrocketed. I've also started learning the ins and outs of Commando tactics, and I may actually be effective in combat in the near future. However, I have made almost zero progress towards level 89. Now that I've gotten the greatest prize of Commando, there is very little motivation for me to continue the painful grind to CL90. I still hold it as a goal, though, and will probably just do the thirty-nine missions it will take to get me there in a four-day grind marathon. Leveling in SWG is not particularly fun. The Collections, however, are awesome. Despite their huge requirements compared to EQ2's collections (completing the Peko Peko kill collection requires defeating 100 peko pekos, 100 giant peko pekos, 50 peko peko albatrosses (not soloable), and 25 peko peko albatross matriarchs (VERY not soloable)), they're a whole lot of fun. If I'm bored or waiting for an instance group to get set up, I'll run around and kill a few dozen critters or NPCs for a kill quest, or search for some of the elusive items for the weapon collections. The rewards are varied and interesting, ranging from titles to new abilities, and it's a blast just finding out what collections are available. Goal Update</h1> Major Goal #1: Hit CL90 with Scin. Almost there, only 39 missions to go. Major Goal #2: Acquire a Vigo. No progress at all. Major Goal #3: Imperial Army space wing. Did a brief tour as a gunner on the Titan VI, one of the IA's gunships. Minor Goal #1: Finish the Rare Weapons Collections. No progress. Minor Goal #2: Fuura Hengwen, Shipwright. No progress, and I may end up keeping Fuura as a domestics trader instead. I enjoy the low time sink and bevy of creativity involved in domestics crafting. Get an awesome new hobby to improve and enrich your life! 2008-03-04T00:00:00+00:00 Balancing a frugal life with a fun life can be difficult. Many hobbies and forms of entertainment cost money, and some are more expensive than others. Some hobbies - like yachting - are prohibitively expensive for the average joe. Others, like hiking, are practically free in the right circumstances. Choosing fun hobbies that don't hit up the wallet too hard can be a great way to reduce living expenses while still letting you lead the life you want. Choosing a new hobby is a simple process, though some of the details can require a lot of thought. Follow the next few steps to gain a new, cheaper, more exciting handle on life! Consider the cost. Cheaper is better, but there are multiple angles to think about. Entry cost is only one part of the equation. There are also incidental costs (like, say, the cost of buying more paintballs), maintenance costs (repairing your hiking boots), and upgrade costs (like getting more involved in the hobby's community). Cost is not necessarily monetary, remember! It can involve significant time and social commitments.</li> Think about your overarching interests. Are you a nature lover? An athlete? Do you like making things? How about challenging yourself? Thinking about these things will get your mind working on the possibilities.</li> Favor physical activities over sedentary ones. Being physically active is much better for you. Mental growth is important too, but if you're used to sitting at home, opt for the physical new hobby over the mental one.</li> Make a list. Considering the first three steps, do some research on fun activities that might match your interests. Don't just rely on Google, either; check out the local library and review your options in your home town. Some cities have extensive bike trails, while others might have public tennis courts. See what's available.</li> Narrow the list. Pick two options from it, and try out both. Go with the one that seems more fun to you after a month or so. Enjoy your new hobby! Spend a lot of time with it. Hobbies can stagnate and become boring if you don't engage them often, so try and dedicate specific blocks of time to it every week.</li> </ul> Don't worry about retiring old, expensive hobbies. Just devote a decent chunk of time to your new hobby, and if you enjoy it, you'll find that your other hobbies won't seem as important and will fade in time... along with those expensive side costs that accompanied them! Web workers don't need Stuff. 2008-02-28T00:00:00+00:00 As is frequently the case, a dozen article ideas struck me as I was checking my daily blogs today. One article I read seemed particularly noteworthy - the Tyranny of Stuff on Get Rich Slowly</a>. After reading it, I thought about how much Stuff is appropriate for various kinds of people. Then I thought, how much Stuff do I, a web worker, REALLY need? The technogeek in me cried out “lots of it! Gadgets define me!” The philosophe in me grumbled “I need nothing. Sell! Trash! Throw out!” Then the rational side started to churn. I've always gone through short periods of BUY BUY BUY followed by long stretches of GET RID OF EVERYTHING I OWN. It's a vicious cycle. More than that, though, it's telling of how I view Stuff. Something that few people seem to think about is the exact level of Stuff they need to be happy and productive. Most are content with continually buying more and better Stuff. A rare few find happiness in owning next to nothing. We really need to think about not just what makes us happy, but what makes us happy for the lowest personal cost. That isn't just cost in terms of money, either. Every single interaction we make has a cost of some kind, and this is particularly true of acquiring Stuff. Stuff has multiple costs - the monetary price, the space it takes up, and the time its usage takes away from other things. There are also a bunch of other indirect costs, such as what others think of us for acquiring this Stuff, opportunities lost because of it, and so on. Rarely do we ever consider all of these; most of the time, we are purely focused on the monetary cost. I blame that mostly on our materialistic culture, but the cause isn't important. Only the solution is. So, let's look at exactly what a web worker in general needs to own in terms of Stuff. Obviously, a computer is a necessity. While it's possible to use only public machines in Net cafes and the like, it's not cost-effective by any reckoning. So, that's one item of Stuff that's necessary. Coffee, Mountain Dew, energy drinks - all consumables that really have no lasting positive effect on us. Bad Stuff there. Housing is vital. Renting versus owning is outside the scope of this article. Utilities, obviously, are also vital. Groceries too….though we really don't need to buy that extra yummy snack just because it's on sale. The latest gadget off of ThinkGeek is not vital. In my case especially, we're only likely to use it for a few days or a couple weeks at most before it becomes just another part of the scenery. So, too, with the latest computer games. That's not to say that computer games are bad Stuff, though - just reduce the frequency at which you buy them. One or two a year is plenty. One or two every couple years is better. Cars are very sturdy things. Buying brand new ones is just silly, so if you really must buy a new car, get a used one that's at least three or four years old. If you're going for a hybrid, though, that's a different matter. Do NOT buy a used hybrid right now….the new battery cost will eat you alive. Get a new one if you must have a hybrid or other alternative energy vehicle. Similarly, how many blogs/websites do you REALLY need to read every day? Though they don't have any monetary cost, they DO have associative costs like time and opportunity. Knowledge may be power, but knowledge at the cost of living tends to drag you down in the end. There are hundreds of thousands of other things I could list here, but I'm sure you've already come up with a few of your own. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you believe is necessary Stuff and what isn't. The art of positive deletion 2008-02-20T00:00:00+00:00 A very important concept in programming is what we coders call “garbage collection.” Basically, a program is like an old pail of water - if you don't make sure all the holes are filled, that water's gonna go all over the place. It'll get everywhere and make your life miserable. A computer only has so many resources, and holes in a program (e.g. memory leaks) will keep taking up more and more of those resources until there's nothing left. The concept of garbage collection can be applied to life in general, though. I call it “positive deletion,” since what you're doing is eliminating Stuff from your life so the Stuff doesn't clog up the rest of your life. After all, you only have so much Life! Positive deletion is a combination of time management and spatial organization. You need to get rid of things that take up resources as quickly and completely as possible. Parkinson's Law is only too true, so you need to make sure you're only spending as much time on a project - whether personal or for work - as absolutely necessary. Thomas Edison couldn't have invented 1,093 things in his lifetime if he didn't understand this principle. Of course, that doesn't mean pushing out an incomplete finished product. Do what needs to be done, but try and do it in half the time you (or your boss) originally assess it at. If you fail to meet this ambitious goal, then I guarantee you will at least have made it in under the original assessment! There are other task/time management techniques you can use (e.g. batching, worst first, etc.</a>), but they're out of the scope of this post. Another aspect of positive deletion is the outright culling of unnecessary garbage from your life. For example, how much time do you REALLY need to spend in front of the TV every day? Or the computer? Try out some of the following tips to get rid of the garbage: Sort out your goals. Make a list of all of your personal and work-related goals. Categorize them by importance - Vital, High Priority, and Low Priority. Assign due dates to each of them, assuming that you will work on only one goal at a time.</li> Knock out the most difficult task first. Also known as the Eat a Frog principle, doing this will ensure your day can only get better…and you'll gain self-respect for not procrastinating in the process!</li> Reduce your time-wasters. If you're a chronic TV-watcher, try dropping an hour off the time you spend watching the tube every day for a month. Next month, another hour. Similarly, if you spend way too much time reading email, try the Ferriss method of email batching</a>.</li> Plan your day. Using Google Calendar, 30 boxes, or another calendar, plan out tomorrow from waking to sleeping. Include half an hour for planning the day after that. Keep doing this for a week. At the end of the week, start planning out the entire week after that, and so on. Most importantly, stick to the plan! While there will inevitably be unforeseen events (such as family emergencies, flat tires, etc.), for the most part the plan'll keep you on track and away from the little time-wasters like neuroticly checking email every ten minutes.</li> Set limits. Don't just let yourself “work until it's done.” Set a specific stopping time, and stop when you reach it.</li> </ul> There are many more possibilities here, but those five will be a good starting point for you. There are a great many other blogs dedicated specifically to productivity (43 folders</a>, Steve Pavlina</a>, Lifehack</a>, etc.) that will expand on the positive deletion principle. For those of you already familiar with productivity optimization, you may be interested to read Dumb Little Man</a>, as it has some interesting and unique tips that go beyond the usual. In the end, if you can take charge of your life, you'll find that the most valuable currency of all - time - is yours to command. Positive deletion is but one of many tools to help you with that goal. Try it out for a month, and see how it affects your life! The Imperial March 2008-02-12T00:00:00+00:00 I resubbed to Star Wars Galaxies despite discovering the announcement that no further expansions will be produced for it, and despite the gnawing suspicion I have that Bioware and LucasArts are producing a SWG-killer. The reason is the Imperial Army. This player association has made its home on Chilastra for as long as SWG has existed. They're a great group of people, and I first joined up with them in 2004. I've been forced to take extended hiatuses from SWG for various reasons, but I was always welcomed back into the fold whenever I returned. I keep coming back to SWG because of the community. It's a dedicated group of honest, hardworking, and genuinely fun people….and not just the IA, though they're obviously at the top of the heap. So then, I'm back. And now, my plans for the future. Major Goal #1: Hit CL90 with Scin. I'm halfway to 88 right now, which is a major milestone. I'll finally be able to wield the lava cannon and hence become roughly on par with the 90-level PvPers. Up to now, I've been relegated mostly to lighting people on fire in PvP and hoping someone else finishes them off before they get me. Hitting CL90 will be the final culmination of a very long and occasionally tedious journey with Scin. Whether I stay Commando or not will depend on how much fun I have as a CL90. Major Goal #2: Acquire a Vigo. The privateer gunship is a very cool-looking boat from the outside, and as a master pilot, it's both a duty and a desire to acquire the most powerful weapon in the privateer arsenal. I intend to make my Vigo into one of the “main characters” in Scin's backstory, and appropriately deck it out with Imperial decorations. Though I'm a privateer, I still need and want to show solidarity with the Empire. Major Goal #3: Establish Scin as a core part of the newly organized space wing of the Imperial Army. It's time to really build the space wing, especially since it is so new, and if I can drive increasingly better performance in space battles I will consider this goal met. It's a tall order, though, as reliant on teamwork as it is. Since Scin is a privateer, he will only be able to act as a crewman on gunships or Decimators in PvP. Minor Goal #1: Finish the Rare Weapons Collections. I'm intrigued by them after finding one of the rifle parts behind the Storm Lord's throne. I want to acquire these badges and see what comes of it. Minor Goal #2: Turn Fuura Hengwen into what Scin used to be - a one-man starship engineering company. Though I don't relish the idea of factory-style production, artisan-style might suit me better. It has in the past. Free software, free world 2008-01-23T00:00:00+00:00 The concept of a free world is near and dear to those advocates of FOSS. In recent years free software advocacy has grown in volume if not in momentum. Subscribers to this peculiar philosophy - that all software should be free, open source, and readily available to the public at large - seem to hold certain similarities to other philosophical positions. Anarchism, for one. Libertarianism for another. But it goes deeper than those mere labels. All software being freely available as a good and desirable trait of a society implies…nay, requires that believers subscribe to the idea that materialism and ownership are inherently negative concepts. In this they resemble some beliefs of a few Native American tribes. Non-market economies</a> based on concepts of barter and dumb-barter, however, almost always have a concept of ownership behind them even if there is no currency or common value basis for items. In small societies, the materialistic bent of placing value on an item gives way to placing value on the exchange of the item, thereby replacing economic value with social value. In today's anonymous global village, social value is of far less importance, and thus materialism has risen as a natural consequence. Interestingly, the FOSS advocacy movement seems to be pushing for a return to social value over material value. Linus Torvalds is considered influential and prestigious for his uncompromising dedication, generosity, and competence. Bill Gates, while similarly intelligent, is reviled for his tremendous wealth and reputed anti-FOSS tactics</a>. A developer's prestige in the FOSS community is directly proportional to his or her contributions to the community. Now, while this is all well and good and I applaud a return to social value over material value, there is one glaring flaw in the FOSS advocacy philosophy - free software doesn't pay the bills. Some companies get around this by offering services to support their free products, but service isn't particularly time-consuming, thus enabling fewer developers to support a single product and restricting the number of jobs available at a given company. This suggests that the entire software industry is either flawed in its concept or flawed in its execution and gives rise to questions</a> regarding the legitimacy and efficiency of the current paradigm. For FOSS to become a viable methodology, the software industry must shift from a production-centric environment to a service-centric one. This is not to say that development itself must go by the wayside; rather, services need to be placed higher in priority than development so as to foster an equivalent financial return for developers and still promote the free usage of software. Service industries</a> account for 70% of the economic activity in the United States; certainly, by transforming the software industry into such will bring no great harm to the pocketbooks of developers as a whole…but its effects on the individual developer can't be directly determined. Personally, I hope that the FOSS philosophy and its focus on social value is a sign of a general disillusionment with materialism in general. Certainly, it can't hurt to help others through ideas such as FOSS. To find out more, check out the Free Software Foundation's website</a>. Their Resources section is particularly helpful. Leveraging Web 2.0 for a tabletop gaming company 2008-01-17T00:00:00+00:00 After the successful launch of the Silver Gryphon Games website</a>, I began looking around at web technologies and software that we could use to better operate as a decentralized company. These days, it's impractical for an RPG company - especially one as small as SGG - to keep offices and on-site staff. Only a select few of the larger companies do this. For the rest of us, it's mostly a matter of keeping track of freelancers and perhaps one or two local resources. For that, we don't need offices. We don't even need warehouses when we use POD services for printing purposes. That's where Web 2.0 comes in. Recently, we've been using several of Google's tools for communication and collaboration. Gmail and Google Docs have been central to our efforts for awhile now. We are experimenting with Groups as a collaborative medium. It seems to be most useful as a way to communicate with multiple freelancers at the same time, kind of like a super-Wiki. We have yet to leverage Calendar, though I do see that on the horizon. I personally use Blogger for this devlog. Since we began using these tools, our productivity has increased measurably. Even Blogger, which isn't used in the creative process directly, grants a certain measure of accountability that serves as excellent motivation. The one thing we really lack in terms of pre-built solutions is something to handle milestone scheduling and task management. Google doesn't have a tool like this, which makes it a little more difficult to integrate into our workflow. I've been looking at a few options, like Basecamp, but we have yet to select any. It's possible that we'll just use Groups for this purpose. What would be really useful, though, would be an integrated suite that combines all of our needs into one package. These needs can be loosely defined as the following: Searchable, indexable, categorized email</li> Real-time multi-user text, voice, and video communication</li> Quick notes</li> Hierarchical roles-based task and project management</li> Accounting control and analysis</li> Collaborative document editing</li> Easy-to-use interfaces for all of the above</li> </ul> Of course, there are others, but they're more nebulous or uniquely “RPG.” For example, the ability to playtest online is useful when we need to all hack away at a particular mechanic. For this, online RPG software like the old and obsolete OpenRPG helps but isn't well-suited to either Æther or Eiridia. If anyone knows of any software that can do what we're looking for (that is NOT Lotus Notes or a Microsoft product), let me know. I love Google's tools, but if there's something better out there, that'd be wonderful. From Lord of the Rings Online to... 2008-01-13T00:00:00+00:00 I canceled my LotRO account, having decided it just wasn't the kind of game experience I'm looking for. While some of the features were interesting and the quest content was phenomenal, other games I've played - like SWG - held my interest for much longer. So, I'm playing 8 days of a SWG trial with my old account, and I bought Guild Wars. So far, GW is a lot more fun than when I last played. That 5 minutes at a friend's was nothing compared to my current experience. SWG... well, it remains to be seen whether I'll resub or not. I also bought a copy of D&D Online, as it was on sale, but I probably won't install that until I tire of GW. More later. Yuletide in Lord of the Rings Online 2007-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 I haven't had a chance to play LotRO much lately because of the holidays, but yesterday I managed to get on for awhile. I trekked from west of Bree to the Shire, partly finishing a quest for Celandine Brandybuck in the process. The Shire is an amazing location and I love exploring it. The sights are fascinating…especially the Hill and the surrounding environs there. The plots of a certain ill-meaning hobbit up that way came to my attention, and of course I did something about it. The end result was I finished a level 1 quest chain with a very entertaining storyline and got a Yule Tree yard decoration for my efforts. If anyone hasn't done this quest yet, I highly recommend it. Lots of fun! Minstrels in green linen 2007-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 My guild, the irreproachable Crescent Order, has seen fit to grace me with a full outfit of custom-crafted light armor and a new cloak. All of it is a verdant hue, with intricate patterns weaved into the cloak. My armor score shot up something like 50 points, heh. I didn't get around to composing music as I thought I would. I got distracted by SOE reenabling my Star Wars Galaxies account for a trial week. My greatest accomplishment in either game, though, was reaching 13 with Ceolrigan. I didn't spend a lot of time in-game. That said, a quest that was giving me a lot of trouble - defending a hobbit by name of Constable Bolger from waves of attacking bandits - was finally completed last night. Just as I was about to be defeated again by the bandits, a level 28 guardian came by and killed all of them for me. It was a happy moment, heh. He disappeared before I could thank him properly. Web standards, browsers, and the future of the web 2007-12-19T00:00:00+00:00 Recently, the CSS working group and the W3C in general have come under fire</a> as Opera launches an assault on Microsoft. A counterculture of pro-proprietary technology advocates has risen up against the web standards movement. The web standards crowd has responded with fire and passion, sending up a rallying cry against what they see as a return to the browser wars of the ‘90s</a>. All of this begs the question - what are we really trying to do with web standards and the Web in general? James Bennett asks the same question</a>, though more eloquently and with greater background than I present here. The point of the World Wide Web is to provide people with information. It used to be nothing more spectacular than that. The type of information varied - marketing, scientific studies, news, etc. - but it was all information. With the advent of RIA technologies and new usage of the Web, though, that's starting to change. People are starting to do more than just research and purchase on the Web. The lines between desktop applications and web pages are blurring. With AIR, Flex, JavaFX, Silverlight, and other possible vehicles for innovative usage of the Web proliferating like mad, we are left with the question - what can't we do with the Web? That question is what drives research and innovation in the Web. It doesn't play as much of a factor, though, in industrial and commercial common usage. For example, when was the last time you overheard any non-developer talking about Web 2.0 or rich internet applications? How many people actually know about and use Google Docs? I'd be willing to wager that not many outside our world do. That will change in the future, of course, as clever and useful new technologies frequently are wont to be adopted. However, it seems that we - that is, web developers and other Internet professionals - often confuse research with production. The development of other new technologies, such as integrated graphene circuits</a>, is kept largely out of the public eye. While not expressly hidden, there is no attempt made to put such bleeding-edge breakthroughs into immediate public usage. Web standards and the development of proprietary Web technology is slightly different, but not much. Web standards are supposedly akin to such things as the Railway Group Standards</a> in that they make the Web easier and “safer” to use and develop for. By taking away the difficulties inherent in producing for multiple different platforms, web standards allow developers to spend their time innovating in more specific ways. The problem is that web standards are not keeping up with technological development, and so developers on the cutting edge are not able to utilize new technologies without resorting to proprietary platforms. Many developers give up on web standards so that they can implement the latest and greatest products of the commercial or open source worlds. I personally would love to see XHTML taken beyond its HTML4.01 roots; the WHATWG</a> tends to agree with me on this. However, with the current leadership of web standards, that simply isn't possible. We need new standards. The W3C is not keeping up with the pace of development, and therefore should either be revamped or replaced. The Lord of the Rings Online: Introducing Ceolrigan 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00 The first MMORPG I ever played was Everquest I. I bought the game at the insistence of some friends when I was living in New Zealand and loaded it onto my PC. I created my character and started killing bees. And more bees. And more bees. It bored the hell out of me. I uninstalled it after a day of playing and gave the game, and my account, to another friend. That “friend” still owes me money (unrelated event), but that's a story for another time. Around the same time I read Lord of the Rings cover to cover - 1100 pages - in two weeks. It fundamentally changed how I viewed fantasy. Back to that in a bit. In July of 2003, I played my second MMORPG ever: Star Wars Galaxies. I had belonged to a pre-release guild for over a year at that point and was absolutely enthralled by the game for over two years. SWG was different from any other game I'd seen before, and while the grind was still present, it was present in a form that was enjoyable. Of course, we all know what happened in 2005 to SWG. It doesn't bear repeating here. I kept playing off and on after that, but eventually (2007) I permanently canceled my account. Over the years since 2004, I've been playing various other MMORPGs in an attempt to recapture some of the enjoyment I experienced when first trying SWG. The list is long, and none held my interest for longer than a few months at most. World of Warcraft holds the record for second-longest played MMORPG for me, but I never got beyond level 37 due to the return of the Bees Syndrome. Enter Lord of the Rings Online. I tried this game out on three separate occasions with three different trial accounts. The first two times, I was very impressed with the graphics and the epic feel of the introductory quest lines, but couldn't get into it for reasons that now escape me. It probably had something to do with time commitments and absence of a guild. The third time was different. This summer I read most of the Silmarillion. I loved the flowery writing style, the epic tales, and relived the two weeks of Lord of the Rings that I'd experienced years before. This was after the second trial, but before the third, which started a mere week ago. My “Third Age” of LOTRO trials finally bore the fruit promised so long ago by the creation of this online Middle Earth. And now, retail copy and subscription firmly in my hands, allow me to introduce the persona that may one day equal Scin Karetyr in my memory: Ceolrigan of Rohan, Minstrel and Spider-Foe. At time of this writing, Ceolrigan is a level 11 Minstrel dressed in stylish purple and blue garb. Regrettably, his weapon of choice at the moment is a not-particularly-attractive club; as soon as I acquire the necessary bronze, he'll be properly wielding a longsword once again. What is so enjoyable about playing Ceolrigan is the musical quality of combat. The various melodies that erupt from his lute during battle lend it a somewhat more fantastical quality than seems usual in MMOs. More than that, he is a Historian. I'm a history graduate, so this naturally strikes me as ironic. I have yet to sample crafting in LOTRO, but if it's as enjoyable as combat, then I'll likely spend equal amounts of time doing both. My time as a Doctor, a Shipwright, and an Architect in SWG matched my time spent slaying Rebels and Ewoks. There's nothing quite like a break from battle to make it seem all the more enticing. I rejoined one of my old SWG guilds, the Crescent Order, as a member of their Kinship in LOTRO. They're good people, and being in a good guild always makes for a more memorable MMO experience. Last night, shortly before logging out of LOTRO for the night I discovered a player neighborhood. Player housing in LOTRO is much different from any other MMO's housing scheme. It seems to combine features of EQ2's instanced housing and SWG's global housing. While the neighborhood is instanced, it contains an entire area with street names and numbers and, apparently, decoratable exteriors and yards. While the price of a house seems very high at my current level, it's going to be one of my main goals to acquire and furnish such a place. I can see many entertaining player events taking place in neighborhoods and look forward to it with great enthusiasm. Other than acquiring a house, my main goal in LOTRO is to experience the story. In retrospect, every time I cancel an MMO account, it has been because I had no clear goals. SWG lasted longest, but unfortunately the game simply didn't provide enough incentives anymore to create goals. LOTRO gives me incentives, and it gives me gentle proddings in the general direction of leveling that are unusually well-hidden for an MMO. I actually enjoy leveling for once. Over the next few days, weeks, months, and perhaps years I will be updating this blog with the adventures, misadventures, and musings of Ceolrigan of Rohan, as told by his player. T-Mobile must be boycotted 2007-12-17T00:00:00+00:00 Normally, I don't post more than once a week. However, after reading about T-Mobile's assault on Net Neutrality</a> on Wired, I had to blog about it. T-Mobile wants to tell you what websites you can visit. We should tell T-Mobile what it can do with its Terms of Service….and take our money elsewhere. Why Jorn Barger is wrong and the rest of the world is right 2007-12-07T00:00:00+00:00 So, as I was browsing the web for a topic for this week's blog post, I came across an article in Wired that really caught my eye. In it, the inventor of blogging, Jorn Barger, talks about what blogging should have been</a> instead of what it has become. He seems to be of the impression that blogs should be, essentially, reports of interesting links the blogger has seen recently. Sorry Jorn, but that's what del.icio.us and digg are for now. Blogs these days frequently come in two flavors - personal diaries and explorations of a particular topic. While links play a major role in most of the latter, they are often completely absent in the former. Blogging has gone beyond its humble origins and developed into something akin to a cross between 18th century coffee houses and digital soap boxes. Blogging is a powerful social medium. It can be a tremendous platform for conversation on just about any topic. My personal favorites, like productivity, fun, and fitness, have endless possibilities for debate, ideas, and plain craziness. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun, though, without the highly social nature of it all. A conversation isn't a conversation if it's a bunch of links. Fitness full time 2007-12-03T00:00:00+00:00 Every day we are inundated with advertisements for Lose Weight Fast diets, exercise regimens, and miracle drugs. Almost all of these products require you to give up a portion of your day to Getting In Shape... or giving up things that you love, like tiramisu. People two hundred years ago didn't worry about such nonsense. People in other developed nations, like England, France, and New Zealand, don't worry about it either. So why are we obsessed with Diets, Exercise, and Drugs? It's all because America has shifted from a society of physical activity to one of mental activity. Now, this is not a bad thing in theory... but in practice, it's the root cause of our national obesity epidemic. So, here's how to get in shape, stay in shape, and actually enjoy it for once. This is targeted primarily towards cubicle zombies, but the philosophy applies to just about everyone. It's pretty easy. The steps are: Ramp up the activity</li> Choose to avoid one luxury food a week</li> Make food your fuel, not your crutch</li> Play hard</li> Work with your body AND your mind</li> </ul> Ramp up the activity.</h1> If you're going to get in shape, you can't just sit in a chair all day, then go home and sit in front of the TV or computer screen. Whenever you can, be physically active. Make sure that if you're spending a day at the office, you move. For example, the recommendation From Above is to get up and move around once every hour. That's not enough, and it can be jarring if you're in the middle of a great idea. Instead, try to be active constantly. Push your chair back and forth. Stretch frequently. Stand up and walk around your office or, if you're conveniently located in a tiny cube, get creative with the objects at your disposal. Tape dispensers make interesting free weights, as do textbooks. The key here is to ramp up the activity. If you do nothing else in this list, do this. Choose to avoid one luxury food a week.</h1> Anyone who's tried most of the diets out there knows how hard it is to suddenly go without all your favorite foods. So, instead of cutting out everything right away, go gradual. Make a conscious choice to turn down or avoid one luxury food per week. Luxury foods are usually sweets like candy, muffins, and pastries. Foods with high carb counts are good candidates for the chopping block. If you can't just cut something out entirely, try substituting something healthier. Honey makes a good alternative sweetener. My first Chop was to stop buying cappuccinos every morning. Not only did that give me 300 fewer calories a day, it also saved me about $60 a month. The key here is to go gradual. Losing weight fast isn't important. Losing weight permanently is. That said, some people like Tim Ferriss have done some amazing things with minimal-effort, fast weight loss</a>. Make food your fuel, not your crutch.</h1> A lot of us enjoy food. It's not just necessary to our survival, it's a social activity. For some, it's a coping mechanism. For others, a passion. Whatever your reason for enjoying food, if you're overweight, you enjoy it just a tad too much. Don't worry, though, because you can still enjoy food and lose weight. All you have to do is make food your fuel, not your crutch. Always eat after being physically active, not before. Eating before you move is like trying to fill a gas tank when it's already full. Some of you might say, “but I'm hungry and tired! I need to eat before I can get active!” First, if you're tired when you get up in the morning, then you definitely need to be more active physically and less active mentally. There has to be a balance there, as with all things. Starting your day with a jog can be inconvenient for some, so try different ways of getting active right away. If you have trouble waking up in the morning, get creative - replace caffeine with dancing. Yes, dancing. You'd be surprised how well dancing wakes you up. Just make sure you warm up those muscles before doing anything too strenuous or you risk injuring yourself, and that doesn't do anyone any good. If you're tired in the afternoon, take a nap. Unless you're starving - and by this I mean your stomach feels like it's stabbing itself to death with a spoon - try and avoid snacking. If you're really hungry, eat fruit. Fruit has natural sugar that will restore some of that lost energy. But always, always, always remember - food is fuel. Fuel must be used, not stored. Play hard.</h1> Instead of sitting down in front of the computer all night after a tough day of being on the computer at work, take up a sport. You heard me. Go to your city's Parks & Rec department and sign up for one of their clubs. If you're a little too heavy at the moment to do this without hurting yourself, then take up dancing. Dancing is easier to do at home and will burn just as many calories as sports. “But my guild in WoW will be angry! I can't just abandon them!” If your guild demands your constant presence every night, all night, then you should think long and hard about whether they have your best interests at heart. Do they care about you, or that AoE heal you just happen to have? There's nothing wrong with playing video games, just as long as they don't make up the totality of your nightly entertainment. On weekends, take up a project that involves working with your body. Something that involves lifting heavy weight - like, say, helping Habitat for Humanity build houses - can really work wonders. Doing something that ends with a finished product and a continual reminder of progress can do great things for your self-esteem and sense of accomplishment. If you're a code monkey who spends the weekends working on personal coding projects, try the same activities in Ramp up the activity for at home. Since you're in your own space, you can go really nuts. Work with your body AND your mind.</h1> If you're too heavy on the mental side of the physical-mental seesaw, you need to work harder on the physical side to balance out the equation. If it's winter and you live in the suburbs or in a small town, try shoveling your neighbors' sidewalks for them. It can be hard work, but it'll be rewarding in both your neighbors' reactions and in the physical results you get. Use that brain of yours to come up with new ways to get your body and your mind working in tandem. Martial arts is a great way to do this. Even yoga at home counts, though the social aspect of training with others can be a wonderful bonus. If you're concentrating hard on developing your body into something you can be proud of, you'll find that your mind will get healthier too. Your concentration, reaction time, creativity, and overall happiness will spike. That ADD you think you have? That's not ADD. It's just a side effect of not being in shape. Eat well, play hard, and work hard. Do this all the time, and you'll find yourself improving on a daily basis... without really having to think about it too much, or spending hundreds on a silly fad diet. Go do it. Liberty vs economy: How far can we go? 2007-11-26T00:00:00+00:00 Freedom. Economics. The two are interconnected on a basic level. Neither can exist while the other languishes. This is the basic philosophy of libertarianism or “classical liberalism,” as some put it. Supporters of the Libertarian Party and its relations vary in their interpretation of this philosophy. Some - in fact, from what I have seen, a good many - wish for total absence of government in the field of the economy. That seems to me to be fallacy. While the government should not have a strong hand in the economic affairs of its citizens, it should not have no hand at all. Inevitably the government will make mistakes, but that is the nature of human things - we make mistakes, and nothing can change that. The government's hand in the economy is necessary to protect against other human mistakes. While the wisdom of the majority is questionable at times, the process necessary to alter a machine on the scale of the federal government is slow. This allows for “testing periods” that might otherwise be rendered too short by an overzealous legislative process, as is the case in a direct democracy. The rule of the economy by large financial entities - such as corporations - can thus be tempered in its fickle nature by the relatively stable hand of the government. By the same token, though, we must be watchful that the government does not take too large an interest in the affairs of business. It is far too easy for large tariffs, taxes, or bureaucratic procedures to stifle innovation or competition which might otherwise be beneficial to the health of our nation's economy. When pressed for a vote on a particular example of this clash of liberty versus economy, one must always, without fail, closely examine as many of the major consequences as is feasible before making a determination. Voting on party lines or by rhetoric alone - be it libertarian, neoconservative, or liberal - is to invite disaster on an epic scale. Such, I fear, is the case with our current financial situation in the United States. I imagine that the collapse of the subprime market, the increase in the price of gasoline and its attendant effects, and the subsequent slowing of the American economy can be traced to poor decisions in the balancing act of liberty and economy. Sometimes, the liberty of business needs to take a back seat to governmental interference in the machine - and sometimes, the reverse is true. Second Life, MMORPGs, and conversation 2007-11-19T00:00:00+00:00 So, I reactivated my old Second Life account to do some building work for my dad at Baker College. He's started a virtual space for Baker College in Second Life called Baker Island. It's apparently a research exercise in the vein of human-computer interaction, and I've been tasked with building a café for all the virtually-hungry students that come calling. As I wandered around Second Life's many shops and freebie areas looking for resources to help build the café, I noticed an overwhelming number of people running around….but not talking. There was very little chatter in the public chat, and little chatter in the rather large groups I belong to. So, while there is a large number of users in these shopping areas - ostensibly the most populous regions in Second Life - there was almost no social interaction. Compare this to World of Warcraft, the largest Western MMORPG in terms of paying subscribers. Everywhere you go, there is inevitably a dearth of conversation. People form groups, raids, and arena teams…not to mention guilds. There is a constant loud presence in larger areas like Orgrimmar and the Crossroads. So why does Second Life have so little person-to-person interaction, while World of Warcraft (and other MMORPGs) has so much? I've noticed in my many gaming adventures online that the more of a sandbox a virtual world or game is, the less chatter there is. The more there is to do, the more likely it seems that people want to concentrate on doing things rather than talking. EVE: Online is an unusual example - plenty of conversation, but a sandbox environment. This one can be rationalized by pointing out that in EVE there are a large number of activities that are heavy on downtime - travel, for instance. Plenty of time to do nothing but wait and, if there are others around waiting, talk. On the other side of things, games like Team Fortress 2 that are filled with highly attention-intensive activities prevent chatter by engaging players constantly. While the number of possible activities doesn't match, say, Second Life, the sheer percentage of the players' brains that must be devoted to normal game activities tends to outweigh the conversational side. So, really, could you say that the amount of chatting going on is directly proportional to the boredom factor of the game? It's possible. It's very possible. Developers would do well to take note of this fact when designing online games. Stream of consciousness, part one: the Internet 2007-11-12T00:00:00+00:00 What follows is a completely unfiltered and unedited post on the subject of the nature of the Internet. This is the first part of an experiment I'm trying on what is popularly called “stream of consciousness” or “free writing.” Perhaps you will find something interesting and comment-worthy; perhaps not. Such is the nature of an experiment. A commentary on programming and the web. Java, JavaScript, AJAX, C++, .NET, ASP, all these things are just different languages that achieve roughly the same end. That end is to produce something or to explore something, two verbs with ubiquitous usage throughout history if only in concept. The web, or more accurately the internet, is a social medium. Unlike other forms of communication such as artwork or books, the internet is by and large two-way. This has given rise to the concept of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is something of a misnomer, though - the Web has always wanted to be a vehicle for large scale communication. This blog is an example of that. The earliest versions of the Internet incorporated email and bulletin board systems. Nothing revolutionary in that, either; it just meant faster communication. So then, combining the production of stuff - using programming languages - and the distribution of stuff (since distribution is a social action), the Web is nothing more than an extension of the real world. It's not particularly fascinating nor particularly original, but it allows us to interact with more people than might otherwise be possible. Something that, then, follows from this is that people will through communication on a larger scale acquire a larger number of experiences and points of view. Through this, more thought is generated, ultimately speeding up the discovery process. Interestingly, the Internet can overcome some traditional barriers of communication and thereby promote freedom. Certainly the Internet has been a godsend for the libertarian line of thought. It has also been highly useful to people like those from Myanmar. By the same token though, it has also enabled the more extreme edges of society to have a bigger voice. Disturbing behaviors and lines of thought are present on the Web where they would not be tolerated in more antiquated types of communication and literature, such as libraries. Imagine, if the speed and reach of the Internet is what has revolutionized the way society interacts….what would society be like if we were all telepathic? Live free. Live open source. 2007-11-06T00:00:00+00:00 In today's digital, global community, many of the old rules no longer apply. One of these is the way in which we get access to and use common everyday information and media. The old way was to do things like buy a CD at a music store, check out a book on writing resumes at the public library, or pay someone $60 an hour to teach you how to play guitar. The world has changed. Now, we download songs through GarageBand, read online resume writing guides found through Google, and learn guitar through instructional videos on YouTube. It's all available freely and instantly, and much of it is open source or public domain. We're in an age of open source living. And it doesn't have to be restricted to purely online things. Open source living is using products and services provided in a collaborative, unrestricted way. It's all about freedom of choice and freedom of creativity. Some examples of open source living: living in 1-month, open lease rental apartments</li> using computers with easily replaceable and customizable innards</li> having a jam session with a couple local musicians</li> choosing open-dialogue farm products over supermarket-bought ones</li> writing a book, then making it available to everyone using Creative Commons license - whether free or for profit</li> </ul> …and so on! Besides promoting the free exchange of ideas, open source living is also frequently cheaper and more fun than what I called “lock-in living.” For example, say you buy a voice for a season in an open-dialogue farm. The costs vary but are usually pretty cheap, since these farms are smaller and don't have to worry about specific crop quotas like the big farms do. Since you've got a voice, you can choose one or more products for them to grow, and you get a portion of everything they make for a season. Another example is choosing open-license music over licensed music. The artists gain prestige, exposure, and input - and sometimes event gigs - and the consumers enjoy themselves. While open source doesn't mean completely free, it usually provides greater freedom of choice. Things that go hand-in-hand with open source living are alternative medicine and alternative energy sources. Solar power and herbal medicines in particular are very “open source” in nature, since instructions and discussions regarding them are easily found online. A Google search for renewable energy will turn up scores of sites about alternative energy sources, and a search for holistic medicine will find you plenty of natural alternatives to the drugs pushed by pharmaceutical companies. Keep in mind, though, that not all medicines are created equal, and you should be very careful about what you do to your body! Partisanship is vile. What loss to this country... 2007-10-29T00:00:00+00:00 Seriously. I see Republicans railing on Democrats and Democrats railing on Republicans. The fighting and partisanship is completely at odds with what our forefathers intended. Benjamin Franklin must be turning in his grave at the extreme partisanship that many Americans today profess. I do not belong to a political party. Neither should you. This is not because I am Right and you are Wrong; rather, it is a simple matter of reason. Political parties inherently divide people into differing camps of rhetoric. This is self-evident. Also self-evident is that rhetoric snuffs out free thought and discussion. For this reason, every time I see someone who proudly declares that they belong to one party or other, I will shake my head sadly at the sorrow state of our once great nation. Powerful we have become, but divisive and hostile. So sad, and so unnecessary. Here are a few action items for you to help improve the political climate of our country: Print and distribute flyers promoting nonpartisan discussion of an issue important to you.</li> Start a discussion club at your local coffee house.</li> Unregister yourself as a member of the political party you presently belong to.</li> Pick one hot issue and start a blog about it. Discuss all possible repercussions it could have.</li> Invite your family and friends to switch parties for a single month and give themselves wholeheartedly to the opposing lines of thought. Don't vote during this experiment though!</li> Read one of Benjamin Franklin's works. There are many, and your local library will have at least one.</li> Start a newsletter for your town that promotes nonpartisan exploration of issues.</li> </ul> True open source - death of the individual or celebration of individualism? 2007-10-10T00:00:00+00:00 Many, many people speak glowingly of the benefits of open source software. A growing movement also seeks to make a great many other things “open source” - from the file-sharing freedom fighters at FreeCulture.Org</a> to the unusual licensing of the newest editions of Dungeons & Dragons</a>. Libertarianism and the concept of freely available content appears to be on the rise. However, is this necessarily a good thing? What of individualism and ego, concepts central to Western culture? Before the Internet and the World Wide Web enabled easy, free sharing of information and data, the individual had two primary levels of protection for his works. First was copyright law, which prior to 1976 and the introduction of Fair Use was a strong wall against unlicensed propagation of content. The other was the simple and undeniable fact that content could simply not be transmitted with any reasonable speed or transparency. The advent of Betamax and the subsequent legal turmoil</a> ended up making unlicensed (and also, licensed) distribution of content much easier. The recent case by Regal Cinemas against Jhannet Sejas</a> highlights a similar paranoia by an industry juggernaut targeted against a consumer and potential distributor. Ignoring the legal implications of the Regal v. Sejas case (that the possibility of infringement is equal to infringement in the eyes of the law), these kinds of events demonstrate growing pains inherent in the development of an entirely new socioeconomic system. Instead of the traditional producer-distributor-consumer model prevalent throughout the past few hundred years, we are now presented with a direct producer-consumer model - or, in some cases, a consumer-consumer model, whereby the individuality of the producer is apparently cut out of the picture. And that, my friends, is the crux of this post. Does the removal of the producer from the cycle and the distribution and modification by consumers of their works remove the individualism from the quotient? For my part, I say no. In fact, it seems to me that rather than removing individualism, it promotes it - albeit in a slightly different form. After all, the concept of inventor-as-hero is a fallacy, with most inventions actually developing from several different points at several different rates. Ely Whitney, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and similar inventors - while important - were not absolutely critical to the development of the technologies they became famous for. They simply became standard bearers. Similarly, the advent of open source society is not going to crush individualism. Rather, it will promote the free exchange of ideas and, thereby, accelerate the process at which these producer-heroes arise. Further, with the free flow of information, their fame will spread far more rapidly than did their cultural predecessors'. Linus Torvalds and Matt Mullenweg are prime examples of this. So lead on, brave open source pioneers, and may your paths be paved with cookies. Yours is the cause of freedom and of the future.

Ben Overmyer's Site

Iron Arachne's eighth anniversary

Sandwich Questionnaire

Linux as daily driver, three months in

Tech plans for January 2026

Looking Ahead to 2026

New Habit #1: Weekly Art</h3> Painting is increasingly part of my life, and so in 2026 I'm making it a focus. Every week, I will spend time working on either a painting or a drawing.</p>

New Habit #2: Daily Walks</h3> For fitness and exploration, I will expand my walking to be a daily activity. No set duration, just getting out and walking outside.</p>

Goal #1: Graduate University</h3> By the end of this year, I want to either have graduated university with my master's or at least applied to graduate. This is partially dependent on external factors, though, like whether the classes I need will be offered on a schedule that supports this.</p>

Goal #2: Stop Drinking Alcohol</h3> In several previous years I've attempted to reduce my alcohol consumption. This year, I plan to give it up entirely. This one will be easy to track.</p>

2025 Year in Review

Books read</h2> My boss Dwayne at Apiture introduced me to the novel series Dungeon Crawler Carl early in the year, and I adored it. I read everything that was available, and for Christmas I got the latest book in the series, so I intend to start on that early next year.</p>

In closing</h2> That's some of our adventures from 2025. I skipped mentioning a few things, but this post is already quite long enough. 2025 was a year of big changes. One thing is certain: no one will ever say 2025 was boring.</p>

Running Linux on my gaming PC again

Becoming a Student Again

Revisiting the Kingdoms of Stone and Fire

Migrated gemlog content into this site

Dune: Awakening - First Impressions

2025 Mid-Year Review

Awaiting Dune

Old and New Experiences

Small web and self-hosting in a world in crisis

Looking Ahead to 2025

2024 Year in Review

2024 Midyear Project Update

Looking Ahead to 2024

2023 Year in Review

Upgrading the star and planet generators on Iron Arachne

Retrospective on November 2023 wellness challenge

Wellness challenge halfway point

First week of wellness challenge

Wellness challenge for November 2023

State of my projects for October 2023

Currently

Old sites and art galleries

Adding a coding reference section

I got a tattoo!

Pivoting back to full-stack developer

Iron Arachne turns five

Looking Ahead to 2023

2022 Year in Review

Old School Baroque

Make the world small again

First Day in Dragonflight

Regarding social media, web presence, and dumpster fires

Return to Blizzard

Checking back in on Blizzard

Word generation in Iron Arachne

Iron Arachne Dungeon Generator and future plans

Finished Shadowbringers

No Man's Sky

Upgrading the Iron Arachne planet generator

April 2022 update on my RPG projects

Looking ahead to 2022

2021 Year in Review

The New HeroQuest

An Eventful Few Months

Blizzard is dead to me.

Hrenovuha, the horseradish liquor

Open Source North 2021

Old RPGs of Mine

Games in progress

Building things slowly, and with feeling

A new wishlist for Star Wars: Galaxies 2

Modern Movement</h2> The original SWG did not allow you to jump over obstacles. A sequel would need full range of motion. Taking a page from Conan: Exiles and allowing for stamina-limited strenuous movement like climbing and running would be a nice addition.</p>

Vehicular Combat</h2> We talked about this a lot on the SWG forums back in the day. Now, though, it's been done many times in other games. In my original wishlist, I mentioned that Planetside 2 had done this. I still think that's a good example of balancing infantry combat and vehicle combat.</p>

Switching to Zola

Another Forgotten Project: Mysteries of a Broken World

Updating Ingenium: Dusting off the manuscript

Looking Ahead to 2021

2020 Year in Review

Uvinji

Just More Color

On Forever Projects

Leading Up to Shadowlands

On Blogging Versus Social Media

On right action and American politics

Minimal CSS

Generating Worlds: Faking Realism

Predictions for 2030

New Habit #1: Weekly Art</h3>
Painting is increasingly part of my life, and so in 2026 I'm making it a focus. Every week, I will spend time working on either a painting or a drawing.</p>

New Habit #2: Daily Walks</h3>
For fitness and exploration, I will expand my walking to be a daily activity. No set duration, just getting out and walking outside.</p>

Goal #1: Graduate University</h3>
By the end of this year, I want to either have graduated university with my master's or at least applied to graduate. This is partially dependent on external factors, though, like whether the classes I need will be offered on a schedule that supports this.</p>

Goal #2: Stop Drinking Alcohol</h3>
In several previous years I've attempted to reduce my alcohol consumption. This year, I plan to give it up entirely. This one will be easy to track.</p>

In closing</h2>
That's some of our adventures from 2025. I skipped mentioning a few things, but this post is already quite long enough. 2025 was a year of big changes. One thing is certain: no one will ever say 2025 was boring.</p>

Modern Movement</h2>
The original SWG did not allow you to jump over obstacles. A sequel would need full range of motion. Taking a page from Conan: Exiles and allowing for stamina-limited strenuous movement like climbing and running would be a nice addition.</p>

Vehicular Combat</h2>
We talked about this a lot on the SWG forums back in the day. Now, though, it's been done many times in other games. In my original wishlist, I mentioned that Planetside 2 had done this. I still think that's a good example of balancing infantry combat and vehicle combat.</p>