Brain Baking 1 weeks ago

Favourites of July 2026

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 parenting; this is another small win for me. I took the eldest to the city centre and of course we ended up in the bookshop where I bought Blaise Pascal’s biography by Graham Tomlin in a whim. I consider that another win: I once started his Pensées but it didn’t yet click. My gut told me to grab that book. I am glad my gut is still intact. Lifts up shirt . The real one as well, thankfully. Previous month: June 2026 . June was a really good month video game-wise. July wasn’t: cero cero cinco . I did try my hand at Void Stranger and got to room eighty-ish but the summer holidays invite outside play here, not inside. So I shifted gears and tried to pick up the board gaming hobby again as that one was doing really bad this year. The shelf cleanup made room for new ones: so far I picked Pirates of Maracaibo and my wife chose Cozy Stickerville . That’s yet another hobby getting quite expensive: the Pirates box was . For a standard-sized box that holds mainly cards and a few cardboard sheets to punch out, that somehow feels very steep. I’ll have to dig into the price history a bit more. Here’s the BGStats summary of this month’s plays: GAMES PLAYED IN JULY 2026 (BGStats summary) The Matcha expansion of The White Castle is well worth the purchase: it streamlines nearly everything in the base game that I found slightly annoying (one more turn, more lantern combo activations, even more variety, …). We’re at play number eight in Dorfromantik: Sakura and just unlocked the ability to collect sakura flowers. Playing such a lighthearted legacy game with the wife is both relaxing and exciting! Yet again, I find myself knee-deep into the fountain pen rabbit hole, so apologies for the fountain of (ha!) pen-related links in here. Related topics: / metapost / By Wouter Groeneveld on 1 August 2026.  Reply via email . The Pen Addict ranks all Pilot CH 912 custom nibs . The Soft (fine) medium wins and my favourite, the Waverly, does poorly. To each their own! UK Fountain Pens has interesting reviews on their blog/site . I think I already posted these, but there’s a theme going round: If I Could Only Keep 10 Pens . I saw The Well-Appointed Desk’s post first. Thanks! This is a 2018 post, but Tom Gidden’s Flex And The Art of Line Variation is a gold mine when it comes to making sense of “flexible” nibs, both old and new. Winnie Lim wrote a letter to her 10-year old younger self and warned her not to play the status game (and more). Another favourite fountain pen blogger that also sketches, Parka Blogs (Teoh Yi Chie), wrote a review of the Pilot Custom 743 with the Falcon nib, the one I bought last week. I haven’t yet encountered ink flow issues as I’m not a good “flex writer”—yet. You might have heard it already: as Roy Tang puts it, the end is nigh for physical video gaming . Nintendo won’t save us this time I fear, Switch 2 is also evolving that way. The Gentleman Stationer quips: chase nibs, not pens . Will do! Clicks buy (again) David reviewed Drop Duchy an indie game mixing Tetris with deckbuilding? Sounds right up my alley! Marcus The Boardgamer shared his current top 10 games over at Mastodon. Fude Fan put out an updated guide on how to buy pens and ink directly from Japan . I really enjoyed this designer diary post from the makers of The White Castle: Matcha . They won’t play the game without the expansion anymore! On a strange corporate looking blog I found a summary of unique Kit-Kat flavours exclusive to Japan . That list goes on and on and on! Nagasawa Pens is a well-known store in Kobe, Japan that collaborates with the Big Three Japanese brands to sell unique and limited edition variants . The more you know! In 2021, Jane from Yoseka Stationary wrote about the origins of the Sailor Naginata Togi nib. Many nibmeisters nowadays offer similar grinds like “katana” or “blade” that resemble the Naginata Togi. I have a Kodachi on my list from Mr. Nagahara Junior. Related to that, Parka Blogs compares Sailor specialty nibs before and after 2015/2025 . In case that wasn’t yet clear: the pen is Mightier than the Keyboard . Ennui Vagaries agrees. A Kelson Vibber conspiracy theory: genAI uses a lot of em-dashes because it’s trained mainly on WordPress blogs and bloggers use a lot of em-dashes—to they? Did you know you can fit a Sailor nib inside a standard JoWo/Bock housing? Or Pelikan or whatever? Thanks to Flexible Nib Factory , you can!

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Brain Baking 1 weeks ago

The 2026 Board Game Shelf Analysis

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 riddled with gaping holes: enough space left to welcome new boxes. But first we have to say our goodbyes to a few ones. Take a look at the photo of the above linked post to inspect the state of the board game shelf in 2022 and 2024. Below is the updated 2026 version, just before selling the culled ones. Please ignore all the baby toys that seem to find their way up, under, and inside every single piece of furniture in our house. The board game shelf, summer 2026 edition. The top right box contains games that should leave the collection. I’m trying to figure out a system starting from the left (in) and ending to the right (out). The idea was also to have a few spaces on eye level where I could place the games that deserve more plays/attention. So what’s gone and what’s new? As mentioned in the 2024 post, we own too many small box 2-player only games that my wife no longer likes to play. Glasgow , Caper , and/or Paris are my next culling candidates. Again, the columns are defined as follows: game name, BoardGameGeek average score ( ), own score ( : Great!, : Good, : Average, : Bad, : No Score, see my grading systems discussion ), BoardGameGeek weight ( ), estimated plays (From ; played a lot, to ; barely played). The table is sorted by plays (most to least). I left out two new dice for Railroad Ink that I have yet to touch and the Kingdom Legacy: Distant Lands expansion that’s also still in shrink wrap. Ouch. That list is longer than I anticipated… Only Fliptown is from 2026 though, the rest is from last year. You might also notice the correlation between a game that gets played and the BGG weight: the heavy hitters sit at the bottom. See my posts on parenting as to why. I’m already more than happy that my wife likes both Dorfromantik: Sakura and The Dice Chambers . It’s really cool to play a tile-laying campaign/legacy style game: the last time we managed to open a new box and envelope and we were really excited to see what’s inside! I got Earthborne Rangers for my 40th birthday last year from a friend. We attempted to start the campaign and played again with more than a month in-between and already forgot most of the rules. He since has moved on to other games he’s into so I think I’ll try and get a solo campaign started instead as I really liked what I saw but I can’t seem to get it on the table. The unopened Spirit Island I got for Christmas is another painful one. I don’t really want to share these stats: in 2024, I wrote Since our baby turned into a rebellious toddler we’ve had to dial back hobby time significantly . Well guess what we had another one and that one loves screaming and kicking around lately. It looks like 2026 is an all-time low when it comes to logged board game plays. The BGG Play Stats in 2026, so far. We’re trying to more actively play something small together after the kids are off to bed which is nice. Writing summaries like these help me ground myself: it seems that I have more than board games enough to cover the next few years. And yet backed versions of Sail Legacy and Dark Venture: Battle of the Ancients still have to make their way to our doorstep. I still read Board Game Quest’s Kickstarter summaries but more cautiously evaluate whether it’s worth it. Click A Tree was a good learning lesson. Today my friend & I played Castles of Burgundy: Special Edition and The White Castle with the expansion. It was a great afternoon to unwind outside (even though we had to seek shelter from the heat after the first game). Related topics: / boardgames / By Wouter Groeneveld on 29 July 2026.  Reply via email . Nightfall was already “culled” in 2024 but I can’t seem to make a sale on that one. It’s out of print and I don’t charge a lot. That is one persistent box! Dungeons, Dice & Danger (Richard Garfield made a roll & write and it’s not very good) French Quarter is just not as good as Three Sisters and I can’t justify owning both Ora & Labora is the one that got felled as I own too many Uwe games and want even more Speaking of which, Click A Tree is a disaster, I wish I didn’t back that one. I also gutted Framework and Robin of Locksley in 2025. Yes I have/had too many Uwe games, I told you. And Nusfjord is on my wishlist. Perhaps also Hallertau ? Conservas is a neat little solo bag building game. I finished the campaign and it has not a lot of staying power after that.

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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

I Guess I'm Playing The Long Game Now

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 do 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 the daily small wins, knowing that it’ll be an exhausting ultramarathon, not a short sprint. I never fully realise this but a friend of mine might be right: I usually overly focus on the negatives instead of cherishing what I already have. So how to turn that around? Perhaps I should simply repeat an experiment from 2013. In one of the first blog posts ever to appear on this site, I explain how I end my days with happy thoughts . I never thought I’d cross-reference to something more than 10 years old but there it is. The idea is simple: instead of letting frustration roar at full speed inside, try to shift your attention to small wins. Tiny little things that unlocked a smile are enough. A daddy, look! perhaps. This is what I came up with in my journal: A 'small wins' logbook in my journal. The “small wins” page spread should cover the entire month and is divided into four columns: (1) day indication, (2) small win description/remarks, (3) mood, and (4) physique. It should be dead-easy to fill in otherwise I won’t be doing it, hence the Studio Ghibli stamps. Totoro happy? Me happy. Totoro OK? Me so-so. Totoro with umbrella? Me expecting emotional rainfall. I have yet to stamp a happy Totoro in there but the point is mostly to what you’d call “get a grip”. For that reason, I don’t want to write anything neutral or negative in the second column. I’ll be needing a fine nib to squeeze everything in there. Maybe I should ignore the “remarks” title altogether. I wrote “TIRED” next to the first umbrella, but should I? A considerate reader told me they take more pictures of their kids just running around in and around the house to look back on fondly afterwards. That’s sound advice. We should do that more often and forget about it in the many hectic moments. I re-read three journals from a few years ago today and the pasted in photos (mostly from the pocket printer ) always make me smile. Our daughter found the photos of the baby funny: “hey look, that’s mom and little brother!” “No it’s not, it’s you when you were a little baby!” “oh wow! but now I already am high up in the sky!”. Note to self: order new pocket printer sheets. The Long Game means leaving short bursts of dopamine behind. And yet I find myself buying fountain pens—the last purchase was three years ago—or scrolling through BoardGameGeek’s The Hotness list to see what else I can pick up after I sold a few ones just lying around on the shelf. I often try to escape into my laptop or book or whatever when things get heated with the kids. I notice I grab my smartphone during breakfast while I never did that before. The Long Game means noticing, admitting, and trying to change behaviour. I guess stage one is as good as any place to start. The youngest gave me a really hard time today. In August I’ll be playing daddy-day-care for both of them and I already feel slight hints of panic rolling my way. The Long Game means acknowledging it’s going to be a mess but we’re going to be okay regardless. As my favourite philosopher Michel de Montaigne said: the purpose of life is to live it. A short sprint would mean this to be over in no-time. The look back into my previous journals already taught me that The Long Game is more than fast enough: one day you’re writing “hey today the first one said bye bye and walked off onto the street for the first time!” and the next day you find yourself writing “next month the youngest turns one what happened??” Small steps. Small wins. I’ll be writing them down. Related topics: / parenting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 26 July 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 2 weeks ago

Creating Life Is Giving Life

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 consideration except for yourself. I can’t remember my parents having any hobby except for keeping me and my sisters—and perhaps the vegetable garden—in check. When I ask them about this now, they respond along the lines of “just wait, you’ll quickly learn that with kids there’s no space for that”. That was a few years ago when we had only one kid. I didn’t believe them. Now I do. I also can’t remember my parents taking the time to often visit friends. There have been a few moments where they would drive over to friends with us three kids but that was initially limited to a few times a year and then gradually disappeared. Yet another thing scratched in favour of more time/life for the kids? Perhaps I am writing this down as a warning for myself not to let my own life derail too much: last week I could feel the dark abyss calling my name. I often resent just starting the day and sometimes wish I didn’t wake up. I am exhausted. Should I be? I see friends jamming their way through life, with multiple kids, pretending there’s an endless well of love to give. I read and hear about folks taking their very young kids on their far travels while we can’t even muster to get our asses to the Belgian coast. My well isn’t endless: it’s drying up. It’s love level is about the same as the rain barrel outside: dangerously low. We are giving and giving up to the point that we don’t recognise ourselves anymore. My relationship with my wife is crumbling because of these little takers. I partially changed jobs because of them. My head is a gaping void and the few intact spots are partially inaccessible due to brain fog. I want to go and sleep this off and wake up a few years later. But I should know better. We people are experts at pretending. Other households have their own problems, they just carefully hide them. As my wife likes to say: nobody escapes their youth unscathed. I’d like to extend that saying: nobody escapes parenthood unscathed. It permanently changes you—and not always in a good way. What am I doing here in front of this laptop anyway, during these few hours that my parents are looking after the kids? Shouldn’t I go back to bed? More anxiety pops up: how to most efficiently pass this highly rare quality alone time? Before you know it it’s gone. This need to quickly enjoy this little bit of free time evaporates my motivation to do anything at all… And thus I keep on thinking: creating life is sacrificing a bit of your own. Creating two lives is sacrificing a lot of your own. Sometimes too much. But the kicker is that you are completely unaware of this as a soon-to-be parent: you’re just excited about what’s to come, blind to the “few” downsides that come with it. And then it’s too late. What did we even do to pass the time before we had kids? I can’t remember. Loitering? Nothing? Gaming? Living? Even in the sense of a non-living creation, creating life is also giving: you’re pouring years of hard work into a project to realise something. Only with kids, these years never end, and the working hours are not from nine to five. Every little scream and cough at night will keep you awake and every little scream and cough during the day will drive you crazy. We don’t have the fortitude of a big social safety net making it difficult to break through this circle of negative thoughts. I didn’t write I regret having children but sometimes I do and today is just one of those days. Another problem that presents itself in our situation is that you can’t talk about this with anyone. Friends with only one kid don’t understand what the big deal is. Friends with multiple kids that are older simply forgot their biggest nightmares and very helpfully say it’ll get better. Friends that don’t have kids can’t imagine that misery—and I don’t blame them for not trying. And even if you could. I don’t have the energy to talk. What is there left to say that will change our situation? Nothing. We’ll still have to get up tomorrow and we’ll still have to keep on giving life in order to sustain and grow these other little lives. A few months ago we had a rare weekend off for ourselves and got out of the house to do something nice together. Later that night I got sick. Flash! Now the weekend is gone and you’re back to giving. My apologies for these rather depressing words but I have the feeling that too many parents are pretending and not showing the true side of daily misery. That’s what it is. It could be happy bearable misery but it’s still misery nonetheless. And it won’t end: diapers will be replaced by another thing to worry about. We endlessly worry. Why is she eating so little? Oh no the youngest fell again, what’s this bump on his head? Was that there yesterday? Why doesn’t she say how school was? Does she feel at home there? Do we really need to rush off to the doctor again for the third time this month? During all that worrying, we lose ourselves. We should be worrying about ourselves instead. But at the end of the day, when the kids are in bed, all we have left in us is the ability to lie down on the couch and mindlessly watch something or read a light novel, if that. Maybe the secret lies in not thinking too far ahead: if you look ahead in time you’ll only be faced with that gigantic amount of life still to give until they’re old enough to start changing our diapers. Related topics: / parenting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 22 July 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 3 weeks ago

In Search Of A New Fountain Pen

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 the ache is real. Especially after seeing a few top list posts appear in my RSS feed such as The Gentleman Stationer’s 12th anniversary post: what’s in your pen case these days? . Six out of ten pens are Pilots! The Well-Appointed Desk followed up with a if I could only keep 10 fountain pens post, as did Rachel’s Reflections . And now I also want to list ten. Except that I don’t have ten decent pens! As mentioned in my daily drivers post , there are three workhouse pens that are constantly inked with a few newer ones and a few that I barely use. I guess I can make up a top 5: Okay fine, a top three then. Spot four could be taken by the newer Pelikan M400 Medium ground to a cursive italic that’s fun to write with, yet I regret not getting a M600 or even M800. The 400 body is just too small. My ideal body proportion-wise is Pilot’s CH 912 that’s just perfect. The M400’s grip section is short and thin, but the M600+ versions come with a (too) hefty price increase. I guess I can still hunt down a bigger body and attempt a nib swap. My wife gifted me a Waterman Expert III Fine when I got my PhD and while it’s an excellent writer it doesn’t really come close to the three pens listed above. And then I wanted a proper Sailor with some colour but not a Slimline variant. I bought a Wancher variant on eBay that came with a busted nib so had to send that off. I postponed that for years hence it’s not really been used yet so I can’t give it a proper place in the above list. A friend listed his own top 10 as well: Pilot Falcon, Pilot CH 912 FA, Pilot CH 912 PO, Pilot Custom 823 F, Pilot Vanishing Point F, Sailor Pro Gear Naginata Togi specialty nib, CONID Bulkfiller, Montblanc 149 Calligraphy nib, and two others. After the Pilots, the price ramps up to almost which is way above my budget for a pen. I don’t really want another 912 even though the nib variability is seductive: it only comes in one colour; black. When we visited Italy in 2016, I wanted to buy a proper Italian fountain pen. The Brain Baker in me of course first thoroughly researched all Italian brands and I concluded that Aurora makes unique in-house nibs so I wanted an Aurora—perhaps even their expensive flagship model the Aurora 88. In Milan a friendly employee helped me to an Ypsilon as the others were very expensive. Two months later, some of the cheap metallic layer covering cheaper plastic came off. I also hear quality control issues for other Italian brands so I’m still unsure even though that Leonardo Momento Zero Grande special edition Tulp Fields Ru looks great. But both the size and the price are a bit too big for my liking. Is it just me or are you just paying for more looks after passing the mark? So what else is on the wish list? Back to Pilot? Yes! Their Custom 823 is a vacuum filler and in select shops in Japan you can order a flexible #15 Falcon nib along with it: impossibly difficult to import. But you can also buy a 743 with a FA nib and swap them… One for the price of two! Why not just get a single 743 then? Because it only comes in black. Except for the US-only limited edition Verdigris colour. I can almost hear the custom till going ding ding ding. I always like looking at special nibs as my daily writers are already here, lying on my desk. Sure it’s lovely to have a bit of a pen rotation going on, but I’m not dropping hundreds just to have yet another fine nib. A Platinum music nib then, which has two slits and has wide down strokes but thin side strokes? As a Belgian fountain pen writer, I’ve always wanted a CONID, especially after testing one from a friend . These expertly machined pens in small batches are made from very durable materials which… drumroll… makes them ridiculously expensive and difficult to get. But they are the ultimate demonstrator vacuum pens with swappable Bock nibs that make it easy to order a few crazy ones from say . Maybe that’s what’s missing in my lineup? The cheapest alternative are TWSBI pens, but my Eco already has plastic nicked off here and there so I’m not a huge fan of their usage of cheaper material. Perhaps the more robust Vac700R is worth taking a look at. In-between CONID and TWSBI, you have the Irish Gravitas pens, of which the new Vac 2.0 looks very attractive both price-wise and aesthetically. Vac-filled, two separate ink chambers, can be fully disassembled, and easy to screw in other Jowo #6 nibs. So what’s the conclusion here? Perhaps I already own anything I will ever need. Otherwise: I left out Visconti’s Homo Sapiens, Aurora’s 88, and Sailor’s Naginata Togi. I just can’t justify putting in so unless someone wants to get rid of theirs at a reasonable price, those will stay within the bounds of distant dreams. Whatever you do, don’t look at the latest Sailor and Pilot prices. Pilot is planning to increase their prices in October—again. On top of that, their limited edition CH 912 is priced at which is more than twice the base price. And Sailor? They’ve been upping the stakes and marketing themselves as more premium: since 2024, prices have literally doubled. Yet another reason to hold your horses… Or to get out that cheap but very serviceable Kaweco Sport? Related topics: / fountain pen / By Wouter Groeneveld on 18 July 2026.  Reply via email . Pilot Custom Heritage 912 Waverly Lamy 2000 Fine Pilot Vanishing Point Matte Black Fine Buy a too expensive and too big Leonardo just for the looks Import a too expensive Pilot 743 with FA nib in Verdigris Buy a Gravitas Vac 2.0 and order another Jowo semi-flex nib to fiddle with Meanwhile be on the lookout for a Pelikan M600 body? If all else fails, get a Platinum 3776 with a music nib?

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Brain Baking 3 weeks ago

Is It Worth It To Buy A Plug-In Home Battery?

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 at least not at the rate the policy makers are making us believe. Perhaps they’re also fond of Lying Science. In any case, suppose you’ve made the purchase. In Belgium, the biggest advantage—being able to sell the generated energy back at a reasonable price—is long gone. Instead, based on the new digital meters that automatically upload exactly what you take and give, the national energy supplier added a “peak moment taxation”: you’re now paying for what you use and a fixed amount based on your monthly max intake. Long story short, it’s financially interesting to store the surplus of energy you generate yourself and use it when you need it. During the evening when cooking, for example. The problem that pops up is essentially the same as the solar panel problem: is it worth it to put in the money for a professional home battery installation given that these are still very expensive? Not really. But a simpler solution, a plug-in battery that is smaller, cheaper, and easier to install might. What follows are a few Armchair Calculations also known as Rigorous Science (TM) to support that statement. First, a few given facts: Okay, so where does a battery help you? At two levels: at reducing what you buy in by providing the energy when the sun is gone, and at reducing your peak energy usage. But that latter is less interesting than you think because of that minimum tariff. Not only that, a plug-in battery has to conform to strict rules: just plugging it into to a socket in the wall (into the net) means it’ll be limited to taking and giving . That is a big downside that is never mentioned on manufacturing websites. Suppose you’re turning on the oven, the AC, and more: you suddenly require more than a few but your battery is only able to help out for a puny portion: . In addition, it’s not able to store energy as fast as possible. Suppose you want to buy in energy during the night if you’re on a dynamic contract and energy is in surplus then. A completely depleted battery of for example might take over four hours—during which the price might have gone up dramatically. You can counter this major shortcoming by installing the battery in a separate electrical circuit connected to its own fuse in the fuse box. The Marstek Venus 3.0 battery we bought can be configured to give/take instead of but then you better make sure your installation is up for it. A fuse of should be good enough ( ). Suppose you don’t immediately go through all that trouble. Then the battery can somewhat soften the tariff blow: from your peak to meaning you’ll save about yearly. Then there’s the matter of the battery cycle. How many cycles the battery goes through from depleted to full indicates how efficient you’re able to use the stored extra energy. Given the above numbers (current quarter export, amount of days sun, …), a rough guess could be 160 cycles. Remember that during the winter period, this thing will just sit there doing nothing. I live in Belgium, not in Spain. The Marstek Venus has a capacity of , meaning we need to import less. Given the current price of energy, that’s less or . Add the softened peak and you’re at a total saved amount of per year. The Marstek currently costs about —so the total payback period is about years. Look at all this Rigorous Science (TM) working flawlessly! Given the separated fuse box upgrade, that might lower to almost four years. Doing that same rough calculation with a professional installation of that still costs over 4k, you’ll end up with a payback period of nine-ish years which is ridiculous: the bigger batteries still do nothing in the winter and for all we know, the average life span of these things might be ten years. This is exactly the same conclusion as local consumer magazine Test Aankoop : We generally do not recommend installing a home battery to store the electricity generated by solar panels. There exist more effective and cheaper alternatives such as increasing self-consumption and energy saving investments. Until recently, a simpler solution such as a plug-in battery was also not really worth it because these batteries could barely store a few kilowatts. The more popular HomeWizard battery costs and can only store significantly increasing the payback period. Their premium software is the biggest draw here, but I don’t need all that crap anyway as I want to monitor and control everything through Home Assistant. The true test will be the autumn and winter period of course, but during the summer you can still see an interesting pattern in the historical capacity chart: hidden standby power consumption. Marstek VenusE 3.0 Remaining capacity history graph. During the day the battery does nothing as the solar panels produce a big surplus of energy. The sudden drop at 17:30h is me getting crackin’ in the kitchen. After 19h30 the kids are gone to sleep, the AC is off, and there’s pretty much nothing except a few light bulbs turned on, hence the slight downward slope until about 06h30 when there’s enough sunlight to recharge (which takes a while as I still have to install that fuse). From 19h ( ) to 06h30 ( ) equals about of standby consumption: the NAS backing up files at night, the TP-Link mesh access points, standby modes of various devices, the battery itself that consumes about regardless, … That means a single HomeWizard battery might not even cut it for you to cover the standby consumption during the evening and night! Enough armchair logic for now. At the price of an entry level MacBook Air, I’m glad we didn’t shell out a huge amount for a useless installation (that needs its own space we don’t even have) and I’m glad the battery does at least something . Oh, and that peak? Yesterday we bought in total . The peak at 18h00 was . Similar patterns in the past week: the peak stays below one. Still ample of juice left as we have to pay for that stupid minimum of anyway. Related topics: / energy / By Wouter Groeneveld on 15 July 2026.  Reply via email . Our local Home Assistant installation collects energy data via a P1 meter that taps off that same official digital counter data. Our energy stats for the last quarter, from 1/04 to 30/06, are: import , export . Peaks at the expected 16-19h interval, mostly ranging somewhere at . The Flemish capacity tariff has a minimum amount! That means regardless of your peak use, you’re going to be paying for a peak of at least at per year. Suppose your peak is , then you need to pay an additional amount of per year. According to various sources ( , ), the price for energy in June 2026 is about while the injection tariff (putting it back on the grid) is about . That’s right: almost one tenth of the buy-in price. To be avoided at all costs if you are to buy back everything during the evenings/night! According to , last year the global solar radiation in per square metres was . also tracks the amount of sunnier days but the weather is very unpredictable and local.

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

A Summer Creativity Experiment

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 to defuse this situation? By building a less conventional house on wheels, of course. Or by building a row boat and claiming it’s also a house. Or by attaching a few farm tools on it and claiming it can also act as a tractor. That also works. Hey, no! No brother you can’t have my house! Wait since when is that your house? I’m working on your house give me a minute. Why don’t you build something yourself? No. I can’t. You must. Ok then. No! Brother can’t have my figures! That’s not allowed! Isn’t it dad? Sigh. We have twenty figures. Even if we would have two hundred, I think I’d hear the same complaints. Here’s your house slash thing. Happy now? A collage of six different weird constructions made with Lego Duplo. Daddy? Yes? I don’t want to play anymore . But I just built you the thing you really really wanted? _I don’t want it._Really? I mean I just… No. Sigh. Welcome to my summer holiday… Hey! Little brother, no, you can’t eat that! Wait! I’m sorry, I have to go rescue Peppa Pig’s skirt. Related topics: / lego / parenting / creativity / By Wouter Groeneveld on 8 July 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Favourites of June 2026

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 more stability this time around, both on personal and professional level. My statute as lecturer has been extended for a year: so far, so good! Previous month: May 2026 . A few very short ones and one quite big one that I ended up enjoying very much. DreadXP, the developers behind Dread Delusion , also recorded dev diaries on YouTube: Related topics: / metapost / By Wouter Groeneveld on 3 July 2026.  Reply via email . The Aching —a Sierra On-Line-like adventure game weighing less than that runs on any 8086 machine. It also happens to be good, even though it feels more like an introduction of this horrified world. Serious Sam: The First Encounter —I started replaying this two years ago and finally pushed forward a bit more. After endless complete freezes of my Win98 machine I gave up. AAAAAHHHHHH boom . I remember liking this a lot more: it’s…. bland? Dread Delusion —A weird looking game that I was drawn to the first time I laid eyes on screenshots a few years ago. I remembered it and felt the time was right to crack this one open. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in the last years. I recorded a playthrough log to convince you to drop everything and go play it as well! Lucy Dreaming —A lovely classic nineties adventure game that’s perhaps playing it too safe to try to be an homage to Monkey et al. ? I still enjoyed myself but the abrupt ending was a bit of a letdown. Speaking of The Aching , the developer explains their philosophy behind the Gorgon Engine . Interestingly, Gorgon is designed to be small and able to run on older original hardware, while new adventure games that look and feel old like The Telwynium are made with PowerQuest for Unity and require hundreds of megabytes. Nobody really cares, but I do. This ACM paper on a conceptual model for ownership types in Rust sheds new light on how the borrow checker works from an educational point of view. More Rust-y stuff—even though I have yet to touch the language—Michael Neumann investigated how long it takes to compile Rust from source compared to other languages. Hint: looooooonnnnggg. As in lonngggggggggg. James also printed his blog in book form years before I did! He selected all coffee-related articles to create a lovely personal caffeinated hardcover. Games That I Missed documents progress on their pinball machine projects . That old electronic stuff inside the machines is mesmerising. Phil Gyford laboriously kept track of how much money he spent each year on music for the past 30 years (via ) In a timely manner, Miss Booleana wrote about Claire Dederer’s Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art By Bad People? . I asked myself the same question recently and added the book to my toread list. Andrew Webster publishes a Great Truth on The Verge: The Nintendo DS is still the best gaming handheld for travel . Yup. Another paper that confirms LLM-driven gender bias in citations in academic work . James Pennebaker confirms what I’ve been thinking and feeling: expressive writing can influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviours . The link is a past event but a good starting point to find publications by Pennebaker. Chris Kirk-Nielsen begs us to start playing indie games . Stop that Assassin’s Creed nonsense: scroll up and watch the Dread Delusion dev diary instead! Nic tringali sometimes feels the creative drudgery . A surprise ending is in it for you if you decide to read it. Jeff Gerstmann finally decided to apply Rigorous Science (TM) to compile an exhaustive (!!) list of the best NES games ever released in USA . Number one is NOT Mario nor Zelda! I particularly enjoyed Erik Hane’s piece in Typebar Magazine on fandom strain and the IP illness killing Magic: the Gathering . The magazine really is “An interesting thing to read on the internet”, as their footer claims. In a post called Cultures of making and relating , Konrad Hinsen brings the recent Cultures of Programming book our attention. It’s been an open browser tab ever since. Memray looks like an interesting memory profiler for Python, if I ever would need one. GentleOS is a friendly hobby OS for 32-bit PCs. The Corporate EU Observatory revealed that Big Tech invested almost 50% more in lobbying throwaway money ( !) compared to 2020. Diablo II has a new class: the Warlock . I really wish it was playable without the remaster though. Warp Point is a curated list of indie video game websites and Jefklak’s Codex is in it.

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Postcard Teas: A Few Impressions

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 up in a disappointment. And then I saw someone claiming that London-based Postcard Teas is “even better than Mariage Frères”. My initial reaction to that was “impossible”. I secretly made a note in my journal regardless. When our stock started to dwindle, I dug up that note and said to myself: what the heck, let’s do something crazy and order elsewhere. Postcard Teas is a small shop in London that sells specialty teas by importing directly from the growers. Their unique selling point is hinted in the name: these growers only have a few acres in which they aim to grow the best quality possible. The result is only a few kilograms of yield each year, yet the average price remains acceptable. Each bag of tea you order comes wich a lovely postcard and piece of art depicting a work from the country of origin. I have no idea where Mariage Frères’s tea comes from and love the fact that with Postcard Teas, this knowledge is accessible—even evident. Besides the location and yield, the back of the postcard even contains the grower’s name and a tidbit of bio. Watch China Minutes’ visit to the small shop to breathe in the atmosphere. Meanwhile, I’ll go prepare myself a cup of their summer Darjeeling. Still interested? Great! Yet people outside UK should be warned as shipping comes with a hefty taxation at the border I didn’t mentally prepare for… Just take that into account when you’re browsing their webshop—and don’t forget to compare prices with your usual supplier per , not the deceptive . With that being said, here are some impressions of the teas we tried out: Golden Darjeeling A lovely dark red tea that goes down very well without being too strong. I usually buy first flush/spring Darjeeling and kind of wish I did here as well as that’s usually milder, but this summer Darjeeling is excellent, even if you accidentally let it steep for too long. Contrary to its spring variant, it also handles heat very well, so I usually set it with boiling water. A pure Darjeeling is usually my go-to in the morning or even right after lunch. This black tea is less black than the cheap green powdered teas bought in supermarkets. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. Gianfranco’s Earl Grey The first thing that came to mind after opening the bag is: I hope the strong scent does not reflect in the taste. And luckily, it doesn’t. Mariage Frères’ Roi Des Earl Grey is more purgent, up to the point that they might have overdone it. Gianfranco’s bergamots in Calabria pair very well with Kerala’s small Darjeeling tea farms. The structure and colour of the tea is very similar to the previous one, the Golden Darjeerling. This is because Postcard Teas blends both flavours in their shop in London giving them the advantage of carefully choosing both ingredients. Since I love a good Darjeerling, it’s impossible to resist. I do still prefer Mariage Frères’ more daring lavender Early Grey. 4 out of 5 Blounts—Great. New Assam Chai This is the first tea from Postcard Teas that I like less the more I drink it. The culprit? The particular blend of spices: way too much green cardamon. Cardamon is a spice with a minty freshness that easily overpowers everything else, as it indeed does here. Also, the Assam is cut in finer pieces than I’d wish making this brew very dark and strong. I recognise the need for a strong tea to counterbalance the just as strong spices here but for me it was just a bit too much. Adding lemon and honey helps but only up to a point. I know you’re supposed to drop a few splashes of milk in it but I’m not British nor Indian so I don’t. 2 out of 5 Blounts—Mediocre. This is a traditional curled green tea from Japan called a “kamairicha” tea: instead of steaming the tea to stop the oxidation, kamairicha is roasted in a dry pan. Contrary to most Japanese teas such as Sencha, the typical bitter taste is gone because of this process. Mr Ogasa’s farm in Gokase is only 14 acres big. I’m not a huge Japanese tea expert but I do like this one. I do find it difficult to properly prepare: at more than the tea oxidises and still comes off as a bit too bitter. It’s more evenly balanced than the Senchas I have tried before, but that does mean it can come across as bland. I enjoy this tea the most when I am not doing anything else besides drinking tea. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Miyazaki Oolong This complimentary little bag of Oolong tea leaves from Mr. Takuya Yokoyama tastes like a sweet Sencha instead of a typical Oolong tea. It’s one of the greenest ones with virtually no astringency, as described by Postcard Teas themselves. This is exceptional tea of which only was madein 2025. This is interesting because Oolong is usually made in China, not Japan. The problem is that this tea is very delicate: if you’re working or watching or playing something, you might gulp this down without blinking and afterwards think “what did I just drink?” I think these delicate teas are an acquired taste and require a mindful, peaceful moment of tea but nothing else. But why should I buy this Oolong when I already have the Guri Green? I usually prefer my Oolongs to be a bit more oxidised. I hope I’m not getting slammed for this. Oolong teas have a huge variety in roasting/oxidation/etc and this one ranges in the “barely Oolong at all” category. What I also learned is that for Oolong teas the first steep is usually a “wash” to get to the more flavourful second steeps. Perhaps I should try that for Miyazaki’s tea. 3 out of 5 Blounts—Good. Jasmine Green As mentioned on the postcard: “a delightful Vietnamese tea made with spring-picked green tea from Mr. Than’s tea co-op in the mountain village of Ban Lien in Lao Cai province”. Delightful is indeed the correct word here: this must be one of the best Jasmine teas I have ever tasted. It’s very delicate, never bitter, and after you’ve had a cup, you want to make another. What else can I say? It accepts but you better wait a few more minutes until it cooled down to at least and not let it steep for too long. Of course, our pantry now doesn’t stock the three Mariage Frères jasmine teas we tried, so I can’t directly compare them. They’re all great and completely different from the supermarket-bought Jasmine crap. 5 out of 5 Blounts—Amazing. Related topics: / tea / By Wouter Groeneveld on 29 June 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Create Your Own Stamps

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 but end up using them yourself!” That reproach is only partially correct, but I digress. Here’s a humble but punchy (ha!) punch machine that allows you to create your own stamps. But to what purpose, I hear you think? Ah, but to what purpose have we been born into this increasingly dangerous world, I hear myself think? Wait, we’re digressing again. Punch thing. Right. We have many of these little tools that look like small versions of classic perforatoring contraptions, only this time they don’t eat up two small round pieces at a paper edge of choice: they punch out a custom form, such as a dog, a cactus, or in this case, a rectangular stamp—sawtoothed edges included. The stamping machine in full effect with an assorted collection of newly minted tiny cardboards. The trick to a “good punch” lies in the careful consideration of the viewport: which side of what thing are you trying to stampify ? What angle of which picture do I want to cut out? I’m making up a lot of English words as I go here which is good as it should intensify the homegrown craftiness of this post. I find rummaging through discarded (cardboard) paper especially rewarding with this stamp punch in hand. It turns wrapping film into a tiny piece of art that I can arrange and stick onto a journal page, instantly upping the enjoyment factor of said page. I tried to capture what I’m trying to get across with these weird words here in a photo. Doesn’t the view of all these little homemade stamps make you happy? Some of them are portions of blown up pasta. Some of them are weird angles of flowers or parts of fruit. Others contain a logo of an Italian milling company. Oh, and a yellow Loco Roco harvested from a Retro Magazine that now is permanently crippled. But that’s alright: it was only the PSP page. In case anyone wonders, Hoogstraten is our local strawberry wholesaler. That laughing kid is playing with rubber ducks my son likes to chew on in bath. The red TONY ones come from a bar of Tony Chocoloney , but the two pieces of blown up dark chocolate I cut out together with the logo (not pictured) are from the best Belgian chocolate brand Jacques . And then there are cut-outs from a local bakery logo, a cereal brand, cookies, asparagus, a tea bag, and other stuff I can’t remember. A lot of fun, right? That fun does end somewhere though: the puncher is only satisfied with thick enough paper, edging to true cardboard. Cheap newspaper from local advertisements won’t make the cut—literally. I found cardboard boxes/wrappings from supermarket purchases work best. I have no idea what to do with all these small pieces of paper but my daughter loves showing them off (and destroying them). Most of these will end up in my journal just to spice up the odd boring page or two. Perhaps I should try to send a few letters with them as well and see what happens. Not every part of everything we do should have a purpose and be measurable. Sometimes it’s also fun to just goof around and try to do things without having a specific goal in mind. And in an hour or two, that means you’re bored and willing to move on, that’s fine as well. I have a colleague who’s impressed by the amount of journals I’ve filled, proclaiming “wow that must have been a lot of work!” Sure, but the emphasis on “work” and the time-based aspect doesn’t apply here. It also heals my soul. It also provides raw material for me to publish. And sometimes, more often than not, it yields nothing at all. Maybe we should store everything into a box and in a few months sort our collection by colour and try to lay them out in a particular pattern to create an interesting cut-out poster effect. I just made that up, but the more I think about it, the cooler this idea sounds. Into a box they go! Related topics: / crafting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 25 June 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

Week of the Eclair

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, even though I’m not particularly fond of them. You see, exactly ten years ago, during this period my friend & I had to prepare and defend our bakery skills in front of a jury. After three years of éclair after éclair after éclair, you get sick at just the sight of them. The Belgian patisserie scene is just like most other Belgian gastronomic affairs: it’s mainly variations of French cuisine—hence the éclair as the pinnacle of an indulgent Sunday afternoon snack. During our training, the cooking of the pudding and the preparation of the choux pastry dough was perfected by repetition, until we could do it with our eyes closed. Most of these Fridays I would return home with a painful tummy. How else do you judge the readiness of the pudding than by tasting too much of it? Hence my growing disgust of the éclair. If you don’t know what a choux pastry is, just think huge profiterole tower—the one where you pour a ton of hot chocolate over. These round doughy balls, risen by employing the steam of the wet pastry, are usually filled with either whipped cream or custard/pudding. An éclair is a longer pudding-filled profiterole. One of our assignments was the creation of such a tower, yet now that I look back at the photos we took of our table displaying the baked goods, somehow the profiteroles disappeared? Perhaps in the jury’s belly? I can’t remember. Our bread and pastry baked goods table, presented for the jury as part of our degree as professional bakers. What I can remember is that we didn’t like the traditional Flemish/Belgian take on most of these pastries. My friend and I visited Paris to do a marathon bakery run and the result was no ordinary pudding/custard. Instead, we infused the boiling milk with a good dose of chai tea. Most other pastries got the “twist treatment” as well. For example, the frangipane dough we were taught is awfully dry. We Belgians are used to that kind of filling but I didn’t like it. I found recipes that combine half frangipane and half pudding/custard to create a smoother texture (the little tartlets on the left part of the picture with pear slices in them). The result? Our jury was displeased: the filling was “too wet”. Sure, if you compare it to the junk typical Belgian bakeries sell you, then yes. Needless to say, the training encouraged you to stay in line and not experiment too much. The black gooey swirls are supposed to be what we call brioches made with buttery yeasted dough. That’s a bit of a deception though: a French brioche is something else entirely , and most swirls you’ll encounter in a French bakery are made with laminated dough instead. Historically speaking, both brioches should share the same yeasted basis, but ours is much less enriched with butter/eggs. Normally, we would spread out the dough, slather it with more pudding and raisins, roll them up and proceed to bake after a quick second rise. We couldn’t stand even more pudding so we turned to David Lebovitz’ chocolate babka whilst keeping the form of a Flemish brioche . Want more pudding? You can’t handle the pudding! I know I can’t. The round sugar powdered things on the far left are boule de Berlins or Berliners. They are traditionally made by deep frying like a doughnut but we made them from sandwich dough instead to keep them light (and digestible). The baked and cooled round shapes are then cut in half, after which… one proceeds by filling them with a thick layer of pudding with the help of a piping bag. No jam-filled Berliner to be found here: pudding pudding pudding. I think I threw up once after getting home from one of the many pudding-filled lessons. As you can see, the end exam consists of a very evenly distributed assignment of 90% pastry and 10% bread. We did make some what we call pistolets , a typical Belgian round bread roll with a crispy crust (due to plenty of steam injected during baking) and soft inside. These are heavily yeasted rolls. I had to sneak in some kind of sourdough somewhere so the salt-and-rosemary sprinkled focaccia was, to me, the tastiest thing we produced. Of course, the jury disagreed. We got our diplomas anyway but I wouldn’t dare to dream of opening a dreadfully boring average Belgian bakery where the yeast, questionable bright yellow looking margarines called “superior butter”, and pudding flows and flows. It turns out that Week of the Eclair is organised by Puratos, a big industrial supplier raw bakery materials. I wonder if all bakery participants are Puratos clients as well? I know our local bakery, where I got the sticker from, is, as I regularly spot the Puratos truck restocking them. The initiative is a Belgian one—I doubt it that French people really need such a week to promote the éclair. Just walk into a random bakery in downtown Paris and you’ll be mesmerised by the unique shapes, forms, colours, and tastes of their éclair offer. Meanwhile, here in Belgium, most bakers offer just one: the classic chocolate top-coated one with vanilla pudding filling. There goes my stomach again… Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off to get my éclair fix. Related topics: / patisserie / By Wouter Groeneveld on 22 June 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

The Panini Sticker World Cup Fever Strikes Again

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 Cup sticker book will be Panini’s last FIFA-related book you can try to fill. And perhaps that is a good thing? Local newspaper Het Nieuwsblad estimated that in order to complete your sticker book, statistically speaking you’ll need to buy around stickers—totalling to the hefty sum of . I never realised that filling your sticker book could be that expensive! That’s even more expensive than your average Magic: the Gathering modern deck— and that hobby can be expensive . Considering most feverish collectors are youngsters in primary school, it might even be called outrageous. For the previous World Cup, this would be roughly . Is has never been as expensive as now. Why? Panini cites The Usual Suspects: rising manufacturing and shipping costs. I don’t entirely buy that. My own little investigation, comparing previous Panini stickers I still had lying around, yield another nasty surprise: not only has the cost gone up, but the quality has gone down as well. My Aladdin Panini stickers I collected in the nineties had a nice gloss finishing that resists scratches. That finishing is gone now, but the biggest change is the sticker size. A quick dimension comparison (measured in centimetres): In 30 years, Panini stickers have shrunk in size by almost . The reasoning behind this is due to the massive team size of the World Cup, having so many stickers would otherwise cause the sticker book to weigh as much as a heavy textbook. So this “shrinkflation” effect is disguised as a way to protect our children’s backs. Clever. My notebook, scattered with World Cup 2026 stickers. Left: local ads from Euro 2020. Top right: Aladdin stickers with yellow border for comparison; a full centimetre taller. Another aspect of the nineties stickers I miss is the variability of them. In my Aladdin album, I sometimes could paste in just half of an image. A scenery from the animated movie, such as the Genie in a parade swirling around with fire-lit batons as depicted in the sticker of the photo above, would be split into two stickers, making it extra satisfying to “complete” just that one scene instead of the entire book (which I never bothered to do or didn’t manage to, I can’t remember how I felt about it). In addition, some of the stickers depicted just the characters in a translucent cut-out shape. I found these stickers to be more fun and desirable to paste in compared to the standard shaped ones that came with a yellow border. Of course, comparing a whimsical Disney animated film to a national football team where you just have to paste in every team member according to their position on the field diminishes the creative options Panini has to play around with the setting. To me, the FIFA stickers have always been one of the more boring sets. Perhaps the contract is not a big loss, although financially speaking, given the typical World Cup craze, I bet it is. According to another local news article , Panini’s expected turnover for this World Cup would be in the billions in euro. Yet this FIFA deal loss is one of the many losses: no more UEFA Champions League stickers, no more European Championship, and now also no more World Cup. In USA, they also lost the rights to print NBA and NFL stickers. There are rumours of yet another complete Panini sellout because of all this. The article also mentions the interesting history of the Italian company: in the nineties it was even briefly sold to comic giant Marvel Entertainment! Did you know there are Sonic sticker collections ? Super Mario Ones? Hot Wheels? L.O.L. Surprises? Harry Potter, Jurassic Parc, Toy Story 5, Stitch, Tour De France, Darts, Frozen, Spider Man, … You name it, they have it. Did you also know the second hand market is cutthroat when it comes to unopened vintage card packs? As I wrote before , this really does feel like unopened Magic: the Gathering booster boxes… If you want to complete your collection but can’t because of limited local trading opportunities, there’s also the option to buy singles directly from Panini. They know fans want a complete sticker album, so expect to drop more for specific requests. The best strategy? Wait until the World Cup fever passes and then buy everything. The interviewee from Het Nieuwsblad managed to procure all FIFA Euro 2024 stickers for just . Good luck with the sticker hunt. Don’t forget to play fair: never trade two-for-one! Related topics: / collecting / By Wouter Groeneveld on 18 June 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 months ago

My Enjoyment From Engagement With Media Deepens As I Grow Older

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 work as a remedy for an acute case of midlife crisis or nostalgic depression. The problem with my nostalgia for games from yesteryear is that it can sometimes be asphyxiating up to the point that I think I won’t enjoy anything else. Even worse, if I do decide to replay said game, because of the shift in temporal context, I can’t recreate the same moment and will feel disappointed. You shouldn’t try to “restore” that nostalgic moment: instead, you should “reflect” on it and enjoy your happy moments. Engagement with new material might result in more disappointments precisely because of that obsession with past media. Yet I think the present has kept one huge joker close to its chest: the older you get, the deeper your engagement with media. Or at least that is my personal experience. Time becomes much more valuable thanks to other obligations. The more games you play, the more you know what you like and what you don’t, and the better you can fillet its gameplay mechanics and storytelling. The more I write about games, the more I look into its background and creation process. For me, writing a few thoughts after I’m done with it is an extension of the gameplay, prolonging my engagement (and thus fun) with that game. When I was younger, I just played whatever I was gifted or could afford. I cared less and could stomach endless grinding because it felt like I had endless amounts of time on my hands anyway. I didn’t explicitly add context by looking into its development process. I didn’t read reviews or game experience reports of others besides the “official” ones from PC Gameplay et al. In short, I don’t think I appreciated media as a piece of art like I do now . I didn’t yet nurture that skill. Yet you could argue that with growing older comes being more critical which could easily hamper the enjoyment, but I say that having well-placed critique means being able to contextualise precisely because of that deeper engagement. Also, playing mediocre games doesn’t have to mean you’re not enjoying yourself. In Daniel J. Levitin’s Successful Aging book, a case for complex cognitive activities is made as a cure for the negative aspects of ageing. I think that happens almost naturally provided you keep on learning and exploring new things (such as games?). In Levitin’s own words (my translation from the Dutch version I read): One of the most protective things you can do against the negative consequences of ageing is learning a craft when you are young and keep on practising it. The second best thing you can do is learning something new when you are older. In the case of engagement with media, playing a new game, exploring a new genre, looking up the history of one of your favourite games, or investigating other ways to play older games such as fiddling with randomizers could qualify as “learning something new”. This is also a wake-up call for the hopeless nostalgic who keeps on replaying the same old games but finds less and less satisfaction at the credits screen. As I write and think about nostalgia and video games, my pattern matching brain yields new connections and ideas. That’s the essence of Brain Baking ! But that’s also the essence of what I’m trying to say here: you will more deeply engage and enjoy things if you fully dive into it and you can only do that if you’ve been diving for years and years. To me, that message is reassuring. It means it’s okay to get older. I will still enjoy things. No, I will enjoy things even more —I will just not be able to enjoy as much. And that’s probably also a good thing. It reminds me that my grandfather who still enjoyed Lego and the odd video game when he was still with us in the early nineties probably enjoyed it more than the little kid he was playing with (that would be me). Does my taste for media change? Of course, but not just my preference, also my ability to complete them. I have no idea how I managed to finish Hollow Knight and I’m scared to start Silksong even though I want to: my reflexes might not be what they used to be and my patience to backtrack to retrieve my dead body might have diminished. I’ve been wanting to start a Dragon Quest game for so long now, but the grinding is off-putting given my limited ability to only play a good hour a day. The fact that a game can be viewed as a piece of art is for me a relatively recent development. In narrative-heavy games such as Morrowind , I never really took the time to flip through the various books that add lore to the game world. Now I do. I never really gave the environment my playable character lives in a thorough look. Now I do. That reminds me, I should put Morrowind back on the backlog—it somehow failed to keep my attention back in the day. It’s also easier to place these games in their historical context. I play old games for old video game systems, new games for old video game systems, and new games for new video game systems. As my older self, I can trace their influence, compare their different aspects, and form an opinion based on that. My younger self just wanted to get lost in the virtual game world to not have to cope with the real world. Perhaps, in a way, I might even like getting older. Related topics: / nostalgia / By Wouter Groeneveld on 15 June 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

Mechanical Buttons, Not Touchscreens (a Design Mistake)

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 and interior design . Especially in cars, the last two iterations of the new designs aggressively pushed the implementation of touchscreens. Many car brands such as Tesla or Cupra from SEAT seem to go all-in and simply jam an iPad-like into the cockpit and call it a day. The ugly screen that protrudes in a weird way from the dashboard not only looks out of place (that’s a polite way of saying bad) but also poses a treat to the safety of the driver and others as you take your eyes off the road to try and “press” something instead of controlling the AC with the help of haptic feedback. I leased a second generation Peugeot 308 in 2016 that came with a “brand new touchscreen system interface” controlling most of the car’s features such as the airconditioning. I hated it: it was slow (a “press” took a second to react) and devoid of feedback (there wasn’t anything to “feel”). A button has a certain springiness—that’s why people who work with computers all day love mechanical keyboards. Feedback. Pressing a virtual button on a touchscreen? No feedback. Besides the terrible software that usually controls the screen, introducing latency when speed is important, the replacement of a true button by a virtual one introduces another problem. While the financial department will hail the adoption rate of cheap touchscreens as a major achievement, I hope the UI/UX department is a bit more reserved. Yet in practice, since “anything is possible” on a blank screen, I’m sure their enthusiasm to use the latest and greatest combined with a pressing deadline yields a lesser product. The terrible interfaces are easy to spot and everywhere. I don’t know why we as a consumer stomach them. Hopefully, our ten year old Volvo manages to keep it together for another ten years. We bought the second hand end-of-lease car in 2020. To avoid analysis paralysis when faced with the many car manufacturing choices, I just went with the one I once drove as a company car that (1) felt very comfortably to sit in and (2) radiated peace in the cockpit. Subjectiveness of both facts aside, the centre console—installed slightly diagonally towards the driver—features… mechanical buttons. The cockpit of our 2016 Volvo. The centre console features... buttons? There are four big knobs that are very satisfying to turn with clear feedback: the volume and menu controls on top and AC controls on the bottom. Between the knobs, there are a few more buttons to navigate the interface and a classic numeric keyboard reminiscent of nineties landline phones. The buttons are sturdy and I can press them whilst keeping my eyes on the road if I need to. Not that I often need to: the most-used buttons are the big knobs to turn up/down the volume and AC. The volume is also adjustable with buttons installed on the steering wheel itself. A friend recently remarked “oh wow that’s a small screen!”. Yes it is, it’s a car from 2016, remember? But the screen is non-invasive: it doesn’t get in my way. It’s fully integrated, not touchscreen, and displays the map just fine when I need a GPS. Unfortunately, the second generation V60 got rid of most of the buttons in favour of… a touchscreen. Nicolas is right: we need something better than touchscreens in cars . The problem isn’t limited to cars. Our washing machine broke down last month, refusing to do anything at all. After two repair jobs, it was apparently time to be replaced. Again, not wanting to sink in hours and hours of time researching potential replacement candidates, we just went with the same AEG brand. Guess what: the boring white front panel with mechanical buttons has been replaced by a sleek black design—touchscreen, of course. The lack of feedback is not the biggest problem. As a short-sighted person, I usually “feel” the buttons and know by heart where to push to just get on with it. Turning the washing machine on was one of those things. I can no longer do that as the front panel feels the same regardless of where you put your finger. Sure, remembering the exact position works, but it doesn’t fix an accidental wrong press. Luckily, the giant knob that selects the washing program is still there. That’s of course part of the core branding/design of any washing machine. We bloggers love to shout Build Websites That Last but perhaps we should generalise instead: Build Stuff That Lasts . But why should the automotive industry do something like that when they’re motivated by company leases to renew their models roughly every four years? Especially in Belgium, more than half of the cars on the road are company leases. I also expected the washing machine to last 20 years. It stranded at 14 including two repairs. I’ve read reports claiming the average front-loader lasts between 7 and 8 years (others say 10 to 12) so I guess we were lucky. At least they’re not shoving AI crap in our cars and washers. Related topics: / cars / design mistake / By Wouter Groeneveld on 10 June 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book

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 years later, I claimed that Good Blogging Habits Yield a Book Each Year of more than words. That means compiling a hefty tome to compress all these years of productive blogging into a single physical volume might be a bit more challenging than I initially anticipated. Yet not impossible. So the last months, I’ve kept myself busy by doing just that: turning this blog into a book! The book flipped open on the blog post 'Three Little GameCube Mods' from 05 December 2021. This was a special experiment with a high probability of failure as I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. What should a Brain Baking book look like compared to browsing this website? How should it feel to flip through the pages? Will I be able to squeeze everything in there (nope)? Do I want to publish this publicly or just generate a , send it to the presses just for myself and call it a day? And if so, which service to use, as the past ones I’ve relied on all showed their shortcomings? Luckily, it turned out all right. I call it Brain Baking DX: Blog Archives 2016 - 2026 and it is available at Amazon under ISBN-13 number 979-8197112897 . My first attempt yielded more than 500 pages and I couldn’t find a publishing service that was eager to print something like that for less than . At Amazon, the book costs… . And it’s globally available, should you be crazy enough to want a copy. Be warned, though: the book is mostly unedited , I created this mainly for myself. I sent out a few copies to friends but have no intention of setting up a marketing campaign let alone making money off of it. I intentionally set the price low and receive for every sale. Please do not buy this just to support me. So why a book? As mentioned before, I want my writing to be a bit more permanent than the fleeting medium called the internet. What happens when my VPS is blown up, my backups burned away, and my motivation to restore all this along with it? In Belgium every author of “proper” books (this is debatable nowadays… Is Brain Baking DX a proper book?) is legally obliged to deposit two copies to the Royal Library in Brussels, where the books disappear into the winding depths of the archive deep below the capital. Plus, I like books. I like flipping through this one and rediscovering old writings: it feels very different than clicking through the online archive. Also, since I like to add photos in my blog posts to help shape the atmosphere, preserving these mostly personal photos in the book makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside when I flip through the book and look at them. Some of these photos are snapshots of my life as a kid, my old and new desktop setup, destinations I once biked to, etc. It’s a nice memento to have these included. Why Brain Baking DX ? What’s up with that? Most readers of this blog know that I grew up with a Game Boy and became a big retro gaming nut(case) because of it. The black DX cartridge editions transformed their original Game Boy release into the wonderful world of colours: black carts work with the original Game Boy and the then new Game Boy Color. DX was simply the “DeluXe” treatment to your beloved Link’s Awakening or Tetris . Funny, as Brain Baking DX might be called anything but deluxe: financial constraints prevent me from publishing this book in full colour mode and space constraints prevent me from simply dumping everything that I’ve ever written in here. Perhaps both are for the better. Still, in a way, a printed edition of ten years worth of Brain Baking blog posts can certainly be called deluxe. My method for compiling the book wasn’t as simple as throwing every Markdown article source file at Pandoc to compile a single . I didn’t want to preserve everything I post here: it had to be a deliberate, curated selection. Things I didn’t want in there include: After proceeding to make a first selection, I categorised these into major themes that became the parts of the book: parenting, journaling & writing, work, the web, technology, retro, video and board games, life & philosophy, food & cooking, and living in Belgium. Then I employed my usual Markdown/Pandoc/TeX magic and inspected the results. The front cover of Brain Baking DX. 600+ pages. Ouch. Now what? Maybe it is time to think about the layout: how do I want to present all this text? Clearly, a typical book layout won’t do. I turned down the font size, opted for a two-column layout, selected a more wide book format ( ) and squeezed everything I could out of those margins. As a last resort, I also allowed chapters to start on any page (as opposed to the right page only which introduces a lot of blank pages). I admit I might have overdone it a bit as the top margin is very thin, but all these changes did reduce the page size to a more manageable 470. After ordering a few copies for myself to inspect the result, I was afraid that the text would not be very readable, or the margins where the book would be glued would be too narrow. Fortunately, the end result is surprisingly pleasant to read. The cream paper Amazon provides is a nice match although the paper feels a bit too thin for my taste. Yet a hefty tome like this for is ridiculously cheap so I can’t complain. The fact that the book is printed in black & white does not work against the many photos and screenshots included. Additionally, because it’s Amazon, it allows the book to be distributed and printed virtually anywhere. My copies were printed in Brétigny-sur-Orge in France. Better than China! When you are selecting blog posts to be included into the book, you’ll notice recurring themes you wrote about. For example, I have wasted too many words on physical video game collecting. Instead of just pasting these chapters next to each other, I wanted them to “flow” better in the book so I did rewrite portions to better match the medium. Also, in many occasions, a new chapter (thus blog post) starts with a reference to the previous one. On the site, this is just a link, but on paper, you don’t want to print “in this article”. Speaking of links, a blog or website is an interconnected medium: how to approach this on paper? I ended up putting all LaTeX links in the margin footer on the same page but did a diagonal sweep to remove the excessive ones. On the site, a long link is just hidden behind a click, but on paper, an link to a long URL is not only ugly but will never be typed over or “used” in that way. Also, internal Brain Baking links usually start with —in the end, I decided to keep it that way as prepending everywhere would mean even more text wasted. I did make a note of this in the newly written introduction. Besides the “in this post” link adaptations (don’t do this—it’s also bad for accessibility in your online blog!), I noticed I also had to do something about the images. Because of the two-column layout, the wide figures such as graphs will be squeezed into a barely readable square. You can fix this by manually adding a to the ones you want to be displayed as a full-page spread ( ). But I made another mistake: in many posts, I write something and then add an image to emphasise the statement, ending in a semicolon to point to the image. Yet in a book, you never know precisely where that image will be included! In my future writings, I’ll take these things into account to more easily compile Brain Baking DX II in ten years. This was a lovely month project that rewarded me with a physical artefact of an ever-evolving digital medium, solidifying words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that perhaps might even envy The Internet Archive. As a hopeless sentimental person, flipping through the book, looking at the figures and reading the text makes me happy. And also embarrassed as there are plenty of contextual and grammatical mistakes in solidified as well. I’m looking forward to revisiting the project in ten years! If you want to attempt something like this for yourself and don’t know how to approach this technically, drop me a line and I’ll be more than glad to help you out. Related topics: / archiving / By Wouter Groeneveld on 5 June 2026.  Reply via email . Research and topics regarding creativity & bread baking: I have other published books that delve into this. Monthly link sharing posts and other posts that are mainly lists or links. Technical posts on programming, coding, Hugo tips, etc. Design mistake posts. Overly negative posts. Anything that has the word “AI” in it (except my more elaborate commentary). Too short posts to be worthwhile printing. Too photo/screenshot intensive posts to be worthwhile printing.

Books Writing

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

Favourites of May 2026

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 daddy day care as my wife isn’t as lucky as me when it comes to paid leave. Hopefully I’ll emerge beaten up but victorious. Previous month: April 2026 . I somehow managed to keep up the pace from last month and finished four (mostly small) games: Forbidden Solitaire is a candidate for my GOTY. Yes, it’s that good. Related topics: / metapost / By Wouter Groeneveld on 2 June 2026.  Reply via email . Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping which is the second episode of the Duck Detective’s deducktions-based adventure game. It’s nice but only two hours long. Forbidden Solitaire , without a doubt the best and most unique card game with horror vibes I’ve ever played. Its atmosphere is inspired by nineties FMV games. Check out the launch trailer and tell me you don’t want to rush out and buy it: Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is inspired by GBA-era top-down adventures. Its unique mechanics, pixel art, and soundtrack are superb, but the platforming near the end was a bit too much for me. Strange Horticulture is a cosy puzzler/visual novel where you have to figure out which client wants which plant. Are we past the point of the The Last Human-Written (academic) Paper ? Scientists Liu et al. compile a hefty report on what they call agent-native research artefacts. The results are… worrying? Promising? Popcar reviewed every single UFO 50 game . I don’t agree with many ratings but they’re well-explained. Noah Clements discusses how he hacked his bycicle monitor . The “welcome to hell developer” message is hilarious! James Sweeting thinks there should be a better term for game remakes and remasters: some specific types could be called videogame remakes instead. PekoeBlaze sees a difference in private versus public creativity . Do you make something different if you don’t have an audience? Seth Godin reminds us that nostalgia used to be deadly : For hundreds of years, nostalgia was seen as a serious disease, with doctors across Europe scrambling for a cure. Hundreds of thousands of people died from it . I enjoyed Pablo Meier’s review of Tunic . Every blog post by Pablo is accompanied by a song (“The song for this post is…”) which is a whimsical way to start an article. What’s a metroidbrania ? Even as a metroidvania lover, I hadn’t come across that term before. GiovanH explains the differences and intersection points . Is Animal Well a metroidbrania? Diederick de Vries played around with a retro printer and explained how you can use a “Retro Printer” daughterboard on top of a Raspberry Pi to connect an old electronics port to a modern printer. Inspired by my workspaces post, Diederick also shared his past and present computing workspaces . Nicole Express unboxes a unique high-tech computer . You’d be surprised. I enjoyed the many photos present in this one emphasiszing the high-tech part. Slightly related: Stephen Sherratt restored his childhood family computer . I’m a sucker for these kinds of articles. Some more articles to rattle the cage: just fucking use Go . Fuck no: Go is a terrible programming language . Ty Porter explains how he built a Game Boy Game in 2021 . Very educational! Blain Smith reflects on 30 years of programming at 44 years old . Profit pursuing enterprises indeed kill the joy of programming. Matthijs van Boxsel maintains a “digital encyclopedia of foolishness” where in 2021 he wrote about the Homo Viator (in Dutch). Miss Booleana writes about the struggles of motherhood (in German). Her experiences with parenting felt very much like ours. Matthias Wiesmann shared his thoughts on the video game Loop Hero . I’ve had my eye on that one for a long while; perhaps it’s finally time to try it out. Fabian Sanglard expresses why he likes the Magic: The Gathering 40 card format more than the usual 60. Over at ResetERA, Toma played 120 roguelikes so that we don’t have to . Their report is very extensive, a must read if you’re into the genre. Jeff Kaufman again urges us to donate 80% of our income and he has the numbers to prove it works for his family. I came across david.reviews , another indie site David maintains where he collects his thoughts on the media he consumes. After ten years of tinkering, Steve McCrea managed the impossible: to recreate Ultima Underworld in the Unity engine. It’s freely available at itch.io and looks very impressive compared to the original. Keep It In Your Pants! What? Apparently, Nintendo thought it was a good idea to create a few bold commercials for their Game Boy—including cuffing a woman to the bed as a misplaced joke to claim the GB is “seriously distracting”. The roguelike Game Boy game Roguecraft got a physical release! Of course I’m too late and everything is sold out. https://www.jwt.io/ is a JWT token debugger that shows how a token is compiled. Retro Ready is a nice Dutch blog that reviews retro-inspired handhelds (think Anbernic, GameMT). It seemed that Atari acquired the rights to the first five Wizardry titles . I still hope they’ll sometime, somewhere do something useful with Wiz 7 & 8. They deserve a proper reimagining/remake/whatever-you-call-it. Geneat is a website that helps you dig into the genealogy of your family. https://cooklang.org/ is a… recipe markup language? Nerds!

Gaming Culture

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

Lawyer (Should Have Been a Marine Biologist)

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 he visits the graves of various famous people and reflects on his own life choices. There was a specific gravestone that caught my eye. The following words are engraved onto it: Lawyer. Should Have Been a Marine Biologist. 1958 - 2015. Lawyer. Should Have Been a Marine Biologist. The short take doesn’t show the entire engraving. Tijs remarks that the engravings in the cemetery are much sharper, funnier, and wittier than a typical cemetary in Belgian that would just state dates and perhaps at most something like “beloved family”. He then moves on to go do other tattooy stuff. Weeks after watching the episode, I still had Should Have Been a Marine Biologist lingering inside my mind, like an unwelcome visitor that I repeatedly fail to show out. Why is this striking example of an enigmatic epitaph so important for me? The admittance of making a wrong career choice written forever on your gravestone is not just funny but can also be interpreted as a friendly warning to do with your life what you want to do instead of what others want you to do. Thanks to a The London Dead blog post on the Highgate East Cemetery (what an amazing blog, by the way), I learned that this specific grave belongs to Sally Hunter. Film director Gurinder Chadha, one of her best friends, explains the origin behind the quip: Sally was one of my best friends, she fell into Law at university but never wanted to be a lawyer. Her big passion was snorkelling, diving and the sea. she would escape to Egypt, or anywhere she could snorkel, at a drop of a hat. She was a very well read, witty, passionate person who made the wrong choice in career life. We miss her terribly. The wrong career choice in life. I guess she must have failed Nietzsche’s Will To Live experiment: would you want to endlessly repeat the live you’re living now or want to make some much-needed changes the next time you’re living it? I wonder if Sally was the one who chose the epitaph and wrote it on her will. Probably not. What would your own epitaph say? Mine’s quite easy: Dr. Wouter Groeneveld. Brain Baker. And of course something along the lines of “loving husband & father of …”. Hopefully, as I’m no longer able to make that decision. Hopefully, by then, I am still loved. Who knows what your relatives will make of it. One thing is for sure: you won’t be the one who’ll get to see it. Unless you plan on returning as a ghost, of course. Most gravestones in the area don’t contain any special epitaph at all: the only text on it is the name, the data of birth and death, and optional close relatives such as significant other and/or children. Inspired by the London Dead blog, I plan on compiling a Hasselt Dead post in the future to highlight the exceptions. The last funerals I attended did not involve any gravestones at all: more and more, people opt for cremation instead, significantly reducing the available size on the plaque—if any. In our city, there are strict rules concerning the placement of monuments/urns/plaques that besides the obvious dimension rules also dictate the colour and way the letters are to be placed. Nothing on text beyond names and dates though. Name plaques for cremations are kept for 20 years and then removed. The only thing I could find local police regulation rule number 120 (my translation): In cemeteries, the appliance of any posters, advertisements, inscriptions, and objects not provided for in the Law on Cemeteries and Funeral Services is prohibited. In cemeteries, inscriptions and epitaphs may not be of a nature to disturb propriety, order, and the respect due to the deceased. So no fuck or God is a DJ , I guess? To be continued after I visited all the 21 local cemetaries 1 ! If you can’t wait, there’s findagrave.com that claims our local village’s cemetary contains 112 memorials , although most grave photos are missing.  ↩︎ By Wouter Groeneveld on 30 May 2026.  Reply via email . If you can’t wait, there’s findagrave.com that claims our local village’s cemetary contains 112 memorials , although most grave photos are missing.  ↩︎

Career Culture Television

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

The Decline Of The Family Computer

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? It’s certainly not Nintendo’s Famicom even though that indeed correctly abbreviates the words. No, the computer wasn’t a console you’d hook onto your television set: it was a separate piece of furniture placed somewhere centrally in the house for all family members to access. More importantly, it was the only computer in the house. That thought bears repeating: the only computational machine with a central processing unit, dedicated memory, expansion slots, and a (very) heavy monitor in the house. How many computers do you have lying around in yours now? We have 2 personal laptops, 1 old but still functioning one, 2 work laptops not owned by us, and 3 retro PCs: that’s eight in total—but none of those could be called a family computer. I don’t want my wife to touch my MacBook: she has her own where she can make a mess on. Joey doesn’t share foo—ahem, laptops. In the early nineties, my dad bought our first family computer: a super modern 80486 with 40 Mhz that back then cost (more than twice the amount of what my father in law paid for his in 1994 ). Taking inflation into account, that’s more than . Needless to say, it was a huge investment and every little bit of usage was squeezed out of it in the following years. I even remember my dad driving to Brussels to fetch it, presumably because in our neighbourhood there was no-one making a similar offer? That 486 became the family computer: it was used by everyone. My eldest sister and I were small kids and my youngest sister was still a toddler so more than playing edutainment DOS games initially didn’t happen. When the Pentium arrived and the Voodoo 3Dfx cards came along, my dad couldn’t resist upgrading. He even got into overclocking (and blew up one of our graphics cards along the way). I started showing even more interest in that mesmerising beige machine. When I moved on to high school and got my Christian confirmation, my parents bought me my very own computer. Finally I could mess around without fearing the loss of important bookkeeping files and other things I wasn’t allowed to touch on the family computer downstairs. That must have been in 1997 or 1998: the beginning of the end of the family computer. Why ask to play on the family computer when I have my own? I still did because my dad’s PC was more powerful and he liked to keep it upgraded. I initially couldn’t play early 3D platformers (e.g. PlayStation ports like Pandemonium!) because a Voodoo card was expensive and we only had one. As years flew by during that period of extremely rapid hardware invention, that difference disappeared. The family computer became my dad’s computer. My sisters got their own desktop PCs. In other words, computing individualism became affordable. The family PC in the kitchen or living room moved out to the private study. In In Defense of the Family Computer , Niklas Barning predicts that with prices of RAM and general hardware going up again, the family computer might return. He writes: Back in the day, a computer was something so special and expensive that you only had one, and it was set up in a way that everyone had access to it. Dropping easily qualifies as “special and expensive”. But buying a new MacBook with 344686 TB RAM and 3482354 M4 CPUs only costs you nowadays. When turning our attention to cars, you can see the same evolution: the single family car got turned into mom’s car and dad’s car (or even the son/daughter’s car) appeared on the driveway as well. Another victory for capitalism and individualism—I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out their relationship. Or how about the single family TV that gradually leaked to children’s (and parent’s) bedrooms and now is so pervasive that small children like ours know that you can watch anything on a phone? I have mixed feelings about the history of the family computer. It is thanks to that machine that I now am what I am, but it is also thanks to its decline that I retreated more often than not to my room to game, program, or do other naughty computery stuff. The social aspect that sparked conversation died along with it. Or at least moved to ICQ and then MSN . By Wouter Groeneveld on 26 May 2026.  Reply via email .

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

Bread Baking In Video Games

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 virtual gaming worlds came to fruition when I played Bug Fables in 2021. As I wrote in the review: As a professional baker myself, I especially adored the baking honeybee in the Golden Outpost, that exclusively sells flour, which you can use to bake tarts, doughnuts, croissants, glazed honey treats, cupcakes, and more. Discovering new recipes was a great distraction—albeit an expensive one, if an expensive ingredient was turned into a mistake, healing one measly HP and TP (“team points”, or mana, just like in Paper Mario). The local bakery in Bug Fables, trying out new recipes. Bug Fables is a love letter to Paper Mario where the lovely toad Zess T. cooks up jummy stuff for Mario to recover heart and flower points—but Zess T. doesn’t specialise in (bread) baking: she’s a chef that whips up as much spaghetti as cupcakes. You can have Zess combine cake mix with inky sauce to bake a choco cake. Eathing the cake will replenish 5 HP and 15 FP, but alas there are no bread-like recipes present in the game. How about a recipe in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ? The closest thing I can think of is throwing a carrot into the fire that yields a carrot cake . Bug Fables still wins, where the baker—with proper baker’s hat—can be seen popping dough into the oven using a pizza peel. In Breath of the Wild , the cooking/baking process is the same: throw stuff into the cauldron, do a happy dance, and poof. How about farm simulation games like Stardew Valley and its inspiration Harvest Moon ? In the former you can cook (indeed, not “bake”) a crusty baguette in the kitchen using wheat flour. There are a lot of recipes that require wheat flour such as pizza, muffins, and pies. In many iterations of the latter, such as the GBA’s Friends of a Mineral Town , you can buy bread in the store and use it as an ingredient to whip up raisin or curry bread, jam buns, or even a cheese fondue . Weirdly enough, you can buy flour that’s required for baking an apple pie, noodles, and (pan)cakes but you can’t bake bread with it. Many RPG Codex members dug up computer role playing games where you can bake bread . The list includes the Ultima games (VII, Online 1 , …), EverQuest , Arx Fatalis , The Elder Scrolls games ( Skyrim ), … In Morrowind , you can grind store-bought bread in a mortar and pestle to turn it into a restore health potion, but there exist survival mods such as Morrowind Crafting that introduce cooking. Still no dedicated bread oven, though. The Ultima VII baker: I am the baker here in Britain and I make the sweetest bread thou has ever tasted. In 2018, James Davenport wrote about the rise of video game bread for PC Gamer, focusing on the early presence of bread in games. But the presence of bread doesn’t automatically mean the crusty goodness can be baked yourself. The article does mention World of Warcraft —the MMORPG as another subgenre of games where crafting and thus cooking is a big part of the meta game. Still no dedicated bread oven, though. In Level 5’s Fantasy Life you can become a cook who masters their skill using three mini-games inside the kitchen: the frying pan, the cutting board, and the oven. Baking is done in front of the oven, not the pan, effectively splitting how ingredients are converted into an edible end product. Except that there’s nothing to consume as it’s not that kind of game. Also, I can’t seem to find bread-specific cooking recipes from the game : only the classic apple pie that requires Faraway Wheat. I’m waiting to play the game until I eventually buy a Switch 2 so I’ll report back when I know more. Some Rune Factory games seem to approach bread baking the same way. Maybe complex roguelike games offer a more realistic way to produce bread? According to the Dwarf Fortress wiki you can bake bread: “You can use flour or sugar milled from plants to either bake bread or make candy”. The Dwarven Cuisine mod adds more variations that even require making dough that then can be turned into bread by baking it. This is the only example I could find of a video game that introduces a “kneading” step before baking! Different types of Dwarven bread to be baked in the Dwarf Fortress mod A surprising entry popped up during my research: The Sims . In the Get To Work expansion of the fourth instalment, you can have your sims engage in some serious cookery/bakery activities . It’s not just bread but also bread sticks, bagels, whole wheat loaves, potato bread, and even a sourdough loaf! As a huge fan of sourdough, I guess The Sims 4 wins this one. And then there’s Bakery Simulator that takes virtual bread baking to a whole new level. Even the reviews say mixed . Get it, mixed? As in mixing dough? No? OK then. Other dedicated cooking simulation games include Lemon Cake , a game I discovered thanks to Kat Thompson’s article on virtual armchair baking for Bon Appétit that looks like a cosy variant of the frantic multiplayer Overcooked! series. EuroGamer’s YouTube video “5 Brilliant Games About Bread (that you probably never even knew existed)” showcases how the physics-based game on bread called I Am Bread redefines bread slice stickiness. It might not enable you to bake a lovely loaf of bread, but a game where you are the slice and have to slather yourself with savoury spreads deserves a special mention: Let me know if I missed a game that features getting your hands dirty with dough and oven. I have to run; writing this post made me hungry. I especially enjoyed Lauren and Lloyd Sommerer’s 2001 essay entitled I Want To Bake Bread on Ultima Online .  ↩︎ Related topics: / bread baking / video games / By Wouter Groeneveld on 22 May 2026.  Reply via email . I especially enjoyed Lauren and Lloyd Sommerer’s 2001 essay entitled I Want To Bake Bread on Ultima Online .  ↩︎

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Brain Baking 2 months ago

The Death of the Brick & Mortar Toy Store

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 about this more often. Yes, it’s annoying for myself, but no, it’s not a big deal: physical editions of rarer Nintendo Switch games or retro video games aren’t available locally anyway. But what about buying the kids a simple box of LEGO? Even that’s not possible anymore. And to me, that’s very sad. When my wife was little, her parents would take her out to the centre on Christmas eve where she could choose a little present for herself. None of the toy shops she used to frequent with her folks back in the day are still in business. None of them. So we can’t offer the same thing to our kids: we’d have to drive further—to a bigger supermarket with a toy region, or to a chain store. And to me, that’s very sad. The evolution of types of stores in our local city centre from small, independent, and varied to big names and nothing but shoes, boutique clothing, or counterfeit made-in-China watches is a curious phenomena. That got me thinking: In which stores was I a (regular) customer, what kind of toy did I buy there, and which of these businesses are still selling stuff today? The only photo I could find of a Christiaensen store (in Brussels) by Jeugdsentiment. The local Game Mania store in May 2009, a year before it closed down. That Chinese restaurant? It got replaced by an Indian one before being replaced by... a for-sale sign. There are two remarkable exceptions to this bleakness: comic book store Wonderland and board game specialist Oberonn . Both stores are not a part of some bigger holding and both stores stem from my youth and are still alive and kicking. In fact, they used to compete: in high school I used to buy new Magic: The Gathering (MtG) booster packs from the opened box at the counter top in Wonderland while Oberonn even sold singles in binders. The last time I visited Wonderland I learned they stopped selling MtG as not to clash with Oberonn . Local Christian youth association shop De Banier not only sells outfits but also creative trinkets for crafting and has a small board game selection. Strange, as that’s only 30 metres away from Oberonn —and usually a bit less expensive. They still exist but they recently meddled with their opening hours, shortening the time span. Hopefully that’s not a bad sign… We bought many of our favourite games there and my wife always finds some kind of jewellery making toolkit in there as well. I hope one day a Pipoos store finds its way to Hasselt as well. We thought the one in Maastricht was gone but it seems that they simply moved instead. The photo was taken from a Google Maps history in time save point: I didn’t know it was possible to go back in time using Street View!  ↩︎ Related topics: / hasselt / By Wouter Groeneveld on 18 May 2026.  Reply via email . Christiaensen : a Belgian toy store chain from the seventies and eighties that got bought out by the Dutch Blokker: see the Jeugdsentiment nostalgia: Christiaensen post. I bought Stratego Legends there when I was 16. Bart Smit : a Dutch toy store chain that got bankrupt and bought by Intertoys/Maxitoys. The Christiaensen store got converted into a Bart Smit that now is yet another empty building. I bought too many Nintendo GB(A)/(3)DS games there and was a regular for over a decade. Every time we went shopping, I just had to drop in and see what’s on sale: they would regularly slash prices so you had to be quick. At one time, there were three Bart Smit stores in Hasselt. I even remember being gifted the MegaDrive cart Toejam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron by my grandparents somewhere in the nineties. Whether you fancied a video game or a LEGO box, Bart Smit was the go-to solution for almost every Flemish/Dutch kid. That building now is yet another boring clothes store. DreamLand : another toy store chain with venerable Belgian roots owned by Colruyt group that briefly had a fancy underground store near a new parking lot not even five years ago. Of course it had to go. I bought The Quest for El Dorado and other board games there, and I think we also bought baby toys for our daughter there. The bigger store about away from us recently also closed down. The store chain is still alive as is their webshop, but for how long… There’s still a DreamLand nearby but no longer in the centre. Free Record Shop : a Dutch retailer that primarily sold music CDs and boomed during the nineties. The one in Sint-Truiden also had a second hand selection that included GBA/DS games. Good times… Free Record Shop was declared bankrupt in 2013. I bought several albums and every good handheld game I could there. Fnac : a French retail chain with a long history that never made it to our city: we used to drop by when visiting Leuven. They usually are more expensive than the above alternatives. In 2020 they finally opened a shop in Hasselt. Since a month, it’s for rent. Yup. I bought a few puzzle games, picture books, and audio CDs there. Broux : a renowned local model building specialist my late father in law loved. I think by now you can guess its fate. I’m not big into the hobby but tagged along once and got myself some kind of fighter jet. I never finished it. Game Mania : the local Game Stop that used to have more than 30 stores across Belgium. I loved its early location at the outskirts of our village, conveniently placed close to a road I passed when cycling home from high school. I convinced my sister to help finance the silver GameCube plus Wind Waker and Super Mario Sunshine . Best purchase ever. They usually were (at least) pricier than supermarket/online competitors but I didn’t care and just wanted to support them. This is also where I got my original Paper Mario 2 edition for the painful full price of (that was even more painful in 2004). I guess that didn’t work out: yet another bankruptcy. The local Game Mania store moved buildings twice before being gone in 2024 1 . The photo was taken from a Google Maps history in time save point: I didn’t know it was possible to go back in time using Street View!  ↩︎

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