It’s spooky season! Wait, no, again. Spooky season is over! Or are we still in it? For just this week you say? I never really understood the Halloween craze and dismissed it as yet another Americanized craze that made its way to Europe, but after participating in a ghost hunt for … | Continue reading
For decades, I’ve been trained to optimize my thinking in terms of numbers. I’ve been pushed to be more productive, and enjoyed being more productive, which in turn led to searchers how to be even more productive. I’ve accomplished things and felt good about it, motivating myself … | Continue reading
After compiling my top 25 best games of all time list, I started drafting a list of my 25 best albums of all time, which after several revisions, I still have conflicted feelings about. It somehow was much harder for me to come up with 25 musical entries compared to the video gam … | Continue reading
A recurring trend among bloggers is meta-blogging: blogging about blogging. My pristine AI model—namely, my own brain—spotted another variation of this pattern in the RSS feed reader this month, and since I like all things meta except for a certain company called Meta, I want in … | Continue reading
After a lengthy regulatory review, Microsoft now officially closes its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Seventy billion, the largest transfer sum to date in the video gaming industry. The EU was worried this might cause harm to the industry as Microsoft comfortably … | Continue reading
That’s a good question! CS1 courses, or Computer Science 1, are typically the first computing courses in higher education where students are exposed to a programming language. They traditionally teach concepts such as variables and scoping, control blocks, code flow, and some, li … | Continue reading
My general conclusion after a day of digging through and studying a semi-random pile of academic papers on the subject of creative confidence is that authors put in disturbingly little effort to effectively make their results and created tools accessible to the general public. I … | Continue reading
Edge Magazine put out another ranking, this time the 100 greatest video games of the past 30 years, which yet again fueled my obsession with lists. The list is—of course—depressingly inaccurate, with giant holes in it such as Diablo II or Final Fantasy VI. And then someone at Mas … | Continue reading
Our first-year engineering students have been exposed to higher education for a good two weeks now, and as is typical for each “virgin” semester, casualties are slowly but surely starting to appear. This year, however, as a teacher, something irritated me more than usual: the qui … | Continue reading
Dear dr. Groeneveld, when are you finally going to properly start preparing for your next big thing? Time is ticking! Yours sincerely, just Wouter. I know, I know, Wouter, but all in due time. October is still a long way off, and—woah, did that just creep up on us? It’s still twe … | Continue reading
With Microsoft’s reportedly digital only plans for Xbox’s future now leaked, Xbox boss Phil Spencer had to be quick to dismiss the information as outdated, as physical collectors and preservationists were already staring to panic on social media. Regular readers will undoubtedly … | Continue reading
The MIT Technology Review headline on artificial intelligence reads: AI just beat a human test for creativity. What does that even mean? I’ll tell you what it means. It means we’re in dire need of a better universally accepted definition of creativity. All those scare makers are … | Continue reading
It’s finally and officially done! I’m now the proud holder of a Doctor of Engineering Technology degree. That means, from now on, the only correct way to address me is by starting your communication with “Dear dr. Groeneveld”. In case that wasn’t clear: I’m kidding. Outside of ac … | Continue reading
Speaking of Mary Karr (see On Revisiting Media), my eyes semi-automatically zoomed in on her author bio on the back of The Art of Memoir as it somehow is longer than the summary of the book itself: Mary Karr is the author of three award-winning, best-selling memoirs: The Liars’ C … | Continue reading
I’ve been reading Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir lately—thanks, Austin—which, besides the needlessly excessive display of intricate diction and Texan-American sauce slathered royally throughout all chapters that endlessly rankle me as a non-native English reader (see, I can do tha … | Continue reading
Denken mit der Hand—Leuchtturm’s slogan for their 1917 notebook series—is, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite accurate. Over the years, journaling has helped me countless times to do many things: capture ideas, slowly but surely marinate, cross-polinate, develop, and help publish them … | Continue reading
Ehhh… What’s up, September? Strange, and just like that, Summer is preparing to pack its bags. The continuous downpour of yesterday served as proof, even though we’ve had more than enough rain during the last two months—good for yet another climate-related record. Perhaps Summer … | Continue reading
I’m replaying Quake—or rather, finally giving it a proper playthrough since I was a Duke boy back in the day, and even though I too “wasn’t afraid of no Quake”1, I never really looked past the monotonous brownness2 of the first few levels. So I booted up my almost but not quite t … | Continue reading
I turned thirty-eight today. That’s the sum of the squares of the first three primes (thank you for that useless fact, Wikipedia). That’s also eight more than thirty, and two less than a psychological crisis followed by a Harley-Davidson, possibly followed by either a sale or a d … | Continue reading
It seems ages ago (11 years to be exact) that I spent too many hours trying to get to work by train—with emphasis on trying. I mostly remember that period as a dreadful one where the long hours, both from work and from the commute, gradually turned me into a zombie. Braaaainnnzz! … | Continue reading
A quick one today: something I noticed in the margins while reading Jonathan Schindler’s Shelf Wear blog over at Board Game Geek: does having to play a game because of product placement kills the joy and fun of playing a game? The answer seems to be yes: I was just at a game nigh … | Continue reading
This article was originally written in 2019 as part of a technical Game Boy series to be published as a bundle. What is a game console without its games? A cafe without beer, according to Belgians. Carefully preserved game cartridges are the bread and butter of any retro game col … | Continue reading
The Gentleman Stationer recently published a 2023 Bag Dump: What Do I Carry To Work post—like a gentleman. I love these kind of posts just as much as anybody else: yes, I admit it, I’m nosy and love to glean insights of other people’s lives via the little things they carry with t … | Continue reading
I know I am. Allow me to explain myself. I’ll be brief: the ratio of weekly new posts in my feed reader is just too high! Stop writing stuff everyone! No wait, wrong advice. Start trimming down blogs in your reader, Wouter! Certainly, I could do that. But it doesn’t solve the pro … | Continue reading
In Retronauts Episode 550, Kelsey Lewin and Phil Salvador of the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) are interviewed in context of their recent study, “87% Missing: The Disappearance Of Classic Video Games”. The study reveals that older video games are becoming unavailable—that … | Continue reading
Goodbye, July 2023—hello, August, and with it, complete radio silence from my academic peers. I’m starting to resent these months. Good thing there’s a high chance it’ll be the last one that plays out like this. Taking care of our daughter sometimes feels like an additional full- … | Continue reading
A couple of months after I published my Save Sourdough book, emeritus history professor Peter Scholliers released Brood: een geschiedenis van bakkers en nun brood (Bread: a history of bakers and their bread), a thorough socio-economical analysis of bread eaters and creators in Fl … | Continue reading
Yesterday’s Yellow Brick Road post by Simone Silvestroni struck a chord. In it, he laments the downsides of choosing the path of a polymath, as people become quick to dismiss your capabilities as a jack of all trades, but master of none. On top of that, or perhaps partially becau … | Continue reading
A short stay at a local holiday resort generated a big shock: they changed the iconic 25 year old Center Parcs logo! I have fond memories of the Parcs we used to visit now and then when we were young. Meddling with such a logo felt like ripping out these nostalgic memories in my … | Continue reading
Identifying And Amplifying Non-Technical Skills In Software Engineering Education, that’s the full title of my accepted PhD which will be publicly defended in September. While the previous blog post explained the technical details behind layouting and typesetting, in this post, I … | Continue reading
There are lots of Tufte-style LaTeX thesis templates to be found on GitHub, but there’s little information on how to pull it off writing mainly in Markdown and letting Pandoc do the compiling. I’ve previously written about the particularities of writing a Tufte-book in Markdown, … | Continue reading
June has passed, and with it, the first bulk of the exams, meaning it’s officially summer in academia. My PhD thesis got deposited in KU Leuven’s document storage system—I have a post for that in the waiting queue. It’s been another difficult month and I’m glad it’s over: it fina … | Continue reading
The recurring pattern dutifully repeated itself this academic year: exam questions we predicted that would be badly answered have been badly answered, and questions that students performed well on in previous years were all right this year too. That means the system is consistent … | Continue reading
Dave Rupert’s The State of Agile Software in 2018 made me think: can agile be detrimental to creativity? I think it definitely can, depending on how you cling to certain methods even though clearly they are meant to be a guideline, not a strict set of rules. The more strict rules … | Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve bought a new pen—from 2021’s Pilot Capless, to be exact. My colleague received an engraved pen from his department with his doctoral title when he graduated, and for years I’ve been promising myself I could get a new pen if I finally get that degree. … | Continue reading
This June marks the start of my 16th journal. Last time I wrote about finishing a journal was book Number Fourteen in July 2021 (which contains a photo of all Hama covers, in case you’re curious). Goodbye, Number Fifteen, and thank you so much for your services, but it’s time to … | Continue reading
Since my brain refuses to boot beyond UEFI today1, here’s a lovely list of things I liked doing before our daughter was born: Write large philosophical blog posts; Enjoy a late night out with friends; Read a thousand page sprawling fantasy; Play a complicated Uwe Rosenberg boardg … | Continue reading
Another month gone—months seem to fly by while hours and days can feel endless. It’s time for another celebration: my PhD thesis got accepted last Friday! The “official” public defense will be in September so I’ll need to hold off writing “dr. Groeneveld” on letters until then. N … | Continue reading
Eurogamer recently announced that their review system will be changing yet again. Instead of the review badge system that was introduced in 2015 as a replacement for typical out of 10 scores, they now reintroduce the rating system but on a scale of five. Before, games weren’t sco … | Continue reading
The Brussels Royal Library of Belgium, better known as the KBR, is the country’s national library and responsible for collecting and preserving all Belgian publications. To achieve that, all Belgian authors are obliged to hand over copies of their publication in the KBR Legal Dep … | Continue reading
The University of Brussels (VUB) started an internal investigation against well-known Flemish clinical psychology professor Elke Van Hoof, who already received complaints before for toxic leadership, reports VRT NNWS. When Van Hoof worked at another university, UHasselt, similar … | Continue reading
In James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, a husband frustrated with his dull live dreams up fearless alternatives where he can be a more exciting and perhaps better version of himself: an amazing doctor, an airplane pilot, and so forth. Most people will probably be fami … | Continue reading
Two days ago, the doorbell rang. Kristien shouted “did you order something?” and I said no. The package proved to be very heavy, and although it puzzled me at first, as soon as the excessive amount of tape gave way to the knife, I discovered its contents: books, 25 of them! More … | Continue reading
After two years of building and running my own fully featured Webmention server, I think it’s time to shut it down. I’ve been thinking about doing so for a few months, and Eli’s comment has finally pushed me to take a closer look whether or not it’s worth it: I think I’m ready to … | Continue reading
Our baby is five weeks old now and it’s been a heck of a ride. Nothing proceeded as planned or imagined and the death of my wife’s father makes trying to find a rhythm that much harder. It very much feels like a fever that suddenly flares up and hits you in the face only to disap … | Continue reading
Barbara Stok’s biggest work to date, a 300 page comic called De Filosoof, de Hond en de Bruiloft (The Philosopher, the Dog, and the Wedding), is a celebration of life’s simple values both ancient and modern society seems to have forgotten in part by largely ignoring the practical … | Continue reading
The answer will inevitably be yes. Both Jan-Lukas and Ton wrote about the Washington Post’s Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart today. The Post investigated a massive dataset called the English Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus or C4, which drives … | Continue reading
Brendan Byers wrote an in-depth piece on the exploration of the Game Boy Memory Bank Controller (MBC), where he used the data from gekkio’s Game Boy hardware database to plot MBC usage statistics over the GB’s lifespan, resulting in the following interesting graph: Histor … | Continue reading