The Backroad to Civilization

October 1st, 2024

My plan on updating daily has fallen by the wayside again. What can I

say? Sometimes I'm a stereotypical male and have problems with

commitment. Sometimes I forget I'm writing for an audience, and I don't

know who that audience is anymore. Sometimes, I'm a lazy cock.

Truth told, I haven't been spending much time online these days. Kinda

tired of the bipartisan radicalization that's everywhere. I swear, social

media is orders of magnitude more toxic than FidoNet or the Usenet

were at their worst.

Much of my creative time has been spent working on (and running) my three

GURPS campaigns, which has had an unintended result: I'm getting pretty

good at using GIMP.

I've been using GIMP to convert my (legally purchased) Classic Car Wars

maps from the Car Wars standard 1/4" square grid to something more in line

with GURPS: 5 hex per inch.

Rather than scale up my Car Wars maps up to GURPS scale (where a 1" hex

represents a yard), I scaled GURPS down to Car Wars scale: one hex still

equals one yard (about three feet), but scaled down to 5 hexes per inch

(fifteen feet). This lets us use our Car Wars counters in GURPS, rather

than reinvest heavily in new miniatures.

I've gotten a handle on how to use transparencies correctly, and am slowly

learning how to do gradients. But more on that later. Maybe. It's not

the most exciting subject, but meh, I'm having fun.

In other news, I've entered the RetroChallenge again, for the first time

in about a decade. I have a couple of computer projects I've been putting

off for ages, and saw the RC as an incentive to get off my lazy ass and

get them done.

I won't rehash my project details here, but the tl;dr is: I gotta replace

the HDs in my Sparc IPX and Powerbook 280c before they finally cack it.

I've bought SD card solutions for both machines, and have a pretty good

idea on how to put them to use.

You can follow my progress here:

I may be back tomorrow.