Fun & Games on Hey Loura!

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:30:38 -0400

To relax I’ve been reading up on Overloading the Random Encounter Table and Hex flower’s as a way to create a little solo RPG to play. I’m thinking three little one page foldable zines for character sheets, a bestiary, and the hex-flower generator. Screenshot of my first concept. WIP.

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 20:10:06 -0400

testing testing…

Next up, testing an in page edit off my blog 😀

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 17:36:54 -0400

I’m eating m&m’s, watching an animal crossing playthrough on youtube, and messing around with code. Next up is dinner, a Just Dance battle with my daughter, and then working in my journal 🥰

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 17:32:03 -0400

I finally have a moment to myself and Im going to enjoy the Halloween festivities on my island.

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 18:08:29 -0400

I had a wisdom tooth removed today. So it’s a play animal crossing new horizons and eat applesauce kind of day.

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 13:06:44 -0400

I have a pumpkin spice latte and I’m listening to animal crossing new horizons music. Time to be extra productive at work ☕🎃🏝️👩🏻‍💻

I Created Some DCC Character Sheets

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:19:36 -0400

Looks like my little gaming group can get together this weekend to play some Dungeon Crawl Classics, DCC. Yay! During our last game I noticed that we spent just as much time looking up what the characters can do versus actually playing the game. I think that’s because we only get to play every four-six weeks which is just enough time to forget everything. So I hunted around for some good fan-made character sheets that actually explained what a character class/race could do. There were a couple of options that were close to what I wanted, but I ended up just drawing my own.

So here they are:

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 15:01:14 -0400

I restarted my animal crossing new horizons island a few days ago. This time I’m not going to unlock the terraforming tools. I feel like I have the best intentions with them, then it all becomes a mess until I’m so irritated that I delete my save file. 🏝️

Sat, 18 May 2024 12:11:51 -0400

Finally, tomorrow is the magical day that all schedules align and we can actually continue playing our dungeon crawl classics game. I know what I’m prepping for the rest of the evening ⚔️🐉

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 16:23:14 -0400

I have reached the point in my day where all I want to do is drink a cup of tea and play animal crossing. Unfortunately I still have a whole lot of adulting hours left to go 😅

Dev Diary 0012: January 1st - 16th 2024

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 13:13:46 -0400

I’ve spent the last few weeks of the New Year, like a lot of others, reflecting on where I’ve been and where I want to go. So this update is a little more rambling than most.

Work

I want to never use Azure Dev Ops again. It is giving me such a headache. I still can’t get our release pipeline working after upgrading our solution to .NET 8. Entity framework is complaining and its convoluted and not my strong suit.

One of the pitfalls of being a solo developer. No one to ask questions or to brainstorm off of. ::sigh::

Personal Projects

My blog

Not too much happening here other than adding in the search-space plugin by @sod on my search page and rearranging how posts appear on the index page as I shared in this update: Some minor blog updates.

The basic Hugo code I used can be found on my paste bin

In general the idea is to group the posts by date with a .GroupByDate That gives you access to the {{ .Key }} which is the date and then {{ .Pages }} which is a collection that corresponds to that date. Then you need to sort the {{ .Pages }} in reverse. That’s accomplished by {{ range .Pages.Reverse }}

I do have some other updates I want to get around to like adding a blogroll, which I might use the bookmarks feature of micro.blog for and creating a digital garden/wiki.

A CYOA/Gamebook website

This is a very very rough concept right now. But I’d love to code a generic fantasy RPG as a gamebook or a “choose your own adventure” type game. I have the concept and flow chart written out. I also want to do it sans game engine and either code one up myself or craft standalone HTML pages. I also want to make my own artwork for it. I picked up a couple of illustration books to start practicing.

Lillihub

Earlier this week I shared this video showcasing my favorite part about Lillihub, that it works 100% without JavaScript:

I can’t think of any other social media site that can do that. Please let me know if another one out there exists.

Back in 2023 I decided I wanted to flex my front-end coding muscles a bit. I was having lots of fun playing around with my blog design and exploring neocities sites. I went off on a tangent exploring iframes as a bit of a retro website frame system. I still think there is something to that, both as a way to manage a static website and to build very basic local apps. It was fun throwing together a calendar and a little budgeting app with it. That’s actually what Lillihub started as, until I ran into CORS issues. Then when I tossed in a backend with Deno, using my iframe trick didn’t seem useful. So I decided to challenge myself with writing all my own css and doing it all without JavaScript. Version 1 of the app had no JavaScript at all and I learned a ton doing it.

Did you know you can stream HTML to the browser like a video? I didn’t.
Did you know that you can target the action of an iframe to a different element? I didn’t.

It’s been a very fun project to build. Probably my favorite personal project ever. It even beat that time I folded 1000 origami cranes.

Updates

Not too many updates were user facing. The biggest one was probably the editor previewing images as you write markdown. There were also a handful of bug fixes and I’m ordering the posts by date_timestamp, but I’m not sure that fixed the timeline marker issue. I’ll need to investigate further.

Future Roadmap?

I’ve been spending sometime thinking about the future of Lillihub. I feel like I have a solid base to launch off of now. And I’m doing my best to not slide into the thought that I should rip it all to pieces and rebuild it with a brand new latest and greatest framework. So I need to step back sometimes and admire what I like most about it. The fact that it streams HTML, that the UI is a bit different but very usable, that there is no build step and its mostly in one file (I know I know, that probably annoys the other developers who’ve glance at the source code)

So what’s up next? This is a simplified “I want” list, not exhaustive and not a promise to build 😉:

I want to have the highlights incorporated into the bookmarks area and make tagging easier
I want to add books via one of the book APIs out there
I want it to better support the IndieWeb
- Let people bring there own indieauth/micropub endpoints
- Let the editor have a dropdown to add microformats markup for replies, likes, etc..
- Microsub client? Integrated with posts?
Let the PWA accept shares
- Share a URL? adds it as a bookmark
- Share copied text? starts a post
- Share a photo/video? uploads it and starts a post (with the photo/video included). Maybe AI could generate alt text…

The Stats

Lillihub had around 40 users login in the past three weeks.

Final Thoughts

There is a whole new year out there waiting for me. I want to keep playing, keep crafting, and keep my family and friends close.

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 17:16:06 -0400

I just spent an hour teaching my mother, 70, how to play Animal Crossing New Horizons 💕. She says it’s much better thank Mario Kart 😂

Dev Diary 006 - Week of November 6th

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 22:12:14 -0400

This week was back to pretty much normal now that everyone is over their colds and now that my wisdom tooth is gone 😄

General Development

So far this year I've tried a handful of ways to track my tasks. Both physical copies inside of journals and on post-it-notes. A couple of apps too, like Notion or Zoho Notes. Still haven't found a system that sticks around for more than a few months. So on a whim I did some searching and came across:

Which made me want to switch back to paper for now. Then my mind jumped over to difference to tracking my knowledge versus my tasks. I tend to mix the two together and then have my little nuggets of knowledge get mixed up with unfinished tasks or tasks, infused with knowledge, discarded when done. I find this most often occurs with my development work. Which circled me over to one of my familiar topics that I revisit every couple of years. Creating a personal wiki. And whenever I think wiki, I think TiddlyWiki.

Turns out I'm not the only one who thought of maybe hosting one on Micro.blog

Hosting my wiki on MB...? - Hosting on Micro.blog - Micro.blog Help Center

I came across this video next. A little meandering but I really enjoyed it.

Joe Armstrong & Jeremy Ruston - Intertwingling the Tiddlywiki with Erlang | Code Mesh LDN 18 - YouTube

Now that video brought up a term that I hadn't heard in a long time: Quine. A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. Which took me back to my first foray into learning about the indieweb and thinking I might like to start a blog. I built a little self-saving HTML engine back then. The code isn't the best, but it worked.

GitHub - heyloura/stunning-indie-web: Trying out a concept to create a indie web blog engine

I wonder if I could code my own little TiddlyWiki clone and make a little personal knowledge management system out of it. Hmmm 🤔

Which meant I almost immediately started a little local project to see if I could get something simple up and running. I'm making use of:

It's still rather undefined at this stage. I want it to be a quine like TiddlyWiki, because that seems like a fun concept. I want to use web components to get a bit more familiar with them. I want to be able to tag notes and support backlinks. I'll share more as I play around and build things out.

Hexcrawls and Dungeon Crawl Classics

I'm running the players through The Dark of Hot Springs Island, which is a hexcrawl. It's basically a play style where you have a map, a bunch of random tables, and then you piece together what happens while the players explore. This particular one has tons of tables, plus a dash of objectionable content I want to filter out. So I wanted to see what was out there to make this as easy as I could to run.

I found this neat little program called Hexdescribe where you can describe the map and create a bunch of random tables to apply to the areas on the map. The syntax to build these out it pretty simple and powerful. The map I came up with is this:

text font-family="monospace" font-size="1px"
0103 ocean
0104 ocean
0106 ocean
0107 ocean
0202 ocean
0203 dark-green village "HS-01"
0204 ocean
0205 ocean
0206 dark-green trees "HS-14" 
0207 ocean
0302 ocean
0303 dark-green trees "HS-02"
0304 dark-green trees "HS-05"
0305 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-09"
0306 dark-soil mountains "HS-15"
0307 dark-green keep "HS-19"
0308 ocean
0401 ocean
0402 dark-green trees "HS-03"
0403 dark-soil mountains "HS-06"
0404 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-10"
0405 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-16"
0406 dark-green trees "HS-20" 
0407 dark-green trees "HS-23"
0408 ocean
0501 ocean
0502 dark-green village "HS-04"
0503 dark-green trees "HS-07"
0504 rock "HS-11"
0505 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-17"
0506 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-21"
0507 dark-green trees "HS-24"
0508 ocean
0601 ocean
0602 dark-green trees "HS-08"
0603 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-12"
0604 rock "HS-18"
0605 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-22"
0606 dark-green forest-mountains "HS-25"
0607 ocean
0702 ocean
0703 dark-green trees "HS-13"
0704 ocean
0705 ocean
0706 ocean
0707 ocean
0802 ocean
0803 ocean
include gnomeyland.txt

Which displays the island the adventure takes place. Though I did need to tilt it to make the hexes line up.

The next thing I did was take the random encounter tables and hex descriptions and add them in. But that produces a lot of text. So I altered it to use global variables and display information for only one hex at a time. It does require me to go in an update the location of the players each time it runs, but I find it worth it to have a much more concise output. Here is a sample of what my output looks like:

Water Imp: Init +6; Atk claws +5 melee (1d4) or water jet +10 missile fire (2d6); AC 16; HD 2d8; MV 40’ or swim 80’; Act 1d20; SP chill water (when submerged, may freeze 20’ diameter sphere of water to subzero temperatures), vulnerable to fire and heat, elemental traits; SV Fort +8, Ref +8, Will +8; AL N. Init 18; HD 14; Dilute,Simmer,Wave Init 7; HD 9; Pool,Globe,Spout Interesting Flora: Constrictor Vine: Roots that resemble pale hair grow outward from central bush for 30’ to 50’, then constrict back. Reshape and destroy areas. Edible berries.

The Rusted Hydra (hs-16-01) Ancients A spire of basalt 30’ tall, 20’ in diameter, and covered in smooth vertical channels rises from an overgrown slope. A red-brown statue of a seven-headed hydra stands atop the spire, mouths agape in a frozen roar toward the sky. Rainbow-colored flowers bloom thickly around the outcrop.

And a sample of the code that produced that:

;Explore Hex
1,
Weather: [[same type] [same currentWeather]]
Wandering Encounter[[same type] Wandering Encounter]
Interesting Flora: [Interesting Flora]

;hs-16-01 explore description
1,[global store Mountainous-Jungle as type][Explore Hex][hs-16-01 explore]
;hs-16-01 explore
1,The Rusted Hydra (hs-16-01) [The Rusted Hydra]
;hs-16-01 investigate description
1,[global store Mountainous-Jungle as type][Explore Hex][hs-16-01 investigate]
;hs-16-01 investigate
1,The Rusted Hydra (The Dark) (hs-16-01) [The Rusted Hydra]
The Dark
[The Rusted Hydra The Dark]
;The Rusted Hydra
1,
Ancients
A spire of basalt 30’ tall, 20’ in diameter, and covered in smooth vertical channels rises from an overgrown slope. A red-brown statue of a seven-headed hydra stands atop the spire, mouths agape in a frozen roar toward the sky. Rainbow-colored flowers bloom thickly around the outcrop.

Getting all the info from the adventure pdf into the right format was a lot of copy-and-paste. But using hexdescribe made it super quick to start running the game when I was finished and it gave me all the pieces I needed to start crafting the story for the players.

Another thing I added for fun, the tables for weather. I used the concept of a hex weather flower and now I can enter in the weather they just encountered and get what the weather will be. Here it the input I used for the weather portion. I hope to extend it with actual randomized descriptions of the weather at some point.

Anyway, that was a lot to jot down. It’s time for some tea and to find a good book to read. 🍵📚

Until next week,
Loura

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 09:56:05 -0400

Schedules aligned and we managed to fit in a DCC game last night. The players finished Sailors of the Starless Sea and each had at least one surviving character. impressive! Now I’m tossing them to Hot Springs Island to see what happens 🎲🐉⚔️

Dev Diary 0005 - Week of October 30th

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 10:16:53 -0400

Job Related

This week ended up being a short week as well so I didn't quite get through my to-do list as I planned. But I still managed to straighten out the application permissions and role creation (which groups common permissions together). I wrote several more unit tests and started mapping out a QA test plan. My boss said one of the help desk employees will help out testing application so I want to make sure that testing is approachable and that we have a good way to track issues in Asana (the project management system my company uses).

General

Sick kids, sick husband, sick me. Though I avoided the head cold that was going through the rest of my family my wisdom tooth infection was pretty bad. So I got it removed on Thursday. Ouch.

Side Project - Lillihub

Besides playing Animal Crossing, I worked on my side project and updated it with a couple new things and all the changes I wrote about from last week.

The biggest one I think people will like is side swiping images (when there are multiple) on small screens. I tried getting it to look good and work well on a large screen, but horizontal scrolling is just a difficult UI monster at that size without resorting to JavaScript. So I played it safe and only did the swipe on small screens. I'll continue to ponder how to make it work desktop users.

In general, on the server using a DOM parser I check each post for multiple images. If I find multiple images I save a reference to that image (or the anchor element if the image is in an anchor tag) and then remove it from the DOM. Then I create a new div container with the css markup I need and append it to the bottom of the post, placing each image inside.

It isn't 100% perfect, if the underlying blog post had malformed HTML tags, or really small images... things can look a bit strange. But overall it works as I expected.

I did get rather frustrated trying to implement "last seen" functionality. I kept running into issues setting a cookie with a post id. I'm not sure if it's because I was doing it inside a GET request or if it's because I'm using chunked transfer encoding or something else. I'll need to dig into this.

Here are the other things I did:

The post editor now has spellcheck enabled
The post editor now has a character counter
Made UI consistent across bookmarks, bookshelves, manage blog area with same action button format as the posts
Manage blog posts now shows the full text of the blog post for long posts as well as short posts
The permalink for the post is now above the comments
Added in a favico.ico
You can now unmute and unblock users (from their profile page, under Advanced)

Also, lots of little bug fixes everywhere. Some from when I refactored and some that were there all along.

I also released the source code! Yay!

I'm not sure why showing people my code, outside of work, bothers me. Imposter syndrome? Spending too long as a solo developer and developing bad coding habits? Maybe.🤷‍♀️ But in any case. It's up there for people to take a look 😄

Until next week,
Loura

Idea: Mini-adventure cards

Sun, 14 May 2023 10:39:34 -0400

I’m rather excited to run a Dungeon Crawl Classics game in a couple weeks. I’ve been making some mini-adventure cards to have on hand for inspiration. After trying out a couple of card sizes I think I like the 5inx7in format the best.

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 09:22:08 -0400

I absolutely love my new journal cover. Animal Crossing is my jam and I thought I’d missed my chance since this design was released before I had a Hobonichi journal. But my husband surprised me with it this week 😊❤️

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 19:24:17 -0400

I’m looking forward to family game night tonight 😁

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 14:52:33 -0400

My son is getting ready to run his first d&d campaign with some friends so I’m spending the afternoon helping him scale and print out maps. He’s responsible for all the cutting and taping together. 😁

Session One - Portal Under the Stars - 1.1

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 16:02:57 -0400

This contain spoilers for the Dungeon Crawl Classics level 0 funnel adventure The Portal Under the Stars by Goodman Games

To go to the start of this adventure visit my post - Dungeon Crawler Classics - Solo Play

Session One

Being a peasant is hard but maybe your luck is about to turn around. The stars have aligned in a strange pattern and that old tale you heard so long ago maybe wasn’t as foolish as you thought. Sure enough there is a shimmering portal right in front of you, just outside of town near that old and strange rock formation. There are riches there, you’re sure of it. And you’re not so sure it’ll still be there if you take the time to wander back home and grab more supplies. It’s been a hard and long winter and didn’t the tale promise vast riches inside? You decide it’s time to take a chance and make it big. So you step through the strange bluish light and to your utter astonishment it looks like a good dozen or more of the town’s folk had the same idea as you. You shuffle closer towards them into the stone hallway and unconsciously group up next to some familiar faces. At least you don’t need to ransack the crazy war-wizard’s hideout alone.

The Not So Brave Adventure Party

With some hushed arguments and a fair amount of shoving all sixteen brave-ish souls eventually formed four groups and one “lucky” soul was picked to march in front. You did notice that the crafty and more persuasive folks weren’t the ones out in front. They made themselves cozy in the back of their groups. Also, there were a few animals milling about as well. Who ever heard of a cow brought along in ransacking a dungeon? And was that a falcon on the elf’s arm? You grip your own “weapon”. It was better than nothing, and from the sounds of it your group was ready to begin exploring this hall and the strange door at the end of it.

Group One	Group Two	Group Three	Group Four
Golda Woodcutter	Gared Caravan guard	Fred Dwarven miner	Thudle Dwarven miner
Mara Halfling chicken butcher	Wisia Turnip farmer	Walter Rice farmer	Leth Fortune-teller
Rime Butcher	Reda Dwarven miner	Oror Elven artisan	Mabell Fortune-teller
Palard Halfling glovemaker	Browe Wheat farmer	Anelen Elven falconer	Clatte Wizard’s apprentice

Area 1.1 - The Portal Entrance

While you waited for anyone to do anything, you appreciated how the entrance faded from the stone ruins you came in from to seamlessly becoming solid flagstones under your feet. Even the starlight filtered in from behind you. Down the hallway you could see that there was a large solid wooden door. It appeared to be banded with iron and was decorated with jewels in an odd assortment of star shapes and some unreadable inscription. You’d need to get closer to the door to figure out if that pattern meant anything. Your group came up with a plan and from the muttering around you it sounds like the other groups did as well. Even though you all had a rough game plan, nobody wanted to take the first step further inward. Eventually Gared, leading group two began heading to the door.

Group	Initiative	Action One	Action Two	Action Three
One	17	inspect the entrance	go to door	inspect the door
Two	18	go to the door	look for traps	try and open door
Three	4	study the star shapes on door	inspect the hallway	check back on entrance
Four	16	check hall for traps	inspect the door	open the door

You watched as he jostled the door handle. Locked. Another group attempted to find hidden clues around the entrance, but came up empty (DC 14, rolled 5). There were no traps in the hallway, group four deduced this fact given that the second group waltzed right over to the door. But they double checked it anyway. The last group sent their best and brightest to decipher the meaning behind the door’s inscription (DC 20, rolled 13) but even they couldn’t make any sense of it. So everyone tried again, each replacing each other and trying anew. But once again all failed in their endeavor.

At last Gared attempted to pry open the door with brute strength. As a caravan guard one would think he could handle breaking open a door, but alas, his muscles failed him. He made a good show of it to impress the others (DC 15 STR, rolled 3) but his terror at what might lie behind the door caused him to falter in his task. While the groups wandered about the hallway and argued over who should try forcing open the door again, Walter, once again near the entrance, had a sudden flash of insight. The stars on the door were constellations! And in fact, in just a couple of hours the sky outside would probably match that pattern.

You’re not sure whether Walter convinced the others to wait the couple of hours to try opening the door, or if it just took that long for Gared or anyone else to overcome their fear enough to try and break the door open again. But either way, when Gared finally grabbed the door handle, the door swung open effortlessly and beyond it lay another dark hallway.

Wearing my DM hat: Mon did I roll poorly for the characters. But luck saved the day and they got through unharmed by the trap on the door, which would have triggered if it had been forced open. The poor peasants have gained 1 XP. Below are the notes I took as I was working through

Dungeon Crawler Classics - Trying Out Solo Play

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:55:25 -0400

I haven’t played a good table-top, dice slinging, rpg game in about six years. So the urge to play has been building for a while. But my schedule is absolutely packed to the brim and my old game friends also have schedules that are equally packed. There isn’t a way to fit in a gaming session with any regularity. Then Wizards of the Coast pissed off a huge portion of the D&D community with some rumored changes to their OGL and I decided to look around and see what else was out there. I came across several new-to-me rpg systems and I wanted to give them a try. Could I somehow play one by myself? Turns out many others have had the same thought and there are quite a few different ways to go about it.

I could look for a system geared towards solo play or pick up an indie pdf that “solo-izes” a typical group play system. There are also random tables galore on the web that I could roll against and techniques of using dice to answer “yes/no” or likert scale questions to try and run my own campaign… with myself.

But what I wanted was to play Dungeon Crawl Classics with the free pdf lite rules and the little adventure printed in the back. I did see another blog post of someone else trying this out. You can see it here Portal under the Stars – DCC RPG but I didn’t read much of the post since I didn’t want to spoil the adventure.

So I’m gonna give it a shot and jot down how I’m approaching solo play and what’s happening to my poor party as they enter the dungeon.

Solo Play Approach

Dungeon Crawler Classics uses a dungeon against a randomized group of level 0 peasants to generate characters. This process is called the funnel. I used the Purple Sorcerer - 0-Level Party & Tourney Generator to roll up 16 characters and then used a random fantasy name generator to give them names. Any character that makes it out alive can become a proper level one character and is ready to have more adventures.
I kept my characters grouped as they were on the random generator printout, which printed them out, four to a page.
I’m printed out the adventure and covered it with sticky notes. The only thing visible to start is the italicized player introduction text.
My initial approach is to write down a series of actions (max 3) for each group that they would do based off of the introduction text/room text. I’ll also roll and record the initiative at the group level.
- I determined the marching order for each group and assumed that the one in the lead is the one taking point on any action that is happening. I also am assuming that my group remains clustered together as they explore.
- Then I’ll reveal the next paragraph of text and try to resolve it with the actions I already planned out.
- Combat will interrupt my table of actions and take precedence. Based on what they characters were doing I’ll know if they are surprised or not (at the group level) and I already have initiative. If characters needs to make a decision, say to run one way or another or to attack back, I will roll a dice to determine what they do.

Session Play Logs

I expect this adventure to take me a bit to finish. Both because I’m juggling 16 characters and because I’ll probably only be able to fit in 20-30 minutes of play time here and there.

When I finish a session I’ll post them and then update this section with a link.

Session One - Area 1.1