Category: Random Thoughts

Lessons Learned from #Dungeon23

It’s 126 days into #Dungeon23, and I’ve stuck with it so far. Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely had some gaps in there where I missed days or worked to fill in those gaps from before. Nevertheless, I’ve stuck with it so far, and it’s been quite a rewarding challenge.

A main thing that I’ve really picked up from it is to be less precious with what I produce. I’ve always implicitly wanted to produce something that I felt proud of. Years back, I had a print hanging of an image I’ve long since lost—it spoke of how people who produce art tend to be disappointed by what they produce and suggested that happens because we have a clear vision of what we want and what looks good but often just lack the physical skills to produce that. It suggested to focus on the good taste rather than the outcome as a means of overcoming that. That’s something I’ve started to understand better now with #dungeon23: I just don’t have the time to make everything look solid or to write excellent prompt for every room—there’s just no time for that! As a side-effect, I’ve become more accepting of all the ink smudges, bad lines, and little cover-ups that have come with this quick drafting challenge. It feels great.

As a corollary to the previous, I’ve also noticed that creativity is definitely something that can be trained. Now, having done about four months of (mostly) daily drawing, I notice that I can more quickly make decisions about my drawings. This morning, I just glanced at the last room of this week and immediately decided it was a storeroom that had basic materials and supplies, that there’d be barrels and crates, and a table for sorting. Being less precious with what I want to achieve meant I doubted less and just put pen to paper and worked as I went. As a result, there’s something on paper rather than a lot of notes.

Lastly, I’ve found how to spark my creativity. As I knew before starting #dungeon23, I’m terrible at a blank page. I’ve tried various methods know of setting up a week’s dungeon: doing nothing and just drawing day-to-day; using ChatGPT as a prompt for writing; and using various prompting tools from blogs, books, and RPG systems. I’ve found that the latter works well for me. The Tome of Adventure Design has been particularly helpful by offering as many or as few prompts as I may need to get going. Once I have those first couple of ideas going, my mind starts going.

The biggest benefit from this is that I’ve seen these tendencies now translate to other parts of my life as well. With 3D printing, I more quickly move to printing a prototype now. In organizing my desk, I just do something that works for now (I can always adjust later). In my note-taking, I’m less precious as well: I stopped caring if I use multiple pens on a page or smudge my writing, as long as the note is down.

All-in-all, I can really recommend taking part in a challenge like this: it’s been tough but that has come with some valuable lessons.

Displaying Images on the Blog

Since I’ve been making so many maps lately, the blog has shifted a bit to a much more visual medium. Originally, the images I put on here were just photos to illustrate electronics projects. Now, though, the images themselves at times are the center stage.

The format that I have for images right now keeps them far too small, though, to nicely host and display something as intricate as a solid map. I’ll have to work on the blog and figure out if I can adjust those settings (and figure out how much hosting space I have, because these images can get big quite quickly!).

If you have any ideas or advice, I’d love to hear it.

Burning France: Additional Thoughts

As I’ve been reading more about running different types of Burning Wheel games, I’ve come to some realizations about my Burning France setup that I should have done differently, in retrospect. In particular, reading about Burning Thac0, an attempt to model old-school D&D with Burning Wheel, was quite an eye-opener for me. I think it’s the meta-system discussion that really highlights what is specific about the system itself, and brought some ideas to the fore.

The first thing that I realized I should have done differently, in retrospect, is work more on the specific situation in Session 0. The start as of Burning France as of now is based just after interesting things happened (the burgeouisie has just overthrown the feudal opressors); however, that leaves us with a big open questionmark as to what should happen next. Now, I had an overall idea lying around, where the characters were Dogs in the Vineyard-style justices being sent out to troubleshoot problems in this nascent political structure, but that’s more the context rather than the immediate situation.

My second realization flows directly from the first, in that I should have focused more on what the individual characters are here for. Now, we’ve agreed that they’ve somehow have been involved in the uprising to the degree that they’ve been selected to do this itinerant justice thing but we hadn’t explored much of the why and how. I realize that what I should have done is ask all the players why their characters bothered to join the uprising and what they are intending to get out of it from hereon out. Moreover, the largest problem, I realize, is that we didn’t get to creating our beliefs together as a group at the same time.

That last issue, I realize now, is the largest one that ties the first two together. Making beliefs together at the same time should have been the moment for all four of us to brainstorm what game we were going to play. The players should have written their beliefs, I should have worked with them to see how they intertwine, and together we would have made the initial story out of this. Ideally, we should have played out a single quick scene just after the first creation of beliefs, and then immediately after adjusted beliefs again to create a direction.

It’s funny, we haven’t even played our first session yet, and already I’m learning how to do better.

Intercultural Marriages and Language

Today, I was browsing potential tools for our garden, as we never really owned our own. The last garden we tended for a few years was back in our apartment in Groningen, and most of the tools we had had been left to us by the previous owner of that garden (it was an allotment garden), and we didn’t feel right taking the tools with us when we left, so we handed it to the next owners, much as they were left to us. So, we’re starting back from scratch, and working out the investment needed to get our starting toolset.

When researching this, I ran into an odd situation that I’d heard discussed frequently but hadn’t experienced myself yet: actually forgetting parts of my native language. You see, Tracy and I speak English exclusively at home. My workplace is an international environment, so we mainly speak English with each other. Even the last week, I was in a meeting with a group of Dutch native speakers where we suddenly realized we’d been speaking English with each other for the past twenty minutes. Before that, my degrees were on English-language literature taught in English. So, even though I was born and raised in the Netherlands and have lived here all my life, over the past twenty-five years or so I’ve predominantly used English.

As a result of all of this, I know that my Dutch isn’t as good as my English. I have a more limited range of expression, and my grammar and pronunciation is off enough that I am frequently asked where I’m really from. Today, as I was looking for basic gardening tools, it was easy to look for spades and shovels, I had to think a bit about what the Dutch word for “trowel” was, but that didn’t phase me too much (it’s not a word I encounter particularly often), but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what the Dutch for “watering can” was. I literally had to go to a translation website to translate the English and find the Dutch word again.

I think I may need to use Dutch a little more again.

Headphones Broken and Repaired Once More

Yesterday, tragedy struck in the form of an excited kitty hunting for a sky raisin (known as “flies” to non-cat owners). Little Geralt was so excitedly jumping from floor to comfy chair to window that he slighly missed the windowsill and in his frantic scramling he discovered my headphones where not the lifeline he was looking for. As a result, they got dashed to the floor like a 16th century ship to a rocky shore and cleft in twain. I am bereft of headphones. I’d replaced the pads, the cables, and even the drivers on this little ship of Theseus, but this time it’s one of the plastic mechanical components. Audio-Technica is not in the habit of providing many replacement components, and the process of even getting to a request form for what they do offer is troublesome.

Fortunately, the break point was not a pressure point as I initially suspected it was. Most headphones clamp slightly on your head to stay on properly, and I had assumed that the breakpoint, being so near the hinge, would experience some forces from that. Fortunately, some liberal application of a glue gun had the section set quite nicely, and I’m now using the headphones once more!

Support the Right to Repair.

The More You Make, the More You End Up Making

Creativity has always been interesting to me, because I don’t see myself as a creative person at all. In building games, I always tended towards making the most efficient rather than the most beautiful structures. Professionally, my greatest strength is reducing the complexity of problems to more solveable issues and helping to guide others to move towards solving them. Artistically, I’ve never been able to do much at all, though I’ve tried calligraphy, playing the violin, drawing, and so on. Language seems to be my best creative skill, though not for fiction but rather for communicating clearly. All in all, I’d describe myself as quite uncreative.

One of my main issues would always be the difficulty of thinking of new ideas out of nowhere. It’s so impressive to me how somebody could look at a blank canvas and just decide what to do there. However, now with electronics, it took me just the one big project to learn the basics of electronics, and I’m starting to get more ideas. I’d run into tiny inconveniences and thought: surely, I can spend way more time solving this miniscule issue than I’d gain by just working through it? And so projects were born. Currently, I have the following ideas clunking around, with no specific timeline for when I’ll actually be working on them:

Hamstercage Lights

My current main project is to install RGB lights in all three levels of our hamstercage build. It’d both simulate a circadian rhythm for whenever we get our new hamster, and would have a manual override for when we need light. My main posts on electronics are all about this, so there’s not much new to report there.

Countdown Timer

This was inspired by the Pomodoro timer, as it’s somewhat related but for a completely different purpose. The Pomodoro timer just counts down in small half-hourish increments, to organize working time and to help remind me to take regular breaks. The Countdown Timer was born because there’d be several moments where Tracy and I are working towards a larger goal with a set deadline, such as when we originally moved over here; conversely, there’s also smaller deadlines, like deciding how much time we have until our groceries get delivered. Again, why use just a mobile phone timer when you can massively overengineer a large LED display or 7-Seg display and program it to display days, hours, minutes, and seconds?

Binary, Hexadecimal, Decimal Converter

While I was programming the Pomodoro Timer in C rather than Arduino, I started using binary and hexadecimal numbers more often to directly address memory. In particular, I’d want to set a whole register to specific bits in one go, and using hexadecimal just seems cleaner to me for some reason. What I’d end up doing is going through a datasheet, checking all the right pins for an 8-bit register, and then using a converter online to figure out what the hexademical is for that binary number. Why accept anybody else’s very convenient solution to a self-created problem when I can make it entirely more complex by spending more time? I could just make a small device that shows the same number in decimal, binary, and hexadecimal, and have several knobs or buttons so that I could change each number and the others would automatically change with it.

Bonus: Taglines For the Blog

As I was writing this, I just kept coming up with additional taglines for the blog (huh, additional task: figure out if I can have rotating taglines). Here’s a selection of my favorites:

  • Answering questions nobody asked;
  • Solving problems I created myself;
  • Solving problems nobody has;
  • Creating problems, then solving them by creating two new problems;
  • Breaking things by fixing them;
  • Fixing things by breaking them;
  • Finding out things nobody cares about;
  • Championing pointless causes;
  • Finding a problem to every solution;
  • Putting the “me” in “meaningless”.

Links on the Blog

WordPress can be somewhat obtuse at times. Or, at the least, its interface is opaque, to me. All I’m trying to do is to add a link to the right-hand menu to my GitHub page, so I can store project files on there without having to do that directly on the blog. If I were to do it on the blog, I’d have to edit some files to allow multiple types of uploads to the blog, including C-code. Considering I don’t fully know what kind of weaknesses that opens up, I’d much rather have GitHub be a place where I make these things public rather than on this server. However, despite clicking back and forth through the settings, I haven’t yet found a place to just easily add a link to the sidebar. Well, more searching online it is!

A little bit of experience

When I started this blog, I mainly did it as an outlet for my thoughts. I wanted to have a place to put my experiences, and since I’d started moving away from most social media, this was still a good place to send things out that weren’t specifically targeted at somebody (come to think of it, I do seem to write to somebody, even if that is an abstract idea of a somebody). However, when I posted about the last revision of the pomodoro timer yesterday, I started scrolling back to see what my earliest posts about it. What an experience to see the progress, not just in the design but also just in my ability to build things! Yesterday, I had the satisfaction of seeing a neatly completed product but, today, I have the joy of seeing the advancement in my own skills. A lovely little benefit to blogging.

In any case: have a look at the before-and-after yourself:

  • The underside of a breadboard, showing point-to-point wiring, with green wires going to an ISP interface
Gallery 1: The first version of the Pomodoro timer

Just compare that to the second revision:

Gallery 2: The revised version of the Pomodoro timer

And to think there’s only really a few months between these versions!

Calculators Have Come a Long Way

I recently purchased a Casio FX-82MS for future use in the exam for the Dutch amateur radio licensing (technically not a license, but let’s just use that word for the ease of writing). The exam involves some electronics calculations, and while most seem easy enough to do without a calculator (they all tend to be tidy powers of numbers, or neat fractions), it still seems like a good idea to have a tool around in case you need it.

I have to say, calculators have come such a long way even since when I was a kid. I remember in elementary school we had a relatively basic calculator that could do most average arithmetic that you needed. Near the end of high school, the TI-83 was released, which we needed for the advanced mathematics classes. It was mindblowing to have a calculator that could make graphs for you. Ironically, though, given the types of maths we did, it was usually more convenient to just visually verify what we already saw in the equations.

The FX-82MS now just has so many simple features that are small quality of life changes. It’s so much more conventient to work with fractions on this thing than it used to be. There’s more memory scrolling buttons than I’m used to, and an easier menu interface to change some basic settings, and so on. It seems like the advances have mainly been in UI, but what wonderful advances they are.

Edit: Of course, after having bought this one, I discover that there is an even cooler calculator on offer: the Casio FX-991EX, that even has built-in converter functions for binary, decimal, and hexadecimal. D’Oh!

Personal and Collective Responsibility

Yesterday was King’s Day in the Netherlands: a collectivity holiday on the day of the king’s birthday. Aside from the fact that it’s bizarre that we still have a monarchy (why on earth do the royal family just get our tax money? Any role they fill should just be a publicly elected offic, but anyway), it was also another bizarre display of the Dutch COVID-19 response. So very few people here follow COVID-19 measures. I regularly get questions from my colleagues along the lines of “Wow, you even wear your mask outside?” – yes, that’s right, hardly anybody here wears a mask outside.

There are so many bits of misinformation that I hear around here. Children cannot get COVID-19; masks outside are unnecessary, because the open air will spread out the virus; masks might be harmful to your lungs, and so on. Worse still are the people who recognize that COVID-19 is an actual risk but seem to lack the ethics to protect others. Someone told me: “You know, you don’t have to wear your mask here, it’s okay.” Of course I don’t have to wear a facemask. None of these regulations are full-on laws, nor do the police seem to reinforce what few measures there are. I choose to wear a facemask to protect others.

The past year has really highlighted a part of Dutch culture that I don’t appreciate: its lack of collective responsibility. When the people I speak with make light of the risk they run themselves, on the face of it that seems like personal freedom. If they don’t see much risk in getting COVID-19, then they can choose to run the risk themselves. However, even a brief analysis of the idea shows that the main problem of this virus is how easily it transmits from one person to the next. So, sure, you can take a personal risk if you want but it turns into a collective risk.

Clearly, the examples I can list are all anecdotal. Maybe I just know many people whose ethics differ from mine – a highly likely scenario. However, this is a scenario that seems to be national. Hardly any Dutch person wears masks unless they are required to do so, yet the government just will not make it mandatory except for stores. Yesterday, during King’s Day, throughout the day I saw groups of drunken partiers meet up with larger groups, and hugs were exchanged among all as they shouted happily. As of today, the government is opening up bars and shops for regular business again, despite multiple hospitals warning that their intensive care units are reaching their newly-expanded capacity once again. The government’s own crisis advisory team has advised against easing restrictions.

Some of the public discourse that right-wing parties are trying to get going is that the real problem lies with the EU distribution schemes for vaccines: it’s because the EU ends up exporting the vaccine to many countries that the Netherlands doesn’t have enough vaccines, so we’re in this situation. For one, it completely ignores the repeated misinformation that these parties spread (one of the parties even organized its own anti-mask rally), but it also ignores the clear data that multiple other countries in the EU are doing much, much better than the Netherlands. Now, data is always tricky to interpret. Some journalists or Twitter users are indeed overrepresenting how poorly the Netherlands is doing in some measures, and as well the Netherlands is improving slightly, but that sidesteps the reality of the matter: we could have been in a far better situations had citizens responded better.

This weighs heavily on my mind. There are large issues that need tackling. We need to dismantle the capitalist system, and we need to prevent climate change at all costs. However, that takes collective action where individuals engage with the large, abstract structures responsible for our suffering. It takes pretty much exactly the type of behavior it would have taken to alleviate the pressures of COVID-19. At times, I feel downtrodden by the view outside my window, and the careless disregard of so many fellow citizens out there.

Every now and then there’s that glimmer of hope, though. The people who do move aside to make room for passers-by. The people who are wearing masks wherever they go. The people who seriously talk about what to do about the virus. The people who talk about the benefits of working from home, and in what ways they’d like work to change once the pandemic is over. There’s not many of us, but I just hope there’s enough.