I wrote some posts about Tildes Backlog Burner event for 2020 - here is the tag to read all the articles, past, present, and future - and it ran again this past february. I took part, and wrote a bit about some games I've tried out this past month.
About 20 years ago, I worked at The Library for a mid-sized University. I was working on a project that at the time was interesting and pushing some technical limitations - the unit I was with had a bunch of resources available as paper, and we were using the same source control for paper copies, PDFs, web copies, and were doing the changes between formats using XSLT, having stored the data as XML (I know there's better ways to do this now,…
This past weekend I attended my brother-in-law's wedding. It was postponed a number of times due to Covid-19, but it was a beautiful event for a wide variety of reasons. My wife's brother is a wonderful person, and his bride is a also a wonderful person; the families involved are full of delightful people. It is the first big family even we have attended since Christmas of 2021, and I'm very lucky to be able to say that I have terribly missed family events with my wife's whole family, so it was a special pleasure on a lot of levels.
I was recently thinking about the act of giving speeches. I have given some wedding speeches, including a best man speech for my brother's wedding, and have been told I give good ones. Here are some guidelines.
I recently had my second vaccination. My first vaccination was Astra Zeneca - for the second, I got Moderna. I am not a doctor, but from what I read this seems like a pretty acceptable level of vaccination for my needs, which do not require travel in the immediate future. I still had no issue with the needle itself, and the nurse was wonderful
Yesterday my lovely wife and I got our Astra Zeneca jabs. The process was literally and figuratively painless; we showed up to our doctor's office, showed our cards, they put medicine in us, we hung out for 15 minutes, and we left. I have never had an issue with needles - hence multiple piercings - and actually enjoyed getting out of the house, which I had not really done for several weeks.
Batch #2 of the sauce has been bottled. This is a much mellower sauce than the first one, because my son loves hot sauce but he is six and he can't quite handle anything super hot. This one was modelled after the "Not So Hot" hot sauce from Spice of Life which is a delightful hot sauce compan…
I guess I have taken up fermenting hot sauces, as seems customary during a pandemic. I've made and bottled my first one, and while I do not have the best tools for the job yet, I am hoping to procure some. t's quite a lot like sriracha, but a bit fruitier and quite a bit spicier. I did boil it, but I think not quite enough, because I don't think the fermentation has completely stopped (you can see I put a fermentation lid on in the picture)…
It is time once more to refresh Aphoenix.ca. I spent a bit of time recently taking part in a project called TiMaSoMo. Tildes Makes Something Month. I elected to once again remake this website. This time around, I decided to use a static website generated called Zola. I've been retroactively adding things that I've written over the last 8 years since my last official entry, and I'll probably continue doing so.
Preface This essay came about as the result of someone asking, "Scribblenauts: can someone explain what makes it so great? I heard you can basically work around every puzzle with a jetpack." I enjoy Scribblenauts and it got me to thinking about how and why different people enjoy different games.
The Problem with Gaming: There are fundamentally different reasons that people want to play games…