Wouter Groeneveld
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The Crazy Shotguns In Boomer Shooters
Emberheart’s recent Wizordum rekindled my interest in retro-inspired First Person Shooters (FPS) also known as boomer shooters. Some are offended by the term, but I quite like it: it not only denotes the DOOM clones of the early nineties as the boomer generation of FPS gaming but also perfectly defines…
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I Owe Warez For Properly Discovering CRPGs
One of the very first games my father actually bought were the DOS games Raptor and Hocus Pocus. It involved going to an exchange centre to convert Belgian francs to American dollars and sending those bills overseas to Apogee HQ, praying that nothing happened with the envelope. If you were lucky, a month…
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My (Retro) Desk Setup in 2025
A lot has happened since the desk setup post from March 2024—that being I got kicked out of my usual cosy home office upstairs as it was being rebranded into our son’s bedroom. We’ve been trying to fit the office space into the rest of the house by exploring different alternatives: clear a corner of…
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I Made My Own Fountain Pen!
Those of you who know me also know that I love writing with a fountain pen. My late father-in-law had been pushing me for years to buy a small lathe and try my hand at some simple shapes—including a fountain pen barrel, of course. Being quite the capable woodworking autodidact, he taught me how to construct…
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I'm Sorry RSS Subscribers, Ooh I Am For Real
Never meant to make your reader cry, I apologize a trillion times. My baby a drama Hugo don’t like me; she be doin’ things like duplicatin’ them RSS entries. Come from her release page to my server tryna fight me, bringing her breaking changes along; messing up index.xml quite wrong. That’s as far as…
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Favourites of September 2025
Hi again autumn, how have you been? Not well? Well me neither but I’ve been told that’s part of life and we’ve got to accept it and move on. Last month I ran a feature on card games on this blog, producing nine lovely articles ranging from Flemish trick taking traditions to card game mini games and how…
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Name Those Card Games Quiz Three
I couldn’t resist creating a third quiz to complete the trilogy. Did you manage to identify all the card from quiz one and quiz two? Again, congrats! Here’s the solution for quiz two in case you were wondering: (Spoilers) Mage Knight Morels/Fungi Race for the Galaxy Lord of the Rings: The Card Game Grand…
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What Philosophy Tells Us About Card Play
Given the extensive history behind a simple pack of standard playing cards, it should not surprise you that cards can be seen as a mirror of society: that’s essentially why the court cards have kings, queens, and jacks in them. In as early as 1377, Johannes of Rheinfelden wrote De moribus et disciplina…
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Name Those Card Games Quiz Two
Did you manage to identify all the card from quiz one? Congratulations—in that case you won’t mind me revealing the solution. Click on the spoiler text below to reveal the answer: (Spoilers) Dominion: Intrigue Bohnanza Saboteur Duel Jaipur Hero Realms Kingdom Legacy Reforest That was (mostly) easy enough…
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Modern Trick Taking Games: Beyond Whist
If you’re not in the mood for a traditional trick taking session, don’t worry: card and board games have evolved greatly since seventeenth century Whist. After both Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan—two board game pioneers that helped reinvigorate interest in tabletop gaming—the industry slowly but surely…
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Card Game Mini Games In Video Games
That’s a lot of games in one sentence. Tell me, what is better than a card game or a video game? Why yes, a card game inside a video game! These so-called mini games—a game within a game that acts as a gatekeeper or an amusing way to win a buck or two—are becoming more and more common in sprawling RPGs…
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Name Those Card Games Quiz One
Akin to many (retro) (partial) screenshot guessing quizzes out there, here’s my own. The photo below depicts my right hand holding seven mystery cards, each from another card game, and a joker as an aid to partially cover the last mystery card. Can you guess which card belongs to which game? Name those…
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On Having the Patience To Solitaire
Traditionally, the magical realm of trick taking and card gaming in general could only be experienced after gathering three other contestants willing to sit together. In part one of this series on card games, we explored some traditional Flemish variants always played with four—although Jokeren is an…
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A Tribute To Hoyle's Official Book Of Games
In 1989, Sierra On-Line released Volume 1 of their Hoyle: Official Book of Games on MS-DOS, a card game collection where you could play Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Hearts, Gin Rummy, Cribbage, and Klondike Solitaire according to Edmond Hoyle’s rules as recorded in his foundational work Hoyle’s Rules Of Games…
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The Flemish Trick Taking Tradition
Did you know that card games are part of the official intangible heritage list of Flanders (Immaterieel Erfgoed in Vlaanderen)? I didn’t either! A special place on that list is reserved for Wiezen, a variant of Whist, the classic English trick taking game played with a standard deck of 52 cards. The…
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Favourites of August 2025
August 2025 was one of those big life-altering and quite stressful months. We welcomed a second baby and had to keep the eldest busy as daycare was closed the entire month. Not exactly a combination I’d heartily recommend. I tried to keep on writing as a way to cope resulting in a steady flow of posts…
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Joel's Top 25 Games Of All Time
My friend Joel finally published his GOAT list (and the honourable mentions). Finally! I’ve only been pushing him for nearly two years to stop procrastinating and get the thing out there. Funnily enough, recency bias made sure 1000xRESIST, a game from May 2024, claimed a top 5 spot out of nowhere—a game…
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Forty
When I turned thirty-nine, I was exhausted because daycare closed all summer and the house renovations constrained our ability to keep the toddler busy. Now that it’s time for the big four-oh, I’m even more exhausted thanks to our three weeks old latest family addition who doesn’t know anything else…
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Festival Noise Pollution Reach
Summer music festivals can be a great way to blow off some much needed steam. Unfortunately, sweat and steam aren’t the only things that will be let loose into the atmosphere: ever-increasing volumes and deeper basses tend to result into more and more noise pollution in and around the venue. We live…
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Indispensable Cloud It Yourself Software: 2025 Edition
It’s been too long since this blog published a meaningless click-bait list article so here you go. Instead of simply enumerating frequently used apps such as app defaults from late 2023, I thought it might be fun to zoom in on the popular self-hosted branch and summarize what we are running to be able…
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An Ode To The PlayStation Portable
This year, the folks from the Into the Aether video gaming podcast put all their eggs in an older basket labelled Sony: the PlayStation Portable or PSP. The previous years were dominated by Nintendo and now Sony can try to fight their way to the handheld gaming top. Did they succeed? The following graph…
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What Exif Data Reveals About Your Site
I recently came across https://theyseeyourphotos.com/, a hidden ad landing page acting as a small tool that shows your photos reveal a lot of private information for bots to ingest. Ente ad and AI guesstimations of people and locations in photos aside, these crawlers also scan your multimedia files for…
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On Being Haunted By My Corporate Software Past
Sometimes I write blog posts about being ashamed to be a software developer. This is one of them. Running around for administrative errands somehow always painfully confronts me with my corporate software past. The bad enterprise part that barely works and has got end users cursing with every single…
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Tracing The Origins Of Fisher-Price Little People
Having kids means experiencing the flea market season on an entirely different level. Last Saturday we returned with a cardboard box full of assorted Fisher-Price Little People toys: a bunch of vehicles (a minivan, a school bus, a safari jeep, and a smaller tractor and car), a few set pieces (roundabouts…
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Favourites of July 2025
It’s August and the weather is getting pretty weird! In the previous monthly overview post, I grumbled about the heat: Here in Belgium, this week we’ve been really hammered with the physical affects of summer: drought and searing heat, up to the point that several tarmac spots on highway roads suddenly…
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Brain Baking Impact
In academia, a number called the h-index is often used to measure a researcher’s publication output and general impact on the world. The h-index is defined as follows: The h-index, short for Hirsch index, is a metric developed in 2005 by physicist Jorge E. Hirsch to measure both the productivity and…
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Say Hi To Pierre
A couple of months ago, we welcomed a new virtual pet. It took a while for our not so virtual pets to get accustomed to this one: it hasn’t yet established itself along the pecking order, but after a few more curious nose bumps from the dog and hisses from the cats, I’m sure it will. Say Hi! to Pierre…
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Pair Programming With ChatGPT: An Experience Report
For a very long time I’ve held off consulting Large Language Models besides the odd query out of curiosity that fizzled out rather quickly. But this week, I broke my own rules and pair programmed with ChatGPT twice. Here’s a quick summary of my findings so far. Everyone else at work was on vacation and…
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Good Board Games Don't Need To Be Owned
As a slight continuation of the previous Too Many Games, Too Little Time, here’s another thought worth mulling over: good board games don’t need to be owned, while that is not the case for modern video games. This thought popped into my head whilst reading Austin Charlie’s Forest Shuffle review on Board…
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Too Many Games, Too Little Time
Here’s a keen observation: each year, more new stuff gets put out. Bigger, better, bolder! True to the capitalist growth revenue mindset, this phenomena can be found in any sector, and I wonder when it’ll all come crashing down. But until then, bigger, better, bolder! The folks of the KARTON podcast…
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