I kept having issues with my board game spreadsheet (previously mentioned here), and ideas about how I could use it better. I finally had enough of them that I decided to revamp the spreadsheet again. Here are the things I changed:
I have been interested in trying to think better, so I was looking for information on cognitive biases. One of the most recommended books in this area is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. So I got it and tried to read it.
I have been slowly working on learning video game programming for a while. I learned C# in order to learn the Unity game development platform. Game development platforms provide a lot of code common to different video games, and they provide a graphical user interface for putting together components. Having those tools available makes it easier to program new video games. Since learning C# I have decided to switch which game development platform to use. I decided to learn Godot instead.
When I first thought about retiring, the obvious question was: What am I going to do when I retire? I thought about it for a few minutes, and my first idea was to have the childhood I missed out on because so much messed up stuff was happening. Even though that didn’t become the main thrust of my retirement, every month I try to take a day and do something that I might have done as a child, although perhaps updated a little. This are short little projects that aren’t worth a write up, but I thought I could write them up in batches of five. Here’s the first five, at least since I started my Icosipental Plan.
So I decided to reorganize my board games, shifting the storage to mostly vertical. I thought I would post about the experience and what I learned about doing in.
Since moving back to Charlottesville, I have gotten back into board games. I’m probably playing more board games these days than I ever have in my life. I now own over 200 games (or over 2,500 depending on how you define “game” and “own”). I play games two to four nights a week, mostly at a board game night at a local game store that I helped revive. I’m also on my computer a lot, programming and analyzing and reading and so on. You can play board games online these days, including at a place called Board Game Arena (BGA). Sounds like a perfect place for me, right? Except for the crippling anxiety.
In the summer of 2025, we moved my mom into assisted living. It was a complicated and exhausting project that took months to do.
In the past couple of years I have not only been playing a lot of board games, but I have been working on rebuilding my collection of board games after the minimalism purge of the noughties. Being a somewhat obsessive statistician, I had a spreadsheet where I was keeping track of all of these games. But I had some problems with the spreadsheet, and so I wanted to redo it, but that was going to be a lot of work.
I really enjoy computer programming. It’s what I started doing when I first retired, and what I still do because it brings me joy. Over the years I have collected a file of programming project ideas. One of them is based on a quote that I can’t remember the source of. It was something like “to learn how to program games, take six simple, classic games and program them.” I was originally going to do this is Pygame, since I’m mainly a Python programmer, but then I learned about Unity. I decided to do the six games thing in Unity, but Unity doesn’t support Python, so I decided to learn C# (pronounced “cee-sharp”), which it does support.
Back in March I finished a two month project to clean out the excess stuff from my condo. This is the latest episode in a long see saw of my life. I’m hoping it’s the final episode of the see saw, but I doubt it.