Grumpy Gamer

Ye Olde Grumpy Gamer Blog. Est. 2004

Jan 1, 2018

A review I read before buying Roll for the Galaxy said it was much simpler than Race for the Galaxy. That’s not true at all, but I do think the dice and other elements make it a better game than Race for the Galaxy.

Dec 31, 2017

Whenever I sign up for a website and it asks me for my birthday, I always enter Jan 1, 1901. This cause two things to happen. 1) On New Years day I get a stream of happy birthday wishes from websites I rarely visit. 2) Chris Remo always wishes me a happy 116th birthday.

Dec 28, 2017

TBD

:-X

:-|

:scull:

Dec 27, 2017

You’d think RSS feeds would be simple, but they are anything but. One of the most frustrating things with online readers is they are often cached, so it takes hours to tell if your feed is being digested or not. Feedly stop reading my RSS and I don’t know why.

Dec 27, 2017

Part of quitting Twitter necessitate rebuilding Grumpy Gamer. The Thimbleweed Park dev blog was based on the Grumpy Gamer blog code, but I’d made a lot of improvements that I loathed losing, but even the Thimbleweed Park blog code was starting to feel old and worn.

It was time to start over, and by start over, I mean completely start over. I crave change. When I find myself in a rut, or lacking motivation, I strive to change as much as I can to spark my imagination.

Writing a new blogging platform from the ground up (again) was what I needed. It’s not rocket science, which is exactly what I needed.

My first decision was what to do about the database. The old-old Grumpy Gamer blog used MySQL, but when I rebuilt that into the old Grumpy Gamer blog I became fascinated with MongoDB. I’d worked a lot in a structured database, and the unstructured nature of MongoDB was enticing. Need a new data column? Just write to one.

MySQL was feeling very heavy, MongoDB felt light and fast.

Three years later, I am back to MySQL and I can arbute that to two things:

  1. The lack of a web based tool to quickly manage and query the DB. There are web based tools, but none of them (that I found) can display your data in anything that resembles a table to quick scanning and editing. Any time I needed to “massage” the DB outside the blogging admin tools, I dreaded it.

  2. The MongoDB query language is a mess. You’re basically constructing JSON/Javascript queries and it just reeks of being wedged into that format. SQL might not be much better, but at least I know it well.

After a few years with MongoDB, I’m also realizing that I was incorrect in one of my initial assumptions: MongoDB is no faster than MongoDB and the footprint on the server is about the same.

I’m sure MongoDB is better for certain tasks, and MySQL for others, but it largely comes down to what you know and what your comfortable with. For me, that was SQL.

P.S. I don’t like that MySQL is owned by Oracle, but I’m not sure I want to make the jump into PostgreSQL. Maybe the next time I’m feeling bored and unmotivated.

Dec 26, 2017

I’m still waiting for Animal Crossing to come to the Switch.

Dec 23, 2017

Clayton and I did this back in Dec of 2004. Interesting how much hasn’t changed. I might have more “male” spouses now, something about loot crates, and maybe change the last verse to be more “indie”, but it’s shockingly accurate 13 years later.

The Twelve Days of Crunch Time

A poem by Gilbert and Kauzlaric

On the twelfth day of crunch time, My project gave to me…

Twelve cents in royalties,

Eleven kiss-ass previews,

Ten nerdy testers,

Nine patent lawsuits,

Eight unplanned for features,

Seven frames a second,

Six angry spouses,

Five focus groups!

Four unstable hacks,

Three days without sleep,

Two surly artists,

and a crappy publishing deal.