Kind of Blue

I seem to keep falling into a familiar pattern. I’ll rebuild the weblog (updating the layout a bit, upgrading the software that runs the blog, etc.), and get all excited. Then I’ll lose interest and forget about it again.

But, let’s give it another try.

It’s been an interesting couple of years since my last post here. Started work at a large multinational real estate company that didn’t end up being a good fit. I left there to go back and work again with a familiar codebase and some great coworkers that I had worked with previously for years and got along with really well. Then they closed up shop and laid off just about everyone, including me.

After getting a new version of Jekyll installed, pulling some archives from Github, and some from the Internet Wayback Machine, I think I have most of my posts back. I need to do some adjustments to a few of the templates, but I think we’re back and running well enough. There may be some older posts that I’m missing, but I think they’re fine being lost to the ether.

I tried a few different static site generators for the blog (like the Python-based Pelican and Nikola), but I think my familiarity with Jekyll made it a bit easier to get up and running. I’m starting with the excellent whiteglass theme, but I’m sure I’ll be adjusting it as I go along.

Unfortunately, most of the content of this weblog is now stuck in the past. The last post I made was almost five years ago. That’s a long, long time. Since then, I’ve been through two other jobs (well, one was kind of return to a previous job). I’ve seen my oldest child graduate from college, and my youngest child is now in his second year of college.

I’m not 100% sure what I’ll be putting up at this site, but at least I have the content back. I’m not sure I’m going to get the The Tools Artists Use site running again, which is a bummer. We’ll see what I can recover.

Editor’s Note: This was moved here from my short-lived TTRPG weblog. I believe I’ve adjusted all the links, so everything should still work.

I’m now just over a couple of weeks into the Dungeon23 challenge, and it’s actually going pretty well. I’m still feeling my way into the challenge, but we’ve only just begun. As it progresses, I should get a better handle on my voice in the process.

As mentioned in my first Dungeon23 post, I’m wanted to do some overland hex mapping, as in addition to dungeon design. Well, I started with some hex mapping (see images below), but then instead of delving into a dungeon, I found a keep and began mapping something above ground. The mapping and points of interest came from the Pocket Lands (and D100 Lands) tables. I figured I’d follow what the dice rolls decided.

Editor’s Note: This was moved here from my short-lived TTRPG weblog. I believe I’ve adjusted all the links, so everything should still work.

In his original post, here’s how Sean McCoy planned on creating his Dungeon23 megadungeon:

A dungeon room a day, every day, for 2023. That’s 365 rooms. I’ll do a level a month, so 12 levels. Every week is a little area of 7 rooms, so I can keep my focus small.

That sounds like a lot of fun, but I think I’d like to try it a bit differently. If you read across Twitter, Mastodon, and Reddit how folks plan on participating, you’ll find ideas like City23, World23, NPC23, and so on.

Editor’s Note: This was moved here from my short-lived TTRPG weblog. I believe I’ve adjusted all the links, so everything should still work.

The first question I need to answer is this: do I really know what I’m doing?

The answer so far is: not really! I’m just winging it at this point. But that’s fine.

TTRPGs aren’t completely new to me, as I mentioned in the opening post here, but writing one certainly is. As a teen, I spent many hours drawing castles, dungeons, and monsters for D&D campaigns that were never played, but now, 35 years later, I’m taking a different approach.

Solo RPGs, and journaling RPGs in particular, have truly captured my attention. In a way, they look at lot like simple creative writing exercises. But I feel like there is more to them than that. Take Alone Among the Stars by Takuma Okada, for example. Sure, you’re describing a certain number of physical phenomena you discover on planets. But if you play it right, you can see yourself–or a character nothing like yourself–as they discover and record what they see. It all depends on how to approach the challenge.

Editor’s Note: This was moved here from my short-lived TTRPG weblog. I believe I’ve adjusted all the links, so everything should still work.

For the last four years or so, I got sucked into tabletop board games to quite a serious degree. Once I found the types of games I liked, I felt determined to own more and more. I bought more games than I needed, and read about even more that I thought I needed. I spent more time on BoardGameGeek.com (BGG) than just about any other website. Heck, I even wrote some Python scripts to built a web site to track good deals on board games, resulting in bestboardgamedeals.com.

But earlier this year, that board game fever started to wear off. The whole hype cycle around the bigger, more complicated, and more expensive games started to lose its luster. I started selling off games from my collection, and backed off on following the constant churn of news about all the games soon to hit the shelves (or Kickstarter). I’ll still play a game when it’s suggested, but I just don’t have the enthusiasm for it I once had.

Thanks to the Roguelike challenge I mentioned in the last post, I’ve been having a lot of fun working on my Python skills. To be honest, competing in the challenge was mainly a lot of typing out code from a tutorial, but it did help me learn additional syntax, tips on class creation, and overall project organization. Building such a big project also got me itching to start on a another where I’m writing all the code myself (not a tutorial). So, I decided it’s time to write yet another blogging app.

I’m very happy–and even a bit surprised–that I was able to complete the Roguelike challenge. It ended up with a few bugs, but those are most likely due to the modifications I made on my own. The game does run, and it isn’t all that exciting as it is now, but the source is available up on Github (it doesn’t even have a name yet!) if anyone is interested. I will keep poking at it to clean up all the bugs I introduced, and add some new features.

That brings us to the new blogging app. By now, I’ve used about every blogging software (Blogger, MoveableType, WordPress, Drupal, Jekyll, and likely others), and have written my own in just about every language I know (Perl, ASP, Ruby, and now Python). It’s kind of a joke at this point, really. So, why write another? Well, it’s often a suggested project to tackle when learning a new language, and since it involves working with a variety of ideas (file access, reading configuration, text transformation, etc), it should be a good challenge. I’m also going work on adding testing and adding type hinting to the project as much as I can.

While I’ve made some progress on the blogging app, I’m not quite ready to share the code. The end goal is to have the app build this site, so I have a bit of work to go.

Well, I didn’t complete the Every Day in May challenge like I was hoping to, but I did do better than last year. Last year I completed 10 of the daily challenges; this year, I finished 17. But even without completing all of the prompts, I am pretty happy with a few of the sketches:

• a bunch of bananas
• the Greentree water tower
• a couple of books - extra special because I used my little paint kit, which had been lost for months
• my late grandfather’s tractor

So, what’s this other challenge then? This go around it’s not a sketching challenge, but a programming one instead: r/roguelikedev Does The Complete Roguelike Tutorial. Basically, we’ll follow along with a multi-step tutorial - completing a little bit each week - and by the end, we should have a somewhat full-featured, text-based game. Since the tutorial uses the Python language, that’s another bonus the challenge has.

I had never played many roguelike games in the past, but more recently they have caught my interest. Since I’ve lost most of any skill I had in the past for first-person shooter games (which I played a lot of in the 90s and early 00s), I’ve become more interested in other kinds of video games. One example, is Dwarf Fortress. While it’s not technically a roguelike - though it looks a lot like one - I’ve been diving into the madness that is that game. I’m sure I’ll have a post on that game at some point, too.

If you look at my Flickr album for 2018’s Every Day in May, you’ll see I was only able to complete 10 of the 31 challenges. I can’t recall what led me to stop keeping up with the entries, but I plan to give it a better attempt this year.

I’ll admit that some of this year’s prompts are a little different - like “Your favorite song” - but overall I think they’re all doable. And there are a few I am looking forward to, like “a ruined building,” and “a toy.” I should be able to have fun with those and most of the others on the list.

As I complete each challenge, I’ll post the result to Flickr and my Instagram. Now, if only I could find my watercolor set.

In my last post, I wired up a very simple API server in Python with Flask. This time, I’ll add in a library meant to make building APIs a bit easier: Flask-RESTful.

The goal will be to add in the library and adjust all code necessary to take advantage of this library. If all goes well, then the tests we wrote the last time should still pass. Let’s cross our fingers.

The code for this time will be in the same repository, github.com/billturner/simple_flask_api, but this time the branch used will be 02-flask-restful.