Blog: Books Read in 2018

Oh!

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Damn! Strut.

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Woosh!

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Blog: Games of February 2018

February was another month of gaming where I played mostly for the quiet and the stress relief. I haven't really had a game I've wanted to sink my teeth/time into, but that's ok.


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

1. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - I have to say trying to do my 100% run and my master mode run at the same time might not have been the most ... efficient way to play. Though as I keep saying, the amount of depth and detail is amazing. Everywhere I look I can see that someone has taken the time to make it special.
   
   

   

   How did they not manage to include a photo mode in this game?



2. Stardew Valley - Speaking of special, Stardew Valley has been the place I go to when I need to get away. You're character in game escapes the work-a-day world for the freedom of the farm and the game fills a bit of that in real life too.
   
   

   

   Spring in Stardew



3. Earthbound - Earthbound is a bit hard to play. I follow several people on line who love this game, and they have been inspired to create amazing things by this game (and the communities that built up around this game). I see what they loved, but at the same time, it's not the most playable game in 2018. Still, a little bit at a time, I'm filling in this chunk of my missed game history.
   
   

   

   Nothing unusual here!



4. Civilization VI - I picked this up again because I was thinking about it, thanks to the new DLC. I enjoyed Civ VI when it first dropped, but (as I seem to get to keep repeating here) I'm not *good* at it. I keep hoping to find my stride and go back to my Civ II days, but I haven't quite found it yet.
   
   

   

   Tundra Egypt



5. Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival - This isn't a game about competing. This is a game about relaxing on Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and a loved one. Don't forget to buy your turnips for the week.
   
   

   

   The cutest damn thing in Animal Crossing: Amiibo Fest is the bit where the hosts run around the station to wave good-bye!

Here's my total play time for February:

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

Blog: Books Read in 2018

Crack!

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Whump!

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Aaaagh!

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Loki!

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Plots

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Project 18 - Video Game Play Tracker - Update 1 (v0.1.0)

I’ve really had a lot of fun with this project so far.

For version 0.1.0 I’ve added in the basics, including:

• A game representation, including the name, the year and the platform.
• A set of games and get back games that match particular criteria
• A play session representation, including the game, the date and how long the session lasted.
• A list of play sessions
• Managers to load and save game and play  data from and from csv files.

I’ve also built a simple text-based UI, which allows you to save, load and add games and play sessions.

The Basic Text Based UI Menu

I also think I did an ok job using the git flow workflow, although I think I ended up adding too many features in my release 0.1.0 branch. I also added a ton of tests, even if I didn’t quite get myself to a test first mentality.

So I’m happy enough with v0.1.0. RIght now I’m keeping it in a private GitHub Repository, I should probably just open it up, but right at the moment I’m not sure I want to. At least just yet.

The basic tracker running in the terminal.

In terms of usability it’s not great, but it’s a good starting point. My next goal from here is to introduce filtering and aggregation so I can see play sessions aggregated over a list and filter for specific games or time periods. I’ll post an update around July 1, 2018.

Blog: Books Read in 2018

Plots

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Nudge

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Push

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Blog: Books Read in 2018

Cat

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Blog Post: Books Read in 2018

Sand

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Project 18: Video Game Play Tracker

I've been tracking the video games I play for the last few years now. It started out as a move to help me remember what I actually played over the course of a year and how now become something of a habit, as well as a good way for me to be more mindful about how and what I play.

Thus far I've been tracking what I've played in a Google sheet (actually 3 of them at this point). This works pretty well for the most part and it has a lot of nice "analytics" features (by which I mean it has nice pivot tables). I'm finding though that the Google sheet doesn't scale as well as it could and it's a little limited in terms of visualization options (especially 3 years into tracking).

At the same time I've been feeling a bit behind on some practical development skills. I'm not practicing as much as I'd like and when I do I'm messing with my behemoth PhD system.  (A story for another day.) I also don't play with as many dev tools and services as I'd like to.

Combining those things along with spending the last 4 months teaching novice Java programmers and I've decided to give myself *yet another* project. Generally my goal is to: make the Game Tracker work, make it work with Google Sheets and take advantage of anything that seems fancy and cool. Also get a little practice in working with a good git workflow and taking advantage of the tools GitHub provides. And most of all not to let any of this get in the way of the other things I need to be doing.

The goal here is to keep it small and keep it simple. For Phase I, I'd like to get the basics set up: a text menu system to track games and play sessions and save and loading to file. I'll check in next on May 15, 2018.

(And if you find yourself wondering what happened to those games he was talking about, I'll get back to those, but this (right now) seems like it's going to be more compatible as a project that I get to work on after all my other work is done for the day.)

Blog Post: Books Read in 2018

Phenomenal

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Blog Post: Books Read in 2018

Humanity, Power and Price.

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Blog Post: Books Read in 2018

Two different ends of the world. 2018 in a book update.

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Blog: Games of January 2018

I'm pretty happy with what I played in January. If you've been following for a while I suspect you can guess which games are going to show up in my top five. I've been busy with work and pushing on my thesis so I haven't wanted to game for adventure, instead I've been gaming for relaxation and comfort. At the end of the day I've enjoyed another month of games.
My top five games (by play time) for January were:

1. Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild  - So I'm moving in on the end of my 100% Master Quest play through. I have most of the shrines finished (I think I'm at 97 right now) and most of the side quests done (no idea how many, but a lot). I'm still loving every minute of it. I think this has been the right game for me at the moment, because it has so much depth I've been able to come back to it again and again, which works well with my plan to stay focused on my thesis as much as I can.
   
   

   

   A fine mountain stroll.

   
   
2. Europa Universalis 4  - History talk enevitably brings me back into EU4, as does spending too much time sitting at my desk and cold weather. So I've been back into EU4 trying to rule the world as the Ottomans (and trying not to get crushed but Poland and Austria).
   
   

   

   A fight for Cairo

   
   


3. Stardew Valley - Again on the deep winter gaming tip, I've been playing more Stardew. It's another great game for that regular returning and short play sessions.
   
   

   

   An event in the night.

   
   


4. Ogre Battle 64 - I am ... almost done. I started this play through in November 2016 and I think I'm going to finish my favourite game for the 2nd time. As I've said before I love this game, even though it has some really significant flaws. I think it ties into my theme for the month, it's a comfortable game and one that's easy to come back to time after time.
   
   

   

   A showdown of friends.



5. Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival - Again good Animal Crossing charm and good friends to play it with.
   
   

   

   A plaza of fun (and dry cats).

   
   

Here's my total play time for January:

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

Blog Post: Books Read in 2018

Wow. Woah. Yikes.

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Project 15: 12 Books in 21 Weeks - Wrapup

That was fun. I've been really bad about reading over the last few years and I wanted to kick myself to do a little more. And I think I did that, I read 18 books, some were comic volumes or graphic novels and a lot were audio books but I'm happy. I read several books I really enjoyed, particularly The Nameless City and American Gods. The Laundry books also scratch a lot of my nerdy itches even if they do sometimes leave me wanting just a little more.

I'm happy to wrap the project here, although I think I'm going to try to keep a list of my reading updated as I go (like the Lee and Miller's books read list) which will look basically like the project updates did. I've also challenged myself to read 32 books in 2018 in the good reads reading challenge.