With another year behind me, I’m still looking forward, and 2024 has a lot of new things in store. This year I’m doing a couple of different things to capture different elements of what I’m trying to do. As usual, I’m going to have my typical list of goals, and they’re going to follow the usual SMART criteria, with a focus on specific and measurable. In the past, these have been my typical resolutions, with rather few elements of, “I’ll know it when it see it” or “at least one is enough”, but this year, you’ll see this be more clear. Conversely, I will also have some things that don’t meet the SMART criteria – they aren’t specific nor measurable; for these, you won’t see a progress bar, or me necessarily mince words on what it even means explicitly. I’m calling these items “themes” as they aren’t really an achievable goal, so much as ideas that I want to keep in mind and guide some of my activities. We’ll see how that works out and maybe it’ll be something I do again more often.
Over the last several days, I’ve been printing a “gaming in bed” gaming table that uses the StageTop system I backed on kickstarter. My goal was to build a table that I could use for gaming in bed, especially at a hotel when I’m on travel. Overall, it’s been a fun project – there are some things that I liked/didn’t like, but at the end of the day, it was good.
It’s time to start looking ahead again. With the new year, I’ve got some new resolutions (as well as some old ones making an appearance). Sometimes I wonder why I still do this, but, at the end of the day, I do it because it’s useful to me – not as a way to give me goals, nor to motivate me to better myself, but to track what I’ve been up to. Looking forward to the new year, and looking back to the past year, helps me remember what it is I’ve done, what I’ve sidelined, and what I thought I might do a year ago.
So, it’s with that that, once again, I set some goals, and here they are:
After seeing the kickstarter for the Teburu game system, I started thinking a lot about app driven games and the integration of digital technology into board games. Specifically, I wondered whether it was something I wanted and how much? Is there a line beyond which integration of technology is too much?
As I started to think through this for myself, I thought about the games that I have, where the app integration happens, and what that means to me.
It’s not my intent to make my blog into a bunch of game lists, but I have been thinking about that a lot more lately, and so I’ve come up with another list of games. These are all games that I want to play to find out if they are something I’m interested in, but I don’t want to take the effort of getting them and being the first person in my group to learn them. A lot of the games on this list are ones that I’m not sure that I would like, or would necessarily make the time to play, while others I think I would like, but want to find out more so I can decide whether the expense and/or difficulty to acquire would be worth it.
It’s likely no surprise that I play a lot of tabletop games, and, as I’ve learned more about what games I like and gotten a better pulse on what games are coming out, I’ve found that there are games that I get excited about. To push this forward a bit, I wanted to do a post about the games that I’m most excited about getting in-hand. Some of these are games that I have played once or twice, while others I’ve only seen previews of, but look like they’re in my wheelhouse. To be honest, most of them I’ve backed on Kickstarter and I’m just waiting for them to ship!
It already seems odd to be looking back, after I’ve already looked forward and set my goals for 2021, but, it’s time to close out 2021 with a look at how I did on my resolutions for last year. As usual, I’ll go through my resolutions one-by-one and see whether I completed them.
This year, my New Year’s posts are going to be a bit out of order, as I haven’t really been spending a lot of time writing. In fact, I just started taking the bus again last week, so we’ll see how that goes. Still, I did make New Year’s Resolutions this year, so I feel like I ought to go over them so I know whether I succeeded or not with them at the end of the year.
Now that I’ve had a bit more time to write, you might guess that I’ve also had a bit more time to read. I have, and that has allowed me to finally finish His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. This one has been on my “in progress” list for a while, so I’m glad to finally move on to reading something else. Though one might want to dedicate a post to each book of the trilogy, I’m only going to be writing this one post covering all three books. There will be minor spoilers below, so read at your own risk. Continue reading His Dark Materials→
I’ve been thinking about a 3d printer filament buffer for a while, but haven’t really made the time to actually solve this problem, mostly because my multi-material printing has, to date, been pretty minor. That’s not to say I haven’t been using my MMU, only to say that so far my prints have primarily needed tens of tool changes rather than hundreds. At this scale, my “non-buffer” buffering solution worked reasonably well. I’ve only had one or two jams, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. Well, I decided to try a “big” project, and printed some miniatures with soluble supports which resulted in 216 tool changes. This, I found, is why the filament buffer exists. Continue reading The Filament Buffering Problem→
Thoughts are stripped of their texture to form words that they might be colored by the mind of another.
