Posts

I’ve been spending some time recently thinking about what I want to focus on in my career as an very average software developer. I do not want to just be a code monkey that can be replaced by AI in about 3 months’ time. Nor do I want to be an architect that just talks about code and has no real involvement in the process. My current skillset, such as it is, consists of C#, .NET, Python, SQL, and JavaScript. ...

A young woman is forced to undergo experimental treatments in an attempt to make her appear “normal.” This episode opens with a shot of a lady laying in a hospital bed with comically large bandages covering her entire head. She talks with the nurse about what the day was like, as she is obviously unable to see anything, and when can the doctors take her bandages off. The nurse tells her that the doctors are still trying to work out how to “fix her face”. The lady says that her face must look pretty bad and that she never really wanted to be beautiful1. ...

A man on a walking trip of post-World War I Europe gets caught in a storm. He comes across a remote monastery with a mysterious prisoner. The episode starts off without Rod’s usual exposition dump, and instead the protagonist is telling us about some crazy shit he has experienced years ago. INTENSE STARING. JAUNTY CAMERA ANGLES. ALTERNATIVE EXPOSITION DUMP. He was on a walking tour of some WW1 beaches and got lost in a massive storm. Lucky for him he saw some light emanating from a nearby building… ...

Avid readers of this blog will know that I bought Star Trek Frontiers this year as an alternative to the rather expensive Mage Knight. I have managed to learn the rules and even play several games, winning many1. The biggest obstacle to overcome was actually staying up late enough to complete the game. Frequently, that is the main challenge in board gaming; putting your children to bed, tidying up the house, setting up the game, and spending those remaining eight minutes hunting down borg cubes before bed. ...

Some of the previous posts were ones I had started and then abandoned after a few words, planning to finish them off, but actually never coming back to them. However that doesn’t mean I gave up with the whole tabletop gaming thing. I have been spending far too much money on them recently and have acquired several new ones. I bought: Expeditions: Gears of Corruption Sleeping Gods Marvel Champions Obsession Dune: Imperium1 The Great Out of these games, excluding Gears of Corruption2, the absolute best game has got to be Marvel Champions by far. This game is so much fun to play, with a wide range of different cards, aspects, heroes, villains, schemes. It’s pretty great, and can be played solo, two (or three?) handed, or with an actual human3. ...

I’ve been looking into some good solo tabletop games that I can get into and spend an entire evening on. I gave up trying to find other people to play with, and coercing family members doesn’t work very well, so games that can be played by myself are what I am after. I actually have a decent amount that I already own1: Scythe Expeditions Arkham Horror: LCG Star Trek: Frontiers Gloomhaven Wingspan Spirit Island And an ever-growing list of ones I want to own, including expansions: ...

At work, as part of the project I’m on, I’ve been working with a third-party open-source application for the last few months. It is a Python application that requires customising in order to fit the way it needs to work. Most of the functionality stays the same, except in cases where that functionality needs to be extended or modified to fit with the needs of the application I am working on. ...

No longer interested in drawing. I still like the idea of being able to draw, but with the amount of time I would have to put into learning how to draw properly and the practice required to improve is too much for me. Guess I need to look into selling most of those books from the previous post. I’ve been thinking a bit more about Retrograde Online. Specifically whether I can actually be bothered. There are so many mobile games out there that do my ideas way better and with graphics. But then that was not the point of it, was it? It was a project to keep me occupied, to learn some more React, and to have ownership of something that others’ could play. Maybe I will continue with it, but I need a re-think about what I am trying to achieve. ...

I started off so well with this blog and Retrograde Online, but as I knew would happen, my interest waned once some of the initial development was done, and I moved onto other things. I started watching some TV shows and films that I never felt I had the motivation to get into, such as For All Mankind, 12 Monkeys (the show), Oppenheimer, The Zone of Interest, Farscape, and Batman (1966 show) to name a few. ...

This website … lives! That’s right, I’ve managed to get this website to deploy to Azure as a static web app via a GitHub Action CI/CD workflow. It’s currently using the catchy URL https://black-flower-040f62903.4.azurestaticapps.net/, but this will be changing when I eventually transfer over my retrogradeonline.com domain. Just have to enter the CNAME hostname record and give it to my DNS provider. I am not the greatest when it comes to websites. It always seemed to lie outside the realms of the software development that I was involved in. IT Support always knew how to deal with this stuff. That’s the Ops part of DevOps though, and I have never liked DevOps. ...