Tobold's Blog

Rerolling maps

2026-05-19T10:32:13.603+02:00

I am currently playing Farthest Frontier. That is a game that I had my eye on since its early access release in 2022, but decided to wait for the full release. That full release came in October 2025, and then I still waited for release of version 1.1 this year in April before buying the game and playing it. I got it via Humble.com for $21, which means I didn't lose money by not buying it in early access. In 2025, 2,640 games were released on Steam in early access, out of a total of 21,400 games released. Some of those games get developed for some time and eventually get a full release, others are abandoned still in early access. While I don't always heed my own advice, waiting at least a while after early access release to see whether that game is being developed or not is generally a good idea.

When you start a game of Farthest Frontier, you select some settings for the map and the difficulty. From that, a random map is generated. And while playing Farthest Frontier, I fell into a pattern that is familiar for me with games that have random maps: I play the game for a while, find out how the game works, find that the map isn't great, or I made a mistake choosing my starting location, and thus reroll the map and start over. That can happen several times, until I finally have a map I am really happy with. With Farthest Frontier, I am now on the third game where I have been playing for more than 1 hour, and had a number of rerolls to get there. In particular, my first game didn't have any sources of sand, and my second map had a sand pit which turned out to be a "deep" sand pit, that you can't use until much later in the game. As sand is important to modify the fertility of your fields, I was only happy with my third map that had sand attainable from tier 2 on.

Farthest Frontier is good for rerolling maps, as it shows you a large part of the map after creating it, before you choose a starting location. In other games, e.g. Civilization or Age of Wonders, you only see a very small part of the map at the start, and it is hard to tell whether the location is any good. Then I need to either play a few turns just scouting before rerolling, or I save the game, use a cheat to reveal the map, and then reload with the fog of war back on when I am happy with the map. I admit that it is a bit of a weird obsession of mine to want to have a "good" map in these kind of games. A lot of people just take the random map / starting location as part of the game they need to accept. However, I have played too many of these games where it turns out much later that some "bad" maps can lead to very annoying situations which make me abandon that particular run. So I am preempting that by rerolling the map.

I am playing Farthest Frontier while waiting for the Civilization VII update 1.4.0, Test of Time, this evening. I am not sure why they didn't call it 2.0, because it really is a kind of relaunch of the game, after the first launch wasn't a big success. I didn't mind that you had to switch civilizations in Civ 7 1.0, but the transition between eras was jarring, the "victory conditions" between eras and at the end weren't much fun, and the whole thing felt rather restrictive. As patch 1.4.0. changes all that, I want to give Civ 7 another try sometimes in the coming weeks. Maybe not on the first day, I'll wait for the inevitable hotfix first and watch some reviews too. But I am sure that this will be another game where I will be rerolling maps until I find one I like.

AI virtue signalling

2026-05-15T08:42:43.472+02:00

I believe that artificial intelligence is an interesting tool, which is frequently overhyped by both supporters and detractors. To anyone who has experimented with large language models like ChatGPT or various image generation tools, it is obvious that AI has potential as a tool for creating both text and image. However, the amount of money poured into this technology stands in no reasonable relation with the possible monetization of the technology. Which leads to a rather pessimistic outlook on the possible paths forward, where either AI is replacing millions of white collar workers and crashing the economy, or AI fails to replace millions of white collar workers and crashes the stock market. It is a hype or doom technology in a media environment that breeds and lives of hype and doom. One would wish that cooler heads would prevail and we'd have some interesting conversation on the advantages and disadvantages of AI. Unfortunately, what we are getting instead is virtue signalling applied to AI.

A month ago, BoardGameBollocks, a mid-sized board game YouTube channel featuring a guy with strong opinions about board games speaking into a camera using a lot of swear words, made a video about his opinions about AI. He had a balanced opinion on AI, which is unsurprising, seeing how he himself is using AI to create his thumbnails: He said that for him AI is a tool, if it helps a good game designer to make a board game faster that was alright with him, and if a lazy game designer thought AI would do his work for him that would only create garbage. There was nothing exceptional about the video: The opinion was middle-of-the-road, and the style was in line with his usual content, some swear words of a guy talking at home into his camera.

However, somehow that video managed to trigger Tom Brewster, the Editor-in-Chief of the world's largest board game YouTube channel, Shut Up & Sit Down. So he used a secondary channel to post a video with his opinion: The BoardGameBollocks video on AI was "mythically bad, don't watch it", AI is the devil, and Shut Up & Sit Down has a policy to blacklist anybody using AI tools.

First of all, that was breaking internet etiquette: The biggest channel in a niche shouldn't badmouth a video of a channel in the same niche that has over ten times fewer subscribers. Calling out another content creator's video's lower production value, when that other content creator obviously hasn't the same financial means feels particularly mean. But Tom's video was also very bad on a range of other standards: It only said that the video he didn't like was bad, asked people to *not* watch it, didn't provide a link, and didn't engage with any of the arguments that were made in that video. Tom's video was just pure Cancel Culture: Another opinion is bad, so it shouldn't be heard, shouldn't be argued, should just be blacklisted. Tom's stated policy of Shut Up & Sit Down, in which he explicitly used the word "blacklist" to talk of any board game company using any form of AI, is also rather extreme. It is just Virtue Signalling, not a viable policy in a world where nobody can even tell most of the time whether for example the rulebook of a board game had some AI tools used for editing. Text and image generation and editing tools using AI are widespread by now, and unless a company is lazy and just uses AI content without further human review, the use of AI isn't even obvious.

Now if you make a video that badmouthes somebody else's video, there is likely to be a response. And if that somebody's trademark is using rude language, that response will be filled with rude language. The natural instincts of somebody having been insulted align with the economic interests on YouTube, where drama creates clicks, which creates revenue.

I do think that it is perfectly valid to be anti-AI. But when observing what has been going on on BGG and YouTube this year, it appears to me that being anti-AI is the new purity test of the hobby, with which some elite is trying to signal how much better and more virtuous they are than anybody else. We had games that don't even use AI being review bombed for just the suspicion of AI use. The AI witch hunt in the board game hobby is real, and it doesn't even serve its purpose.

Harnessing the power of parasocial interactions for virtual worlds

2026-05-10T10:58:00.001+02:00

You might be excused for thinking that OnlyFans is a porn site. But in reality, creators on OnlyFans make about three quarters of their income not from porn, but from chat. Lonely people, mostly men, pay a lot of money to have a parasocial chat interaction with the OnlyFans content creator. And that in spite of the fact that it is well-known that this chat isn't necessarily actually with the content creator herself; especially for the more successful content creators the chat volume is far beyond what a single person could handle in a day. So the chat gets outsourced, often to countries like the Philippines. And increasingly the "person" the client is chatting with isn't even a person anymore, but an AI chat bot. That doesn't seem to be bothering many people, and in fact there are an increasing number of other web services which explicitly offer AI girlfriends / boyfriends to chat with, with or without sexual content.

Large language model AI is pretty bad at getting facts straight. But its weaknesses in matters of truth are strengths when the task is a friendly chat: AI models tend to be extremely sycophantic, doing their very best to say exactly what the person using the service wants to hear. That can be bad when the person using the chat service is pondering something harmful, and the AI encourages that person. But outside those edge cases, many people think highly of their AI "friends", because those are so supportive, unselfish, and unlikely to contradict you.

The origin story of this blog is as a MMORPG blog. After many years of covering MMORPGs, I stopped playing those. While some were quite good if you just considered them as games, the overall feeling was that MMORPGs never lived up to their promise as virtual worlds. NPCs in MMORPGs were static and boring. Other players were either actively harming you if they could, were more interested in their own goals than interacting with you, or were simply offline. I certainly had some great moments of interaction with other players, and even great roleplaying moments. But mostly I had the choice of either fighting other players in PvP, which I hate, or playing a PvE game in which the interaction with other players was just a minor part. The most common positive interaction with other players was trying to beat group content together with other players, but that was not always a nice experience, and rife with stuff like guild drama or group members shouting at each other. The most famous player interaction in the universe of MMORPGs is Leeroy Jenkins, and that is telling you something.

It isn't just MMORPGs. Other attempts of creating virtual worlds, from Second Life to the Metaverse, not only failed because of technical problems and design flaws. The fundamental problems, that other players were online only some part of the day, might be gone next month due to having lost interest, and rarely had a positive social interaction with you are their primary goal, made the whole idea of virtual worlds that feel lived in impossible. People ended up playing The Sims instead, because the interactions with the NPCs in that game were still better than the social interactions with real people in virtual worlds.

So I had a vision of a future in which somebody would create a virtual world which was predominantly or even exclusively populated by AI chat bots. Where you could live in a virtual village, and have virtual friends and neighbors that are all powered by AI. They'd be there 24/7, they'd always be interested in chatting with you, and they'd always be nice. They would have memory of previous interactions with you, and a consistent personality. The virtual world could optionally have game mechanics, like Stardew Valley or The Sims, but in a way that wouldn't punish you if you spent most of your time just having parasocial interactions with AI chat bots. I do think that such a virtual world would be highly attractive to a large number of people. Maybe humans just aren't good enough to populate a virtual world and make it feel alive.

Wealth generation through houses

2026-05-09T09:23:00.001+02:00

I am a boomer in retirement, being financially comfortable. So you might assume that I did as many in my generation, and created that wealth by buying a house when I was 30. Instead, the house I live in is my first one, and I only bought it not so long ago, when I was already 57 years old. But then, I bought it without needing a mortgage. Houses are not the only possible path to wealth generation. In fact, as long as you spend less than you earn and invest your savings at a decent yield, you'll generate wealth. So why do so many people think that a house is necessary for the middle class dream?

Much of this is in fact psychology, not economics. Saving is hard. If you have unspent money, there are numerous temptations available, and countless people who are clearly out for your money. The huge advantage of a mortgage is that it forces people to save money. By borrowing money to invest in an asset, you turn optional savings into required debt repayments. People consider their mortgage repayments like the rent they paid before buying a house, as a fixed cost, not as something that ultimately generates wealth. One day the mortgage is paid back, and surprise, surprise, you are suddenly sitting on a valuable asset.

Since the end of World War II until the financial crisis of 2008, houses have been a great investment in most countries. Houses are an investment which result in two different sorts of yield simultaneously: One is the rent you are saving by living in your own house, which is a yield that you "get" (or rather "not have to spend") every month. The other yield is the increase in value of the house, which historically in the period mentioned above has been well above inflation. Combined, the two result in a historically great return on investment.

Now social media have fabricated an intergenerational conflict well above the natural conflict between generations that already the ancient Romans have been writing about. Part of that is just how the internet works, taking small conflicts and blowing the out of proportion, because conflict drives clicks, which can then be monetized. Another part might stem from an attempt to deliberately stoke intergenerational jealousy in order to turn public opinion against state-run pension systems, as turning these systems market-based would generate billions of profits for the finance industry. So there is a wide-spread story around that older generations somehow conspired against younger generations to make it impossible for the younger generations to buy houses and get wealthy too.

The more likely explanation is that there isn't a conspiracy, and the high housing prices are an accident of history, caused by a number of reasons. Some of those reasons actually can be blamed on current owners of houses, e.g. zoning laws. Other reasons are more political, where the neoliberalism that started in the 80's led to a global retreat of governments from providing social housing. Housing was thought to be best provided by the free market, and the market pretty much everywhere failed to provide affordable housing, as affordable housing simply isn't as profitable as unaffordable one.

However, there is a part of the story that is nearly never discussed: Would it actually be a good idea for younger generations to buy houses today in order to create wealth and provided for a comfortable retirement? Now the part about mortgages forcing people to save, and house ownership giving a yield of unspent rent remains valid. However, it isn't obvious that house prices will continue to rise above the rate of inflation. If you bought a house in 2008, the value of that house dropped after the financial crisis; and while in general house prices are back up to where they were in 2008 plus inflation, there has been stagnation in the housing market over the past years.

The future of house prices is uncertain for two reasons: One is the fact that the political consequences of people not having affordable housing, whether bought or rented, are high. There isn't a government in the world that is currently not working on policies to make housing more affordable. The second factor is demographics: Many countries have already reached peak population, and while the US is still growing, that growth is only driven by immigration; and immigration has an uncertain political future as well. The world's largest generation, the boomers, are soon going to leave the single-family homes they currently live in, and move into retirement homes and cemeteries. Both of these factors combined, and given that house prices are currently at historical highs, suggest that betting on houses continuing to increase value faster than inflation is not a safe bet anymore.

The dream of a single-family home in the suburbs with a white picket fence providing financial stability might also be outdated for cultural reasons. The single-family home doesn't make much sense without a family. Marriage and having children are both strongly decreasing in popularity, especially with women. It is hard to imagine somebody following a 4B ideology (no dating, no sex, no marriage, no children) still believing they need to buy a house to fulfill their dreams. The prevalent housing of the future might be the one-bedroom apartment in the city, and the advantages of ownership vs. renting aren't quite as obvious for these.

That doesn't mean in any way that wealth generation will become impossible. It might not even be harder than for the boomer generation. The younger generations will just have to learn to save more of their income and spend less. How that clashes with their ideas of work-life balance is a different story.

The Turks at Vienna - EU5 DLC comments

2026-05-07T10:24:00.000+02:00

In 1529 and 1683 the Ottoman Empire besieged Vienna, but got beaten back on both occasions. These events were highly relevant for European history, as they resulted in centuries of Europe being afraid of "the Turks". A fall of Christian Europe to Muslim invaders appeared possible, and is affecting the relations until today. That threat is reasonably well presented in Europa Universalis IV, but much less so in Europa Universalis V. The Ottomans start a lot weaker due to the earlier start date of EU5, and I have rarely seen them rise to the power they had in EU4 in 1444.

The Byzantine Empire in reality fell in 1453 and didn't play any role anymore in European history. In EU5 the Byzantine Empire at the start date of 1337 is weakened by corruption and internal problems, and is often conquered either by one of the Turkish beys or by its northern neighbors Bulgaria and/or Serbia. That is of course only if the Byzantine Empire is played by the AI. A player-run Byzantine Empire naturally does a lot better.

Yesterday the first DLC for EU5 was released, Fate of the Phoenix, which adds a lot of content to the Byzantine Empire. While the free patch 1.2 changes a lot of things for other countries as well, the Fate of the Phoenix DLC is only affecting the Byzantine Empire, and indirectly the regional neighbors. That in itself is a problem: If you don't want to play the Byzantine Empire, there is zero reason to buy this $10 DLC. On the other side, if you buy the DLC, you are going to play the Byzantine Empire, and thereby take the history of Europe down a predictably ahistorical path: A player-run Byzantine Empire is going to crush the Ottomans early and probably all other Turkish beys as well. If anybody is besieging Vienna in later centuries, it will be Orthodox Greeks, not Muslim Turks. You can't play Fate of the Phoenix without seriously altering European history. The DLC is thus only interesting for people who prefer history simulations to strongly deviate from reality.

The interest of the DLC is obfuscated by the free patch. If you play the Byzantine Empire before and after, as I am doing, a part of the difference in experience is due to new content like bureaucracies. But that is free patch content, not DLC content. So my comparison games are inherently flawed. What I should have done to identify the interest of the DLC is to play the Byzantine Empire twice under patch 1.2, once with and once without the DLC.

Apart from the ahistorical direction, I also dislike Byzantium for a different reason: It appears even more scripted and railroaded than other countries. The Byzantine Empire in EU5 in 1337 has some big strengths, "balanced" by some big weaknesses. For example your estates all have unique corruption privileges that make them not pay taxes. The problem is that every player of the Byzantine Empire will play this in exactly the same way: Use the strengths of the Byzantine Empire to expand into Turkey in order to preempt their rise; while one by one removing the bad privileges, bureaucracies and laws that keep you down. The economy is in a terrible state, and that the player will have to fix as well. But if you look at the various content creators that are currently flooding YouTube and Twitch with Fate of the Phoenix EU5 videos, after several decades they all look very similar. Yes, there are two options of whether to style your empire as "roman" or "greek", but everybody a few decades into the game has fought some successful wars in Anatolia, has much improved their economy, and has removed the same bad privileges.

Due to me having bought the Premium Edition of Europa Universalis V, I will get the first three DLC automatically. But if I play EU5 for many years, I can totally see myself not buying many DLCs, except for those that provide content for a country I am already interested in. That is in stark contrast to previous games, like Victoria 3. While the base game of Victoria 3 is currently available for just $15, the "ultimate" bundle with older DLCs adds another $60, and that doesn't include the latest $30 expansion The Great Wave. Even if I just wanted to buy all the major gameplay-changing DLCs for Victoria 3, I would have to pay $65 to get access to all game mechanics, without the country-specific content, and all those prices are lower than usual due to a big Paradox sale. And with the latest DLC having apparently "broken" the game and being rated "mostly negative" by Steam users, I don't think I will buy all this.

So I am not yet totally convinced of either the EU5 nor the Victoria 3 DLC business strategy. In fact, the only Paradox game where I like the DLC business strategy is EU4, where you can cut through the jungle of game changing DLC by simply subscribing to all of them for as low as $5 per month.

Progressive ideas and their realisation

2026-05-06T10:04:00.000+02:00

Are you for or against socialism? While this sounds like a simple enough question, once you discuss with people it turns out that the people who are for socialism generally talk about the progressive idea of collective ownership reducing inequality, while the people who are against socialism talk about the history of countries that call or called themselves socialist. I am from West Germany, but I grew up with the constant presence of East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, a country claiming to represent "real existing socialism". In the 41 years that country existed, it became rather obvious that their socialism hadn't in fact eliminated inequality, and had led to lower living standards. The GDR famously built a wall to keep its people from fleeing to West Germany, and shot people trying to do so.

The country I now live in, Belgium, I jokingly sometimes call a socialist paradise. Belgium is a democratic and capitalist country, but has a number of progressive social policies that don't exist elsewhere in Europe. For example Belgian salaries and pensions are automatically inflation adjusted, and Belgians enjoy extremely strong workers protection rights. And while all that certainly has its problems, it also has huge advantages: Belgium has a low Gini index of 26.8, compared to over 30 for France or Germany, or over 40 for the USA, meaning Belgium has less inequality. Although GDP per person is lower than in Germany, median household wealth in Belgium is over 4 times the German number.

By comparing different countries, it can easily be shown that for example health care systems have much better outcomes if they are organized around "socialist" principles, while mostly "capitalist" health care systems cost more and achieve less good outcomes in public health and life expectancy. So to answer my initial question, me personally I am much in favor of for example "socialist medicine", but much against the "real existing socialism" of the GDR. The most successful country calling itself socialist is China, and that only since it injected a good amount of capitalism into their system, to form a so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics". History to me suggests that the countries that have the best outcome for the common people have all adopted a mix of capitalism and socialism, while countries with extreme capitalism or extreme socialism have done a lot less well on various measures.

Now the idea of socialism is nearly two centuries old by now, and a lot of people (mostly outside the USA) are able to make the distinction between socialism as an idea, and possible partial solution to problems, and socialism as a failed system to run countries. But with newer progressive ideas, we can observe the same gap in the discussion: People liking certain progressive ideas generally talk about the advantages of the concept, while people hating that same progressive idea talk about the failures of implementation.

For example I have seen a lot of social media posts with people expressing their astonishment that anybody could oppose DEI, because diversity, equity, and inclusion are all obviously good things. But the people that do oppose DEI don't actually oppose the idea, they oppose the implementation. There is sufficient evidence and data that for example DEI programs in US academics has led to exclusion instead of inclusion, with a demonstrable discrimination against Asians and White Americans. That has led to weird events, like White people falsely claiming to be Black, seeing that as their only means to have an academic career.

The same gap in discussion between a positive progressive idea and people opposing the negative points of its implementation exists for "wokeness", on which Americans are divided whether that is a compliment or an insult. That is mostly because the people who consider woke to be a good thing define it as being informed, while the people who consider woke to be a bad thing define it as the resulting censorship due to political correctness. Like with socialism, it is impossible for people to agree on something they don't even share a common understanding of the definition.

I generally think that we should discuss more and fight less. But that discussion requires a certain openness to what exactly the concerns of the other person are. Otherwise we get two people who are both in favor of tolerance calling each other intolerant, because they simply have very different definitions of a word describing a progressive idea.

Internationalization of Netflix

2026-05-05T09:19:00.000+02:00

When I first got Netflix here in Belgium over a decade ago, I was somewhat disappointed about how little „international“ it was for an international streaming company. As I was regularly travelling to the USA, I couldn‘t help but notice that I had a much better choice on Netflix when I was there. Netflix had mostly licensed TV shows, and it only showed those shows in the countries they were licensed to. So for some time I used a VPN to access TV series that didn‘t have a Belgian license.

Then the streaming wars happened, and a lot of companies stopped licensing their content to Netflix in order to fill their own streaming service with exclusive content. Netflix responded by both producing far more own shows, and by buying shows from a wider, more international selection of providers with less license restrictions. The overall result was that the content I get now in Belgium is a lot more international than it was a decade ago.

A year or two back, my wife started to watch a lot of Asian TV series, often costume dramas. Not really my favorite genre, and I don‘t liked that they usually aren‘t dubbed, but are in their original Chinese or Korean with English subtitles. Nevertheless I watched the latest Netflix Asian costume drama hit show, Pursuit of Jade. I liked that one, because a part of it is about how regular people lived in a small town in China. It isn‘t really historical, but it gives you some idea. Pursuit of Jade is a huge success, with over 80 million people watching each of its 40 episodes, for a total of over 3 billion views.

Personally I found Pursuit of Jade interesting to watch, speaking as somebody who hasn‘t watched other Asian TV shows. There are cultural differences in how a story is told that I needed to get used to, but overall it was a good experience. And I like the fact that I can get TV shows from all over the world on Netflix now, and it is much less US-centric.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era

2026-05-04T06:30:00.004+02:00

Out of nostalgia, I bought Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era. That was a mistake. First of all, the game is available on Game Pass, and I would have been better off paying for two months of that than buying the game. But second, after playing Heroes of Might and Magic for a while, I remembered why I don't play the numerous HOMM games and clones (e.g. King's Bounty) in my library anymore: The doomstack problem.

In Heroes of Might and Magic games, you have few armies. Often one hero is transporting basically all the troops you have, while other heroes are running around without troops to gather stuff. The reason why you want to concentrate all your troops in one spot is because the more powerful you are, the fewer losses you will incur when fighting. Ideally you have a doomstack that kills all enemies before they can even kill a single unit of yours. Splitting your army in half and doing pitched battles with two heroes would be much worse, as you would lose too many units, and be weaker afterwards.

The problem of that is that playing this way isn't all that much fun. Pitched battles might be more fun, but you do your very best to avoid them. There is fun management gameplay involved, but actually not much tactics. Units in the Heroes of Might and Magic series don't even have zones of control, which further limits tactical options. Other than the clever use of the waiting mechanic to move twice in a row (something the AI in HOMM: Olden Era is good at), combat is mostly trivial if you do the management part right.

Having said this, HOMM: Olden Era is certainly a good representative of the HOMM series, building on the strengths of part III. There is a heavily scripted campaign, and a great single game mode, where you can choose the general layout of the cities without having to get into details of map editing. The game is fun for some time and true to its origins, but doesn't overcome the basic limitations of those origins either.

Longevity of survival crafting games

2026-05-03T06:30:00.048+02:00

45 hours into Windrose, my enjoyment of the game has decreased significantly. Part of that is due to me having killed the second boss and reaching the third and currently last zone, the Cursed Swamp. The Cursed Swamp has far more and more aggressive enemies as the previous zones, as well as added difficulties like some sort of poison cloud over large parts. That is a bit problematic, because at the end of the second zone you are soft-locked with your gear upgrades to level 10, until you have collected enough resources from the third zone to upgrade them to level 15. If there are mobs everywhere, it is hard to gather those resources, without being attacked by level 15 mobs.

Of course, Windrose is still in the first phase of early access, and I assume that more additional biomes will be added, and maybe the leveling curve smoothed a bit. Enshrouded, which is a good bit further on in the development cycle, occupied me for nearly 90 hours before I got bored. But I find I get bored after X hours with every survival crafting game, and there is very little motivation to either continue or replay them from the start.

I believe that this is due to how much you depend in these games on the tech tree, or what you could call resource evolution. These games are often divided into different biomes, and to develop your character further you need to get to the next biome with the next set of resources and unlock the next set of crafted items. The link between what your character does and can do with the tech tree is far more direct than in other genres of games where you might have a tech tree or talent tree, but do a lot of things independently from that.

I sometimes even feel in other genres, e.g. grand strategy games like EU5, the fact that the tech tree is always the same or nearly the same lowers my motivation to replay the game. In survival crafting games the closer connection to the tech tree means that due to the tech tree being exactly the same, a second game would play out almost identically to a first game. So why bother? It isn't as if I could go down a different route and do things very differently when playing the game again.

The sock drawer problem

2026-05-02T06:30:00.001+02:00

In mathematics, there is a probability calculation known as the sock drawer problem. It asks how many single socks you need to draw from a sock drawer until you get a matching pair, if you have X different types of socks in that sock drawer. That assumes you have single socks in your sock drawer. Up to now, that hasn't been the case for me, because most of my socks are different from each other. Drawing socks one by one every morning to find a matching pair would have taken too long, as X is too large. Instead I sorted my socks after washing, where I had to deal with a smaller number of socks, and then rolled each pair into a ball.

I've been doing my own laundry for decades now. For a long time I even ironed my shirts, but since retirement I decided I can lower my dress code and live with unironed shirts. That resulted in the sorting of socks becoming the most time-consuming part of the laundry process. Being lazy, I wondered whether there wasn't a better solution. And I found a pretty trivial one: I got rid of all of my old socks, and bought 100 identical pairs of black socks on Temu. So now I can stock them as single socks, as the solution of the sock drawer problem mathematically is trivial if X equals 1. No more sock sorting after laundry for me!

The added advantage of this solution is that buying socks in bulk is rather cheap. My previous solution, of throwing socks away when they had a hole, and occasionally buying a new pair of socks when shopping for clothes, was a lot more expensive. I bought those hundred pairs of socks for less than $1 per pair. It is likely that they will last less long than more expensive socks, but with brand socks being sometimes ten times more expensive, it isn't obvious that they would last ten times as long.

Life choices and assuming the consequences

2026-04-30T09:49:00.000+02:00

A life is a complicated thing, and as a young person it would be impossibly hard to predict how everything works out over decades. I would certainly not claim that every event in my life was planned, and that 40 years ago I had a clear vision of where I would be today. But what I can definitely say is that I am not a victim of my life: While random stuff certainly happened, and luck or bad luck was involved, my life choices played a huge role in how my life played out. Because of that I am highly critical of modern social media content in which people frequently play the victim, and claim that everything bad happening to them is the fault of other people or bad luck or global economic circumstances.

I very much support the freedom of everybody to make life choices. But it is equally important to think those life choices through, and ultimately assume the consequences of those choices. If you tattoo "Fuck You!" on your forehead, you don't get to complain that people you meet the first time have a negative attitude towards you.

One life choice I am very supportive of, because I took it myself, is the choice to not have children. Random chance is certainly involved here, and both unwanted pregnancies and unwanted childlessness happens; but between birth control and fertility treatment, the part that choice plays in having children has been growing. If global fertility rates are dropping precipitously, that is largely due to individual choices. Young people these days are increasingly likely to be single, increasingly likely to not have sex, and increasingly likely to not want children. These are all valid life choices. I just would wish that everybody would stop complaining about the logical consequences of those life choices.

Big global problems like the housing crisis, the uncertain future of pension systems, or immigration are directly related to these aggregated life choices. In 1940, under 8% of all households in the US consisted of only one person; today it is 29%. Which means that the same number of people these days need 21% more housing units to live in. That doesn't help when there is a shortage of housing. It is also significantly more difficult to finance housing with one income rather than two. I'm not saying that everybody marrying would solve the housing crisis, but this is certainly a contributing factor that nobody ever mentions. You might look at the 1950's core family model as outdated, patriarchal, or otherwise bad; but the model does have advantages in terms of both financial and emotional stability, especially for the children. Different models of living are all valid, but one has to be aware of the likely consequences.

I just started to get a state pension, and in my case I will never get more money out of that pension than I paid into the system over my career. I don't know how safe my state pension is over my remaining years. But I do know that I shouldn't complain, as my decision to not have children contributed to the problem, due to the pay as you go pension system that many first world countries have. I will complain about the fact that politicians took my money out of public pension funds for other stuff when those were producing surpluses, instead of covering the predictable future. But I can't help to notice the irony of millennials now complaining about having to pay boomer pensions, before they wake up to the fact that their own pensions are in even more peril due to their even lower childbirth rates.

The potentially highest hypocrisy of not assuming the consequences of life choices is in the subject of immigration. A large number of people oppose immigration. But both the life choice of not having children, and the life choice of going preferably for white collar jobs, in aggregate make immigration inevitable. We only get the choice between replacing missing population with immigrants, or replacing them with dolls, and the dolls are less productive, economically speaking. In Germany, over 40% of jobs in the hospitality sector are filled by people with an immigration background, and there is still a shortage of workers there. If we want fewer children, and if we want our children to all have white collar jobs, we need to answer the question of who is going to do the menial labor.

I don't claim my life choices are somehow superior to the choices other people made. But I am okay with my life choices, and the consequences. I object to the maximalist position, in which some people want to have the freedom to make any life choice they want, but do not want to live with the logical consequences if everybody else makes the same choices. It is Kant’s categorical imperative that we shouldn't make life choices that we don't want everybody to make.

Projection onto Pragmata

2026-04-25T06:30:00.004+02:00

Hugh, the adult male protagonist of Pragmata, does not have a pedophile relationship with Diana, the female child protagonist. Not only because Hugh is just virtual and doesn't have human vices and flaws other than those specifically written into his story. But also because Diana is an android, and certainly lacks the anatomy for sexual relations. Capcom went out of their way to dress Diana as un-sexual as possible. But still there have been multiple articles in the so-called gaming press accusing Pragmata of being "pedo bait".

Politics have an increasing gender gap, the progressive left is increasingly female. And they hold world views that are increasingly hostile to men. Not just feminist or anti-sexist. But world views like strong male protagonists being inaceptable per se, and it being impossible that an adult male has a relationship to a female child other than that being pedophile. So they project their world views onto Pragmata, and come up with these ridiculous stories. It is culture war, and that culture war is increasingly a gender war.

Capcom understands representation much better than the progressive left. They know that regardless of the gender of the protagonist, the majority of players for a PC/console shooter game are male. And male players do like positive male role models as protagonists. With those positive male role models having been chased out of other media, video games sometimes seem like a last bastion in which such role models are still possible. Video game journalists complaining about that doesn't tell us anything about the game in question, but only about the world views that these journalists project onto the game.

Data centers and district heating

2026-04-22T12:09:00.000+02:00

The AI boom has led to the construction of data centers that can have 1 GW or more of capacity. Which means that it takes 1 GWh of energy to run them for 1 hour, or 8760 GWh per year. At an electricty cost of let‘s say $100 per MWh, this costs 876 million dollars. And thermodynamically speaking, all the data center does is transform high value electric energy into low value low temperature heat, an energy that is currently just wasted.

It doesn‘t have to be that way. Many European countries have for decades been working on district heating, that is systems that use waste heat from incinerators to heat water, to be sent by pipe into every household for heating. A million inhabitants in a central European city need about 2 GW of heat in winter. If that heat could be provided by two data centers, the overall CO2 emissions for heating would be a lot lower.

Windrose Beginner Tips

2026-04-21T09:28:00.001+02:00

As I now finished the first chapter of Windrose and started exploring the second biome, I thought I post some tips about the game that might be helpful for that first part.

You start out Windrose with nothing much, but following the tutorial you will quickly build a base and a workbench, crafting your first tool. As soon as you have a stone axe, I recommend doing a shipwreck beach tour around your starting island. The idea is to do a complete tour around the island, to see where is what; and at the same time use your axe on every crate and piece of shipwreck you see. Hitting shipwrecks with an axe is more efficient for wood gathering than hitting trees with an axe, as the trees you first need to fell, and then hit again. Also the shipwrecks sometimes drop nails, which you can't make before you found copper. You can then use the wood and nails to build the treasure chest shaped storage, which is bigger than the storage bags you can make without nails.\

Before heading into the interior of the island, you might want to build a first hut. A bed is useful to skip the night to avoid stumbling around in the dark and roaming undead. Even more useful is decoration: Every different type of decoration (as in a chair and a table, not two chairs, only trophies stack) increases comfort by one. And the higher the comfort of your base, the longer the rested buff lasts.

When exploring an island and finding useful stuff like clay, peppers, or potatoes, take the time to go to your map and right click on your location to mark the spot. The resources respawn, and you will want to be able to find those vegetables again.

When you find the copper mine on your island, go there with an empty inventory, except for a stack of wood. You will want to build a lot of stand-up torches in that mine, for 2 wood each. Copper respawns after something like 6 hours real time, but the torches you placed stay. Having completely lighted the mine will make your next copper run a lot easier. Note that for later mines the same is true for scaffolding you might want to build to reach ore spots that are too high to reach from the floor. Fun fact: The ore respawns around stuff you built, so if you build a torch where some ore was, the spot will be dark at first, but light up as soon as you mined the ore around the torch.

There are three basic game loops in Windrose: The first is the xp / level game loop. This trips some people up, because you can actually play for hours without making a single xp. Neither killing mobs, nor sinking ships, nor gathering resources, nor crafting or building gives xp. The only things that give xp are quests and fully exploring locations on islands. At first all locations on islands are marked with question marks, until you approach them. Then either it is a mine, which doesn't give xp, or another location with some number under it, e.g. 0/3. That means you need to find 3 chests at that location, and when you do you get xp, and the number turns into a green checkmark.

The second game loop is your gear. You can craft some basic gear at the start, but things start to get interesting once you find rare "blue" gear randomly in chests. The trick is that you can then upgrade that gear, whether it is weapons, armor, or even ship equipment like guns or hull bracing. Just go to the upgrade tab of your respective specialized workbench (which needs to be under a roof) and see what resources you need to upgrade. That will generally be wood, copper, or rough hide, which you get from killing boars and sows. Every enemy, monster or ship, has a level; and if you attack with a weapon which has a much lower level than the enemy, you won't do very well. In the first part of the game you will want to have blue weapons and armor fully upgraded to level 5 before tackling the end of chapter boss.

The third game loop kicks in as soon as you repaired, equipped and crewed your "bigger boat", the Ketch. Sinking enemy ships gives some loot and insignias; boarding ships with a glowing chest icon floating on top of them gives additional money (piastres, a silver coin). At some point in the game, following quests, you will meet the various factions of the game. For each faction you can hand in insignias at the bounty hunter for reputation; then with the right level of reputation you can pay your silver for useful stuff, like armor blueprints, merchants you can set up in your base, or rare resources. Gold coins are used to buy blueprints for building nicer stuff.

Note that before you head out to visit other islands, you should build a fast travel bell at your base, and bring a bell to build a fast travel point on the new island. Advanced tip: When building a fast travel bell, a wharf, or any foundation, use Z plus mouse wheel to adjust the height to align it with the ground level. That way you can walk onto it, instead of having to jump on it every time.

Feel free to post any tips you want to share in the comments.

Windrose First Impressions

2026-04-20T10:38:00.001+02:00

Kraken Express is an independent video game studio from Tashkent, Uzbekistan. In March 2025 they announced their upcoming first game, Crosswind, a pirate-themed MMOish / Live Service PvP adventure game with crafting and survival. Fortunately, at some point during development they did a reality check: Do people actually want Live Service games? How hard/expensive is it to keep the servers running and populated? And to their credit in December 2025 they changed course, renamed their game Windrose, and made it a single-player / co-op PvE crafting survival pirate adventure game, which then released in April 2026. That change of name and course led to some confusion. There is currently a highly annoyed subreddit for the Italian metal band Windrose, complaining about thousands of PC players posting there instead of on the correct subreddit still called Crosswind. :) There are also some players complaining about the lack of PvP, not understanding how you'd need large servers for that.

Ubisoft is obviously a much bigger company than Kraken Express. They released their Live Service pirate adventure game Skull & Bones as a "quadruple A" game with a $70 price tag in February 2024 and failed miserably with it. You can now get the game for $30, which is exactly the release price of Windrose. But if you knew nothing about the two games, you might still assume that a game with twice the number of A's from a far more experienced game company and two years after release would be a lot better than an unknown company's first game in early access. You'd be wrong. Windrose in early access is a far better game offering far more fun than Skull & Bones. Windrose is potential "indie game of the year" material, and might be this year's "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33". It sold a million copies in the first week, and has 222k concurrent players on Steam, a number that is still growing. Skull & Bones has 280 concurrent players on Steam, nearly a thousand times less.

Having said that, Windrose doesn't reinvent the wheel. People call it "pirate Valheim", and that is pretty much what you get. In the first few hours you actually don't do much piraty stuff at all, but just the usual stuff you would do in games like Valheim or Enshrouded: Gather wood, stone, and plant fibers, build a workbench, make basic tools, build a basic camp. Once you find copper you get your first ship, but it is just a small sloop without any guns. You need to do find a bigger boat, rescue your old crew, repair the boat, and equip it, before you can really go doing any ship-to-ship combat a bit later in the game. And while ship-to-ship combat is important in Windrose, it is just a part of the game. You still need to do a lot of resource gathering, base building, exploring of various islands, and combat on land.

On normal difficulty, land combat in Windrose is relatively difficult, and you are likely to die repeatedly at the start, especially from boars. As this isn't the part of the game I am most interested in, I am playing on easy difficulty. You can also customize difficulty, e.g. making enemies hit normally hard, but have lower hit points. This is already part of one of Windrose's strong points: Quality of Life features are outstandingly good. Anything you ever were annoyed with in any other survival crafting game, Windrose is doing it the right way: Crafting from chests, easy building mode, everything is very smooth and comfortable. You don't die from hunger, but food increases your health bar, which ends up with you still wanting to have food all the time, but without feeling penalized so much if you don't have it. Forget the "early access" part, you don't feel it when playing the game. It just means that the devs will add a lot more content to the game in the coming year or so. And while I *would* like a few more enemy types, Windrose doesn't feel unfinished or buggy at all.

The internet is full of comparisons of Windrose, with its $2 million budget, compared to not only Skull & Bones but other recent $200 million budget games. While I wouldn't stretch that too far, and the more expensive games certainly have some superior graphics features, the general point is correct: From the game experience and fun, Windrose is currently beating out several games with 100 times its budget. But even if you aren't interested in that discussion, and just want a fun pirate survival crafting adventure game, I would very much recommend Windrose. Even at the most basic consideration, this is easily 60 hours of fun for 30 bucks, as long as you like survival crafting games in general.

Gaming status April 2026

2026-04-17T12:59:00.002+02:00

Due to holidays abroad, I haven't played anything for the last 10 days. That has the advantage of getting one out of the tendency to just keep playing what one played the day before, and thinking about what one really wants to play next. And after some consideration, I ended up buying Windrose. That is one of the rare cases where I care more about the theme of the game than about the game mechanics. I'm a sucker for pirate stuff, apparently. So much, I even tried the boring Skull & Bones, but fortunately just the free open beta. Windrose is a pirate crafting survival game, and for some reasons crafting survival games cost half of what shooter or action games cost. So even with just 10% release rebate, I bought Windrose for $27. Even if it is only early access, I didn't feel as if I could save a lot of money by waiting another year or two.

On the other hand, I had looked into Pragmata, another recently released game with good reviews, and didn't want to buy it on release due to the $60 price point. Pragmata seems to be a good enough game, but managed to acquire some hype due to all the things it is *not*: It is *not* a live-service game, it is *not* a sequel, it is *not* at game with microtransactions. I find it curious how the genre of a computer game correlates with its price point and business model. In the shooters genre a buy-to-own game without continued monetization stands out, while in the strategy and tactics games that is still the norm.

In board games, my campaign group and I are still playing Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread. We have already played 8 sessions of 5 to 6 hours each, and estimate that it will take another 4 or so sessions to finish. While at the start of the game there were some extremely generic stories, including the classic rat hunt in the basement, the quality of the stories improved over the course of the game. There still isn't much of an overarching story, and the individual character stories are minor, but the events have gotten more interesting and varied. The designers did a good job of replicating various types of possible pen & paper adventures, e.g. a city adventure or a detective adventure, in the confines of the board game rules.

From my stack of board games bought at the Essen Spiel fair in October last year, only one game remains unplayed. Which is just as well, because I plan to visit another, albeit smaller, board game fair in a week from now. Not sure I am going to buy that many games there, but I'll see.

Playing the tourist game

2026-04-16T10:28:00.000+02:00

In case you noticed my absence over the past 10 days, I was on a holiday in Morocco. It was the first time I set foot into a plane since Covid, and that wasn't due to fear of infection. Rather, over the past years my attitude towards tourism has soured. For example the island of Santorini had to limit the number of cruise ship passengers stopping at the island just long enough to make a selfie at the exact same spot for Instagram to 8,000 per day, because that form of tourism is extremely harmful to the environment and the destination, while not adding enough to the local economy. With the cruise ship company grabbing the majority of the tourist spending for food and lodging, the positive economic impact of tourism per tourist is too small, compared to the damage. So I prefer holidays where I stay and eat locally, and also spend some money in other ways. Because, let's face it, if I don't leave money there, I'm just a nuisance for the location I am visiting as a tourist.

Ideally, that leads to some sort of win-win situation. I spent a day visiting Fes, with a local guide. Fes has a fantastic Medina (old inner city), a labyrinth of narrow alleys of residential quarters and shops, which is actually a protected UNESCO World Heritage. You can explore it without a guide, but there are shops you'll never find, and you'll have no idea which shops are interesting, or how their relative quality to the next shop is. If you hire a guide, you will quickly notice that there are some undisclosed economic interactions involved: The guide will lead you to certain shops, and he'll get a commission when you buy stuff there. That is just part of the tourist game, and it isn't necessarily to your disadvantage. Our guide led us to shops that were, as part of their sales pitch, quite willing to show how they were making the things they sell. We visited for example a pottery, a weaver, and a tannery, and were able to watch the artisans. It was extremely obvious that the goods for sale were not made in China, but made at the location by local artisans. And for me, there is some value to that.

Of course a hand-woven scarf, even in Morocco, costs a lot more than buying a similar looking scarf from Shein. But it costs a lot less than a hand-woven scarf made by an artisan in a first world country. And while patterns are sometimes internationally copied, getting a scarf with Moroccan design in Morocco feels a lot more authentic. I even got a hand-woven djellaba, which I'll use as a house coat, and which is something hard to get outside places with a strong Maghrebian community. We got a pottery plate with Berber design, and a hand-stitched hand bag. We visited a hole-in-the-wall bakery and bought some excellent Moroccan cookies, with lots of almonds and sesame. In general, we are quite happy with our purchases, feeling that the prices we paid were very much justified by the quality of the goods. We were happy, the shopkeepers were happy, and the guide was happy. In such a constellation, tourism feels less exploitative.

House of Cards - Season 7

2026-04-06T11:56:00.000+02:00

No, there isn't actually a season 7 of House of Cards. But if you watch US news, stories of a ruthless president doing evil and illegal things are now part of the daily news coverage. The showrunner of another TV series about the White House, Veep, actually said that their show couldn't compete with reality anymore. Even the relatively tame West Wing back in the early 2000's used to be more dramatic than real world politicians. These days it is hard to come up with a TV series about US politics that isn't put into the shadows by the daily news.

So if you watch US White House news for entertainment, I have good news for you: The next 3 years are going to be full of spectacular drama. I think most people would agree that Donald Trump is not a particularly nice person, with his supporters pointing out that being nice isn't a qualification for the office of president of the United States. But while Trump's behavior can sometimes seem erratic, we know enough of his personality to allow us to predict things: Donald Trump doesn't like losing, and he tends to get particularly nasty and lashes out when things aren't going his way. And while all predictions of the future are highly uncertain, the predictive tools we do have say that Trump will face a series of major losses in the coming years. Which then almost certainly will trigger even more nastiness and lashing out, making for highly entertaining drama, if it wasn't also negatively affecting the lives of many people.

In 1525, Machiavelli wrote in his Florentine Histories: "Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.". Five centuries later Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: "Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH.". Which is basically him slowly realizing the same truth that Machiavelli wrote. It is almost certain that the next step for the US will be committing a series of war crimes by destroying civilian infrastructure to increase pressure on Iran. Politically speaking, Donald Trump is losing the Iran war, in the sense that the war is hurting him more politically than it helps him. And there is no realistic path forward for him to politically win this war anymore, as that would require the Iranian regime to voluntarily give up, which they never will. Whether you prefer the version of British Field Marshal Montgomery or the version in The Princess Bride, "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" remains true, and there are limits to what you can achieve with a pure air and naval war. There are no good options here, and all signs point to the damage already having been done being hard to reverse, with serious consequences for the global economy, especially with regards to inflation.

The self-inflicted timing is particularly unfortunate for Donald Trump, as this presages another major loss this year: The midterm elections. In as far as prediction markets aren't just thinly disguised gambling, but have actual predictive power, the midterm elections will go very well for the Democrats, through no fault of their own. Kalshi currently even predicts Democrats to win the senate, an outcome practically unthinkable just a few months ago. Chance of the Democrats winning the house, according to Kalshi, 86%. While I usually ridicule American voters for holding their president responsible for gas prices at the pump, this time they actually have a point. And exploding prices for fertilizer during this spring will almost certainly lead to inflation in grocery stores in the autumn, which is very bad news for Republicans. I am also highly sceptical of Donald Trump's current attempts to turn the midterm elections around by restricting access to voting; that idea comes from a past age, where it was presumed that poorer people and minorities vote Democrat, so restricting their access to voting helps Republicans. But that "demographic destiny to win for the Democrats" has turned out to be an illusion, and today it isn't obvious whether voting restrictions aren't hurting lower-income white, rural, or non-college-educated demographics who vote Republican as much as any Democratic voters.

Compared to previous presidents, Donald Trump has very much ruled by executive orders, with a friendly congress just keeping quiet about it. Presumably, for the second half of his term in 2027 and 2028, Donald Trump will face a hostile congress. It doesn't take a genius to predict that he won't like that. While he is unpredictable in the sense that we don't know how he will lash out, it is certain that he will lash out. Lame duck president Trump will cause a lot of drama over the coming years. There will also be some entertaining drama regarding his succession. And, unless they nominate Kamala Harris (which they might be stupid enough to do), the Democrats are going to win the presidential elections in 2028, simply by default.

So that is my prediction for the coming years: Donald Trump will have a series of major losses, and in reaction he will lash out and do some more "unprecedented" dramatic stuff. If that was a TV series, I would predict rising ratings. But as the outcome of all that drama in the real world is probably going to be bad news for many people, I would recommend to strap in for a bumpy ride.

EU5 - A game playing itself

2026-04-02T09:56:00.000+02:00

At the start of a game of Europa Universalis V, The Great Yuán (China) covers 1,661 locations. Many major European powers have over 100 locations. And that is just the starting point: In my current run as the Byzantine Empire, I grew my country from an initial 72 locations to currently nearly 500 in three centuries. Every location has several different population groups aka "pops". Every population group has needs for resources. Every location is producing different resources, one of which their "resource gathering operations" are specialized in, others produced by buildings. Every resource can be traded, and countries often span several markets when growing, and trade on even more markets through trade offices and the like, both in colonies and trading partners.

Now you could micromanage resource production and trading. However, trading works on monthly ticks, and a game of EU5 spans 500 years, 6,000 months, and you would have to optimize trade on every market you are present in. So the overwhelming majority of EU5 players just automates trading. Manual trading is slightly better, but experiments suggest the difference isn't huge, about 10% more trade income for manual trading. Given the huge effort manual trading would involve for any medium sized or large country, that just isn't feasible. And even if you switch off automated trading, you still have burghers pops that trade, so you never control all of the trade in your country.

Nor do you control all production. In patch 1.1 a major change to the economy resulted in the estates earning a lot more money, and they use that money to build buildings, resource gathering operations, and roads, just like the player does. There are also "mass build" and "mass upgrade" buttons, so when you replace your scriptorium technology by printing workshop technology, you don't have to upgrade a hundred buildings manually.

In my Byzantine Empire run, in over 3 centuries I haven't done a single manual trade. While I do construct resource gathering operations and buildings, I mostly do so using the mass build and upgrade buttons, as everything else would be too fiddly. And I simply ignore the notification saying that some of my pops have unfulfilled resource needs: It turns out that building and trading by the burghers is enough to fulfill all reasonable needs. The unfulfilled resource needs that I am notified about are things like tea, where the global production is just a fraction of the global population needs, and as each market first fulfills its need before exporting, tea never actually makes its way from China to Europe. It also turns out that pops having unfulfilled needs for exotic goods doesn't meaningfully impact your country.

So when I look at the whole system of population needs, resource gathering and production, trading, and everything around it, I see a hugely intricate and complicated system that I am only marginally interacting with. That part of the game mostly just plays itself, without my input or attention needed. I would need to play a very small country very slowly to have a major impact on my economy myself.

And all that isn't that much fun. At some point my Byzantine Empire expanded covered the whole area from the Balkans to the depths of Anatolia, and I didn't want to expand anymore. I took Rome for fun, as there are events linked to controlling it. But I am already the greatest power in Europe by far, and if I wanted to become the greatest power in the world I would need to expand all the way to China, which doesn't seem worth it. So I am mostly running an automated game at highest speed, waiting for stuff to happen.

Only, the stuff that is happening in the later half of the game isn't much fun either, because it is the same for every country: The age of absolutism has your estates getting uppity, so you need to manage that internal strife. The age of revolutions expands that to you having to fight your vassals and colonies to keep them under control. It is all highly scripted, doesn't much take your current real situation into account, and is mostly annoying. It is a bit like those city building games where at some point a volcano erupts in the middle of your city, just to provide a challenge to a game that has gone stale. I'll probably stop my Byzantine Empire run soon, before reaching the end date.

I understand why EU5 needs automated systems, as forcing players to do everything manually for a large empire would be even worse. Events in EU5 are mostly not much fun. While there are a few country specific events, over the course of a long game the most events you deal with are the generic ones, sometimes repeatedly. And with the tech tree also being mostly the same for every country, the overall experience of different countries converges to something very similar in the second half of the game, regardless of whether you started as a large country, or started small and then expanded.

So I think I'll stop playing EU5 for a while again now. My next run, somewhat surprisingly, will probably be the Byzantine Empire again, but in a month or so. Because that was the purpose of my current run: A practical test on EU5's new DLC policy. The first DLC will come soon, and it will be mostly country specific added content for the Byzantine Empire. The question is how playing the Byzantine Empire differs between before that DLC and after, which then might answer the question in how far those DLCs are worth buying.

Shrimp Jesus on feet of clay

2026-03-29T11:04:00.000+02:00

I generally understand the economics of AI slop: AI companies provide cheap or free image and video generation AI tools to reach a dominant position in the market, which they hope to exploit later in the process now colloquially known as "enshittification". Users of these AI slop generation tools use them to flood social media with clickbait, images and videos that are so bizarre that they grab people's attention. Advertisers on social media pay content creators for the amount of clicks and attention they receive. But it seems to me that this chain of business models isn't sustainable, and that cracks are appearing.

OpenAI just closed down Sora, one of those AI slop video generation tools. AI video generation is relative resource intensive, and OpenAI lost huge amounts of money on it, while receiving very little revenue. Now they could have kept Sora, and just raised the price to at least break even. But that price would have been eye-watering, and would have destroyed the myth that AI is a cheap way to replace humans. So the first threat to the AI slop business model is that cheap or free image/video generation is on its way out.

But the bigger problem is probably on the revenue generation side. If you think of for example the monetization of free products like the Google search engine, it works because your input of a question into Google has a value. If you are searching for the best headphones, chances are that you would be willing to spend money on some headphones; Google is able to either sell that information to the right people, or even more bluntly steer you towards the headphones somebody paid them to advertise. The monetization of social media like YouTube works by assuming engagement: If I click on a video with a review for a board game, I am probably interested in that board game, and at least engaged in the board game hobby. Again, that can be used by YouTube to serve me advertising on whatever interests me, increasing the chance that I click on the advertisement and buy stuff.

OpenAI is not getting any valuable or sellable information by somebody using Sora to generate an AI slop video. And on YouTube that video might get a lot of clicks, but the engagement is very shallow. What advertising do you serve somebody clicking on Shrimp Jesus? Sea food? Chances are, they are more grossed out by the images than interested in any product.

Ultimately the whole AI slop business chain consists of a number of steps, none of which is actually creating any real value. The people using the AI image/video tools aren't buying anything and aren't willing to pay much for their low effort content creation business. The people clicking on those images and videos aren't engaged, and create just empty clicks of no value to advertisers. The real cost to generate the AI slop by far exceeds the economic value created by it. The people paying that cost are the investors in the AI companies and the advertising companies, and both of these will one day realize that there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Shrimp Jesus has feet of clay, economically speaking.

SOVL: Fantasy Warfare

2026-03-27T18:00:00.003+01:00

I'm pretty certain that the name of this game is pronounced "soul", just in a font like that of old Latin inscriptions, where the letters "U" and "V" are identical. You might find the old Romans silly for that, but I assure you, that if I had to write my blog with a hammer and chisel into marble, I'd use letters without round parts too. SOVL: Fantasy Warfare is, as the name suggests, a war game using fantasy miniatures. That might remind you of a certain fantasy miniature wargame from Games Workshop, which used to be the best way to separate a gamer from his money until somebody came and invented the trading card game. And yes, SOVL is to Warhammer what Palworld is to Pokemon: Technically "legally distinct", but looking rather similar.

Only Games Workshop never made an official digital version of Warhammer Fantasy, as plastic miniatures make better money. SOVL is playable on PC and mobile platforms, although the controls of the PC version are superior. The rules are not exactly the same as Warhammer, but similar enough, using D6 rolls to determine hits and saves. And unlike the expensive Warhammer system, you can play SOVL for free. That gives you the complete game including 4 different armies. If you want to play another army, let's say the Ratkin, who are legally totally not Skaven, you pay 5 bucks. Or 32 bucks for all 8 additional armies in a bundle. Which is about 10% of what a single army of plastic miniatures costs you in Warhammer. So, if you were ever interested in Warhammer Fantasy Battles, but the price or the fiddling with rulers did put you off, SOVL might be the game for you.

I must admit that my first games of SOVL didn't go very well. SOVL is a roguelike game with a procedurally generated "tree" of battles, events, shops, and rests, a bit like Slay the Spire. You need to finish two of those trees aka acts to win, and I never won on the first day I played. It turns out that using infantry is one of the weaker options in this game, and frontal charges are to be mostly avoided. Once I started using more cavalry and ranged unit to shoot enemies from the distance and then flank them when they approached, I managed to win games.

SOVL isn't the world's most polished game, but I didn't encounter any bugs or technical problems playing on my iPad. I'm considering switching to the PC for the keyboard shortcuts that show the ranges of all units, while the mobile version is a bit fiddlier to get that information. But in any case, the free version of SOVL: Fantasy Warfare has my recommendation, and it'll keep you playing for many hours before you even need to consider spending any money on additional armies.

Not buying that game - Board Game Edition

2026-03-25T10:40:00.001+01:00

It is curious how sometimes events with a similar theme accumulate in life. After writing my last two posts on this blog about not buying a video game, I spent much of the day yesterday pondering the purchase of two board games, and then not buying them.

That started when I stumbled over the news of the release of Arkham Horror: The Card Game - Chapter 2. Arkham Horror: The Card Game is a so-called Living Card Game, a type of game that lives somewhere between board games and trading card games. That makes them a bit confusing and annoying for board gamers, as different expansion sets arrive and sell out, and you never know what exactly you would have to buy to get started here. As Chapter 2 is a new Core Set, it would be a good starting point, and so I looked into the game. Read on various forums about it and asked questions, watched YouTube videos, the typical stuff I do when I research a game.

Then in the afternoon of the same day, I got a mail that a crowdfunding campaign I was interested in had started. It was for Brass: Pittsburgh, the latest entry in the Brass series of board games. With Brass: Birmingham being the top rated game on BGG for years now, that crowdfunding campaign had 60,000 people following it, which is a very high number for a board game. So I had the same question again, do I need this game? And I again spent hours reading about the game and watching videos.

At the end of the day, I had made my decisions: I won't buy either of these games. That is not because I think these are bad games. But because in my current board game environment, I wouldn't be able to bring them to a table and play them.

I currently only have one campaign game group left, the only group that is repeatedly playing the same game, currently Arydia: The Paths We Dare Tread. The rest of my gaming activity is board game nights, either privately organized or in public spaces like my friendly local game store. As the public spaces have opening hours, I am limited to games I can set up, explain, play, and pack in within 3.5 hours. And as these are public spaces, I tend to play with different people every week.

Arkham Horror: The Card Game is recommended for 2 players, while playing it with 4 players pushes it beyond my 3.5 hour limit. And it is a game in which much of the interest lies in deckbuilding between sessions, so one would need to play through several scenarios of the same campaign with the same people.

I already have Brass: Birmingham, and I am not playing it all that often, as games are often getting very close to that time limit. Looking at Brass: Pittsburgh I quickly saw that the game is more complicated than Brass: Birmingham, adding several new game mechanics and resources, and will almost certainly take more time to play than Brass: Birmingham.

In the end, both of these board games would be more suitable to a fixed group of players meeting privately in a regular manner and repeatedly playing the same game. That isn't a good fit to my current situation.

A post-scriptum to yesterday's post about Crimson Desert

2026-03-22T10:06:00.001+01:00

To the best of my limited knowledge, Crimson Desert is a game that is difficult to review, because it takes a large number of hours of play time before you understand the game's scope, and what it is trying to do. So what value does my post from yesterday have, based on zero hours of play time?

Last year, over 20,000 games were released on Steam. Over 99% of them I never played. But for the overwhelming majority of those unplayed games, I didn't play them because I am either not aware they even exist, or I only saw the game in passing and instantly decided that this wasn't a game for me. There are quite a lot of games out there that are simply trash. Others might be good for their audience, but that audience isn't me, e.g. I'm not playing visual novel games.

The games I do end up playing, I usually inform myself about before hitting that purchase button. I don't spontaneously spend 60 to 80 bucks on a game just based on the cover. And it's not just the money; the whole process of installing a game and learning how to play it is an effort I want to only undertake if there is a good chance that I will actually like the game. And so I read reviews, watch the game played on YouTube or Twitch, or check out discussions on forums or Reddit. I try to find out what other people liked or didn't like about that particular game, and then apply my personal filter, because something some reviewer hated might actually not bother me at all or vice versa. That isn't a 100% surefire process, I did end up playing games that ultimately I don't like. But it helps taking a decision.

Crimson Desert is a game that fell into the middle ground between the two extremes. As a highly anticipated and talked about game (which then sold 2 million copies on release), it certainly was a game I was aware of. And as a kind-of-single-player-MMO / RPG / crafting base builder game it certainly falls into the genre of games I often like. And so I informed myself about the game, watched the videos, and applied my filters. And then I decided not to play it, because it fell through those filters. A game where even the people who like souls-like games complain about the tedious boss fights raises a big red flag for me. The general complaints about the control scheme and lack of quality of life features didn't help either.

The main reason I ended up blogging about Crimson Desert was not because I think my personal opinion of the game is particularly valid, not having played it. But because a recurring theme of many of those reviews was they had expected a game more like The Witcher 3, with a strong story, and came away disappointed by the lack of story and uninteresting main character, but were impressed by the huge open world. My post was more about how a strong story with interesting characters isn't wholly compatible with a huge open world and sandbox style gameplay. But sometimes people ask me whether I would play a particular game, and so I threw in my comments of why I probably won't be playing Crimson Desert.

Bridgerton vs. Crimson Desert

2026-03-21T10:58:00.002+01:00

Imagine you are a big fan of the Netflix series Bridgerton. So you decide to take a holiday in London, and visit the Mayfair district around Grosvenor Square, where much of the series plays. Probably that would be quite disappointing. Not only because Bridgerton is fictional, and plays over 200 years ago. But because if you visit Grosvenor Square, you can only look at the expensive houses from outside. You can't go in, and even if you could, there wouldn't be a drama going on like you can experience if you watch Bridgerton.

That is a common feature of any historical tourist spot. I used to live half an hour's drive away from Waterloo, and I can really recommend the museum they have there about the famous battle. But if you are outside the museum, and climb the commemorative Lion's Mound to see the actual battlefield, these look suspiciously like ordinary fields these days, and there is no battle going on. You need to use your own historical knowledge and imagination for that to have any sort of interest.

If you watch Bridgerton, you don't have any freedom to explore. You can only watch the linear story, episode by episode. If you found one side character particularly interesting, but the script doesn't have any further important role for him or her, you don't get the option to see how he / she is faring. If the script skips a week for dramatic purposes, you don't get to see what happened during that time, except for the bits the series chooses to show you. All that is in the dramatic interest of the narrative. Somebody wrote "only the good bits" into the part that is shown to the audience, and thus gets to choose what the good bits are.

This week the open world game Crimson Desert released, and I looked into some of the reviews to find out whether I wanted to play that. That resulted in me not wanting to play it, because of too hard action combat boss fights and too bad controls. But it also resulted in me watching a bunch of people complain that they had expected Bridgerton and got Grosvenor Square. Crimson Desert has a huge and beautiful open world, with many points of interests and opportunities to interact with the environment, up to picking up and cuddling with any cat running around. What it doesn't have is a tight dramatic story that hooks you early in the game and drives you through that world.

I would argue that to some degree the freedom to explore and the tight dramatic story are mutually incompatible. There are many games that try to do both, with more or less success. Games like The Witcher 3 or Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom in my mind found a good balance between freedom and story. But even in those games there are moments where you basically have to decide between one or the other. When you are farming Korok seeds in Zelda to grow your inventory, you have to leave the story aside. There is never any urgency, you can take off a week to just explore, and the princess to save will still be there once you get around to her.

Crimson Desert is definitively leaning towards the freedom side of the balance. And there are people who enjoy that. There are also people who feel a bit lost due to the lack of handholding and story direction. That is neither new nor unique to the medium, I felt the same conflict between freedom and story when I was writing and/or running D&D adventures. Some people liked hex crawl adventures full of freedom, others hated them due to their lack of a strong story and sense of purpose.

I do like exploring, and I do like games like Valheim or Enshrouded. That is why I looked into Crimson Desert in the first place, it looked like something I would like to play. But Crimson Desert is also trying to be Elden Ring, Legend of Zelda, and a bunch of other games at the same time. With the finite number of buttons on a gamepad, wanting the player to be able to do too many things becomes a control problem. And I don't like souls-like boss combat in any version. So I am not going to spend money on this.

War profiteering and the future of oil

2026-03-20T12:20:00.002+01:00

This is not financial advice. Although I have a general interest in economics, I don't claim to be particularly good at personal finance. In fact, one could say that me not being good at personal finance led to this post. It is not meant as advice, but as a journal of my thoughts on the matter.

For nearly 3 decades before my retirement I worked for an oil company. Not on the actual oil exploration and production side, but in research of the chemical transformation of oil into petrochemicals. Like many other large companies, my employer wanted me to own shares in the company. Part of that is that companies believe that employees that hold shares are more interested in the share price and well-being of the company; another part is tax reasons, where paying an employee in shares is taxed less than paying him cash under specific circumstances. And so I received some shares for free, and participated in offers where I would get company shares at a 20% discount. Basically free money, so it would have been stupid to refuse that. But not being good at personal finance, I just let the shares accumulate, with the dividends being reinvested. The miracle of compound interest over decades led to the majority of my retirement savings being in that one stock. On the one side, having much of your savings in a single stock is a bad idea. On the other side, old school bankers in the previous century considered oil shares the best investment for widows and orphans, them being relatively safe and paying good dividends.

And then some idiot decided to bomb Iran. That is generally bad for the global economy and share prices, with the exception of oil shares. A large part of the share price of an oil company depends on the proven reserves multiplied by the price of oil. Skyrocketing oil prices mean significant rises in oil share prices. And so I am war profiteering, obviously without having wanted to do that.

I think it is time to sell a large chunk of my oil shares while they are high. Not that I see anything better to invest in: There is considerable financial risk in shares these days, for various reasons from rising energy prices, to a potential AI bubble, to a potential private credit debt crisis. Price to earnings ratios are at record highs, the stock markets had a long bull run, and a correction is overdue. But selling my oil shares would help me diversify my portfolio. And while the transition from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable energy economy is slow, the long term future of oil is declining. I'm not saying that this is the last chance to get out with a nice profit, but it is a chance, and we don't know how many future opportunities like that there will be.