works of wanderlust

Category: technology & toys

I am a nerd by nature and a geek by trade, and I have a few things to say about all kinds of technology from enterprise platforms to playful games.

  • game con-spiration

    I’ve been a lazy game developer lately. 

    A couple months ago I was proudly telling people how much progress I was making on Pleck’s Mart. Heck I was logging at least—at least—a couple hours every day adding to the code base and debugging the game and making art and then sitting at the cafe writing story for the damn thing.

    I also wrote a couple months back about how I made some silly choices around leaning into a dead-end part time job that was supposed to round the rough edges off my days but instead wrapped me up into grocery store drama and derailed a bunch of personal motivation in my off-hours, plentiful tho they were.

    In short tho, I haven’t been coding for about two months now.

    Sadly. Realistically. Frustratingly. 

    There is a mental wall in the way, if I’m being honest, because (a) I was just coming up on a challenging bit of code, (b) a new version of the engine came out in the intervening months, and (c) it’s kinda sorta summer and (d) I should be spit-polishing my resume and not making video games.

    But then I went to Game Con this weekend.

    A couple things happened, very passively to be honest, but they happened at Game Con nonetheless.

    First, I got to wander around and talk—actually chat with and talk to—other indie game developers. That’s big. There’s a hundred reasons to go to a convention linked to your hobby, but seriously on or close to the top of that list of reasons should be the simple fact that hanging out with likeminded individuals is inspiring for another long list of reasons. There is a community. There are organizations boosting these efforts… locally. People have trod this path before us and are coming up the path behind us, and that means something.

    Second, I got to finally have a chat with Chris. We’ve been friends for over twenty years now, hung out countless times, vacationed together, stood atop a mountain peak in the sun, and rung in the new years nearly every year of that twenty. He is a legit developer. I mean, he professionally codes for a living, has a business, does community building, and that list goes on. And I sheepishly gave him access to my github repo. We finally got to chat, hanging out in the halls of Game Con, playing some board games and poking at the demo booths, and he wants to help with Pleck’s Mart. What’s our next step, he asked.

    So, it’s monday morning after the gamer inspiration weekend and I’m looking down the day at a question of not if I go down into the basement today to write some code… but when.

    What is the next step?

    As ever, it’s one problem, one line, one version at a time. And if nothing else, looking for that lost momentum.

  • game: civilization seven

    Would you say that I got this game for free?

    I mean, I didn’t pay for it. I ordered it using points. AirMiles(TM). So it wasn’t strictly free because, I mean, those points have a kind of real and tangible value, but they are not money in the sense that I could buy anything but whatever random crap is listed on their catalog on any given day. I didn’t pay for the game, I guess is what I’m saying, and using points made it feel like something I got for free (even though I didn’t really, I suppose) and I mention it because I’m still very torn on how I feel about this latest insallment in the Civilization series inasmuch as I’m feeling pretty smug about not having spent real cash on the game.

    I’ve been playing Civilization VII.

    And shortly before that I had been playing Civilization 6, which was both a mature game which had been tweaked and refined and bug-squashed long since, and which I picked up up for literally a few bucks on a big digital sale lowering the stakes dramatically for what turned out to be an excellent purchase and investment of my gaming time.

    And? Before that I’ve played every other installment of this game going back to the original in the 90s. 

    All this is just me setting the stage and suggesting my bonafides when it comes to a player of this particular game series and type.

    If you’ve never played a “Civ” game let me elaborate as best as I can bring it down: It’s like a big game of Risk on a huge interactive video game map of a randomly generated world—except rather than just rolling dice and moving armies you need to build the cities and grow the economies to raise and support those armies, ensure that they have resources to fight, negotiate diplomacy with other societies, fend off natural disasters, counter religious uprisings, research and build new technologies and so on and on and on into a kind of complexity that is hard to explain in a single paragraph.

    Look up 4X games which stands for eXplore, eXpland, eXploit, and eXterminate, and which in a vague sort of way truly summarizes the core of the gameplay.

    I play Civilization and have played it for pretty much my entire adult gaming life as a kind of slow, serious, strategic gamer’s pursuit. Civilization is like the chess of the video game world: that is to say a lot of people take it serious as f. 

    So it is a big deal when a new installment ships. Civilization VII shipped just a few months ago in early 2025 and generally—well—people hate it, frankly.

    Personally I’m torn.

    Here’s the thing about that. I play it with seriousness, but I am not serious about the game. I just dabble in seriousness, and in saying that my stake in the game is not about the fine-tuned mechanics of a elaborate and complex simulator leveraging the raw strategy of a well-honed plan of tactical gamers pursuit vibes. I’m just playing to go with the flow. I don’t just click and click and click some more. I think about my moves, but I guess what I’m trying to say is that on a scale of hard-core Civ-ness, I’m like a 4 out of 10.

    I’ve played three games of Civilization VII since I got it for not-exactly-free from my reward points, such a middle aged dad thing to do by the way, ordering video games on a physical disc using your airline rewards, and three games in I’m like… hmm… uh… yeah. It’s… okay. I mean, I like the innovative thinking. I like that game companies are trying new things. I like that this is more than just an updated graphics engine smeared over the old engine. It is a new approach, and that is a awesome and we should all celebrate risk taken in the name of advancing new ideas and updates.

    But there is a hitch—and an itch I can’t quite scratch.

    The game is—I dunno—bumbling. 

    There is just something about it that I haven’t been able to put my finger on. It’s as if the game is simultaneously too complex for its own good and yet insufficiently rigourous in allowing the player to control all that complexity. There is stuff that happens, automatically, behind the curtain, out of sight, that I just simply don’t understand as I’m playing. And I write this not as a good veil-of-war kind of sense where such secrecy promotes strategic play: I say in the sense of it sometimes feels, just feels, like the game is playing itself and that I am reduced to little more than button mashing the turn meter forward. It just bumbles along, tap, tap, tap, bumble, tap, tap, tap, bumble—and I’m left thinking, like, am I playing this or watching it play?  And that is the type of game that leaves you with a kind of vague emptiness when you’ve progressed far enough along.

    It likely doesn’t help that I’m playing this on Playstation, to be honest. On a desktop I assume I’d do more mouse-hovering and poking around the UI to see what I was missing, read the help tips, or something. So is it a UI issue or a game issue or a hand-holding issue or—I don’t even know what is bugging me. But as it stands, I got the PS5 version with points not the other one, so that’s what I have been playing.

    Or should I say watching?

    And even though I write all this I still want it to be good. Maybe I write all this because I want it to be good. This is a beloved franchise. This is a piece of my gaming persona.  This is my chess. 

    I’m just torn on if I like it or not—and actually a little bit glad I didn’t really pay for it, either.

  • pi dayrectory

    Oh, remember back in 2023 when my attempt to run a web server from a raspberry pi computer in my basement got hacked and some turd of a botscam hacker tried to hold my data hostage for a few thousands of dollars in bitcoin?

    Yeah, but I do.

    I tell people that there was nothing irreplacable enough on that little web server that I would ever have paid to unscramble the encrypted data for cash, and that’s true. But a year prior I did take the entire contents of my web comic website and migrate it over to that little server and damned if I know where the original copy went.

    So the website I had built to host my little web comic project, This is Pi Day, was suddenly gone.

    Fret not, dear reader, the art and files for those comics were triply backed up on three different computers, but damned if it wasn’t a pain in the ass that I would need to start from scratch on the website to share them again, ever.

    But fast forward right back here to 2025.

    My whole recent effort to consolidate my web properties under a single central domain has me leaning into the notion that it might be time to tackle that pain head on. I recently incorporated myself as a little consulting business and needed to think about how to build a brand for myself off that little four letter domain name I had named my new corporation after. Long story short, I landed on the idea of a multi-site wordpress installation to host the corporate website while keeping all the other hanging-off’rs alive and well. And still-long story short-ish, it wasn’t a lot of extra effort to hang yet another little subdomain off that installation upon which the effort to rebuild This is Pi Day could be foisted.

    I started work on that this week.

    I mean, heck, it won’t be fast or easy. There is something like two-hundred plus cartoon strips that all need to be uploaded and categorized and published. I spent an hour on it this morning and got something like fifteen of them up. It’s gonna take some weeks… buuuuut it is started.

    In the coming weeks expect to see piday.ca which points to piday.8r4d.com come back to life and fill up with all those old comic strips.

    Moral of the story? Shit happens. Back up your work. And if you get knocked down get right back up again, even if that takes a year or two.

    Or whatever. Go check out the comics. They were actually kinda clever if I do say so myself, and who knows what I’ll resurrect from the archives next.

  • technical shuffle

    For a guy who claims to be a strategic thinker and a web guru I sure did my own stuff in the wrong order.

    To be fair on myself this whole incorporating thing snuck up on me from around a corner and I’ve been adapting and reacting as best I can. And yesterday I found myself doing a whole pile of digital reorganizing as a result.

    I wanted to use this domain.

    Specifically, a while back I made 8r4d.com into my primary domain name. That is to say, while I own and manage about six domains at any given time, this one has been following me solidly through most of my career. When I opted to name my corporation along the same vein, I found myself needing to get some kind of corporate presence onto the top of it all.

    Problem is, I’ve been using it for other things.

    This blog, for one.  Plus I’ve got a whole load of homebrew projects running on various subdirectories and such. Also, the last thing I want is eight different wordpress installs running on the same server.

    My solution was a shuffle. I installed a fresh copy of wordpress at the top of everything, mucked around with my htaccess file to ensure the minimum amount of stuff broke, turned that same wordpress install into a multisite mode cms, migrated at least three of my websites into the new install as sub-sites (including this one which is running on a whole new installation today than it was when you read that post yesterday) and relinked up everything to seem pretty seamless. 

    I’m sure I’ll run into something quirky, but as it stands I now have a pretty robust setup to manage a corporate presence at the root of this domain and still keep all my little quirky hobby code running and managed.

    Y’know. In case you were wondering.

  • obscurity by design

    Blogs tend to get looped in with a broader definition of “social media” –and that is fair, to a point–but there is a much more modern attitude around social media fatigue and frustration to which that inclusion I may be less inclined to agree.

    I am going to write something that may make your eyes roll into the back of your head: I deleted Facebook. Seriously. But here’s the part where you can stop thinking of it as performative righteousness: I deleted Facebook over five years ago and have not looked back. People send me links and I ignore them. I am told someone sent me a message that I didn’t respond to there, and I say I have not logged in in years. Folks suggest I should check the online marketplace or visit their community page or whatever, whatever, whatever, and I shrug and tell them the same as I just wrote for you above: I deleted Facebook.

    This is a complex topic, social media.

    Our whole world seems to revolve around a handful of little corporate micro-blogging platforms that steamroll through the barriers to entry but, like a set of tire spikes at the entrance, create a troublesome blockade to escape again.

    So then that’s the thing. A lot of people “perform” the little notion that they have escaped social media apps, but like abandoning your car and walking out of a lot with tire spikes at the gate, you haven’t really deleted Facebook if your account is still there. You haven’t left Twitter if you could log back in and pick back up on whim. You haven’t escaped the doomscroll of Tiktok if you offload the app from your phone.

    I started blogging in 2001 and created my own little platform upon which I heaped countless hours of effort to write and post and share and converse. All of this was before the apps we know as social media were even twinkles in their tech bro’s thirsty eyes. And I write about it now because I am walking a fine line between grumpy old man yells at cloud (services) and clear-eyed neo-luddite looks at a world consumed by unidirectional experiences driven by inhuman algorithms that are literally destroying our society–and every day I feel like I need to say something.

    So, when I write that blogs tend to unfairly get looped in with social media what I mean to tell you is that sure, blogs are a kind of spiritual older sibling to the likes of Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, but maybe more of an older step-sibling, born of a different first marriage between society and technology, built and nurtured in a more innocent time, still problematic and ripe for potentially harmful communication, but far less wild and spoilt by their parents bitter fighting. Blogs are related, but they shouldn’t just be looped in with the other kids.

    I tend to fumble over to analogy when I am stabbing around for my point.

    I deleted Facebook but I re-invigorated my blogging because there is something deeply toxic that is being nurtured on those social media platforms that is a little more under control on a private blogging site.

    I suppose we could deconstruct this a little more technologically.

    What is a blog?

    I have built so many now that I take it for granted, but essentially your modern blog, like this very one you are reading, is a giant database of text and images stored on a web server. I log into a piece of blogging software, in my case WordPress, which opens up into a friendly screen that invites me to do all sorts of things: manage my design, check the health of the site itself, change my account or add another user, and probably most importantly add or edit content. I can open a little word processor, type and type and type, upload images, add links and tags and a hundred other little design flourishes. And the big database behind that system keeps track of what I made, stamps a date on it, and let’s me push a publish button that sets that post I made to be visible to the public. All of that means that when you load up my blog, in a fraction of the second the blogging software goes into that database and shows you a reverse chronological list of everything I have created and made public. In my case that means you get a reverse chronological listing of (as of right now) a couple dozen long-winded, text-heavy personal essays with a smattering of photos and images. All of that is stored in a database I control, on a server that I pay for access to use, and no one but me–absolutely no one else–has any control over what appears here so long as I don’t break the rules of the hosting company or the laws of the land.

    You may be thinking that this doesn’t sound too different from, say, Facebook and you’d be right… to a degree.

    What is a social media app, then?

    Well, a lot of that stuff about databases and content uploading and profile management is actually pretty similar to a blog. You log into a piece of software that lets you write something, add pictures or video or links, drop in some hashtags, and press the equivalent of a publish button. But that’s about where the similarities start to diverge. This will be a simplification because (a) every platform is a little different and (b) a lot of this stuff is hidden, secret and proprietary to those companies. But just like me, those companies are managing a piece of software on a piece of technology infrastructure, it is simply a matter of scale. And just like what happens when you visit this site and the database and software work together to build you something to read and view and interact with, those platforms do the same. But where mine is simple and reverse chronological, those platforms have introduced something that we so often hear referred to as The Algorithm. All this means is that rather than a tidy ordered list of the stuff people post fairly, simply, democratically laid out like how I do in my blog, countless factors–from what the company wants you to see to what they think will keep you reading to what they think you might click on to buy, and the list goes on–weight into the order in which the software generates something for you to look at. And that’s it. That’s the difference… and in many ways it’s all the difference in the world.

    You will not be surprised to learn that not that many people read this website. I don’t have much visibility or profile on this big wide internet now dominated by a handful of massive corporate interests. Almost one hundred percent of the users of the internet (statistically speaking, of course) feed their time and energy scrolling through outputs of the software created and curated by Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Tiktok. And you go on these sites, you are entertained (by design) and you never leave… but you roll your eyes at the kinds of people who try to step away. And like trying to drive backwards through the tire spikes, most who try are unsuccessful.

    And then we yell at each other, on those very sites, trying to understand why we feel the way we do about them. Why do we feel empty. Why do we get enraged so easily. Why do we feel drained and broken and mentally bloated from the experience.

    I’m not going to sit here and write that there is any one reason, but I would contend that it comes down to something in the difference between a blog and Facebook feed… in which at the same time I would contend there is simultaneously very little difference, yet all the difference in the world.

    Whenever someone loops an effort for someone, anyone, to maintain a blog into the social media categorization that talks about the decline of the internet, whenever I hear that, I shudder. And I go write a post about it that you may never read, but which will be right here waiting for you in the exact spot where I put it, not promoted by an algorithm with an agenda, nor hidden by anything but my own obscurity.