During this past Halloween weekend, I was in a Montréal pub with my friend, Marc Guenette, celebrating the second half of my birthday travels and rooting for the Toronto Blue Jays to bring a World Series championship to Canada. Being of a similar age, we were discussing various life milestones and I remarked about how turning 60 didn’t really bother me. The whole “it’s just a number” thing aside, the point about why it didn’t bother me was rooted in one comment I made during our conversation, a point he wholeheartedly agreed with. “My life’s not over. I still have a lot to offer. I’m still hungry.”
I’m still hungry for the wonders of life: family, friends, travel, creativity in all its forms.
People, as I’ve begun to notice, age at different rates, numbers aside. You can see it in how people talk about their personal goals, if they still have any, and other important things in their life. For some, their life is now all about the grandkids. Now, I’m not passing judgement here. Far from it. Grandchildren are a joy. My granddaughters, Alina and Mikaela, are bright, fun and engaging girls who are blossoming into their tween years. For one reason or another, I went months without seeing them this summer and fall and the last two visits with them were filled with lots of laughter and roughhousing, though they are both getting a bit big for the latter. (I had to have my eyeglasses fixed the other morning because they went flying off my head during one tussle. Shhh… Don’t tell their parents.) They are not, however, my raison d’être. I still have my own personal interests and I am still going to pursue them with the (mostly) same vigor that I did in my younger days.
The End of Act III
The end of Act III came with a bang, but is finally ending as a 2.5 year long whimper. Getting laid off in May 2023, while a hit to my pride, became a blessing in disguise and served as the catalyst for the remainder of the scene. The house that I (still) currently co-own with my ex-wife, is heading to the market, a court-mandated sale based on our 12-year-old divorce agreement. While the process has dragged on beyond the point of reason, assuming that all parties were capable of acting reasonably, it is coming to an end … soon-ish. It has taken a lot of work, patience, and a deeper understanding, on my part, of the separation of how things should progress and how things will actually progress. How things should have progressed would have involved a maturity on the part of my ex-wife that she is quite incapable of and, considering how long we lived together, should not have taken me by surprise, although surprise is a strong word here. In the end, I’m not surprised that I had to get hands-on and direct that particular sub-plot of my life. In the end, it should not have taken me that long to understand that the square peg was never going to fit in the round hole.
In the end, the situation has allowed me to fully understand and appreciate what it means to lead a Christian life. Practicing patience, forgiveness and understanding is not a 9-to-5 job with weekends off. It requires 24/7 diligence, especially when dealing with people who are not you, who don’t think and act the way you think they should, and are at the end of their rope with their own struggles, if you bother to look hard enough or compassionately enough. It requires a separation of want vs need and an accurate assessment of how you want something to happen and how it is actually going to happen. The personal angst of the past 2.5 years finally led to an internal crisis point where I was in a position where I could make a phone call and have my ex-wife jailed, my autistic son sent to some kind of home and their personal belongings sent to a landfill, traumatizing my son who is already struggling with the need to move from the only home he’s ever known. A more selfish version of me would have made the call and, to be frank, I did contact my lawyer and came within a hair’s breadth of initiating that process. Instead, I rolled up my sleeves and got directly involved, finally understanding what it was going to take to help them move. And by helping them move, I mean that I have done and continue to now do all of the leg work with finding an apartment (check), emptying furniture and packing it (check), scheduling movers (check) and transferring utility services from the landlord to her (pending). It took far too long to realize that waiting for and wanting her to change was an effort in futility.
The End of Brick Mill Games, LLC
While trying to empty a house containing decades of someone else’s personal items may seem like a time-consuming effort, and it is right now, the biggest time investment that I had been making over the past 2.5 years was a software venture called Brick Mill Games, LLC, where I was chief developer and 50% partner. That, too, sadly, is coming to an end. When Paul Chicoine and I made the decision to start this venture, sitting at a hotel bar, we fully understood that we might be biting off more than we could chew. And… we were right. There was just too much work to do and we tried to do it on the cheap while keeping our day jobs. Hindsight being 20/20, while the basic idea was good enough to pursue, trying to accomplish our goals during what free time we had in between our career and family responsibilities, and other interests, was too ambitious. While I was able to commit full-time to the effort after getting laid off, or, at least as much full-time as I could commit, I was simply getting burned out by the effort. When passion projects become drudgery, it’s tough to push through it and the writing was on the wall. And so, Brick Mill Games, LLC will cease to be a legal entity as of end-of-year 2025.
Cue the Stagehands
Like all good plays, Act III deepens the crisis while Act IV brings resolution. With the constant pull of Brick Mill Games absent, I am now free to pursue my other side projects with some renewed, aforementioned vigor.
The TOCS System
The double-blind wargame system that Brick Mill Games was creating, aka TOCS (Tactical Operations Command System), is still active, though with much reduced scheduling. Without the urgent need to build a viable company whispering in our ears, we can still pursue the project but in a hobbyist role. There are still technical tools and fees to pay for to continue the project, such as domain and server fees, but the two largest annual fees, the Massachusetts Annual Report and Income Tax fees, go away. Paul and I have agreed to simply share the fee load equitably and keep building the project as time permits.
An added benefit of this reduced pressure is that I am able to address latent bugs and technical debt in some of the tools that I had written to support the project. Software applications are not built in a vacuum; they require software building blocks which provide necessary functionality. Sometimes these building blocks, aka libraries, are built in-house; sometimes they are built by outside providers.
Quite a bit of the library code the TOCS System relied upon was built in-house. Unfortunately, the focused drive to build the application meant that issues in the libraries, unless they blocked app development, were noted in an ever-growing to-do list. I can now address these.
From this point on, I will be managing all of those non-TOCS-related software tools personally while treating the TOCS System as a customer of those tools and technologies.
Mill #6
Going forward, Mill #6 will become my new brand as I find time for my other, related software and board game projects. As you cannot assign copyright to a DBA (doing business as), and since I have no interest to incorporate “Mill #6” as yet, Mill #6 will exist as a brand and nothing more.
Natural Intelligence
There will also be a second brand, or mark, that I will be attaching to my software projects as well. NI, for Natural Intelligence, will accompany my works going forward. At its heart, it is a statement that I will never use AI technologies in any of my software projects. The reasons for this are many, and I will detail some of them in future posts, but the primary point about not using AI in my projects is accountability. It is not enough to merely have the idea. You need to stand behind the quality of its implementation. You need to understand, and/or actually make, the myriad design and implementation decisions required to bring a quality project to fruition. While I feel that the application of AI technologies can be extremely beneficial as a supportive analytical tool in some realms of science, I feel that its use in writing code is misplaced.
Even more concerning to me, beyond the application of AI, are the questionable ethics of the corporations and other entities regarding the training of AI models via the wholesale theft of imagery and other forms of art and intellectual property that form the underpinnings of it all. When the corporations that are building AI models are also developing, or in league with the corporations that are developing, the quantum computing technologies that can easily and quickly crack passwords, how much of your on-line work is safe? The answer is: None. To that end, my initial, post-BMG projects will be aimed at developing my own sets of tools to wean myself from the free, on-line code repositories that I use to house my code.
We have entered an age where ownership of your digital media, of your digital property, of your digital selves, is ripe for harvesting. It will soon be possible, or is already possible, for an AI model to scour your Facebook feeds, links and photo libraries and generate an artificial version of you. That version will be a purely on-line entity of course, at least until robotics and AI sentience merge, but those artificial versions could cause quite a bit of damage. If you thought financial identity theft via stolen documentation was terrible, try proving that those posts on X or Facebook or those messages to your bank granting withdrawal authorization weren’t from you when AI models will be able to mimic your mannerisms to a tee. Even if/when institutions require visual confirmation, an AI model will be able to fully mimic you visually through generated video coupled with LLM response generation.
In the short-term, however, I simply don’t want my intellectual property to be harvested, especially when code repository sites like GitHub, now owned by Microsoft, is integrating CoPilot into it. Your intellectual property is not safe when AI agents have access to it.
Board Game Projects
My work with NES will also increase with the added time on my hands. Over the past couple of years, I and the rest of the NES crew have been working with John Butterfield on On Hell’s Highway, a new edition of John’s classic from the 1980s. Updated graphics, rules and OOB will make this game a winner. I think I’ve play tested this game close to 20 times now and I’m still not bored with it. It is heading for a mid-2026 release, but don’t quote me on that.
Another classic is NES’ own Killing Ground with its D-Day expansion, Overlord. I have been offered the developer role in bringing about a new edition which will put both games into one box. In that vein, work has already begun on combining the two rulebooks, and different logistics systems, into one coherent system. We have a lot of work to do still, but I’ll keep you in the loop as work progresses.
Steel & Steam will be resurrected yet again. In between other projects, I’ve been running through all of my development tools and getting it ready for a return to the table. Version 3 returns to the simplicity of Version 1, but adds more optional rules for people who want a more cut-throat economic game. One addition will be fuel boxes on the train cards. Instead of having to constantly remind players and/or handle money every turn, players will pre-buy their fuel for their trains and remove fuel every turn instead of forking over cash. Those small cash transactions add up to effectively make the game go longer than it should. In order to purchase fuel, you need to be at your destination city or you need to visit a major city en route. In the early game, you might be making fuel stops more often than you’d like, especially on longer deliveries. This makes access to cities like Chicago and New York more important in the early game.
A Series of Catastrophes is the name I’m giving to a corps-level WWI game that I’ve begun working on. This work began as a question posed by Mark Hinkle over a glass of scotch. “As a WWI buff, what is your favorite WWI game?” I don’t have one. I do own quite a few: Mike Resch’s 1914 series, Vuca’s 1914: Nach Paris, Nuts Publishing’s 1918 series. I have yet to play them, although Nach Paris is currently on the table. They are, for the most part, division-level games. They get into the nuts & bolts of moving divisions and artillery assets around the map. I want something simpler, yet not simple. I want a game that captures the ebb & flow of the early- and late-war mobile war as well as the positional warfare that characterized the mid-war exertions. For the latter, I want the players to feel that a breakthrough is possible, but not likely. Overall, I want the game to be playable, engaging, historic and fun.
Raise the Curtain
Work on all of these projects has already begun in earnest. The Crux Application Server, upon which the TOCS System sits, has already undergone one important overhaul, the need of which was highlighted when I bootstrapped three new applications and discovered cross-talk issues.
With the overhaul completed, I can consider future enhancements to the platform, such as WebSockets support and dynamic service sandboxing. Until then, however, I can build new applications for the platform and update existing applications.
Dice: The Dice Rolling Application
Dice is a random number, dice rolling service that I’ve been providing to the Internet-at-large since 2000. In 2018, it was hosted at brickmillgames.com. It is now moving to mill6.com.
The front-end hadn’t been touched in all of that time and it was well past time for an overhaul. Additionally, the back-end code needed a bit of polish. It is currently undergoing beta testing by a group of Britannia players who use its battle resolver module for on-line game play.
Gemz: A Private Ruby Gem Repository
Gemz was born from a need to have a private gem server that I could manage.
The Ruby community relies on and builds packaged libraries referred to as gems. There is a public gem server at rubygems.org that serves as a public code repository. All gems there are open source, meaning that anyone can download them and use them.
I do not load my own personal gems there. One, while I use open source software libraries, I do not contribute back to open source software beyond bug reporting and, rarely, fixing. Anything that I build on top of open source I consider to be private. Is it hypocritical? A bit. A line has to be drawn somewhere between freely available functionality and my own added value for my own personal use and gain. But, two, I do not want my time taken up with having to maintain publicly available software. If someone else uses my code, there is an implied expectation that I will also be receiving bug reports and should be fixing them in a timely manner. Priorities shift away from app development and into library management.
Which leads me to Gemz. I had already hosted my own personal gem server by using a publicly available gem called “geminabox”. I fired up a domain, configured the web server properly, wrote a small bit of Ruby code to handle paper-thin authentication, and called into geminabox for the heavy lifting and web page management.
As of Ruby version 3.3, geminabox broke. Ruby 3.3 was released on 25-Dec-2023. Geminabox was last updated on 28-Jun-2022. According to the rubygems site, there are five authors, but no one seems to have addressed the current issue. Geminabox works with Ruby version 3.2, but the language is currently at version 3.4 with a 4.0 under development. Supporting a website that is running a different version of the language adds management overhead.
Gemz is a gem server which works within the Crux ecosystem, including its authentication system. It manages the storage of gems as well as each gem’s metadata. While the system is built upon the storage of private gems, there are hooks which allow for the sharing of gems either publicly or among a set of users. I don’t need this latter functionality yet, but who knows.
Currently, there is a web browser, Javascript application that allows for gem uploading and management. The next step will be an API interface. Geminabox allowed for the downloading of gems via an API used by command-line development tools. Gemz has such an infrastructure in place, but is not fleshed out yet.
And… Action!
As you can see, there is a lot going on with more in the pipeline and my blog posts will be more frequent with my renewed focus. In between all of this will be travel and fiction and genealogy and the occasional cocktail recipe.
Stay tuned…