Hi. A lot has happened. I figured an “update dump” post was in order. I hit a bit of a snag recently. I try to publish one post a month, and I missed November. A series of events starting in October led me to missing the November deadline. It provides a good backdrop for an update dump post. Let’s start with my sanity campaign.
In October 2021 I ran my first tabletop RPG campaign. It was fun, so I did again in 2022. The campaigns took place in the same world, just a year later. I had planned to continue the non-tradition in 2023, but felt overwhelmed at the thought of running another 12 hour session. We skipped it, but I kept promising that we would do another one some day.
This spring, I started noodling ideas. I split it up into multiple sessions. I ended up setting the game two years after the last sessions, which allowed me to introduce a cataclysm to the world. I started writing the campaign in September, hoping to play in October. I planned for a character creation + session 0 followed by three main sessions. We didn’t start playing until November, but I kept writing changes. This led to my October post, “Soul Thief.”
In October, I was tired of writing. I decided to dig into my unpublished works, and picked this one from 2015. Its introspective, and I do not post many posts like it. I felt it was the right time to bring it out. It could have used a little bit more editing, but it allowed me to get an October post out the door.
In November, we started the campaign. Between sessions, I wrote some updates to the story to build on what the players have done. I hit a bit of writers block at the end of November. I was trying to rewrite a session, and I was struggling. Nothing fun or cool came to me. I tried to write a November post for the blog, and I could not do that either. Right before the session, I was struck with inspiration, and wrote some good stuff for the session. We played it, and it was alright.
However, I still needed a November blog post, and time was running out. I still needed to prepare for Thanksgiving, and travel to my grandma’s house. Thanksgiving was fun. It was a small gathering with my grandma, my parents, and my aunt and uncle. We ate, played cards, and just enjoyed each other’s company. We had fun, but it did not leave a lot of time for me to pull together a blog post.
I was leaving on November 30th. In the morning, I typed up a first draft for a post. When I got home, I would edit it and publish it. Things did not go as planned. Switches went down at work, and my boss called me in to fix them. I traveled back home, and got into work at 5:00 pm. The protocol that detects switch loops shutdown trunk ports. In non-tech speak, network loops are bad, and the only way for switches to protect themselves from them is to turn off ports. In this case, the trunk ports are the ports between switches. When those ports shut down, they had no way to communicate with the rest of the network, including the Internet. I had to manually enable the ports, which meant visiting each switch. It took me two and half hours. I did not find the cause of the loop, but I did disable the protocol on all trunk ports.
Needless to say, I was too tired to edit and publish a post. I chose bed instead. Into the unpublished works folder it went. The post is about a digital audio player, AKA MP3 player, I bought recently. I will most likely add some information to it, edit it, and publish it within the next few months.
I also bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 FE, because I’m an idiot. I think tablets are dumb. However, I have a very specific use case for one. I’ve been playing Animal Crossing: Wild World on my phone. I have a Nintendo DS and a 3DS, but I wanted to do some Retroachievements. For that, I need to play on an emulator. It works well on my phone. The touch controls are responsive, and I can play it anywhere. The overlay for the non-touch controls are okay, but I have to collapse them if I need to use the touch screen. This is a little annoying, but it works well enough for Wild World.
I would like to play other DS games with Retroachievements in the future. My phone setup will not work for games like New Super Mario Bros. and Mario Kart DS. The overlay controls are not precise enough for the movement in those games. Also, the screen size combined with the higher resolution is not great. The tablet and a GameSir G8 controller were on sale, so I bought them. I tried out the setup a little bit with Wild World, and it actually feels really good. We’ll see how it goes for the other games whenever I get a chance to play them. It’s an effective solution, but expensive and stupid.
I started tinkering with a programming project. I want to combine all my blog posts into a single archive. This includes Roy’s Ruckus, Royfuss Old, Your Personal Gamer, Games of Remaster, and my current WordPress site. There are a lot of steps involved. Step one is to download all of the posts into a file with no formatting changes. Step two, read those files, and output a universal output for all of the posts. Step three, take those universal files, and generate a static website from them.
Each site needs scripts for steps one and two. I started with Ruckus. Originally it was a Blogger blog. In 2021, I scraped it and archived it. When I did that, I added paragraphs, and made some minor formatting changes. I used my work on that to create my step one script. It worked great, and I didn’t have any issues. Step two, I needed to format it into a universal format. This was also pretty easy, because they are just text posts. I only needed to worry about paragraph tags, blockquote tags, list tags, line break tags, and a handful of tags with custom CSS classes. However, I decided to do a lot of manual editing for each post. I added author notes at the beginning of the post instead of inline. This is for stuff like “broken link was removed” and to make posts more searchable. I also wanted to italicize book, movie, video game, and album titles. I finished all of this, and now Ruckus is good to go.
The step one script for Royfuss Old is done. Images are a problem, but I think I have a solution. I can use the step two script for Ruckus as a template, but I need to add the logic for image tags. I was about to finish up this script before I realized I needed to get a few other things in my life reined in. These scripts will be similar for Games of Remaster. I have some old scripts for archiving my WordPress site that I can leverage for those posts. After I get all of the posts into a universal format, I can then create the script that will build the archive site. I’ll restart that work after “Games of 2024.”
“Games of 2024” is what I am focused on right now. I need to finish up Donkey Kong Country 2, and then I can begin writing. The post will be a little late this year, because of Wild World. There are a few achievements I want to get during the first week of the year. I should have everything written; it will just be for updated stats. I’ll have to remember to exclude those next year.
Have a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!