Category Archives: Random

Gaming and Happiness

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Once again, I might be full of shit, but what I understand, psychologists studying happiness seem to believe that happiness has to be intrinsic (come from within us) to last. However, right now, most of our society seems to be geared towards getting extrinsic (from outside us) happiness.

This might sound like some New Age garbage, but this wasn’t told to us by the universe (at least not personally), but its a real result of real studies.

So, why am I writing about this in a gaming (sometimes comics) blog?

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Strongest Writer on the Blog

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I’m quite sure that Aki had no intention of ever bringing this up. During this year’s Ropecon we decided to sumo wrestle for the title of the Strongest Writer on the Blog. It might have started out as a minor gag but it turned into an epic battle of mensweat and curses.

At the end of this challenge only one warrior stood on the hot tatami shouting praises to Crom and Thor. Lauri was the champion of this blog.

For your (well, mostly mine) entertainment here is the video of the final match!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9DMQYYsvYI

(Actually this post serves to notify those interested that I just opened a YouTube account for the blog and thus also happened created a Google+ page for us.)

Geek Services in Utrecht

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Couple of weeks ago I was in Utrecht for the Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix, which is the highest level open tournament in the game. As usual, I regard these more like excuses to visit certain cities, so why not stay a full week at the former capital of the Kingdom of Holland.

One of the points of interests in the city for me personally, was Oudegracht (the Old Canal), as for some peculiar reason, there are seven shops dedicated to all things geeky (although, I seem to have missed one).

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Building Legos or How I Stopped Worrying And Ordered Pieces Online

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This spaceship started the madness.

This spaceship started the madness.

“Hey son, lets play with Legos! Or to be precise keep doing whatever you are doing and let me build small shit that can’t even be used by minifigs.”

That might have been a conversion I could have went through yesterday with my four years old son. Luckily it wasn’t. Like a great dad I masked my obsessive building under the guise of playing with my son… Thanks internet for that too. Continue reading →

Using Games to Assess Future Employees

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Last year our company (small software venture) underwent some changes and we needed to hire more people. How does one go about that? We had hired people before, but people we knew. This time there weren’t any apparent candidates we could cherrypick from. So, we put out a notice and waited for people to answer.

As a small company and with little reach for our notice, we didn’t get many applications, but some. We chose two to be interviewed. How does one assess people based on an interview? After all, we’re a small company and can’t really afford any dead weight.

My proposal was to test them through games.

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Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy Review

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This is a book from a series of books called Popular Culture and Philosophy. Although many of those books are based on very good properties, mostly they feel like novelties and are not very compelling to me with the exception of Monty Python and Philosophy, which I haven’t read, and this one. Shouldn’t have felt that compelled, but anyhow.

The subtitle of the book is “Raiding the Temple of Wisdom”. Apparently, there wasn’t much to loot there.

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A Look at Alignments

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I have a book called Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy lying around somewhere. Haven’t read it, but I’ll probably try in the near future. In the meantime, I thought I’d share my thoughts on alignments based on what I know about ethics from back in the day in my gymnasium (roughly high school for those who live in the large part of the world with no idea what the word actually means) philosophy course.

(And yes, I’m finally writing something RPG-related again.)

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