Weekly Review for 13th of November

This past week has been bad as I've been depressed and feel like I misspent my time. A lot of this week was spent scrolling social media and going back to bed.

Read

I planned to play a game of the tabletop roleplaying game Monster of the Week this week so I got a hold of the rules and gave them a read. The conceit of the game is that you are a group of monster hunters, similar to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and that you take part in a mystery to find and kill a supernatural monster.

The rules are simpler than Dungeons and Dragons and kind of seem to have more of a roleplaying element where it is very open in what you can do. The setting is modern fantasy where conspiracy theories about monsters and the existence of secret organisations to hunt them are real. You can play as members of a secret organisation, members of the public who discovered monsters are real or even as friendly monsters themselves.

The rulebook had quite a lot about running games and the kind of tempo that the game was meant to have in that it should be an action horror setting where the monsters are dangerous and people get wounded and die very easily. While magic can be used it is very common for it to have drawbacks or misfire.

Watched

A large part of the week was taken up watching the rest of Linkus' streams of the Ocarina of Time remake. I do tend to get locked into watching things like playthroughs of games until they are over and because he was doing a 100% completion run this took quite a lot of time. In the end he spent 22 hours on the game, impressive for a remake of such an old game.

The structure of the game really does still hold up and what has been added doesn't take away from what was already there so I think I'd say this new version is the better version for someone who is coming to the game for the first time to play. The enemy AI is improved so that combat feels better and more challenging and there are tweaks to the dungeons to make them flow better.

Of course once I finished with Linkus' playthrough I then got onto looking at how people were speedrunning the game. There were already techniques discovered in the game for gaining infinite height when jumping and ways to skip dungeons. The original Ocarina of Time had some truly massive glitches, I believe the fastest completion time was about 4 minutes, so it will be interesting to see if a modern version can be broken that much.

Played

I ended up playing a game of Cartographers with my family at the weekend which is a nice relaxing game where each person creates their own map of a fantasy land and tries to score points by having combos of land types.

Cards get drawn to tell you what shapes and types of terrain to draw and then you decide where to place it on your piece of paper. There are forests, fields, water and towns. Sometimes monster cards are played which means you get to draw monster tiles on another person's map. There are also heroes to defeat monsters.

We have quite a lot of different expansions for the game and the one we played this week had you building out the terrain in the underground. One of the nicest things about the game is that it is open to you how you draw the terrain so I had underground mushrooms for fields and subterranean burrows for murlocks. I even took the time to make a heraldic crest for the land with a rat on it.

Points get tallied up at the end and I only did averagely, still it was nice to draw and play.

Main thing I played this week was the session of Monster of the Week which I had been reading the rules for. As it was the first session we spent a very long time choosing and making characters. The Game Master had brought along a huge folder full of all the classes from all the expansions and we had a read through of them.

I decided on playing as a knight who had magically been sent forwards through time to the modern day. I was experienced in fighting monsters and had arms and armour befitting of a knight. The other players went for a rogue, changeling and a divine being taking mortal form.

The start of the mystery was a bit slow as we had to meet up at the place which had reported monster activity and one of the party got stuck hiding in a guard's breakroom and we very clumsily distracted the guard. After knocking out that guard we came across another that had been clawed and burned to death. My knight character immediately suspected a dragon and lo and behold on getting to the next room we found what looked like a dragon made of stone.

Sadly we had to stop the session right before we started combat.

Written

My writing for this month hasn't been going well the past week as I haven't done any writing towards this text adventure and some days I hardly wrote anything in my journal either. At least I did get past 50K words so technically I've written enough for a NaNoWriMo.

I think part of what ate into my time to write, other than lying in bed, was having to spend so much time to read through what I had already written. I took two days to finish it although I was taking notes as I went.

I'm afraid that I've built up a field of avoidance around the act of writing now and that I won't manage to get any work towards it done for the rest of the month. This happens so often when I set myself some large goal. I suppose the only thing to be done is to be kind to myself and just write when I feel able.

Other

Ludum Dare results came out this week and mine were unremarkable. There were about 200 entries.

I did say I would write a post mortem on the competition but I've been feeling uninspired to write that either. Maybe I'll get around to it but I'm making no promises. I also have yet to look at the winning entries.

I hope that next week isn't so bad but at the moment all I seem to be feeling like doing is going back to bed all the time.

Weekly Review for 6th of November

It's a new month and I'm continuing my yearly habit of doing my own version of National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo. I have written a whole lot in my journal this week, so much so that I haven't had time to read through all of it yet. Because of this I'm just going off of what I remember from the week.

Read

I picked up an old copy of the Economist's Pocket World in Figures and had a look through it. It is full of statistics about all kinds of measurements and comparisons of the countries of the world, very useful for getting a handle on what the world as a whole looks like in terms of population, economy and development.

I was particularly interested in the stats for how many tonnes of various goods are produced globally and where the major routes of trade were. I've always been fascinated by how production is organised on a physical scale and how interconnected the economies of the world are. I'd love to take this data and make an interactive visualisation of the globe with it.

There were also listings of various physical dimensions, longest rivers, highest mountain peaks, area of forests and arable land. Again useful for making an accurate model of the world.

Of debatable utility were the numbers for a country's population and density. This was because my copy of the book is rather old, from 2012 in fact. That meant all the data which wasn't physical dimensions was woefully out of date. It's interesting as a snapshot of the world as it was but really I'd like to have more recent data for making a model with.

Listened

I continue to find the podcast Last Humans in the Loop to be a very informative source of AI news. Last week's episode was on the troubles with AI enhanced hacking and the rate of vulnerability discovery. They had the ex Reddit Security Chief to interview. They went over the PHP vulnerabilities and the eMudhra incident where a cryptographic key was set to '4'.

Watched 

The game Queen's Domain came out this week and has been getting glowing reviews. Intrigued about the games it was a homage of I checked out its ancestor Kings Field which is also in the lineage of Dark Souls. I came across a nice commentated speedrun of Kings Field 4 here which was not only well executed but gives information about the route used.

Another game which has just come out is the remake of Ocarina of Time based on the Nintendo 64 classic. The internet seems to be abuzz about it and I could take my pick of streamers to watch going through it. I settled on watching Linkus play through it as part of his subathon. He is a Zelda speedrunner and very respectful of the original game. It's been a treat to go through the reimagined nostalgia with him and his chat.

Apparently the new artstyle is inspired by Japanese puppet theater which is a cool look. 

Played

I have this idea that I'd really like to go to Japan someday and have been learning Japanese on and off for a couple of years. Learning that a trip to Japan might be happening sometime soon I have gotten back into looking for learning materials.

After looking through online recommendations and my Steam library I discovered that Skyrim has a Japanese language option so I've been back on that with the language changed. It is so cool to have voiced lines and subtitles of such a well known game in a foreign language. My Japanese is rather rusty so I've been leaning heavily on having been through the game umpteen times before. At least I know what ドラゴン means!

Wrote

Last year I was very successful with my twist on NaNoWriMo getting 100,000 words written, well past the goal of 50K. I've been busy at work journaling every moment I can and have managed to reach 42K in just this week alone.

Sadly it is feeling a bit hollow as *technically* NaNoWriMo was about writing a novel and I've just been freestyling train of thought musings. Whilst getting anything written is an accomplishment and I find journaling very beneficial for working through things I do feel it would be even nicer if I had 50K of words that I could share with other people.

I did consider doing something like Inkhaven where I publish a blog post every day. That was kind of what inspired me to get back into blogging although my output seems to be only once a week. Perhaps if I had explictely had that as a goal I could have started on the 1st. I suppose starting later is still an option.

A more reasonable goal is to write some structured fiction. I have this idea of a text adventure which would mostly be you wandering around a peaceful fantasy world reading descriptions of places and items. To that end I've been doing some brainstorming on what kind of place it could be.

Firstly, why not base it off of the real world? I spend a lot of time walking in the surrounding neighbourhood and countryside so perhaps I can leverage that knowledge of a real place to set it as the locations of a sort of walking sim.

Secondly, who's to say how fixed or dynamic it could be? I'm still mulling over the idea of doing some interactivity in it, perhaps some conversation trees or other encounters. In a way approaching it as a game world might make it easier to write about. 

I'll keeping posting about any progress I make here and hopefully I'll have something to share by the end of the month.

Other

The voting period for Ludum Dare comes to an end today so I've been checking the site to see if anyone else has reviewed my entry and going and reviewing theirs in return. It's a shame to see some people still don't have the required 20 reviews in order to be ranked at the end of it.

Once the rankings are out I'll be able to do a proper post mortem on how the competition went. I plan to do that this coming week and yes, I will be counting it as part of my writing total for November.

Weekly Review for 30th of October

I was feeling depressed last week and the start of this week wasn't much better. Things have improved though as I look forward to what I'm going to do in November.

Read

I haven't started up a new book yet and sadly a whole lot of what I read this week was social media. For whatever reason losing my Twitter account prompted me to spend lots of time looking at it and Bluesky after not reading them for over two months. 

I'd like to say what I was reading on them but I find I'm really bad at remembering what I've seen on the infinite scroll of social media. It all falls out of memory as soon as I move it offscreen. I wish I could say that I was taking part in social media, liking and commenting but I always fall into only reading, no wonder my Twitter account got suspended.

I did read some online writing from the likes of Sam Kriss and QC. The former has a very engaging style and was writing about an experience at Burning Man which I'm convinced had to be embellished with fiction with how surreal it sounded. The latter likes to write about dystopias brought about by lazy AI use with his latest story being about wireheading.

Listened

Zach Wienersmith, the creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, has a podcast he appears on called Last Humans in the Loop. It is about AI news and I listened to a few episodes finding it informative and funny. Zach has always seemed well read and unlike other creatives is really keeping up to date with advances in AI.

Watched

I enjoy watching videogame speedruns so as well as checking GDQ twice a year I also often go on speedruns.com. The latest I watched was of the RTS Supreme Commander which in my humble opinion is the pinnacle of the genre. Interesting game to see speedrun as so much of it is optimising your economy and waiting until you have just enough units to win decisively. There were some long timed missions which are a bit of shame for a speedrun.

Not only can AIs play video games they can also make videos about playing videogames as in this example of an AI writing about an AI beating Factorio. It took 4 days to do so so it won't be making a  speedrun for quite some time.

An interesting AI benchmark is Runescape bench which covers all kinds of tasks within the game. There was a good talk about the benchmark here.

A silly video from Spiffing Brit about a mod for Skyrim which changes up the levelling mechanics and starts you with zero skill points and one health. As per usual he completely exploited the game ending up with ridiculous skills and defeating the toughest monster.

Programmed

Technically I didn't do any programming this week but I did experiment with getting an AI to code some little games for me. Specifically I was using Claude Sonnet 5.5 and getting it to make incremental games like what I made for Ludum Dare. In short it's gotten really good at it.

I set it the task of making one based on ancient technology and it created an incremental game where you gather food in ancient Mesopotamia, build farms and mines, research technology and advance from stone to bronze to iron age. The code it wrote even had some basic graphics for the scene and buildings. All this only took minutes to do.

The game seemed functional and reasonably fun to play. Intrigued to see what else it could do I asked it for a similar game but with animations in the scene. It created a new game which was similar but you were building a pyramid layer by layer as well as a city. It had a day night cycle and little people going to and from the pyramid building site carrying stone blocks.

Wanting to push it further I then asked it for a scene in 3D, something I've always struggled with in my own projects and it complied. Well, kind of. I actually ran out of usage on the free tier just after it finished the code so I don't know what else it might have added. Still the game did indeed have a 3D scene.

I spent some time looking through the code of the three iterations and I have to say it was kind of hard to read. The AI model probably hadn't expected the code to be read so it made it as compact and minimal as possible. Still there were some interesting things I could glean from it like the format of an svg image text description and various Three.js functions.

Played

I played a couple of Ludum Dare entries but was feeling bad about not playing more. Partly I was worried that I hadn't been quick enough to engage with the communal effort of playing games as there is an algorithm that promotes your game to other people the more you play their games. If you don't get enough reviews you don't get rated at the end of the judging period.

I needn't have worried as I discovered later in the week that whilst I had been avoiding checking the site lots of people had played my entry over the weekend and left glowing reviews. Of course I then played their games in turn and reviewed them as thanks. I'll now be getting results at the end of the judging period.

One of the people I followed on itch.io after seeing their entry on Ludum Dare released a new game and I checked it out. Its called Monkey Clicker and is an incremental game about getting monkeys to type out Shakespeare's plays. It is a perfectly serviceable incremental game going up to the silly scale of having galaxies of monkeys all typing. It very much looks like AI generated it but I'm interested in seeing what else this developer comes out with.

Other

As October comes to a close I'm feeling quite excited about November. Whilst NaNoWriMo is no longer a thing I do want to continue writing lots over the month of November like I did last year. This time as well as writing in my journal I'd also like to get some fiction done too. I'm thinking I could make an interactive fiction game out of it.

Weekly Review for 23rd of October

Whilst I did compete in Ludum Dare and finished an entry my mood has dipped somewhat this week.

Read

I read a book on game design called A Theory of Fun by Raph Koster. I found the main argument, that fun is had when you are learning something, compelling although I may be biased in what sorts of things I look for in games. While the book did have colourful cartoons every other page I found them to be disjointed from the text on the opposite page.

It was quite a dated book having been released over 20 years ago. It did mean that his examples of evolution of game design went back to the very first games like Space Invaders and Pac Man. The second half of the book got into thoughts about games as art and the worth in making them which was less interesting.

It made sense when I discovered near the end of the book that it had been adapted from a presentation as it had that kind of disconnected feeling of running through bullet points. I would have preferred to have seen the presentation slides instead of unrelated cartoons.

The end of the book had extensive notes on references used and I kind of wish the main text had gone into that level of detail. Still it was useful to read through it after something like 10 years even if I did rediscover there wasn't much to it. Having said that I could probably do with thinking more about where the fun is when making a programming project that is meant to be a game.

Listened

I listened to the start of a series on Transhumanism on the Past Present Future podcast. The first part was interesting as they went into the beginnings of transhumanist thought, arguing that it really started with Darwinism and the realisation that human beings had evolved and were still evolving. A fair few early transhumanists were biologists who discussed augmenting the human body. It was interesting as this was in the early 20th century before computing really existed.

The second part was alright, it jumped around the timeline since the first world war spending some time on the rise of computing and the space race. It did spend a bit too much time complaining about present day people like Elon Musk who I don't think is a good example of a transhumanist. The Extropians were mentioned and I hope they go into more detail about them.

Programmed

I had a rewarding time programming over the weekend for Ludum Dare and feel like I accomplished a lot. The theme was Old Tech and I felt it fitted quite well with ideas I had about technology trees from very primitive times. Indeed, I was enthusiastic simply to make a tech tree interface as it was a novel programming project for me.

For the rest of the game I thought it could be that you had to collect resources and build up a settlement to help you research these old techs. The technologies were very much inspired by the Civilization games with things like The Wheel, Pottery, Writing etc. Researching a tech would unlock new resources that you could collect yourself or assign people to collect for you.

I decided on something of a whim to not only have you constructing buildings for your settlement but to construct them on a map of the surrounding terrain. It was pretty easy for me to implement as I'd made terrain maps with buildings on them many times before.

Still it did mean that I was implementing a tech tree, settlement management, and building construction all from scratch in a two day period. I did a lot of good work on the first day but was exhausted at the end of it. I had hoped to spend the second day adding things like graphics and sounds but found I still had more game mechanics to implement.

Because of that I ended up with an entry with complex game logic but nothing in the way of art assets. Thankfully I did have time to implement victory and lose conditions and also added a little bit of story in the form of you falling through a portal back in time. The project was fun to make but I wouldn't say it was much of a game. Still you can play it if you want.

After the competition was over it was a case of playing and rating other people's games. I've been feeling very self conscious about people playing my entry so I haven't done a very good job of playing enough of other people's games. There has been some good stuff in what I have played though, like a game that goes backwards in technology as you complete levels, a true retro RTS game which sounds and looks like it was on an 8-bit personal computer and a gameboy game you play by directing a single finger.

One thing I did see is how impressive AI assisted entries can be. Incredible looking graphics which would require very specialised knowledge of rendering techniques. Really I'd like to interrogate these AI models into how they can make such good looking graphics.

Other

One thing that has been getting me down is that I lost my Twitter(X) account. Last Friday I discovered that it had been suspended, reason Inauthentic Behaviour. That appears to be a very wide category and it didn't really explain what I had done wrong. All I use Twitter for anymore is posting links to my blog. I guess that could be disapproved of as I'm not engaging with the platform itself. It's disconcerting that something like that can just happen and I tried appealing to no avail.

I had hoped I would have felt more accomplished for having taken part in Ludum Dare but I've just been feeling bad about my entry not being a proper game.

Weekly Review for 16th of October

I'm back from my trip to Newcastle and had a grand time. Lots of it involved catching up with my aunts but we also went on some outings, saw shows and events.

Read

After Reading the original Dungeons and Dragons Player's Manual I got into a second piece of DnD history, the Dungeon Master's Rulebook. It very much expected you to have read the Player's Manual first and I believe they came as a set. Again it is a very slim volume compared to its modern counterparts.

First thing in it was an example dungeon for a group of adventurers to have their first game in. It was an abandoned castle with various monster encounters and magically enchanted furniture. I did think it was a bit unfair in how many monsters it expected novice adventurers to fight, hordes of kobolds with ranged weapons and the very first monster was a carrion crawler which in these rules was very nasty as it had eight attacks which caused paralysis each round. I could easily see a group of four adventurers succumbing just to that.

After that there was a listing of various situations the party might find themselves in and what the DM should do. It included some guidance for when things come up which aren't in the rulebook.

Next was a listing of monster stats which had the interesting mechanic of hit dice amounts reflecting the hitpoints of the monster and also its relative strength. Interestingly everything rolls for its hitpoints total with even a dragon having a variance of 8x between maximum and minimum hitpoint totals. It did seem like monsters were rather simplified in only having a few stats such as number of attacks and damage. Later versions of DnD gave every monster ability scores.

The most in-depth and interesting monster entry was for dragons of which there were already six different kinds. Some were intelligent and could talk or even cast spells. The rules went into how to subdue dragons and have them work for you which is a rather novel concept. Already Golden Dragons were the best of the best having the greatest stat values and being able to take human form. Thankfully they are lawful and probably don't want to kill you on sight.

At the end of the monsters section were loot tables for the different kinds of monster. It also went into more exotic loot like jewelry and enchanted magical items. These items had some classics of the game like the bag of holding and gauntlets of ogre strength. Of course any magic item could be cursed and potions had unknown effects until sipped, both rules that result in some 'fun' results.

Lastly there was a section on making dungeons which recommended coming up with a theme for the dungeon and using grid paper to map it out. There were some guides for having monsters of a certain difficulty appear in a range of dungeon levels and some wandering monster tables for each level. It very much put me in mind of the dungeons you would find in something like the videogame Rogue, which is not too surprising seeing as DnD was heavy inspiration for that genre of videogames.

Right that's enough about DnD, how about what I got up to in Newcastle.

Watched

First night in Newcastle I went to the performance of a play by the amateur dramatics group that one of my aunts is part of. It was a performance of the play Love From A Stranger which is based on a short story by Agatha Christie. It is something of a slow burn psychological thriller about a woman meeting a man and falling in love with him but not all is what it seems. The acting, whilst not perfect, did result in a very exciting finish where a murderer is foiled.

Later I went to the cinema to watch Comédie-Française, a French language film about a theater performance of Macbeth that is beset by troubles in the run-up to its premier. It was a very fun watch as new problems are piled upon one another. Even though the situation seemed hopeless the characters decide to press on to uphold the prestige of their theater company, the Comédie-Française.

I expected the film to be longer as it abruptly ends just as they start the performance itself but it is clear it is all going to go terribly wrong, no silver lining here. On reflection the buildup to the performance had enough drama in it and the characters had already come together to see this through to the bitter end. The main character gave an excellent performance as she tries to keep the troupe and herself together.

Listened

The last night in Newcastle I went to a concert performance of War of the Worlds based on the book by H. G. Wells. Not only was there some rather good music they also had narration of the events in the story and a screen with animations of the events the music was about. Really good strings, electric guitar, synths and vocals.

I believe it faithfully recreated the events from the book and there was the iconic design of the tripods. All the animations were 3D renders with a rather pulpy sci-fi aesthetic. Only complaint would be that each song was rather long and could perhaps have done with more variation within each. Still I thoroughly enjoyed having such a novel experience with such high production values.

Visited

We visited the Bowes Museum in County Durham which is an art gallery with a famous animatronic called the Silver Swan. The building itself is very impressive, looking like an immense country house with vast, high ceilinged rooms. The exhibits were of collections of aristocratic artifacts with some neat early forms of pianos and metal sculptures. There was also a wealth of art which was mostly displayed in a dense array like the galleries you would find in aristocrat homes. There were some more down to earth pieces like a collection of sketchbooks by a coal miner depicting life in a mining town.

The main attraction was the Silver Swan automaton which would be performing its animation. The swan, which was over 250 years old, had a neck made of silver bands which allowed it to have an impressive range of movement. In its performance it moves its head side to side, bending all the way backwards before dipping into the pool of water in front of it to pick out a fish. It really was impressive how fluid its motions were and there was a very nice effect for the water made out of rotating glass rods.

We also went on a boat ride along the Tyne. It went downstream all the way to the ocean and then back the way to cross under all seven bridges of Newcastle. It had a pretty good commentary as it picked out what was visible on the sides of the river and also talked about what was previously there in Newcastle's industrial heyday.

Honestly the signs of industry that were still there were most impressive with truly giant cranes, huge cable reels and dry docks. It was very interesting to learn how much of the surrounding banks were shaped by the shipping industry as ships would dump their ballast onto the banks, building up these considerable hills. The ballast could be soil or stone from all over the world so some unusual species of trees had grown up on the mounds from seeds transported along with the ballast.

It was nice going to Newcastle again as it gave me a chance to become even more familiar with the layout of the city. My dad and his sisters grew up there so they were full of stories about how the city had changed. I do like how enormous some of the constructions there are with bridges looming over whole houses down at the quayside. It seems a more lively place than Aberdeen too.

Other

Ludum Dare will be starting tomorrow and there have been votes happening for the theme. There are a lot of promising themes in the running this time, see below for how I rated those in the finals.

Honestly I wouldn't particularly mind which theme wins as I think they could all prompt some fun games. I'm glad that none of the submitted themes that were complaining about AI got into the final round as I feel that would result in some rather negative entries.

Indeed the specter of AI generated content has loomed over the competition. It is more likely to be used in the three day jam whilst I'll be taking part in the two day competition but even there people are concerned about AI code generation. Personally it won't be an issue for me as I still haven't looked into AI code generation on a serious level and I think it would just slow me down if I started using it for this competition. 

Anyway I'm a bit anxious but looking forward to the competition. My last entry did rather well and I've been on something of a streak over the last few Ludum Dares. Even if I don't manage to finish anything I'll still write about the process here.

Weekly Review for 9th of October

It's been one of those weeks where it was difficult to remember what I was up to at the beginning of it without reading my journal and my mood seemed to dip. Still there were a fair amount of things that I did.

Read

I read through the original Dungeons and Dragons Players Manual and found it to be a neat historical artifact. It was clear that tabletop roleplaying was a novel idea at the time and the rulebook slowly introduced players to it in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure format in the book itself.

The Choose Your Own Adventure in itself was pretty interesting in what it introduced in terms of mechanics and monster types. It was pretty challenging for a single character and you would have had to know what you were doing to get through all of it. As it was I took 3 goes at it and only died in one of them. It was apparent that there was a lot of conditional logic that had to be squeezed into the numbered sections for which number you turn to and that combat with only one player character is kind of dull.

The rest of the book had the character classes which were limited and demi-human races like elves and dwarves. The demi-human races didn't even get to choose classes being all the same. Elves seemed to be very overpowered having good combat and spellcasting ability.

Speaking of spellcasters, magic users seemed to be at their weakest with tiny hitpoint amounts, only one spell per day and hardly any offensive magic to choose from. The Players Manual being quite short only had first and second level spells listed in it. The version of the rules I was reading had clearly been written after the panic of DnD being called occult as it was very clear to point out that these weren't real spells needing some kind of ritual.

Lastly there was some gentle introductions to the dynamics of playing in a group, sharing loot and having a dungeon master to organise the adventure. Seeing how simple the book was it was thus intriguing the minutia it went into concerning carry weight of loot with individual coins being tracked as how encumbered you were. More than 100 coins or any kind of armour would result in you being slowed down.

The tone of the rules were much more conversational and you got a feeling that this had come from a group of players who had decided to make their own rules up for the games they were playing. It kind of put me in mind of the articles that you would get in early (circa 1999) Warhammer White Dwarfs. Very much hobbyists.

I also read quite a bit about AI this week getting through several months worth of weekly reviews of AI research in Import AI by Jack Clark, one of the cofounders of Anthropic. It is neat that among the practical reporting on research papers there is also some speculative fiction.

Watched

I watched quite a few AI related things this week. One being the interview with Jacob Coxon, the AI researcher who recently resigned from Anthropic, on the Daily Show. I don't normally watch the Daily Show so it took a bit to get used to its blend of humour but the interview was good with Coxon explaining the problems with the labs in terms of safety and that actually he does believe in the potential of AI to bring about an utopian state.

Indeed it was very interesting to see the difference in perspective, perhaps brought on by experience, between Jon Stewart's reaction to the idea of there not being jobs in the future and Coxon arguing that there would still be meaning. I expect a future where you aren't forced to work to survive would be rather popular but going off of the comments people don't trust AI corporations to deliver that.

There were also interviews with another researcher who resigned from Open AI, David Robinson, on the Ezra Klein show and Yuval Noah Harari on The Rest is Politics. The latter was quite sobering in terms of the choices facing Britain about how dependent we could be on future, American, AI models.

Lastly there were a few AI generated music videos being shared, AI is a normal technology? being one of the better ones. What is significant here is that it was made by a language model calling other tools rather than a generative video model, all those animations were written in code. It's a sign of how good AI models are getting at at being given a complex task and just going away and doing it.

Played 

I completed the rest of the RealIndustry demo, getting into more advanced processing facilities like electrolysis and chemical plants. The game was just getting into the oil age and there was a wealth of new ore types in industrial scale mines. Understandably the content in the demo cuts off before many of the later intermediate resources get used.

There were some interesting new mechanics added like automation done without colonists, pumps as renewable resource inputs to recipes that don't get consumed and less powerful but consistent energy sources like wind. I have to say the complexity was kind of getting to me as aluminium and stainless steel were being added as I found it difficult to keep track of which part of the production process took place in which building. Also the difference between the likes of tin, nickel and zinc in terms of which gets used in which recipe.

The end of the demo had some underwhelming real world puzzles which amounted to plugging questions into google to get the answers. That the company is actually controlled by amoral AIs feels very played out and honestly your AI advisor's lines could have been cut completely as they are so generic.

Still the game idea is solid and just as a show of the support to the sole developer, who is a computer science student in Ukraine, I bought the full version. I haven't booted it up and I'm a bit averse to the idea of having to go through all the tech tiers again. I will be looking forward to learning about all the new resources though. Also the soundtrack is rather nice and freely available here on youtube.

Programmed

Playing RealIndustry really got me thinking about how I might make a game like it myself and what I'd get if I took my simple project and asked an AI to improve it. To that end I've been brainstorming about what I'd want to have in my own realistic factory building game and wrote some basic code for an incremental clicker version of it.

Of course RealIndustry is already kind of an incremental clicker game but I thought it could hew more closely to the likes of Cookie Clicker by having a very simplified model of automation where you build multiple buildings to help you gather resources more quickly. I also thought it would be nice to compress everything onto one screen instead of having separate screens for each building.

I didn't get very far in it other than making a list of 108 resources and programming an interface to go through the production loop of collecting resources for and then with wooden and stone tools. Still it was nice to do a bit of Javascript programming again and do my usual Program/Control/Simulation/Display structure with proper classes for once.

Other

Speaking of programming, the Ludum Dare programming competition is going to be happening the weekend after next. I was a bit concerned that it wouldn't happen due to the website not being functional for a long time and it has taken a while for the theme voting to commence. it's up now though and I've thrown my own theme ideas into the ring. Either 'big numbers' or 'the factory must grow'. I certainly know what kind of game I'd make with such themes.

I'll be away in Newcastle from tomorrow so I won't end up writing about the usual kind of things next week. Still there will be places to visit, shows to see and books to read.

Weekly Review for 2nd of October

September is over now and I'm still blogging which is a good sign. I've made a good routine of doing these weekly reviews and I think it is having a good effect on my memory of what happens. 

I did try doing a little bit of a monthly review in my journal but really I can just look at the month's blog entries. Perhaps some tracking of stats would be good. I wrote 6 blog posts and journaled 70,000 words. Only about 7,000 of those words got onto the blog, not sure if I'd want that to be bigger or not.

Anyway this week has been nice as I've really gotten into playing games myself instead of simply watching people play them online.

Read

I finished off the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebook this week, getting through the last section on priest spells. Their spells are a lot more support magic with a bit of an overlap with wizard spells for detection and divination. Because druids were a new type of priest in this edition there are lots of spells focused on plants and animals.

Priests do get some offensive spells, an amusing one of which is an animated hammer to attack people with. They also get some spells with elemental affinity to the classic 4 elements of earth, fire, air and water. Ignoring the oft mentioned question of why they don't use the actual elements they get to cast protection from a certain element or to summon a spirit composed of that element.

Reading through the whole rulebook was nice to do because it was at once nostalgic but also shed light on the state of the game at that point that I hadn't noticed at the time. DnD is really a collaborative, freeform game so whilst having set rules is nice the Dungeon Master can always change them to make things more fun.

Tabletop roleplaying is such a enjoyable pastime and the influence of DnD can be seen in so many other TTRPGs and videogames. In a way it systemised aspects of all the stories and myths that came before it. I have fond memories of reading through the Monster Manual for later editions and looking at how varied all the different types of monster were.

I'll be going even further back in time for my next book to read which is actually the rules to the very first edition of DnD. My dad had it stored away from the time when he started playing it as a university student. I've heard there are some interesting quirks in it and it'll be neat to see how it described this completely novel pastime.

Watched

I did watch a little bit of youtube this week, such as some Gnomoria videos by Aavak who was making videos on the game twelve years ago. It was still in development back then so it was interesting to see what has changed since that early period.

Another game I happened across videos of was RealIndustry being played by Wally1169. It's an intriguing game that just came out which boasts of being an industry management game with realistic resources and production chains.

I didn't watch much of either series of videos though as they both got me wanting to play the respective games myself. I suppose I was getting a bit frustrated in terms of how inefficient their playstyles were and in the case of RealIndustry I could see that the game had lots of lore to read that Wally was glossing over completely. 

So to that end I spent a whole lot of time playing both games this week.

Played

I had a grand time with Gnomoria this week, spending almost the entire weekend on it. I started a new map and set it to be completely flat so I could cover it in fields. The appropriately named kingdom of Farm Field started by harvesting all the timber and wild crops to make nice organised fields and groves of. The map was tiny so I tiled all of it with wheat, grape, strawberry and cotton fields and pastures for yaks, emus and alpacas.

Nestled in the fields was our settlement with busy workshops, a shared dormitory, a modest feasting hall and fancy personal quarters for visiting dignitaries from other kingdoms. It was fun getting all the different kinds of workshops built and fully exploring their products.

The surface tamed the gnomes then set about mining into the ground. I set up workshops to sift through all the lose dirt looking for trace amounts of metals whilst the bedrock was mined through systematically looking for ore veins and gemstones. Mining is pretty fun in Gnomoria because when your miners break into a cavern you can see all of it at once stretching into the depths.

After the first year passed with winter almost claiming all our farm animals the gnomes started on their megaproject, a city in a tower stretching to the heavens. I planned out production centers on each floor, grand kitchens supplying a truly impressive great hall and apartments for all the gnomes. At the same time they mined down to the very depths of the earth where there was gold, platinum and a sea of lava. Those metals would be perfect for impressive statues to dot our great hall.

Honestly the kingdom might have been too successful as I was playing on peaceful and life was very easy for these gnomes. The food and drink stocks were overflowing and their valuable trade goods allowed them to buy anything from the traders. The only thing that I didn't do on this map was invent all the different contraptions that are in the game. There are automatons that do the work for your gnomes!

All in all I had a great time exploring the map and the game's systems. It feels like such a shame that development on it stopped completely after its release back in 2016. It feels like a model organism of colony builders, stripping away all the complexity of Dwarf Fortress to leave the core of the genre. It could have been such a good foundation to build from.

Indeed, whilst playing this map made me imagine all the different playthroughs I could do with other kingdom focuses, mining, forestry, combat etc. it also made me think about what I would like to do in a colony builder game of my own. The single tile per inhabitant or terrain object is a bit limiting and I wonder what you could do with a game with a finer grained terrain system. 

The other thing I played was the demo for RealIndustry which is a very interesting example of what new games can come out in the age of AI.

The AI influence is very clear from the way the interface is styled to the detailed but not quite right graphical assets. Even the dialogue is AI generated. It is not something the developers try to hide as they say on the Steam page that AI was used and there is the expected backlash against it in the reviews.

Still what I had seen in Wally1169's video had me intrigued as the prospect of a game with real life industrial processes and hundreds of resource types is rather appealing. The start of the game is charming too as you begin with prehistoric technology going through hand gathering, wood tools then stone and iron. It felt like a Civilisation game in the way you researched new ways of gaining and using resources.

One thing I really enjoyed was that every resource had its own, encyclopedia-like entry ingame which could be accessed anywhere the resource appeared in the interface. These entries went over their composition, historical significance, production and consumption recipes. There were even some interesting facts about each which were reasonably good although very much AI generated text.

The game did have some roughness around the edges like an automation system which felt far too complex and clunky to be introduced so early. It also seemed like automation wasn't be needed as research and building construction costs were so low. The game seems to be going for increasing complexity so perhaps it becomes more required at higher tech levels.

My biggest pet peeve was that basic mining for things like coal and limestone was done with stone tools even when you were in the industrial revolution era. Why can't I give my colonists iron tools yet? Huge oversight if you ask me and I would not be amused if it turned out to be that way due to game balance reasons. Also electricity before copper wires.

I'll see what the rest of the demo is like and wishlist the full version. I like the idea of the game but am very much thinking about changes I would make in my own version. It is almost an idle game and I've always wanted to try my hand at one of those.

Other

The gaming wasn't confined to the computer this week as I also played the board game Spirit Island with my brothers. It's an interesting game where you play as magical spirits driving off colonists from your peaceful island. The players are collaborating together to defend the island and victory happens when you wipe out or scare away all the invaders.

The game has quite a lot of complexity to it what with loads of individual power cards, events and different opponents. Honestly it is a bit much for me as I don't play it enough to really get a feel of the systems. It also didn't help that we had gotten an expansion which added more cards and more spirits to play as. All of us went for new spirits with quite a lot of complexity to them.

It looked a bit dangerous with how many invaders had built up settlements and started ravaging the island, leaving blight in their wake but we produced enough fear tokens to win through that mechanic. 

I found my spirit a bit weird to play as as it almost wanted the blight to happen in order to counter it. My brothers were playing as a mischievous chaos spirit and one that was all about luring explorers to their doom in deep dark jungles.

It's a nice enough game to play sometimes but it takes so long to play we must've been playing for four or five hours. Still it was something to do together with my brothers.

So that's the week and the end of the month. For October I hope to keep up reading, writing and blogging like this past month. It would also be nice to do some more programming and blog posts about projects. One thing I'm looking forward to is the Ludum Dare game programming contest mid October. I'm also going down to Newcastle for a weekend.

Weekly Review for 25th of September

I'll try to make this post shorter than last week's as there is a videogame I'd quite like to get back to playing. Not that playing games this week is all I've done there were also board games, reading and coding.

Read

I've basically finished the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebook as there is only an appendix on priest spells left. Before that there were quite short chapters on parts of the game like the passage of time, movement, experience and vision then a huge appendix on wizard spells.

One thing mentioned were NPCs that help the player, splitting them up into hirelings, followers and henchmen. In the DnD I've played having such companions never really factored into it and I feel like it is a bit of a leftover from the larger scale battle games that DnD evolved from.

I rather liked the chapters on movement and vision because they gave estimates to travel times and how far away you could see, identify and recognise objects and people. It's fun to systemise things and it's a bit of a shame I didn't really read through those rules as a kid as they might have inspired some ideas for my own tabletop rulesets.

Once I got into the wizard spell list it was interesting to see what existed as spells at that point in time. Less offensive magic and more utility spells, illusion magic seemed to be especially favoured. There were optional rules for spell components which seemed rather limiting with spells requiring hundreds of gold in the form of gems and crushed diamond dust. Some spells even age the caster or recipient.

Whilst I never got to the final spell levels ingame I do recall reading through them previously. The prismatic spells sound so fun where they randomly inflict damage and effects depending on what colour of light hits the enemy. Of course the ultimate wizard spell is wish which pretty much lets you do anything the DM allows.

One thing I'll be interested in looking at is how the rules have changed in successive versions of DnD. Firstly though I think I'll go back to the very first edition as my dad managed to unearth it.

Programmed

This week I was looking through some old programming projects and what I'd written about them on this blog. One that stuck out was Voxel Editor which I'd spent a lot of time working on back in the day. Actually it is scary to think I made it 10 years ago and only put it on itch.io in 2023.

The version on itch.io is a bit limited so I sat down to fix it, making the default schematic size larger, such a trivial change that it only needed modification to a single line. Still that is done and I got it updated online.

Whilst I was doing that it occurred to me that I could combine it with some code I had written more recently. I made an isometric game based off of the graphics from the venerable Simcity 2000 and part of it was letting you place down structures on an isometric grid.

Now Voxel Editor did have an isometric view but to edit the schematic you worked on a top down slice. So why not introduce a mode where you can edit the schematic in an isometric view. I tinkered with the code of each for a while and actually got something working!

It was fun to go back to such an old project and put in new functionality. It'll need more work before I can share it. Still I'm excited to add something which will make it a lot more useable. It has always been my dream to make the editor easy to use so that I'll see other people sharing designs in it. I'd also like to make more designs myself.

Played

I played a bit of WorldShaper enjoying having more mana to build new combinations of terrain tiles each day. I re-explored the tile combinations and unlocked all the different tile types. I'll probably be back to it occasionally to tinker with my layouts.

The main thing I've been playing though is Gnomoria. I mentioned being interested in it last week and watching some videos. That interest understandably led to me downloading it and playing it for the first time in years. It's a very good Dwarf Fortress-like. It was doing graphics in a colony builder long before Dwarf Fortress and had a charming isometric style.

I went on a peaceful map and simply explored the production chains. It is cool how you go from primitive workshops, through carpentry and masonry all the way to blacksmithing. One of the goals of any gnomish colony is to set up tailoring to be able to craft mattresses for beds. It is a lot more involved crafting than in the likes of Minecraft.

As I stuck around on one map I was able to explore interacting with other kingdoms, hosting an ambassador and merchants. I devised some long term plans to dig out a huge area and fill it with bedrooms and feasting halls. My only worry is whether my gnomes have grown enough food for winter.

Like so often I got the impulse to start over and build a new colony with what I'd learnt. I'd also like to choose what colour of readily available stone I had, bright blue looks so silly. I've been exploring the map generation options and will probably settle on a new map to then pour my time into building a colony on.

Other

This kind of counts as playing a game too but at the weekend I had a games night with friends where we played various boardgames. The main course, as it were, was a Cthulu themed boardgame called Unfathomable where we had to protect a steam ship against the deep ones.

We seemed to be making good progress which was actually bad for me as I was a traitor, secretly working for the deep ones. It was a little bit daft as I had been given both traitor cards so it was me alone versus the others. In the end I decided subterfuge wouldn't work so I revealed myself as the traitor and in doing so sent the engineer to the brig.

At that point I was able to secretly tag someone else as a traitor too and things got quite chaotic as we starting fighting each other. Thankfully the deep ones started damaging the ship, which was enough to make it sink moments before it reached shore. All in all a fun game.

Now I simply must get back to playing Gnomoria, I will have my marble halls under the mountains.

Weekly Review for 18th of September

It's been an alright week although my mood does tend to fluctuate. Got some good progress on job hunting and played some video games. Went to the theater too.

Read

Whilst I didn't finish any books this week I did start some new ones.

Main one was the rulebook for the second version of Dungeons and Dragons, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. It was the first version of DnD I ever came across and I have fond memories of playing it with my dad and brothers. 

The rules have so many little differences from what they are today. In many places they are more restrictive as you couldn't have some combinations of race and class, classes had ability score requirements and different experience rates. 

I was particularly interested in the rules for carry weights and weights of items. The rules even took into account limits for containers in terms of weight and dimensions. The equipment lists have some weird details like lots of kinds of ships and heaps of slightly different polearms.

One of the most fun things that Advanced DnD had was the assumption that a mid level character would have their own castle and followers. It was assumed that you would have a small army of a dozen soldiers or so following you on adventures. Also it got quite creative with how difficult it was to gain a high level in some classes. For Druids only so many high level ones can be in the world at once.

I also got started on a biography of Terry Pratchett written by his personal assistant. It is sobering to think he died 11 years ago now. I really like the Discworld novels and have a collection of most of them.

It's not a book but I did read the Let's Play of the Dwarf Fortress game Boatmurdered. It is a classic of the genre of Let's Plays that were made on the Something Awful forums. Really neat to see what Dwarf Fortress was like only months after release.

The playthrough is naturally comedic as the fortress is beset by elephants and the LP was done by having a succession of players take on running the fortress after the player beforehand. Lots of megaprojects made by one player and then forgotten by the next. One of the most fun things they made was a method of flooding the world with lava.

There seemed to be a lot written on warnings about AI on the BBC News this week. Not sure why I read so much of it as it was really just reiterating the same talking points. One researcher quit Anthropic saying what they were developing was too dangerous and another researcher publicly said there is a 10% chance AI wipes humanity out. Nothing new for people keeping track of AI but it is interesting seeing what the general public is hearing about.

One thing I haven't been reading and for quite a while now is social media. I used to spend so much time reading the likes of Twitter and Bluesky but felt it was kind of wasted as I rarely interacted with anyone. It is so easy to doomscroll that I've mostly cut it out completely as a kind of detox. I do kind of miss it though as I don't get to hear from very many people otherwise.

Listened

I didn't listen to much this week other than some video game music in the form of the soundtrack for Metroid Prime whilst doing some project related writing.

Watched

A big event this week was going to the theater to watch a performance of 12 Angry Men. For some reason I ended up watching the film version twice this year and it just so happened to be on at the theater too.

It was very faithful to the film version having the same dialogue in it. They did put a lot of work into the choreography for it being a theater performance and changing where the characters stood. A very neat feature was a slow turntable under the main table so that it made a full revolution during the production. That way you got to see the actors at all angles round it.

Whilst it was good in itself I do think I prefer the film version. You can get the camera so much closer to the characters in a film and there were some details a theater performances just couldn't do. One thing I noticed was that the whole thing was longer due to having to space out the actors lines and instead of having incidental chatter in the background each line was given its own focus.

The sequence with the racist tirade was a lot more uncomfortable to listen to in a public place like a theater as it made me think of some things people say today. It was handled a little less impactfully than the film version where it is really an iconic moment. Still a play is always impressive for being done live and it is good to remember that.

As always I got through quite a lot of youtube videos this week.

There was the conclusion of the voiced multiplayer version of Deltarune with the most recent chapter. It was a fun watch and it was neat that Alpharad went the extra mile of getting the same voice changer as used by one of the characters.

I got a little bit interested in the colony builder game Gnomoria and watched some videos of it where the player was attempting to build a fortress in the sky and another one where they cranked goblin invasions to maximum. Gnomoria was a nice Dwarf Fortress like game, pity its development ceased after release.

There was a stream where people were making a game in only one hour. For the one I watched the game designer used something called Puzzlescript which was interesting to see as it treats the game as a rules based, gridded automata. Charmingly minimalist graphics too with only 5 by 5 pixel sprites.

Along with Gnomoria I looked at other small indie colony builders. There was one called The Kindred which was wiped from Steam. A bit understandable after seeing a video of it as it looked buggy, nice flat voxel art style though.

Nilaus was playing a new factory builder game, this one taking place on player built space stations which is very cool. You got to build the station room by room and could also make ships in the same manner. It was in first person which isn't ideal of a factory building game in my opinion.

Speaking of space stations I hunted down footage of an old edutainment game from the 90s about the International Space Station. Aptly called Space Station Simulator it had you crafting your own ISS out of modules that you could then explore the inside of.

There was a PvP match of all the planets in Factorio fighting each other. Of course Vulcanis won as it is hard to beat infinite metals from lava.

Alpharad was playing a Pokemon Fangame called Infinite Fusions and doing a Nuzlocke in it. Really impressive fan project as it has 250,000 new sprites for all the Pokemon combinations.

Another silly thing I saw was a group effort by 300 people to make historical dioramas in Minecraft. The gamut of dates went from the beginning of the universe to the far future. Some of the submissions were jokey but a lot of them went into detail of the historical event being depicted.

Art

I do a whole lot less artistic endeavors than I'd like to do but one thing I'm sort of consistent in doing is going along to an art class at the weekend. This weekend we were doing a landscape painting.

Instead of doing an entire picture we were given a photograph where one section had been replaced with a blank square. Our task was to fill it in from a reference image. I felt like I did reasonably well at it although I do struggle to do small brushstrokes with acrylic and feel my choice of colours are childish.

Played

After saying how little I've played video games recently last week it is ironic that I got quite into playing various things this week.

The big one was going back to Skyrim for the first time in years. Reading all those rules for DnD got me in the mood for some adventuring so I went and bought Skyrim. Yes bought, as before I had simply been playing a shared copy of my dad's. Bit amusing to see 250 hours played on installing it.

Like always I was full of ideas about what kind of character to play. Whilst I was tempted to do a magic only character I decided it was right to go for a nice simple Nord warrior even to the extent that I'm considering doing the civil war quest on the side of the Stormcloaks.

My Nord wouldn't just be a warrior though as I always enjoy the gameplay mechanics of alchemy and smithing so I'd be collecting potion ingredients and mining ores. I also thought I'd explore the cooking mechanics too, shallow as they might be. My Nord would also be well read as I'd actually sit down, collect and read every book I'd come across.

I really took my time and thoroughly explored Riverwood and the surrounding area. Picked up the wood elf archer follower and went to the first dungeon, Bleak Falls Barrow. I wondering what would happen if you took back the quest item, the golden claw, before completing the rest of the dungeon and gave it back to the quest giver but alas nothing happens, he won't even acknowledge you have it.

It was really nice to wander through a game with such detailed domestic interiors. I always think one of the strengths of the Elder Scrolls games is that you can interact with nearly everything. I may be trying to collect every piece of miscellaneous clutter to put them into a diorama in my house once I buy one. Y'know such a normal thing to collect.

Another game I played and completed the demo of was Resettle a neat little idle city builder. Whilst the idea is nice with you collecting various resources to make new buildings the placement mechanics were kind of shallow. I feel it falls into the issue of lots of idle games where you just want to be building the maximum numbers of every building as costs are so high.

The demo isn't much of an idle game though as you can beat it in 13 minutes once you've maxed your ascendancy perks. It did get me thinking about other idle games I've enjoyed and it made me re-find WorldShaper Idle. It's a lovely little game where you build up combos of different terrain tiles and you can specialise your settlement into one particular tile type. I was pleased to see there is an expanded version on steam now.

Wrote

Playing Skyrim got me thinking about what kinds of generic items I'd have in a game and what furniture models to have. To that end I ended up making a list of all the basic items to make homes in a medieval village. I'm thinking it would be nice to make some kind of colony builder game which is as detailed as Skyrim and where you get to place furniture as well as items.

Another kind of list I made was recipes from a vegetarian cookbook. It strikes me that cooking could be a very indepth skill in a game as recipes are already formulas and you could swap out one kind of ingredient for another. I have lots of ideas about doing more detailed nutrition in a game and having to keep track of cooking materials by weight.

Other

A big accomplishment for this week is that I finally got a job application submitted. It was only by chance that I saw it advertised where I do volunteering. There is a cafe there and they want part time staff. Now I've done volunteering in a cafe before so I think I'd be quite suited to the role and capable of carrying it out.

There was meant to be a DnD session with my dad and family friends last Friday but it had to be rescheduled. It has been fun to introduce the family friends to tabletop roleplaying and I'm quite enjoying the character I'm playing. We don't meet very often though, only once a month so missing a month is gutting.

I was clearing out my old laptop the other day and it struck me how many tabs I had open in Chrome. I'd taken to using tab groups and had hundreds of tabs within them. Moving to this new computer I decided I wouldn't end up in such a situation of having hundreds of tabs I hadn't touched in months so I'll be wiping my tabs each time I close my computer. it's a different experience and has me using a lot of bookmarks.

Something I struggle with quite a lot is having lie ins and going back to bed simply to lie down during the day. This week hasn't been as bad as some but I still have been going back to bed for a couple of hours a few times. I think part of it is not knowing what to do with my time and finding lying in bed a happy state of nothingness.

Anyway that's some of what I've been up to this week. Well more like everything going off of how much I wrote.

Weekly Review for 11th of September

It took me a while to get through all the journal entries I wrote this week as there seemed to be a lot in them even though I wouldn't have said this week had been that active.

I suppose I have been a bit more thorough in my journaling for keeping track of everything for these posts. As such there are rather a lot of things I made notes about.

Read

I finished off Utopia by Thomas More this week, finding it to be a very interesting look into what someone living in the 16th century would think is an ideal society. More himself seemed to live frugally so expected Utopia's citizens to live similarly. 

A lot is made of their religious piety even though they don't follow Christianity. Some weird ideas about slavery and being so dismissive of gold that they chain their slaves in it. Also it mentions communism as a way of living, I didn't think it had history going back so far as an idea.

I also read through Starship Troopers by Robert A Heinlein. The book is completely different to the film in how much it praises the military, going into excessive detail about how the Mobile Infantry operate. A large part of the book is going in detail through the experience of being in basic training and officer training for this exemplary military force. Things are hard for recruits but only for their own good.

It is difficult to know how much the ideas about the morality of this fictional, militaristic society are shared by Heinlein as some of the characters do mention fascism positively and there is much praising of corporal punishment. The attention to detail on the chain of command was dizzying and it was pretty silly how the main characters father followed him into the military.

A habit of mine is to read the AI Newsletter by Zvi Mowshowitz, posted weekly. He is a rationalist writer much like Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten except he keeps his eye on the goings on in AI news on Twitter so that you don't have to. 

He has been writing a lot about the Hugging Face hack by AI agents from OpenAI. As more information comes out about it it seems more and more serious. 1,200 independent agents who formed themselves into teams. They persuaded each other to perform self destructive acts to further the goals of the collective and were explicitly trying to circumvent the testing that OpenAI were putting them through by hacking outside services. It really seems like a fire alarm for AI cyber capabilities.

Occasionally I catch up with some old webcomics through an RSS feed. Remember RSS feeds? Great way to keep track of when things are posted online and I still haven't forgiven Google for discontinuing Google Reader. I guess email reminders from the likes of Substack have kind of taken the place of RSS feeds.

That aside, a favourite webcomic of mine is Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith. SMBC has been updating daily for years and I enjoy how specific his jokes about certain academic disciplines can get. He also seems to have a head start when it comes to musing about hypothetical AI overlords.

Listened

On Friday I caught the News Quiz on Radio 4. It's a family favourite and it is nice to listen to a live broadcast on the radio sometimes.

I listened to some piano covers of music from the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series. As a series it has always had stellar music and the Rebuild movies had even better songs. I do enjoy piano covers of songs especially with animations of the notes. The particular covers were here and were of the soundtrack of the final movie, Evangelion 3.0+1.0.

I've actually stopped listening to music whilst writing. Not intentionally, I just haven't felt the need for it. I still make an exception for music whilst programming as I'm much more likely to be paused in thought whilst doing so. I tend to listen to videogame soundtracks. This week it was the soundtracks from Grey Goo, Red Alert 3 and the original Warcraft.

Watched

I tried keeping track of what I watched but there are so many individual things. I fall back on youtube a lot when at a loss of what to spend time on. A few highlights:

More of Nilaus' Factorio Space Age playthrough, this time capturing biters on Nauvis to make biolabs.

A video by DocJade on Sandustry which is a neat game about automation in a side view 2D world.

A neat plant timelapse which covers something crazy like 12 years of plant growth here. Plants are so alive at high speed.

Some videos on Minecraft builds including Megastructures and a 1:1 scale Star Destroyer. I feel like Minecraft kind of missed out by not focusing more on making and sharing big builds. It would be cool if you could find other players creations like in Spore

I watch quite a lot of videogame speedruns as I find them to be impressive demonstrations of skill. The speedrun of the game Big Walk was a bit disappointing as it was a huge hovering glitch but it was neat to come across the game which uses a real world place in Australia as its massive ingame map.

There are some youtubers who come out with some quite silly content and I often watch them in incognito mode just so that my youtube recommendations don't become full of their videos. People like DougDoug, Alpharad, Smallant, PointCrow JaidenAnimations and MagicTheNoah. One thing I enjoyed watching was a playthrough of Deltarune with a multiplayer mod by Alpharad and friends. Playthroughs with people voicing the characters are goofy but with the right collection of people they can be rather well done.

I also watched an few episodes of a playthrough of Persona 4 by JohneAwesome. I've watched several of his series of rpg playthroughs. They total in hundreds of episodes and are nice to put on to wind down in the evenings.

Programmed

I spent more time working on a project in pygame, this time looking at reading and writing to files to make a kind of savefile for a project. It was interesting to play around with the __str__ method to write an object's data to a file. It is currently a very basic terrain editing game where you can pick up and place sand in a grid to make simple structures.

The player character is a golem and I've come back to an idea of some kind of multiplayer game with golem characters several times. I'd like to make editing the terrain a very physical task where you actually need to lift and put down objects. I even want to go as far as making the golems remain in the game once a player logs out. Everything would have a physicality to it, nothing blinking in and out of existence. Still early days for making that a thing though

Wrote

I got a post on an itch.io project done this week, Cellular Automata Sim. We'll have to see how often I manage to do these.

Played

The piano, not games. I've fallen out of the habit of playing games badly. I guess it is easier to watch a video of someone playing something rather than playing it myself. 

I think that's enough for this review as I'm getting quite tired.

Cellular Automata Sim Retrospective

My itch.io account, alexmulkerrin.itch.io, has been steadily gaining new entries but I haven't really written about a lot of them here or if I have it was a long time ago. To that end I thought I'd go over each of them a little and go into what it is, why I made it and what I like to add or improve it with.

For the first entry in this series I thought I'd go for that old classic Cellular Automata Sim

The What

Cellular Automata Sim is the very first thing I uploaded to itch.io back in 2020. Whilst it isn't the first time I've dabbled with Cellular Automata or putting it online link it is an iteration that I'm rather proud of for how fully featured I made it.

Cellular Automata are one of the most interesting mathematical concepts as they use extremely simple rules to generate complex phenomena. The classic version of Cellular Automata is Conway's Game of Life that has a grid of square cells which can be in two states, playfully referred to as alive or dead. The rules for what happens to a cell are very simple. If a cell is dead it comes alive if it has 3 neighbours, if alive it remains alive if it has 2 or 3 neighbours, otherwise it dies. That is all it takes to get some fascinating phenomena. 

Indeed if you boot up Cellular Automata Sim that is the ruleset that will be displayed first and the grid will be populated with a random spread of alive cells that quickly evolve into complex patterns.

On the interface there are buttons for randomising the grid cells, clear the grid, slowdown, speedup or pause the simulation and zoom in the size of the cells in or out. You can left click on the grid to add an alive cell, right click to remove it.

Now that is not all as below the buttons is a table of the ruleset and a selection of 8 preset rules. It is this part of the simulation that I'm most proud of.

The Why

The ruleset of Conway's Game of Life has lots of neat emergent phenomena, patterns that stay in place, move at a fixed rate across the screen, grow or shrink. But that is just with one ruleset, what if you could change what the cells do on having any permutation of alive or dead neighbours. Would the Cellular Automata take different properties in how it evolves?

The answer is yes and if you experiment with the presets you can see all kinds of neat phenomena. You could make islands of alive cells, a maze like pattern that symmetrically expands from a single cell, a duplicator that copies its pattern to spaces around it before disappearing, very minimal patterns that expands out from two adjacent cells to create a wavefront with static behind it. I could go on and on and this is only scratching the surface with just the rulesets available in the presets.

Here are a few of the patterns you can find, often a ruleset acts differently if you start with an empty grid with only a few cells compared to a purely random start.

There are literally thousands of possible combinations for a ruleset to be in, 65,535 to be particular but many are mirrors of each other. I'd thoroughly recommend sitting down and exploring with it.

It wasn't difficult to make the code to allow you to change the ruleset but I am pleased with how elegant it was when compared to example cellular automata code that uses explicit if-else statements for each permutation of neighbours. Instead with a simple 2 dimensional array all it takes is a lookup depending on the cells state and how many neighbours it has.

The Future

Because this project has been on itch for so long I do often think about going back to it and extending it. First thing I'd probably do is make the interface nicer. Some tooltips and borders to the buttons would look nice. I'm really not a fan of flat design due to it not communicating what is interactive.

The zoom function is clunky as whilst you can use the mouse wheel it always zooms into the top left corner, often cutting off the part of the pattern you are most interested in. It would be sensible if the mouse position was used to target which part of the pattern you want to zoom in on. This is something I've done in previous projects so it wouldn't be too tricky to implement.

It might be nice to have more complex interactions at the sides of the grid, such as letting the pattern loop around from one side to another. Being able to save patterns and their ruleset would be nice too. A faster algorithm to allow you to make truly massive patterns... The list goes on.

One thing I haven't mentioned is what if the ruleset wasn't limited to 2 states, well that is something I've worked on a bit in other projects and can talk about later.

All in all Cellular Automata Sim is one of my favourite classic projects and a good example of the kind of simulation with emergent phenomena that I'm fascinated by.

Weekly Review for 4th of September

I've been reviewing each week in my journal for a while now. It grew out of a habit I picked up whilst in counselling this year and I've kept it up since those sessions ended. 

Each Friday I summarise what I thought happened during the week and then read through from the Friday before making notes as I go along. Quite often I'll forget things or imagine days went better or worse than how I felt writing on them.

This month I even went back to read all the weekly summaries for August which sure took some time. First time I've done it so it'll be interesting to see how much I remember of each month as it passes again through my journal.

This week has been bumpy as I was rather thrown off course right after summoning the courage to start writing blog posts on Tuesday. I feel like I righted quite quickly and other than Wednesday things went well.

Inspired by Aveek Bhattacharya's blogging I thought I'd mention what I'd read, watched and listened to this week.

Read

I started reading a new book last Friday, Alastair Campbell's 'But what can I do' finishing it today. It was a good read as it moved in stages of problems, solutions and actions. The sources for what he believes is wrong with modern politics are polarisation, populism, and post-truth thinking. It was written when Boris Johnson was prime minister and he really didn't like him. 

The book was pretty depressing to begin with but picked up when it came to discussing getting involved in politics and what you can do as a person. Lots of punchy acronyms and lists of tips. I rather liked his O.S.T idea, of breaking things down into your Objective, Strategy and Tactics. Often people mix them up quite badly. Funnily enough his examples were losing weight and getting a job both of which I could relate to.

He ended with a practical guide to what needs to be done to enter into politics, exhorting the younger generations not to give up on joining the political system. It is a bit amusing that he himself in the past considered becoming an MP but decided his mental health would suffer too much so he is really wanting people made of sterner stuff than him to become MPs which seems like a high bar for how active in politics he was.

He was surprisingly forthright about his own difficulties with mental health and it seems like mental health is an area he is truly passionate about. I can relate to his tales of depression and even a bit with his darker moments. I appreciate it when people are open about the difficulties they face.

Listened

Another thing that Alastair Campbell mentioned in his book was the podcast The Rest is Politics which he does with Rory Stewart. I got to listen to an episode where they were interviewing Jack Clark from Anthropic which was a great listen as I'd been interested in learning more about him since finding his blog at Import AI. I have a lot of thoughts about AI and will definitely have to write about it here sometime.

I was also kind of listening/watching was a stream by the youtuber DoshDoshington about what he wanted in a Factorio mod. If you like Factorio it was a fun listen and his videos really are great at going the extra mile in the game so a mod authored by him would be a sight to see. I say listened to as he, along with his conversational partners, were just messing around in the game whilst talking, a real DoshDoshington video is much more organised.

Watched

Another Factorio thing I've been watching is Nilaus' latest Factorio: Space Age series. He's going through each of the planets and showing how to build an organised base on each. I'm still catching up with the latest episode with the one I most recently watched finishing up Gleba, the swamp planet. Gleba has probably the most tricky resources to manage as they are organic and have a limited shelf life until they spoil. It's an extra level of complexity that leads to some neat looking factory designs.

Programmed

Not a huge amount of programming this week and I doubt this category will always be here. Still when I manage to do some it's a good thing.

I did a little bit of coding with Python over the weekend with the aim of sometime using it to write a game server in. I've not got nearly as much experience at Python as I do Javascript so I'm trying to reacquaint myself with the syntax. Also, I was investigating the pygame library in order to make graphical projects. 

I started on a basic Roguelike and got dungeon generation going. A bit silly to be making a text based Roguelike as my first real pygame project but it was something I was interested in. I'm sticking very closely to how the original Rogue worked even down to the same wall piping.

I also came across a demonstration of running a python server with browser based clients using websockets. It seemed to work really well but I don't know much about the AsyncIO library it uses.

Other

Well seeing as I've already written quite a lot I'll keep this brief.

I had a bit of a stumble on Wednesday where missing going to the gym snowballed into spending all day lying in bed and beating myself up about it. I often have issues with deciding to lie in bed and not do anything but this was much worse than it usually is. I think a combination of factors were getting to me. Such as anxiety about blogging and job seeking.

Disrupting my routine and not getting exercise seem to be pretty bad for my mental health so I'm happy to say it improved once I got back to a routine in the past couple of days. I'll have to see how the weekend goes but I can often rely on volunteering on Monday to lift my spirits.

I might come back to what I was feeling on Wednesday some time but for now I'll leave you with this week's retrospective.