Mocha Friday

November 06, 2026 by Adam in Family

I woke up at 4 in the morning, my brain deciding it was the perfect time to design a complicated computer system.  I never did go back to sleep, but I'm hoping my agents can build the thing before our demos today.  I'm starting to get sleepy, but I'm still working through the rest of my mocha and hope springs eternal.

My new computer is actually awesome, which is nice.  I think it's like the frog boiling situation and I hadn't noticed how slow it's gotten.  Now games are snappy and look nice, I can do some amazing looking AI generation of things, and the migration to the new machine hasn't been as painful as I feared.  I had it make animated attack movies for the different D&D characters in my game - some of them turned out really well and a few need some redos.  I'm just having fun tinkering.

Jo and I went to 5th Street on date night.  Tonight we're going to a Friends of the Library fundraising event.  Hopefully we can haul away some of the donations we've been piling up.

Excited about Delta Green tomorrow - hoping we wrap up the mission, but who knows how it's going to turn out.

D&D Recaps

November 05, 2026 by Adam in Adam's Games

I've been making recaps for my D&D group, a little slideshow to remind them of what they did a couple weeks ago and to get them in the mood.  My new video card is beefy enough to turn these into short video clips and I'm really happy with how it's turned out.  I've used online services for video creation before, but the free versions are always limited.  I'm excited to turn my new hardware towards even more impressive feats.

New Computer Who Dis?

November 03, 2026 by Adam in Adam's Projects

I finally bit the bullet and bought a new computer for myself.  With the AI craze driving up memory, storage, and graphic card prices, I stumbled across a $2K Costco computer with an RTX 5070 Ti graphics card.  The storage is a little light (1TB) and the memory configuration is stupid (a single 24GB memory stick), but hopefully in a year I can buy a matching stick for less than $1K.  Still, I'm hoping I can play modern games without the constant stutter and do some of the fancier local AI things like image, video, and 3d model generation.

Time Travelling Monday

November 02, 2026 by Adam in Family

Daylight savings has me feeling slightly jet lagged, but I do appreciate the view of the colorful Fall trees out my window first thing in the morning.  I've also started listening to a new time travel audiobook.  Add in weekend conversations with kids about their next phases of their lives and I keep thinking about time and how it seems to speed up or slow down in unexpected ways.

It was a generally good weekend, with lots of hang out time.  I managed to cross a few things off my list, buying a Costco computer that I think is a good deal despite some quirky choices due to the insane memory prices.  Hopefully I can upgrade in a year or so after the AI price insanity calms down.  I look forward to playing modern games without a stutter and I think I can do some of the AI video and 3d model generation I'd have to pay for on my local machine.  We'll see how the experiments go.

Halloween was very low key - putting out a sign and bowl of candy.  Both the candy and bowl were gone at the end of the night, so the scoundrels continue to run free apparently.

Sunday we celebrated Parent Day for Jo, with cards and messages from all the kids, along with a loom that they immediately started playing with.  We managed to repair the trailer to the point where we can haul away our next batch of donations.  The move prep continues slowly, with endless phases.

My hobbies continue.  I played more of the latest Gears of War game, finally getting into the groove.  Wandering through a destroyed city is quite pretty since it's imaginary.  I did a little more D&D prep, making maps and images and putting together a recap of last session.  Plus my weird "recreate Neverwinter Nights" project continues - I keep trying to figure out how to make low-poly game assets.  Sometimes it turns out surprisingly well, taking a high-poly skull and baking in the normal map to a lower poly one to retain the detail.