April 8, 2021

The Starship Game

If you’ve known me for more than a couple of years, you know that I keep coming back to a sci-fi TTRPG idea in which you play as a starship AI. The setting and rules have gone through many iterations and never been really finished. Today I decided to update them to use the Fate Accelerated system, because I’ve had some fun GMing that since my last pass over this.

December 8, 2020

Advent of Code 2020, Day 8

I liked day 8. It made me feel clever when I worked it out. Spoilers follow as usual, and my solution is here. There are a few classes of puzzle that show up time and time again in Advent of Code. One of these is the virtual machine puzzle. That's where it gives you some computer code, and the task is to make something that can run it. Remember I mentioned Intcode from 2019?

December 7, 2020

Advent of Code 2020, Day 7

Day 7 was a bit more challenging than the last couple. As usual, spoilers for day 7 follow. This time around, the subject of our airline-based adventures was the baggage restrictions. Each bag is given a certain colour coding, and must contain a selection of bags of other colour codings based on a simple set of rules. The rules are a mere six hundred lines long, so not that different from real baggage restrictions.

December 6, 2020

Advent of Code 2020, Day 6

Not much to write about for day 6, though the premise is again very relatable. It's nice to help people out when you're the only one that can make sense of a system, though I believe more in teaching them how to understand the system than doing the work for them. I'd far rather have someone say to me, "let me show you how to do it," than, "let me do it for you.

December 5, 2020

Advent of Code 2020, Day 5

Curiously, day 5 was actually simpler than day 4. My solution is over on my git repo, and as always, this post contains spoilers for day 5 and earlier. First of all, I'm continuing to love the writing introducing the problems. Let me just quote the first paragraph verbatim: You board your plane only to discover a new problem: you dropped your boarding pass! You aren't sure which seat is yours, and all of the flight attendants are busy with the flood of people that suddenly made it through passport control.

December 4, 2020

Advent of Code 2020, Day 4

I've been doing Advent of Code again this year, and this time I'm using it to learn Haskell. You can see my adventures with the first three days over in this thread on fedi, but my day 4 writeup ran a bit long, so I'm posting here instead. If you're doing Advent of Code yourself this year, then be aware that this post contains a detailed discussion of my solution to day 4, so consider this your spoiler warning.

September 28, 2020

The Basics of Home Networking (or: Why IPv6 is Awesome)

I was getting excited over on Fedi about finally having native IPv6 support on my home Internet connection, no tunnels necessary, and after someone asked, that led into an explanation of the basics of IP addressing, NAT, port forwarding, and routers generally. It was a bit long to dump onto people's timelines, but that sort of long-form infodump is exactly what I put this site up for, so here we go.

September 27, 2020

Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is a fine game that is far harder to get working than it should be

I've been playing Heroes of Might and Magic 2 recently. It's one of the games I grew up with, and it holds many fond memories for me. It is also, as anyone following me on the Fediverse will know, how I discovered my lifelong fascination with griffins. After a bit of that, today I decided to try and get Heroes of Might and Magic 3 running. While I strongly prefer Heroes 2's aesthetic in most ways, Heroes 3 is mechanically the better game.

September 21, 2020

Hello world!

Wow, I have a blog? When did that happen? Who is responsible for this travesty?