Hobi dan motivasi

It's time for my annual self review. You can see previous ones from 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018. I didn't have a lot of goals for this year:

1. Write to my blog instead of only to Twitter or other closed platforms.
2. Improve my explanations and write new ones.

The first I can measure by looking at whether I blogged about my projects. I did: 24 blog posts this year. I'm pretty happy with that. The second is harder to evaluate, but I would say I didn't spend nearly as much time on explanations as I had hoped to. I wrote these new explanations, but they were small:

• Axes and Angles
• Grid Edges
• Circle Filling
• Making-of: little details

And I worked on these two, but didn't get them to a point I was happy with:

• Coordinate transforms - abandoned
• A* Heuristics - incomplete

I spent some time improving existing explanations:

• A* Implementation - clarified terminology: "location", "node", "state" can all be graph nodes
• Distance to Any - improved layout
• Making-of: drag handles - updated to work with touch screens
• Differential heuristics - continued to work on it but still nowhere near complete
• Terrain from Noise - island and wraparound map sections
• Hexagon Guide - improved the map storage section, and improved the load time
• 2d Fourier Noise - refactored code, improved the terrain rendering

Instead of explanations, this year I was more inspired to work on art, learning, and other fun projects:

• Goldberg Coxeter
• Orbit Spirograph
• Growth Forms
• Reaction Diffusion
• Delaunator Animation
• Voronoi Percolation
• Sphere HEALPix
• Cube morphed into a sphere
• Square tiling of a sphere
• Dungeon on a sphere
• Weighted cell rendering
• Isometric outline experiments
• Cellular influence maps
• Dyson Hatching
• Triangle texture patterns

I also have 15 other projects that weren't for the general public (for clients, or responses to emails, etc.). I generated new logos for my social media presence using a new logo generator I wrote. And I updated my home page with links to lots of projects I hadn't previously linked. I track these projects on Trello.

What else? I'm hanging out on AIMA chat (students who want to contribute to the AIMA textbook open source project), Roguelike Discord, ProcJam Discord, a few Slacks, Twitter, and a few subreddits. I decided to go to non-GDC conferences this year, and went to BangBangCon, FDG, and Roguelike Celebration. I'm pretty happy with how all of this went this year.

For several years I've hoped that the coordinate systems page would become the next big successful project after the Hexagon page and the A* page. I've attempted to write it several times but just haven't been happy with it. I'm now starting to think that maybe it's not going to be the next big success for me. I've also been trying to come up with a good explanation of differential heuristics but can't seem to make much progress. Maybe I won't have any more big successes with tutorials, and should stop looking for that.

What are my goals for 2020? Unfortunately, I don't have any strong goals. After working on big projects in 2018, I ended up working on small projects in 2019. I would like to work on something bigger, but I think my focus will be on learning new things rather than explaining things I already know. I'd like to work on projects that last a month or two rather than a week or two, to really dig into them and learn a topic deeper than I can do in a week. Other than that, I feel kind of aimless right now. I'm ok with that. I'm in a wander-and-explore phase of my life.

The PCs

• Kalovi: female blood-elf fighter, quick to draw first blood.
• Dome Clo-Kar: human fighter, sturdy and tough, his right arm blackened and cursed.
• Ultimus Van Huka'a: moon-elf, thief, came to Cha'alt for the rich zoth deposits.
• Sasha: female sun-elf cleric whose family lost their name because of some disgrace, but still carries herself with pride.  Also, has a demon that she must appease.
• Bandalorr: midnight-elf wizard.  Absorbed in the dark arts, he shocked his own people and was captured by slavers.

The Setup

The Highlights

• Dome Clo-Kar did something which no one else has tried, and I didn't really anticipate (that's just one of the many things I love about roleplaying games).  He exited the conduit between rooms and was able to walk upon the outside surface of a room.  The hardened fighter stood there, surrounded by the inky void of blackness... before coming back inside.
• Exploring the movie theater playing Escape From New York, I feel the players really got a sense of The Black Pyramid.  It's not just a tomb of horrors waiting to crush PC bones into dust.  Rather, it's a strange environment with people looking for not just survival but entertainment, power, and looting the room that contains god's shadow.
• There were a number of great lines heard from the in-character banter back and forth between PCs.  My favorites were, "All men are free when the slave masters aren't around," from Dome Clo-Kar.  And the gloomy Bandalorr, "We'll be free when we're dead."
• Bandalorr acquired himself a magic item via Logan's Run.  After he identified and attuned it, he went up a level.  I decided that for this one-shot, it made sense to incentivize the acquisition of magic items above all else.  
• It's not a dungeoncrawl until a PC goes all murderhobo on some poor unsuspecting NPC.  Kalovi decided to slit a priest's throat for no reason in particular.  That led to interrogation of the dead priest's companions and eventually bartering with amicable psionicists.  
• The last room explored contained a gigantic devil-toad slumbering next to a pile of treasure.  Amongst the treasure was a magical sword.  Dome Clo-Kar really, really wanted that sword.  So, he stole it, waking the devil-toad, failing to correctly answer a riddle, and then the rest of the party tried to kill the infernal, tentacled godling because... it's D&D, I guess.  Well, that proved to be a fatal mistake for all but one party member.  Bandalorr used his fireball spell (thanks to my little fireball hack d6 table) and rolled a 1.  He used divine favor to re-roll... and got another 1.  Then no one made their saving throw and all the PCs were either burned to a crisp right then and there or died in the next round of combat against the devil-toad.
• Using his newfound magic item to escape harm, Bandalorr walked, between universes, out of The Black Pyramid and back to slave master Kell.  In exchange for the sanctuary medallion of renewal, Kell rewarded the sorcerer with not only freedom, but a spot in the highly coveted sorcerer's training program that Tyra'ak instituted not long ago.

The Aftermath

While I was routing for the players and their characters to not only survive but flourish, I realized that glory was not to be there's as they willfully engaged in battle with such a creature.  

There were many chances to avoid the fight, but apparently that was not the adventuring party's destiny.  

• ·         Our Warmachine community has shifted to play mostly in a Scrum League, and ironically I can't afford to play in that with my work and family situation. 
• ·         One of my best friends picked up the Guild Ball Kick Off set, and would come over to play when my wife would have a girl's night out.  It was very easy to play him while also taking care of the kids, also only having 12 models max on the table made it easy to get a game in under 1.5 hours.
•  ·         My wife started playing some Guild Ball herself, and we got a bunch of games in as well.

Out of all the privacy-focused products and apps available on the market, Brave has been voted the best. Other winners of Product Hunt's Golden Kitty awards showed that there was a huge interest in privacy-enhancing products and apps such as chats, maps, and other collaboration tools.

An extremely productive year for Brave

Last year has been a pivotal one for the crypto industry, but few companies managed to see the kind of success Brave did. Almost every day of the year has been packed witch action, as the company managed to officially launch its browser, get its Basic Attention Token out, and onboard hundreds of thousands of verified publishers on its rewards platform.

Luckily, the effort Brave has been putting into its product hasn't gone unnoticed.

The company's revolutionary browser has been voted the best privacy-focused product of 2019, for which it received a Golden Kitty award. The awards, hosted by Product Hunt, were given to the most popular products across 23 different product categories.

Ryan Hoover, the founder of Product Hunt said:

"Our annual Golden Kitty awards celebrate all the great products that makers have launched throughout the year"

Brave's win is important for the company—with this year seeing the most user votes ever, it's a clear indicator of the browser's rapidly rising popularity.

Privacy and blockchain are the strongest forces in tech right now

If reaching 10 million monthly active users in December was Brave's crown achievement, then the Product Hunt award was the cherry on top.

The recognition Brave got from Product Hunt users shows that a market for privacy-focused apps is thriving. All of the apps and products that got a Golden Kitty award from Product Hunt users focused heavily on data protection. Everything from automatic investment apps and remote collaboration tools to smart home products emphasized their privacy.

AI and machine learning rose as another note-worthy trend, but blockchain seemed to be the most dominating force in app development. Blockchain-based messaging apps and maps were hugely popular with Product Hunt users, who seem to value innovation and security.

For those users, Brave is a perfect platform. The company's research and development team has recently debuted its privacy-preserving distributed VPN, which could potentially bring even more security to the user than its already existing Tor extension.

Brave's effort to revolutionize the advertising industry has also been recognized by some of the biggest names in publishing—major publications such as The Washington Post, The Guardian, NDTV, NPR, and Qz have all joined the platform. Some of the highest-ranking websites in the world, including Wikipedia, WikiHow, Vimeo, Internet Archive, and DuckDuckGo, are also among Brave's 390,000 verified publishers.