Projects Update: January 2021

I'm finding this particular project update a bit of a struggle. On the one hand I feel that I've been much more productive on my own projects than I've been in the past, but on the other hand I'm feeling a bit lost overall and like there's still a lot of things I'd like to do. 

At the beginning of January I started a new job and I'm finding balancing my energy difficult. I appreciate having my time better structured with a 9-5 position and the position itself has a lot of breadth for creativity, but I do find myself pretty tired at the end of a day. 

All in all I'm finding it a bit of a challenge to hit a balance that works for me. I probably need to relax and take to heart that I've only been working on this for a month. One thing I am trying to do is to reduce the number of things I'm trying to do at any point in time. For the first time in most of a decade I've reduced my daily to-do list down to just the absolutely must do things. Then I allow myself to decide what the best next thing for me to do is. 

As an AI researcher this gives me a real fear at getting stuck in a local-optima, but honestly I find that the landscape shifts and I'm able to get things moved forward here and there. Not as much as I'd *like*, but that's how life works. Beyond that, I'm trying to decouple my feeling of self-worth and happiness from productivity and completing projects, but that's a long journey to undertake.

At the moment, I've got 6 projects I'm providing updates for:

• The Blog, as ever, is ticking along. I actually wrote my first editorial piece in ages earlier in the month. I may write more, but my primary focus is to have fun keeping track of my reading and game playing.
• I left the Chrono Trigger Sprites without a deadline and I'm enjoying that. I've done a bit more and so there will be project updates about those eventually, but I'm not rushing and I'm kinda happy to have a hobby that just a hobby. 
• I haven't been writing  outside of the blog, so my project on The Roofs has been slow. I think if I do decide to carve out a little more time this will be the project I go to first. I'm definitely sitting on those first four thousand words I wrote and finding it a bit hard to accept the permission to write terribly, while pushing forward. If I don't carve that time out, then I'll let this go dormant for a bit.
• I want to put together a Google Drive backend the Game Tracker, but this has been complicated, because the documentation from Google is all built around accessing drive through a Gradle build. In my mind I'd just like a library I can link against, but that's not the way the (fairly limited) documentation works. This throws me off making any progress and even though I have other avenues I could work on, I keep getting stuck. I haven't put in a huge amount of time, but this is definitely a project I'm focusing on. 
• One of the ways I was able to justify taking the non-teaching job is to myself that I want to work on Code Click, building teaching resources and building up my experience for teaching. Code Click is a huge part of that, but for now it's also a project that can wait. I'll come back to this (I've spent quite a while thinking about what I would like Code Click to be like), but for now I'm not going to focus on it too much.
• My time on Infinite Acorn Adventure has mostly been spent trying to remember all of the linear algebra that I took (poorly) two decades ago. That's been fun in itself, especially with Daniel Shiffman's videos.

I'm not going to share any deadlines for things right now. None of these projects need to go anywhere in particular, so I'm going to work on them when I feel like working on them. Later if something needs a push to get *actually finished* then I might bring back the idea.

This was a lot of fun to build and definitely easier than some.

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Sacrifice. Horse.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Duty. Habbit. Church. Sin.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: 2020 in Games

It's time to take a quick look at my yearly gaming wrap up for 2020, wrapping up what I played the most (and least) and what I enjoyed the most. 

Top Games by Time Played

I don't think it's too much of a surprise that my most played game of 2020 was Animal Crossing: New Horizons at 205 hours. Animal Crossing was exactly the right fit for a year where we avoided contact with other people and mostly stayed home. In a lot of my recent monthly tracking posts, I've mentioned that this particular Animal Crossing feels a little hollow compared to some of the ones that come before (I'm a relatively recent convert, but Tama Hero has a video on what changed). I'm not sure as things stand AC:NH will be that high on my 2021 list, but it was certainly a pleasant way to spend the year.

Following up AC:NH, we have Europa Universalis 4 at 84 hours and Dragon Quest XI S at 83 hours. EU4 filled a lot of my time in the first half of the year. It's enjoyable and has the right amount of challenge that I'm engaged without being too frustrated. I'm not exactly good at it, but it's also not a game you really need to be good at, it's just interesting to see slightly different ahistorical version of Europe turn out.

Dragon Quest XI was also a lot of fun. It is Dragon Quest, so if you're not interested in straight ahead JRPGs you're apt to not enjoy it too much, but it's a nice addition to the series. I found it a little bit longer than I'd really have enjoyed but the late game had the right level of challenge and fun.

My two least played games of the year were Bloons and Space Hulk Tactics at roughly 6 minutes each. Bloons is (was) a free flash game so that's no great loss. Space Hulk Tactics was pretty wildly disappointing and I wish it had the Warhammer 40K name on it because I probably wouldn't have tried it.

For the record the "middlest" game I played was Risk II. This was a version of Risk (the board game) produced in the early 2000s published by Hasbro/Mircroprose. It's abandonware and my PC did not enjoy trying to play it (even with windows XP compatibility turned on). It's an ok version of classic risk, but it has a fun construction of "Same Time Risk" where you put in your orders and then the game reveals everyone's orders at once, so you can have armies clashing over boarders if two players decide to attack each other. It's unbalanced and honestly has some problems, but it's a game that has really stuck with me. It also has the mechanic that bigger armies get bigger dice so if you do it right you can role a d20 against your enemies d4 (that's not quite how it's implemented but that's the idea). Kinda odd for a thing I didn't download until after Christmas (and can't switch away from once it's started).

In total I played 799 hours of games in 2020. This is a bit up from previous years, but given the nature of 2020 I don't think that's a surprise.

For fun, I also keep track of how often games appeared in the games of the month. So in case you were curious here's how often each game appeared in the lists:

Top Games by My Rating

My favourite games that I played this year are (in alphabetical order):

• Chrono Trigger
• Hades
• Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Super Mario Odyssey
• XCOM: Chimera Squad

I never look back at previous rankings, so this is my subjective list from late 2020. I think it's a solid list of games. Chrono Trigger is a classic and Breath of the Wild will be too. Hades is seriously one of the best games I've ever played. After feeling ambivalent about most of the XCOM reboot, Chimera Squad is a breath of fresh air and a total blast to play. Odyssey is maybe the game that's most on the bubble in this list, but it's an absolute tour de force in how to put fun movement mechanics into a game that easy to pick up an play for a minute or an hour.

Thoughts on Games in 2020

I'm pretty happy with a lot of what I played in 2020. Ending the year with Hades was a delight and it topped off a year with a lot of other things that I was pretty glad to play. I was pretty intentional with what I played (especially considering there was a pandemic on) and generally I didn't feel like I was supposed to be doing something else for a lot of my play time.

Beyond Hades, I also really enjoyed starting the year with Chrono Trigger and then Dragon Quest XI. I also really enjoyed XCOM Chimera Squad, Golf Story, Mario 35 and ending the year off replaying Illusion of Gaia. 

I did end up feeling uncomfortable towards the end of the year. I wasn't as good as I should have been about being intentional and additionally I found myself very tired, so I was doing less and playing more. I'd like in 2021 to be a little better about getting things done outside of playing games. In particular I'd like to actually *make* some games, so that's a thing I'm going to try to focus on.

The other thing I found towards the end of the year is that it was hard to really get engrossed in a game. That's a thing that's hard to control, but I think it's worth it to try to push myself through a couple of games that I haven't stuck with so that I can see them and feel done about them.

I also want to find some quick-fun games that I can play in 5-15 minute chunks when I need a break from getting stuff done.

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Life.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog Post: Teaching Online in Fall 2020

Having made it through Fall 2020, a bit by the skin of my teeth, I thought I would write up the things that seemed important to me. I'm not sure if these would be a lot of help to anyone else, but it seems worth having a record of how I was feeling. In particular as I'm moving away from teaching undergraduates, I thought having a record of how the last time went from my own perspective would be a good idea.

That first day.

Things That Probably Apply to All Emergency Online Teaching

• Students appreciated the amount of empathy and flexibility I brought to the class. 
• Flipping two classes, while moving online and trying to be very on top of assessment was really, really hard. 
• I ended up giving myself significantly more work than I could really manage and it made handling everything the whole semester harder than it should have been.  I ended up having to slip deadlines and cut elements from the course on the fly. In the end I think the damage was contained, but I definitely didn't have the semester I was hoping for.
• Generally, smaller one-topic videos are the best fit to what students are looking for.
• Students generally found that a flipped experience online (recorded lectures, with readings and quizzes) was a lot of work. I've lost the reference, but this seems to be due more to the introduction of a flipped classroom forcing them to actually do the learning activities more regularly.
• It was hard for both the students and I to assess how long things would take for them to do.
• In the long term I think this works out, but you definitely have to adjust your assumptions about how much work a student can get done in a week and make sure they have some time to breath around your constant low level work.
• That being said, videos, especially where I worked topics and examples on paper were very well received and usually the things students pointed out as working very well for them.
• I found my first year (first semester) students were much more willing to adapt and work in an online context than my returning students. This was true for the first few months, but flipped as we got into the end of the semester.
• That may have been that I had trouble keeping up with the schedule myself, and the returning students had more context for that situation.

Things that Apply to Learning Technology in an Emergency Online Classroom

• Make sure you understand what the student experience of each piece of technology you use.
• Using Blackboard, I discovered that the feedback I was writing to students, and which appeared alongside their grade in *my* view, were not shared with the students unless you changed *several* configurations.
• Using Blackboard, I also discovered that if students are using their phone to look at the course (and they are) then details under items aren't shown, so they often didn't see links available in the description of an item.
• Have Plan B in place, even if you don't think you need it.
• Our primary tool for practicing coding shutdown in October. The effort to replace it was astronomic and took myself and one of our staff the better part of 2 weeks to replace. Even then, we didn't get the system really nailed down until the last few weeks of class.
• If you happen to be teaching at Mount Royal University:
• You are not supposed to "title" your questions in a Blackboard assessment.
• If you happen to be using Blackboard:
• You should, under no circumstances name a question "null".

Things that Apply to a Programming One Class

• Trying to stay language agnostic and approach the basic concepts of computing and problem solving using Karel the Robot worked fairly well.
• I regretted not having a perfectly functioning Karel tool, but I started working with the students moving paper doll Karels around and I think that worked well.
• Transitioning into Java was a bit rough. We had some tech problems (See plan B above) and that slowed us down, but also the sheer amount of extra stuff Java needs for basic programming concepts makes it harder to pick up.
• Honestly this is the part of the course I'm least sure about. The transition to Java was rougher, but transition students on Python hasn't been as smooth as I want either.
• I really want to have students writing 1/2 drills a day, maybe only 5 lines of code, but I just want to see them keep working on stuff.
• I think a Programming One can do without a lot of larger assignments or projects. Generally I think the focus should be on becoming fluent and then in Programming Two they can apply it to something interesting.
• A lot of the above things are based on the idea that the bulk of the class can't program already. I'm not convinced that's true. I did a survey at the beginning of the semester and the bulk of the students described themselves as having some programming experience.
• I also struggled a bit keeping the more confident programmers from running away with the thread in class. I think everyone ended up well enough this semester, but I think we need to be cognizant about how experience is handled coming into a Programming One class. 
• Worth noting that several of the more experienced programmers appreciated how Karel forced them to be clear in their programming thoughts.

Things that Apply to a Programming Two Class

• I'd like a giant pool of drills to draw from. Giving students a selection of application areas for a given programming topic would help broaden their perspective. One thing I didn't manage to do but want to do is show them the different solutions they produce for a drill and that generally is easier if you have 4 answers each for 5 questions rather than 20 answers for 1.
• I like the idea of a semester long assignment or project for students, but I've struggled to find a way to introduce it effectively. This year. particularly, trying to do an assignment along side my students was a real struggle. In the future I'd rather have all of the pieces done, but I will say the students seemed to appreciate watching me build my solution to the assignment as well.

Blog: Books Read in 2021

Enthusiasm.

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Books Read in 2020

Consequences. Personhood. Stereotypes.
Embers. Romans.

Have I mentioned that I read American Elf when I'm stressed?

I'm on Good Reads

Blog: Games of December 2020

I'm not sure I was in a great mind-space in December. Looking at how I felt about most of what I played none of it really seemed to be great. I've been thinking about how to manage happiness and fun and so hopefully for the stuff I play next I'll be able to enjoy it more.

My top five games (by play time) for December were:

1. Civilization VI - Coming out of November I had a few fun games and a few games that weren't so fun. I want to love this game, but sometimes it just feels so draggy.
   
   
   
   
   


2. Hades - I'm a little frustrated that I'm not better at Hades than I am. On the other hand even as someone who isn't very good at it the game is still fun and interesting and doesn't make me feel like I'm really missing out. I wonder if playing mouse and keyboard has held me back some (I don't think much), but mostly I think I'm just a little too impatient with the game. I'll talk more about it in my 2020 wrap-up post, but the fact that this became a top 10 game in less than 2 months of play time really speaks to just how good it is.
   
   
   
   
   


3. Illusion of Gaia - I don't pick up Illusion of Gaia every year at the holidays but it's definitely the time when I want to play it again. It was nice to have a couple of days to play and I was able to get all the way though quite quickly this year (9 and a half hours) at least partly because I learned the speed running tactic (fact?) that the game gives you all of the XP even if you don't defeat the enemies. So it was nice to be able to tour through the parts I liked and keep going. It felt interestingly dark in the year 2020, with a lot of people not really responding to the crisis the world is facing in the game. 
   
   
   
   
   


4. Animal Crossing: New Horizons - I dunno. It's cute but I'm finding less and less urge to actually play. I've given myself a goal of getting my island to 5 stars in January and then we'll see what's next but without a significant update, I may just drift away from my island.
   
   
   
   
   


5. Luigi's Mansion 3 - If you are an animator you should play this game. Other than that I'm not sure. I think there are a ton of fun ideas in here and it's certainly charming, but I just didn't every feel that invested.
   
   
   
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for December:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month: