The personal website and blog of Ben Overmyer
Iron Arachne has been undergoing a lot of changes this year. It's the first year where I really started experimenting with using large language models for coding in general, and it was inevitable that I would try using them with Iron Arachne. The results have been mixed, as anything with AI is going to be. On the one hand, I have massively increased the number of unit tests for the code base,…
My project for the textjam, "akrete," is now at the point where the hard work begins. I successfully ported all the easy logic from Iron Arachne's Typescript to akrete's Python. The only hiccup I ran into was in the random number generator class's "next()" method, where in the Typescript version I was using unsigned bitwise operators to handle some of the logic. Python only has…
I decided to participate in Jack Harrhy's "game jam-like" for text-based projects, textjam . It's my first time participating in any kind of a jam. The requirements are pretty permissive. We just have to create something that outputs only to a terminal; no graphics allowed. Also, LLMs are strongly discouraged, and only allowed if you describe exactly how and where you used them. Oh, and…
My personal site is a static site built with Zola and stored in git. Up until now, I've mostly used Visual Studio Code to edit it. That works fine for development-y tasks, like updating styles or adding new pages. However, for writing blog posts, it feels like a bit much. I also have a unique publishing workflow that requires several manual steps. I need to know the year and month of…
So, a few weeks ago I discovered Spirit City: Lofi Sessions on Steam. It was not a game, but rather a gamified productivity program. I hate that description. It sounds soulless and corporate. What Spirit City is, instead, is a chill background environment. It doesn't have to be productive. You don't have to be productive. However, as a result of it, I have been productive. For decades,…
Over a decade ago, I used a program made by Microsoft called Windows Live Writer for a couple years to write blog posts before uploading them to whatever blog platform I was using at the time. That program used a proprietary file format. The blog platforms are lost to me now, an unfortunate casuality of my earlier habit of creating (and sunsetting) new websites all the time. Also, Windows Live…
Today is the 8th anniversary of the launch of Iron Arachne . In those eight years, I've built some things I'm pretty proud of. The planet generator and the culture generator stand out most. There's still a lot of things I want to improve, and the list keeps growing. I daresay the list of things to do is increasing faster than the rate at which I do them. The context for Iron Arachne…
This is part of a blog post title trade with Zachary Kai. We swapped title ideas, and I got this one. You can see his original version on his blog. I spent a few days refining this post. My answers to several of the questions changed rather a lot during that time. Photo courtesy of Bimo Luki on Unsplash How Many Sandwiches Do You Eat Per Week? On average, less than one. However, sometimes when I…
Back in October of last year, I switched from Windows 11 to Linux on my gaming PC. I noted how well it worked for me compared to previous attempts. Now it's a little over three months later, so let me tell you about how it's going. I started out with Debian 13 . That seemed to work fine, but as I used it more and learned more about why I was encountering the bugs and glitches I saw, I…
This is a look into my tech-related plans for January. Originally I considered making this a "tech plans for 2026" post, but I have a feeling my plans are going to change as the year progresses. Iron Arachne's Huge Update Iron Arachne is getting a massive update this month. I've been working on a huge update to the random number generation paradigm across the entire code base, and while…
2026 is full of promise. A new country, a new lifestyle, a new outlook... I am hopeful. As 2025 was a bit of a disaster for setting new habits, I'm reworking my expectations. Goals for 2026 This year, I plan to make some pretty big changes to how I spend my time. None of these goals are new, but some of them are significantly different from previous attempts. I have a set of new habits to…
Well then. 2025 did not go as originally planned. Not even close. A year of challenges We attempted to foster a puppy in January. She was a cute little rescue pit mix named Clover . Unfortunately, I discovered that I'm allergic to dogs. I don't know if this is new or if it's just something I never noticed before. While it seems to be a relatively mild allergy, combined with other…
With everything that's going on in the world right now, I am increasingly sensitive to the security and privacy implications of the tech I use. While most of my devices are in the Apple ecosystem, there has been one big hole in my device privacy footprint: my gaming PC. I have been restricted to the Windows ecosystem on my gaming PC because of the games I regularly play. A few months ago, I…
Early this year, I started applying to universities in Canada for master's degree programs. In March, I was accepted to the Master of Software Engineering program at Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. From that point forward, we began the planning process for a major life shift. In early July, we gave notice at our jobs, and our long journey to move to Canada became mostly…
I haven't touched tabletop role-playing games in a few months now. In preparation for my upcoming move to Canada, I sold most of my collection. I didn't expect to even think about these games until well after the move. Then, I found Typst . Typst is a computer language for laying out books and documents. It's similar in concept to LaTeX , a common tool for academics. In fact, I have…
I'm in the process of sunsetting my gemlog. I liked the idea of the Gemini protocol, but it never really grew beyond a specific set of niche topics. Further, it's just easier to write in Markdown, which is what I use for writing this site. As such, I've migrated all of my gemlog posts into this site. Here's a list of them: Dune: Awakening - First Impressions Awaiting Dune Old…
Well, I've been playing Dune: Awakening for about a month now. I joined a guild right away and spent the first few hours after launch exploring and doing early quests ("journeys" in Dune parlance). I spent most of that first day in Discord voice chat with my guild. I love the game. I've sunk many hours into it already. As expected, I spend most of my time building interesting things and…
Well, 2025 has certainly gone differently than I originally expected on January 1 st . Much and more has been written about the state of the world in general and the United States of America in particular. I won't go into those topics here. In March of this year, I was accepted into the Master of Applied Science in Software Engineering program at Memorial University in St. John's,…
I pre-ordered Dune: Awakening at the highest level. When I first heard that Dune: Awakening was being made by the people who made Conan: Exiles, I was interested but not excited. I thoroughly enjoyed Exiles. My friends were the ones who routinely hunted for larger and more powerful bosses to slay, but my enjoyment focused on taking the resources they would bring back and using them to build…
The last three years have been quite the experience. I'm not really sure how to differentiate between new (and therefore top-of-mind) and old (and therefore more nostalgic/emotional) recollections. As I write this I'm listening to the soundtrack for Age of Conan, as replayed on a Jellyfin server in my house. It reminds me of Conan Exiles, which I've spent way more time in than…
As I write this, the new President of the United States is trying to replace the democratic republic form of government with a fascist one. It appears that he's succeeding. Despite the focus on the United States right now though, this trend of far-right groups taking power is not limited to this country. Several countries in Europe, like Italy and Spain, are seeing a resurgence of…
This is going to be a year of big changes. Goals for 2025 My goals this year will be primarily setting new habits. I started guitar lessons in December. I plan to continue practicing every day, excepting some holidays or travel. Also on the creative side, I want to develop a painting habit. This will probably be less frequent than guitar, but I still want to paint at least once a week. Continuing…
2024 was a year of travel, challenges, endings, and beginnings. I went on five trips, four of which were for recreation and the fifth of which was almost a move to a different state. My fitness and health suffered, and Silver Gryphon Games shut down. However, I began taking music lessons, won an award at work, and regularly ran an RPG campaign for once. Winning an Award at Apiture At my day job, I…
2024 has been a hectic year so far. Most recently, we very nearly moved to western New York, but a series of unfortunate events and observations made us reconsider at the last second and decide to continue renting in Wilmington. I haven't made any progress on reigniting my morning jogging habit. However, once my leg heals (dermatology thing, don't ask), I intend to start it up again. I…
This year I want to continue my introduction to bodybuilding and round out my fitness regimen with regular cardio. For January and February, I'll finish the "Start From Scratch" series of workouts. I will also start running three days a week again. I'll be taking progress photos. By July, I want to see distinct muscle definition in the mirror. I also want to try and get my VO2 max…
2023 was a year of important changes and improvements in my life. My goals for the year according to last year's "Looking Ahead to 2023" post ended up going wide of the mark. I didn't succeed at the SGG goals and I abandoned #dungeon23 early in January. I also didn't keep to my ban on new entertainment. Where I did succeed, though, was in the fitness goals for the year. More on that…
For over a month I've been working on upgrading the graphics that I generate for stars and planets in the planet, star nation, and star system generators on Iron Arachne . That work is now done and live. Instead of setting up a 3D scene, texturing a sphere, and adding cloud layers if appropriate, now I'm doing everything in a single 2D shader. This was a lot of math to learn and apply.…
November's wellness challenge was a success. I had no alcohol, despite going out with friends and coworkers multiple times. It helps that there are several good non-alcoholic beer options these days. I also kept up the workout regimen. I went to the gym four times a week every week. The only exception was Thanksgiving Day. Speaking of Thanksgiving, despite eating normal Thanksgiving dinner…
Here we are at November 15, halfway through the wellness challenge that I set for myself this month. I've kept to it, and while progress has been slow, something interesting is happening. I started this challenge at 226 lbs. I'm now down to 221. Also, I'm now past the "warmup" workout plan and into the first week of the "phase 1" workout plan. This means I'm going to the gym…
The first week of my November 2023 wellness challenge went well! Going without alcohol has given me back a ton of calories I would otherwise have gained, and I'm feeling more energetic every morning, too. My first workout was on Wednesday morning at 5:00. It took me a bit to figure out where the stations and machines were that I needed for my workout plan. Some things I had to improvise a bit…
Last month, I went over my goals for this year to remind myself what they were and see how I'm doing. It was an unpleasant surprise; I'd failed to do any of them. Then, earlier this month, I read Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Be Useful" book. His stories about growing up and getting into bodybuilding made my brain start working. After a few days of reflection, I decided to do a wellness…
I have a lot of irons in the fire. Here's where everything I'm working on this year is at. Ingenium Second Edition: The playtest book is out. The cover art is done, and I've started collecting more interior art. Sarah will be editing it in the not-too-distant future. I don't think this will be published until next year. Aether Second Edition: The playtest book for this is also…
Last night I was poking around at the Homebrew Website Club and discovered a site with a "/currently" page. It's just a little status update along the lines of the old Livejournal tags. I thought this was clever, so I added something like it to my own site.
Someone on Hacker News mentioned that he liked my website's content and that it inspired him to go find his old sites on the Wayback Machine and add their content to his site. This was a great idea. I did the same and recovered most (but not all) of my sites and content. I put them online at old-sites.benovermyer.com . It stretches back to when I was in high school in the late 90s. My first…
Today I added a section to the knowledge base portion of this website for coding languages . It's meant as a reference for me to refresh my memory when I haven't used a particular language in awhile. I used ChatGPT to help automate this process so it went faster. It still took me about two hours to add all of the languages. To start with, I've added the languages I'm most…
I got my first tattoo. The studio was 5th Layer in Wilmington, NC, and the artist was tatdew . Here it is!
So we're in the process of immigrating to Canada. As part of that process, I discovered that software engineers in Canada are treated like proper engineers. That is, they are regulated like engineers, and require licensing in order to work. I would need to go back to university and get a degree specifically in software engineering in order to work as a software engineer in Canada. However,…
Last month, Iron Arachne turned five years old. Lately, it has not been seeing much in the way of updates. Several half-finished projects lie in local branches in the git repository, waiting for a time when I spend attention on them again. A.I. is proliferating in the RPG content generator space. The Discord server that I run for authors of RPG generator websites has been much quieter than before,…
This year I don't have to worry about an upcoming move or an expensive vacation, so I can focus on other things. I'm going to follow up my successful abandonment of alcohol with a reduction in portion sizes at meals. My goal is to reduce body fat percentage. To aid in this and to improve my cardio health, I'm also going to be more regular about going for walks. I'm also going…
2022 was a year of big changes. Some were foreseen and others came out of nowhere. 40th birthday trip to Hawai'i At the end of February, we went to Hawai'i for my 40th birthday. Our trip was exclusively to the Big Island. We stayed in three different places - a small Bali-themed apartment, a treehouse in the rainforest, and a resort hotel. The treehouse was definitely both the scariest…
Lately there have been an increasing number of new tabletop role-playing games coming out that are distinctly different from the Dungeons & Dragons retroclones popularized categorized as Old School Rennaissance or Old School Revival. These games eschew simplicity in favor of complex or complicated rules, and often have remarkable layout and design or gonzo themes. However, they still are directly…
The world has gotten too big. A lot of online services that we've come to rely on are too intent on serving everyone. In the process, they serve no one well. Similarly, governments are trying very hard to generalize and set universal rules and policies that ultimately cause more problems than they solve. I won't talk about that latter issue in this post, though, as that would make this…
So after coming home from a business trip, I finally got to play the new World of Warcraft expansion yesterday. It's so much fun! The last time I remember thoroughly enjoying the initial experience of a WoW expansion was Wrath of the Lich King over ten years ago. The starting area of the Dragon Isles is absolutely gorgeous. That the expansion encourages exploration makes it even better. There…
So, some rich sociopath bought Twitter and seems hell-bent on destroying it. I haven't used Twitter in years, except to occasionally check the status of a misbehaving SaaS. So, Twitter's implosion doesn't really bother me. It did prompt me to log back into my Mastodon account and start using it actively. So in that sense, Twitter's implosion has affected me. Tons of other…
A few weeks ago, I made the decision to rescind my ban on playing Blizzard games. In part this was because Overwatch 2 was imminent, and I missed the particular style of gameplay that only Overwatch had. But it was also because I know people who work at Blizzard, and boycotting Blizzard games appears to be wholly ineffective at assisting change. This unlocking of the gate meant several things. I…
It's been over a year since I swore off of Blizzard games. A lot has changed in that time. Many people have left the company, and they've made several changes that appear on the surface to indicate a better culture. They've also made some questionable decisions. I decided to give Blizzard another chance. This decision point happened a little over a week ago. I was talking with Sarah…
When I first rewrote Iron Arachne as a static JavaScript website, I quickly hacked together several name generators using different methods. Most assembled pieces from several different chunks into a single word. That quickly became insufficient. The results were predictable and small in number. After awhile, I wrote a simple module called "invented" which was meant to create words for invented…
This weekend past, I launched the dungeon generator for Iron Arachne. I've been working on it off and on for a few weeks and I finally got it to the point where it was usable and useful. However, it's by no means complete, and a lot of features were left unfinished. The above is an example of the maps it currently generates. In terms of pathing, there is a pretty linear flow to the…
A few days ago I finished the content for Shadowbringers (the Final Fantasy XIV expansion). Now I'm working on the content that's between that and Endwalker. Well, that's the vague plan, but I'm also doing other types of content completely unrelated to the main story quest. Like fishing. I enjoy fishing in FFXIV, just like fishing was my primary activity in Animal Crossing when…
I've been playing a lot of No Man's Sky lately. It tends to go in waves - I'll play a lot of it for a short period of time, then I'll stop playing for months or even years. Then the cycle repeats. This time, I'm doing a lot more combat than I used to and not because I seek it out. The recent pirate expansion has increased the number and strength of pirate ships attacking…