Jeremiah Tolbert's Blog

Well, that election kinda sucked, huh?

It’s been hard to spare time for much of anything but surviving these past few months. The economic changes on the horizon are frightening to me, and when I am frightened, I have little energy or time to make art. Even my roleplaying games are on hiatus for the next month while I focus on the next stages of Clockpunk Studios and plans to make it through the next 4 years.

Despite the looming dystopia, there are good things in my life. I’ve lost a considerable amount of weight this year (about 40 pounds) and I’m sitting at 33 books read for the year (counting some graphic novels and at least one long podcast series). My family is healthy. There are things to be grateful for, on this Thanksgiving-eve.

So, we are still alive here (cue Jonathan Coulton). I have jokingly said next year is gonna be my year of the cockroach — my primary goal is just to survive out of spite. Maybe no so jokingly?

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The last week (and consequently, all of May) really flew by. I’m having a hard time comprehending the speed of the passage of time lately. This year seems to nearly be half over and I feel like I just got started.

Last week was about recovering from the epic 2024 Microcenter Fail. A couple of weeks ago, a harddrive died in my primary work station. Microcenter took a week to try and fix it, and ended up formatted my data drive for no good reason in the process. They’ve since promised to restore the data with a recovery service and are giving me a refund for the purchase of the machine, which is not even six months old.

I’ve decided not to rely on PCs anymore for my work machine, and I’ve been making major adjustments to my work station layout for it. I’ve been taking the awkward time to get better organized, and have been setting up github repos of all my most important codebases for even more redundancy, and hopefully for easier developer workflow in the future too. It’s boring work, but it’s helping me combat the anxiety of things and important.

I’m trying to figure out how to safely upgrade client sites to the High Performance Order Storage for their Woocommerce sites, but creating local development installs of sites with 15 GB databases has proven damned near impossible. I’ll probably have to do it all on-server in staging environments. (This is probably jibberish to a lot of you, but it’s helpful for me to record here for posterity). I’ve also been trying to solve a thorny issue involving our coupon system across multiple sites.

The weekend flew by. I picked up a new computer game on Friday afternoon called Soulmask and it’s right up my alley for a survival game. A kind of MesoAmerican Conan Exiles with bits of Palworld and ARK in it. I’m really enjoying it so far, and I spent almost all day playing on Saturday, but today, I’ve just been napping, reading, and getting ready for the work week ahead.

I hope that my data is recovered from that drive soon, and I can get back to work on some important projects that are currently trapped in limbo there. I also hope June slows down some and I don’t feel so metaphorically out of breath. Finally, I hope your month is fruitful in all the ways you want as well.

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As I grow older, I am less interested in sharing the details of my life in real time; I have a feeling the death of blogging coincides with similar sentiments with other people. I’ve commented that I have found myself posting updates to Facebook lately not because I expect anyone to read them, but for my future self to see them in my memories in the future. I’ve started to take the same approach to blogging – I don’t really care if anyone reads these beyond me, much like the gratitude journal I keep in my Obsidian notes. A regular monthly dump of what’s going on in my life seems like a good idea; I’ve liked Dave Rupert’s blog for this kind of update recently. What follows is an unorganized list of media, events, and other ephemera from my life recently.

Hot Frank Summer is a hashtag running on Bluesky encouraging people to read the novel this month. I’d actually never read Frankenstein, so I used the event as an excuse to grab an ebook copy and dive in.

I spent my entire evening last night finishing the book – I’ve never been very good at reading in moderation once I’m hooked, and I found it a truly excellent read and well-deserving of the reputation. However, I found it odd that the book serves as a cultural stand-in for humanity’s technological excesses when I think it serves as a better example of the consequences of being a terrible father more than anything else.

I cannot remember a time in my life when I didn’t know the “basic” story of Frankenstein, but my understanding was shaped primarily by media takes, so I was surprised by how much was present or wasn’t in the actual text. The means of the monster’s creation are left entirely to the reader’s imagination, and I think its absence from the text actually makes me question its position as the founding text of science fiction, at least the kind of SF I grew up reading. Which is not to detract from Shelley’s genius – it’s a wonderful title, but I feel if a science fiction writer had written it, the book would have had reams of pages dedicated to the method of instilling life. It’s a much better novel for not including that, of course. And media has certainly taken every opportunity to fill in the blanks anyway.

I find the language of a 200 year old book challenging, but also engaging in a way. I felt it stretching the old synapses in a pleasant way. So much of my reading is conversational text on screens! I’m idly considering what classical literature I should pick up next.

My favorite section was from the monster’s perspective. The monster definitely gets up to some heinous stuff, but his tale elicited my total sympathy. I low-key hated Victor pretty much from the jump, and at no point did he take an action that made me like him. Team Monster all the way. (Team Bear, too).

About two months ago, my five year old Macbook Pro bought the farm, so I was forced to purchase a new laptop, and it’s a good thing I did, or I would be totally dead in the water right now. My six month old desktop PC, and daily workstation (which I replaced only six months ago due to lightning hitting my network) decided to corrupt Windows. I took it in on a Friday, and got it back later that day. I spent all day Saturday reinstalling my suite of tools, and by Sunday, expected to be back up and running, but it died again, so I took it back on Monday, and I still don’t have it back. I’ve cobbled together something using the Macbook Pro and two of my three external monitors.

I’d honestly be tempted to go totally Macbook Pro for everything if I could get all three of my monitors to work. I’m shocked at how quiet my little office is without the big computer case full of fans running around the clock. Of course, my Macbook Pro isn’t exactly a gaming PC, but do I really need to be spending my precious time playing pointless video games?

Monte Cook Games has a need for a 3D visual tool that serves as a player-facing map for their cyberpunk game, and I’ve offered to learn how to build such an app. After reading up on the basics, I settled on utilizing the open source Godot Engine, and set about dedicating much of my spare time to doing tutorials and learning the basics of the engine.

It’s served as a reminder of how much I enjoy learning new technological tools, but also how frustrating it is to have your vision exceed your abilities constantly. Still, before the tech woes I was making great progress towards building various tutorial games and my own attempt at a flash card game to help my son memorize his multiplication tables this summer. Once I have computer stuff situated, I’ll probably dedicate more of my time back to working on those.

I’m running three regular campaigns right now. One is a self-created D&D setting/campaign, one is a relatively new campaign of Wildsea, and the last is a campaign of Numenera running the Glimmering Valley adventure.

I’m enjoying all of them! D&D is fun for the players more than the setting and system at this point. I don’t much care for the mechanics of Wildsea, but the world-building lends itself to such a wildly unique form and style of play.

My favorite right now is the Numenera campaign. The Cypher System hits a sweet spot for many of my players–between mechanical crunch and narrative space. It’s supremely easy for me to run as a GM, allowing me the time to focus on the parts of GMing that I like most (story and pacing). That said, it’s also easier to run than the others because I’m using a pre-written adventure.

For the longest time, I looked down on running pre-written adventures, but now I cherish them when I can find one that works for me. They save me so much effort! I love creating a world for my players to explore, but sometimes, there’s just too much work and not enough time. Being able to rely on the hefty back-log of existing material for Numenera has made it my most enjoyable game at the moment because it lets me enjoy the moment a lot more, having that material prepped. There’s so much less pressure than my other games.

But it’s like the difference between a 97% and a 95% on a test. I love all my children equally.

I’d like to say that we have some exciting plans for the summer, but Sarah has a tendon injury in her foot that has her wearing what we’ve termed affectionately as the “Boot of Slowness +2.” She’s scheduled to start some physical therapy for it in June, months after we started trying to solve the problem. There was insurance coverage chicanery, as you come to expect with most any ailment in the United States these days. Turns out the PT she was sent to first by the primary doc wasn’t in-network. Networks are so dumb.

I have a strong hankering to make my way to one of the MeowWolf exhibits soon. Either the one in Las Vegas or in Denver is doable probably with a short trip. Heal quickly, little tendon!

Anyway, that’s a wrap on what’s been going on this month. Stay tuned for more exciting updates in the life of a middle-aged nerd.

The post May 2024 Life Updates appeared first on Jeremiah Tolbert.

I’ve got more blogging I’d like to do sometime soon about some of my projects that I’ve been working on (namely, learning game development in the Godot game engine) but I thought I’d quickly jot down some thoughts I had after watching Late Night with the Devil (2023) starring David Dastmalchian.

I used to consider myself a wuss when it came to horror films; as a child, my mother would jump and scream at jump scares whenever my parents watched movies, and this scared me more than the movie did, probably. I am still not a fan of jump scares, but luckily, there’s a whole world of horror films out there that don’t resort to cheap stunts for cheap thrills. I mean, a few jump scares here and there are fine; I just cannot stand films that are one-trick ponies in this regard.

That is not what Late Night is. It’s a low budget period film, set on a 1970s talk show set, that uses a light touch with its found footage/documentary concept. The main thing selling the period is the costuming and hair styles, along with some period jokes. The film doesn’t take the made-for-TV visual aesthetic too far — just enough to help suspension of disbelief and sell the concept. The behind the scenes stuff during commercial breaks is shot in b&w documentary style, and mostly works, although some of the more intimate conversations seem to ignore the camera to a point that stretches credulity.

Overall, it’s a bit more cerebral than the kinds of slasher/jump-scare movies I grew up with. A talk show host played by Dastmalchian, on Halloween night in 1977, is trying to save his failing show by having on a guest and her handler who claims the young girl is possessed by a demon.

As a child of the 80s and a survivor of the Satanic Panic, the characters, tropes, and ideas here were all familiar and even a bit nostalgic to me. You have the TV psychic ala Uri Geller, and the skeptic stage magician that is basically James Randi dialed up to 11. You have the talk show host sidekick who gets no respect. And there’s a recent death of a wife hanging over the host, giving him some depth to him that he’d lack otherwise. And of course, all is not what it seems, yada yada yada.

It being a horror movie, you can imagine that spooky stuff eventually happens and it’s all sort of silly and sort of thrilling and generally just fun to watch. I never felt scared but I did feel entertained, which these days is rare enough to be worth noting! I don’t expect every film I watch to be a 10 out of 10. Sometimes a low 7 is more than enough to make it worth my time, and that’s the case here.

There’s been much said elsewhere about it’s very minor use of some AI-generated TV title cards in the film. I don’t really have much of an opinion about that except that it’s bad and they shouldn’t do that sort of thing in the future. They’re on the screen for barely any time though, and it’s sad that they detract from an otherwise entertaining movie. They probably could have paid an artist fifty bucks and a credit in the credits to do the same thing. A lot has been made about the budget of this film being something like $1 million or so, but come on. There’s low-budget and there’s stepping in a mine field to pick up a penny. It’s not worth it!

But this film is definitely worth a stream on a rainy night when you don’t have anything better to do.

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I love A24 movies, in principle. Sometimes, it feels like they are the only studio (?) making genuine, original movies that aren’t sequels or shared universes or superhero slop. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever finished watching an A24 movie and thought “I understood everything I just watched and feel satisfied.”

I was slow to get around to The Green Knight (2021, starring Dev Patel) because while the trailer looked amazing, I knew there was a good chance that my lack of knowledge of Arthurian legend would hamper my enjoyment. Turns out that was only partially true. Mostly, I’m just not smart enough to get every literary allusion in a film like this.

I got the impression that camera rotation was happening for a reason, that the transition of time and seasons was important, but why, not so sure. And there were many temptations on the path of honor, many of which our knight (or aspirational knight, as he keeps saying he is not a knight) fails to resist.

The cinematography was rich and dense. The pacing pretty ponderous, but at least the frame was full of beauty to pass all that dead time.

I can’t say I disliked it, exactly, but like with most A24 films, I come away wishing I had majored in literature or some other humanities degree so I could understand just what the hell their movies are trying to say. As it is, I am left feeling befuddled but entertained. Perhaps this is just what old age feels like.

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Every few years, I try to freshen up this place and give it a new vibe. I really do enjoy designing websites for just myself. I went a few different directions with this one, but ultimately decided to lean heavily into my love of green, living things. My office is full of plants as of this year, and they make me happy to spend time in it. Perhaps this will work for getting me to spend more time blogging?

So far this year, I’ve accomplished several of my goals for the year, although it’s only April. I wanted to paint 50 miniatures – done! I’ll share some of those here soon. I also wanted to read twelve books – that too I’ve accomplished, and I’ll share some of those titles in an upcoming post as well. Finally, I wanted to give this site a face lift, which I have now done. Check, check, and check.

I have some big goals for the year. I’m working on trying to learn game development in many various forms, and I’m slowly trying to get better at drawing (again). And generally speaking, I am trying with each passing year to become more authentically, uniquely me.

Is this a step closer? Dunno. I hope so!

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I recently finished Silver Nitrate, the latest novel by one of my favorite horror (or perhaps horror-adjacent) authors, Silvia Moreno-Garcia*. This one was set in the early 90s in Mexico City and involved an audio engineer getting mixed up in the occult and dark magics started by a possibly Nazi occultist film-maker a few decades back.

What I love about this author’s work is how it’s not written to exoticize Mexico for English-speaking audiences. There’s so much that this culture has in common with ours, and Moreno-Garcia doesn’t de-emphasize this. And yet, the setting is interesting and different enough that it satisfies my desire for novel experiences.

As usual, the protagonist is a prickly, awesome woman who I would enjoy having as a friend. The supernatural elements are more overt than I expected, after having read Velvet Was the Night most recently, which was more of a crime noir than anything else. That said, it was a welcome return to the subjects that first captured my attention with Signal to Noise.

If any of that sounds up your alley, I highly recommend giving this one a read. It kept my attention even in this time of atomized attention spans, which is really saying something.

*Disclaimer: I did Silvia’s website a few years back.

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Funny story; at some point in the last couple of months, I put this title on hold via Libby and my public library, but during the excitement of the last month, I didn’t realize it’d arrived on my Kindle (or rather, I had added it to my Kindle and completely forgotten due to my scattered nature lately). I’ve been eager to read books about attention span since the great attention span crisis that was COVID-19 and the past three years. Me, I don’t read nearly as much in my 40s as I did as a teen or even as much as I did in my 20s, and this has bothered me for some time. I’ve noticed that I’ve trained myself so well to skim articles that I start to do it even when reading novels and nonfiction books. I also suffer from the usual problems the rest of us do — social media stealing my attention, wasting time etc. Basically, I don’t often feel like I’m in control of what my brain decides to spend time on. I want to do better in this regard.

So I dove into this book and found it really quite readable, interesting, well-argued and persuasive. The opening chapters were the strongest ones and helped lay out the case that we actually are finding our focus stolen by technology (and technology’s evil older brother, Capitalism), and some few ideas of what we can do about it. I was especially happy that Hari addressed the idea that this is simply old age catching up with us with studies that show a decline regardless of age.

Most of the book is divided into chapters looking into the various factors that Hari believes are contributing to our stolen focus. These include the regular suspects, as well as a few that are more surprising to me, like bad food and pollution, but which make sense when explained here.

Ultimately, the book concludes that we need mass collective action to really attack the core problems, but the era of Americans agreeing to change anything at that scale strikes me as over, so I was far more interested in what the book would have to offer as far as personal modifications I can make.

It’s got a few ideas (switch to a 4-day work week if you can, use limiters to block yourself from distractions like your phone or internet browsing on your computer with apps like Freedom) but mostly reading this book served to cement my interest in finding ways to recapture focus and think more clearly and deeply about things.

Thanks to this book, I’m hoping to turn 2024 into a grand experiment for me in restructuring how I interface with my work and clients and how I structure my day. I am giving serious consideration to a 4-day work week, and I want to structure my day in terms of focus blocks of extended time instead of task-switching every 15 minutes from issue to issue. To be fair, I don’t think any of my clients asked me to work in this distracted manner. It’s just kind of how my brain decided to tackle the workload. I’ll be curious to see if any of these tips help me feel an improved sense of focus and flow. I have to write up the changes and float them to my major clients– that will be the first hurdle to the experiment, but I am hopeful.

I would be remiss in not mentioning that the author of this book is apparently the subject of numerous controversies which you can read about on his Wikipedia page. At least in the case of this book, it seemed well researched and provided quite a healthy back matter of citations (not that I did more than skim them). Having heard that from Gord Sellar (who has a far more detailed writeup about this book than I do), who read the book last year, I decided to take the book with a grain of salt. Especially in later chapters where Hari decides to tackle ADHD and children’s mental development. The research in that area seemed particularly on shaky ground to me, but it’s more of a gut instinct than anything specific, so take what I say with a lump of salt as well.

Have you read this book? What did you think? What do you think about the idea that we are all having a much harder time thinking deeply these days? Share your thoughts in the comments.

The post Recently Read–Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention–and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari appeared first on Jeremiah Tolbert.

Okay, so I’ve installed the WordPress.com desktop application to see if having a dedicated icon reminds me to write to this blog more often. Who knows if it will work? Let’s solve this mystery together, gang!

One advantage of taking a long time between posts is that you have plenty to talk about. What have we missed? A lot, as it turns out.

I was rear-ended by a semi while trying to take a friend to the airport way back in… May, I think? It was my fault, and nobody and nothing was injured except for my nearly perfect driving record and my sense of superiority as a driver. The car was eventually totaled out by insurance, so we bought a 2018 Suburu Outback. Back when we lived in Colorado, I used to long for a Suburu, which I often say is the official state car of Colorado (as well as apparently being the preferred car of lesbians everywhere). We’ve taken to calling it White Lightning. It’s certainly the nicest car we’ve ever owned. It has lane assist and adaptive cruise control, more radar technology than you can imagine. On the highway, it basically drives itself, speeding up and slowing down to go with the flow and staying in lane. I keep the lane assist off most of the time because it creeps me out when the car steers itself. I am definitely entering the old-man-shakes-fist-at-clouds stage of my relationship with car technology. For the most part, we love it.

I went to GenCon 2023, and Sarah came with me. You can read all about Monte Cook Games at GenCon over on the company blog, and even see pictures of Sarah and the cool costumes she helped us design. If you squint, you might see me in one of the photos. This year, I ran four games of Stealing Stories for the Devil and three games of Old Gods of Appalachia, including 4 outside-the-con games. My 7th game of Old Gods was at table 7, which felt proper. 28-ish hours of GMing left me exhausted, but happy.

A week after GenCon, a lightning strike fried my modem, router, and the main computer I use for work. $4000 dollars later, I am the owner of a brand new workstation. Beside the finacial expense, which is thankfully tax deductable, it also cost me two days of work last week around the clock to get everything restored. The biggest change on my outside-of-work life is that I now have a 4K monitor that can do HDR. If you haven’t seen Baldur’s Gate 3 in 4K and HDR, you are missing out. And that game doesn’t even have top-of-the-line graphics! I am looking forward to seeing how Starfield looks on it. Not that I have much time for either.

My personal time is mostly going to RPGs lately. I’m still running a D&D game on alternating Thursdays, our Blades in the Dark campaign on alternating Fridays, and of recent, a Brindlewood Bay game on Saturdays. We’ve only played Brindlewood Bay twice so far, but we’ve really enjoyed it. I hope to do a blog post with greater detail about how I’ve been using some AI tools to create assets for myself to use in my Brindlewood games. There are longer posts to be written about ethical use of AI generation for RPG campaigns, and maybe I’ll get a chance to write my view.

Speaking of Brindlewood, my good friend Gord Sellar has published his Carved from Brindlewood game, Something Tookish. A group of us got to playtest this a couple of months ago. I played a North Country halfling farmer with a dog as tall as he was. It was a real hoot, involving a mystery of who was stealing vegetables from a garden, and why. I absolutely love the Brindlewood system for mysteries, which makes them far more fun to game-master than a traditional mystery where you as the GM know the solution to the puzzle and have to somehow guide the players to it. If cozy halfling mysteries sounds like it would be up your alley, I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Gord’s creation.

Finally, when there’s any time left, I’ve been working on creating my own Forged in the Dark RPG, yet another attempt to somehow create the Conspiracy Game, something only friends from 25 years ago will know of. Basically, my goal is to create an RPG that is a cross between the X-Files and X-Com. I’ve been reading every Forged in the Dark game I can find to study up, as well as slowly working through the early seasons of the X-Files on Amazon Prime. The HD versions are a delight to watch. Bless those 90s shows that filmed in 35mm instead of video! At the rate I’m going, I will probably finish the game by 2030, if I am lucky. But the main reason I am making it is not to have a career; I just want to make something my friends and I can play. And with those low stakes, I will get there.

That about sums up my summer, besides the fact that my eight year old turned into a nine year old. He spent his summer learning Unreal Engine and Blender to do animation and video game stuff. I envy that kid.

Anyway, I hope your summer has been full of delights. Let’s try not to go so long between talks, okay? Good. Together, we have forged a pact in the eyes of the Internet Gods, one that cannot be broken without suffering terrible misfortunes!

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I’m at the start of a week off from client projects work, due to it being the fifth week in a month, so I am of course teetering on the brink of a depressive episode and feeling aimless and introspective.

I wonder how common it is for men my age to realize that their work life has mostly subsumed their sense of self. I don’t even work as many hours as a typical salaried type, but even I feel at times that the totality of me that is valuable to society is the me that fixes computers and websites for a living, and everything else is chaff.

On a private Discord I run, one thing we’ve spent a decent amount of time talking about is how insidious the capitalist notion is that we are only the value of our work, and that we should all be allowed to feel worthless from time to time. I really struggle with doing that. Almost all time exists in a potential state of what I can accomplish with it. Even if that thing is “play a video game” I am very task-oriented in every aspect of my life. Simply existing isn’t satisfactory to me. It feels vaguely troubling, in fact. Like I’m wasting something precious.

I don’t know how much I want to change that. I want my time on this Earth to feel like I added value–well, there I go again, parroting capitalism. I want to… improve? things, make them a little better than they were when I found them? Even that feels like far too big of an ask in this era of decline and imminent eco-collapse. I guess at the end of the day, I can’t relax unless I feel like I’ve been productive with my time. My standards for being productive aren’t that high, though. Maybe just an hour or two a day even on weeks off will be enough to stave off the existential jeebies. We’ll put that to test this week.

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