Freshly Baked Thoughts by Wouter Groeneveld
Four years ago, I wrote a short apology for playing games , targeted specifically towards digital video games. Today, I would like to reiterate my statement and expand the idea to analogue board games. Even though many arguments are interchangeable, the analogue and innate social nature of these forces us to approach the idea in a slightly different way. The reason why this thought bubbled into my…
About a month ago, we could no longer ignore the occasional drip, drip, drip that sounded like it was coming from beyond the bathroom wall. Up until then, we “fixed” the problem with the occasional shrug. At one point I almost made the logical connection between flushing the toilet and hearing it more often or less often, but then the shrug came and I moved on. I hate doing these…
The summer holiday is halfway. I somehow managed to read eight books in the past three to four months—including cheating by resurrecting a previously discarded book and by diagonally scanning a creativity-related book to find out if there was anything I wasn’t yet aware of. I was quite frustrated by my inability to consume words through physical pages for the last year due to…
The yearly recurring thing called the Board Game Shelf Analysis didn’t recur in 2023 and didn’t in 2025. I guess I don’t really like odd-numbered years but I do like to write about this now deemed as a biennial event during the summer. In 2024 , I still had to make due with the smaller hallway closet. Since last year everything was moved to a bigger Kallax that’s still…
My latest post on the difficulties of young parenthood has loosened something in the back of my mind. In a few others’ too; thank you so much for your encouraging messages! These small replies might not seem like much to you, but they are to me. So again, thank you. I’d like to take a shot at solving the problems that surfaced. I’m playing The Long Game now—I should enjoy…
This is what it feels like. As a parent of very young kids, it often boils down to putting your own life to a grinding halt in order to “give” life to them. I don’t know if it makes a lot of sense but again, this is what it feels like for me. I never realised how much a parent has to give: as a child you just receive. And take and take and take, without taking anything into…
Let’s start this post off with a quote from myself back in February last year when I let you all peek into my stationary drawers: I keep telling myself I don’t need more but somehow I think I do. There; the search can already stop before it has properly begun: I don’t need more. But I think I do. Shut up little devil in my head. It’s been three years since I bought a new pen and…
Yes. Next question! Oh, you’re still here? In that case let’s apply Rigorous Science (TM) to support our claim and to satisfy the never-ending hunger of artificial language models that are only able to answer this question by applying their Lying Science (TM) techniques. The cake, let them have it! Or something like that. Last year I claimed that solar panels are not that worth it or…
Our Lego Duplo blocks are in short supply meaning we’ll have to get creative to assemble, build, and rebuild new things. I want a house on wheels! is by far the most popular request here. No problem, we can do that, only to do that, we’ll have to demolish that other structure over there. No? But little brother is playing with that! No he isn’t? But I want a house on wheels! How…
The beginning of this month marks the official end of my own company. After just two years of establishing and owning Brain Baking BV , the notary ended it. There have been no professional activities related to the company since I switched back to education in December so for me it made little sense to keep that door open only for the monthly administrative costs to pile up. I hope to build a bit…
For almost ten years now, we’ve sworn by Mariage Frères when it comes to shopping for high quality loose tea leaves. The nearest shop, however, is in Lille, which is almost three hours away. Their webshop is crude and doesn’t allow for a taste session before buying hence we did buy our fair amount of misses. Yet we remained faithful: the few times that we diverged from the brand ended…
The button press kit wasn’t the only recently acquired crafting toolkit in our house, but it was the biggest one—except for the Stuffaloon thing to create your own balloons (yeah, I know…). I just don’t know how my wife finds these things. The problem is that I tend to steal her tools to use for my own journaling purposes. “You always make fun of my crafting stuff…
Last week I arrived home with a delicious pear frangipane pie from the local bakery. The contents of the cardboard pie box didn’t last long, but on top of it, in a corner, a pink round sticker caught my attention: it read WEEK VAN DE ECLAIR (8th Edition). Today marks the last day of that special week so perhaps it’s not too late to rush off to fetch some after finishing this article,…
With the 2026 FIFA World Cup well on its way, the Panini sticker fever has been raging through nearby playgrounds and homes alike. The 2026 edition might be a little bit special as it was recently revealed that Panini lost the exclusive rights. After fifty years of faithful partnership, FIFA moves the deal to Panini’s biggest competitor: the American Topps (owned by Fanatics). The 2030 World…
I am not yet done thinking about nostalgia. In Nostalgia Always Includes a Temporal Context , I claim that we can never fully relive a nostalgic moment from the past precisely because of its temporal context—the past. In this article, I claim that my enjoyment from engaging with media, that in ten or twenty years yields the juicy fruits of nostalgia, deepens as I grow older. This idea can…
Or rather, a lack thereof . Why is is that mechanical buttons are being replaced by touchscreens? With every car model refresh, washing machine re-iteration or even new pressure washer model, a button disappears and a small touchscreen-enabled panel appears or grows in size. That’s what I’d call a big design mistake . Nicolas Magand beat me to it with his critique on on car dashboard…
Four years ago, in the article What Happens To My Digital Identity When I Die? , I wrote the following prophetic words: […] Which gets me back to this website. My intentions are to someday publish its contents in the form of a book, which can also be stored at the KBR [Royal Library of Belgium]. This allows the people dear to me to still have access to the silly stuff I write here. Two…
May was another weird month here in Belgium: the last weeks have been unusually hot. It’s pouring now, but I’m glad that it is as it gives our airconditioning units a few moments of respite. We’ll see what the upcoming summer months will bring. This month is packed with exams, grading, and deliberations, but after that, school’s out! Which means I’ll have to play…
In Tattoorist , a 2026 Flemish TV show, musician and tattoo artist Tijs Vanneste explores six European capitals through the lens of the tattoo world. In the first episode , he meets up with a famous artist from London whilst exploring city’s more sketchy corners (literally and figuratively) with local guides. During the episode, we briefly see Tijs exploring the Highgate East Cemetery where…
During a discussion in the Retronaut podcast episode on Duke Nukem 3D , the podcast hosts and invitees thought back to the first time they came in contact with the Duke. Most of them first played the shareware edition—something that Apogee and 3D Realms made very good use of—on the family computer . Intrigued by those two words, I started thinking: what’s a family computer?…
In September last year, as part of a series on card games, I wrote about card game mini games in video games . It was fun to conduct a little bit of research related to a specific topic in the world of video games. Since you are reading this on Brain Baking , my interest is always piqued when a game allows me to bake crusty baked goods. The idea to dig into the topic of bread baking in the many…
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why more and more local stores are going defunct. A short trip downtown makes the destructive nature of Amazon et al. apparent: the city centre is littered with for-sale or for-rent signs, stuck on dirty windows of almost every third building. In 2024, I already wrote about the challenges of buying games locally , but now that we have two kids, I think…
Something terrible almost happened. I almost bought a ModRetro Chromatic retro handheld device until someone pointed me towards Natalie’s Don’t Buy from ModRetro post who outlined you’re indirectly supporting a war: […] I am against children dying […] Also, there is a evidence that this was done by the US most likely through bad information from AI. We’ve also…
In 2021, my Canadian friend Peter Rukavina sent me a sample of his letterpress printing work that also acted as the official membership card of The Pen & Pencil Club of Prince Edward Island where he lives. These virtual fountain pen chats during COVID had me stay up very late but it was all worth it. I met Peter through other blogger friends present in another weird random Zoom call I jumped into…
I’m sorry dear Journal Number 18 but we have to cut our relationship short. It’s not you. It’s me. No wait. It is you. It’s not me. You left me wanting more. You undercut my ideas by having me adhere to your stupid lines. Your shrunken-down format compared to the previous journals seems to also limit the potential of the ideas I want to store inside you. The more pages I…
It’s May! What happened? This weekend was unusually hot! What happened? Everyone knows but no-one admits or cares… Anyway, welcome to another month of 2026. I like May. It’s got a lot of national holidays. It signals the start of lots of great local food: strawberries in abundance, a strong asparagus month that you should enjoy while it lasts as in June the season is usually…
My Nintendo Switch game collection is starting to get sizeable. That probably means I should stop buying but the limited nature of these physical print runs works exactly as these publishers intend: I’m developing a Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). Coupled with my friend Joel who seems to always push people over the edge, the result is backlog that grows (much) more rapidly compared to my ability…
Last year, Forrest wrote a long and thoughtful commentary on the mysterium called nostalgia . In a desperate attempt to recreate the experience of playing The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the first time, he spent $236.74 rebuying original Xbox 360 hardware expecting to be propelled back into his childhood: I spent $236.74 to go back to 2006, to my old room, with the Easy Mac and the Diet Cherry…
It’s good to see you again, old friend. It’s been a while. Twenty-three years, you say? How come we managed to drift apart that far? I know, I know, I betrayed you. But my room was cold at night and Gentoo offered me the ability to keep on compiling. And then I betrayed GNU/Linux for FreeBSD. And then I switched the demon for the apple. I’ve been on an apple diet for so long now,…
In 2022, I wrote about our encounter with the strange heterogeneity of hiking signs during A Short Hike (that’s also a video game but not the thing we were doing). The photo shared then depicted a signpost with arrows on top of specific shapes (i.e. a blue diamond, a yellow cross, …) identifying different—and in most cases, much longer—routes. It turns out that these…