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:

gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/sparcipx/retrochallenge/


I may be back tomorrow.