Yak shaving, Revisiting Old Posts, and Link Rot

ClausNo Comments

Recently, the owner of WordPress.com and the WordPress foundation went batshit insane. That deserves its own post, but the final result is that I decided to take the plunge and move this blog away from WordPress and into something else (Pelican or 11ty, I haven’t made my mind yet).

Today, after spending way too much time updating all the things (something else that deserves its own post), I tried to use the WP export tool, just to realize that my blog has a lot of draft posts, and that would cause a lot of problems when migrating!

Why my blog has a lot of draft posts… eh, at some point I decided that I wanted to make sure that all published things were things I really felt comfortable saying, and I hid all the posts in this blog. Honestly, I don’t quite remember the details.

So now I decided to go through the old posts and un-drafting them. I think I went through about 100 old posts today? The vast majority of them are just fine. Two of them I deleted because they were just a dead link, and only one of them was actually something too awkward that I decided did not need to see the light of day again.

And since I was going through these old posts, I decided to fix their tags and categories, because if we’re going to shave that Yak, we might as well do a complete job, right?

Which brings me to the title of the blog — so. many. dead. links. I think more than 2/3rds of the link in those old posts don’t work anymore. It’s really sad. The posts themselves were nice, most of them reminded me of good old days when I was finishing my PhD and starting a new job, but every now and then there was a “by the way, I saw this really cool thing on the internet today”, and the cool thing was just a dead link now.

I started tagging those posts “link rot”, but I almost named the tag “Ganondorf”…

Anyway, let’s hope I finish the migration to a SSG soon!

“The Planet Crafters” – a cool janky game about terraforming

ClausNo Comments

This week is the Obon holiday, and I spent some (too much) of my vacation time playing this little game called “The Planet Crafter”.

Screenshot of a 3D game, showing a blocky, futuristic-looking base on a green fields among brown mountains, under a blue sky.
My base at the end of the game.

The Planet Crafter is a 3D survival game where you gather resources and build a base to gather more resources. The gimmick of this game is that you have to terraform the planet you arrive at. In the beginning, the planet is cold, yellow, dusty and inhabitable. You build machines to add oxygen, heat and pressure, and slowly the planet changes – the sky becomes blue, ice melts into water, and eventually plants start to spread.

The changes are not only cosmetic — Improving the air increases your view as the dust settles. The ice melting opens caves and new areas of the map. As the water melts, some parts of the planet become flooded. Roots and trees break down rocks and also give access to new areas. Eventually, you do not need to track your O2 and water closely, as you can get them directly from the planet.

Screenshot from the game The Planet Crafter. A 3D view of an orange, inhospitable alien terrain.
The view when you first leave your landing pod, at the start of the game.

This is the best idea of the game, and it is very well done. You really do feel the planet changing, and it is a very nice feeling when an area you visited only once early in the game is completely changed after some terraforming.

That said, the game is very janky, and far from a master piece. Collision is a mess, and you’ll be frequently clipping into terrain and risking getting stuck, or being unclear how to get to some place (or if that place is even accessible). The line between finding a hidden cave and clipping into the back of the play area is very thin indeed here. The models, other than the terrain and nature, are kinda ugly. Finally, the terraforming machines are mostly magic boxes: you plop them down anywhere and wait for numbers to go up, with little to think about other than replacing the machines with the next tier when the time comes.

The beginning of the game plays a lot like a clicker game: You place machines that increase the values of O2, temperature and pressure, and as the values reach a certain thresholds, you replace them with higher tier machines. Eventually, these higher tier machines require rare materials, which require you to explore the world, navigating caves and shipwrecks for loot. This exploration becomes the largest part from the middle game to the end game. Finally, near the end game, you unlock the ability to explore random ruined shipwrecks. At this point though, you don’t really need the extra resources, except to unlock one specific ending that requires a lot of grinding. This grinding is not enjoyable at all, but I had a backlog of podcasts to listen to so…

All in all, I actually enjoyed the game, specially given the tiny size of the team (I believe the game was made by 3 or 4 people). The premise was really creative, and the gameplay was endearing, jank and all, up to until the insect stage of the game. I do wish the base building and the assembly of terraforming machines was a bit more interesting though.

A screenshot of The Planet Crafter game, showing the same base from the first screenshot, but from a different angle.
The huge planet in the skybox is really cool. Unfortunately, it does not move…

I wonder why street pass is not a thing on the Switch

Claus2 Comments

Recently I’ve been playing a lot of “Etrian Odyssey Remastered” on Switch. A lot of people compare this game with the DS originals regarding the mapping, which is the main charm of the series. I’ve been thinking a lot about the game’s street pass feature in the 3DS.

Street pass was a feature where a 3DS could see if another 3DS was nearby, and then exchange information if they had the same games in the memory. What information changed depended on the game. In Etrian Odyssey, you could mark one of your characters to send, which other people could add to their party. In Animal Crossing, other people’s villagers could come visit your island. In Rhythm Heaven, you could get statistics and ghosts of other players. Even if you didn’t have any games in common, the 3DS included a standard functionality where you could get the home country and region of people that you connected with, and you could do a kind of “scavenge hunt”, trying for example to street pass with people from all provinces in Japan, or all countries in Europe.

Street pass was a really fun feature of the 3DS. I loved to go for a walk with my DS in my back, and look forward to what the Street pass would bring me when I was back home. It gave an extra flavor to go on local trips. There were even a few places in Tokyo were people gathered just to street place with each other — I remember going to the little benches in front of Yodobashi Akihabara to get the Dragon Quest street pass from other people (I don’t even remember what the street pass was, though… maybe random dungeons?).

I’m a bit puzzled, and sad, about why the feature was not added to the Switch, though… I wonder if later games in the 3DS stopped using it, and Nintendo felt it did not made sense to add it to the Switch, or if it was a battery saving measure…

Keyboard Fixing Failed!

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Tonight my wife asked me for help fixing the keyboard of her notebook. One of the keys was stuck, and not being pressed correctly. Playing with the notebook, it was clear that something was stuck under the key. Ideally, all I had to do was to pop the key off, inspect what was wrong inside, and pop it back in.

The problem was: I had never popped a keyboard key before, neither did she, and we were both stumped.

A little bit of searching for her laptop model and “key” and “exchange” led us to this Youtube video.

Screenshot of the Youtube Video mentioned in the post. The video's title is "How To Fix Replace Keyboard Key for Lenovo Ideapad - Individual Key Repair - Letter Arrow Etc"

The video was actually quite easy to follow, and filled me with confidence. Out of an abundance of caution, I first tried the procedure on two “dead” laptops I had on hand – an old mouse laptop, and an out of commission laptop of the same brand as the target computer. In both cases, I managed to remove and reinsert the key a few times without almost any issue.

Feeling confident, I tried the procedure on my wife’s computer… it seemed to work, at first, but when I tried to put the key back into place, the bottom part would not stick. The top of the key was affixed correctly, but the bottom of the key was loose and pushing up, which made matters worse than when we first started. :-(

I tried to remove and reinsert the key a few times, with identical results. As far as I could tell from a visual inspection, all parts seemed to be in place and not broken, so I’m not sure what went wrong… I guess we’ll have to take the computer to a nearby shop tomorrow or the day after to get someone who know what they’re doing to take a look at it :-(

Oh well. We try things. Sometimes they even work!

Hello 2024!

Claus3 Comments

A pico8 animation. A green dragon flies over a body of water, against a morning sky. Mountains and trees scroll in the background. The words "Happy New Year" wave at the top.

Like last year, I spent the morning of January 1st working on this little animation. But other than that, 2022 and 2023 were really different.

If 2022 for me was not bad, not great, 2023 was… well, let’s start with the good. Several posters and papers in GECCO and ALIFE was good. Being active in the Artificial Life Newsletter was good. I started taking more care of my health, with visible results.

Somewhere around August, though, I feel like I lost control. Too many things happened at once, and I started feeling like I was falling behind and playing catch-up on everything, personal and work-wise; choosing what I could afford to leave by the wayside.

My naturalization process didn’t progress at all this year. I did very little programming. Besides the papers (which were submitted in March), research feels in a rut. RPG too. Journaling or blogging are distant dreams. In short, the later half of 2023 feels like a wasted blur.

So the overall feeling is this need to center myself and turn these things around. Be more active and less reactive in the work and personal arenas. Even as I say that, I still feel reluctant to set clear goals for this year.

But maybe I can start by building a proper emergency kit this weekend, given the huge earthquake we had today the west coast.