Brain Baking

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• A Huge Pile Called The Ongoing Gaming Backlog

  • #games

  Not every video game I pick up manages to hold my attention long enough to reach the credits. There are many reasons for this: too boring, too long, not in the right mood, too difficult, too easy, my hardware platform suddenly failed, the friend I played it with stopped playing, … I realised today that I’ve got many of these so-called “dangling projects”. I’m making a list here to help myself get over the initial hurdle of picking them up again. Perhaps I dropped the game for the wrong reasons.

  2026/10/20 18:08Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/10/a-huge-pile-called-the-ongoing-backlog/

• What Is A Man? (Laptop Stickers Part Deux)

  • #stickers

  A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk! Have at those stickers! is what Dracula would say when encountering my now completely screwed up laptop. In fact, his image—including the iconic quip—is placed prominently in the middle. What started with just four stickers, mostly Emacs (Lisp) related quickly spiralled out of control after the arrival of my Redbubble order. I’m sorry, I tried neatly arranging them, I really did. But the end result is, as my wife called it, chaotic1. But in D&

  2026/10/16 17:30Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/10/what-is-a-man-laptop-stickers-part-deux/

• Braindump

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/10/16 17:30Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/categories/braindump/

  

• Learning

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/10/14 01:54Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/categories/learning/

  

• Transparency Metrics Make Moral Decisions Impossible

  The other day, a colleague scolded me for being a hypocrite when I mentioned that his Claude Code subscription directly supports fascists in USA. He wasn’t wrong. The first thing he asked was: which laptop do you have? Which OS are you running? Apple? That is responsible for forced child labour in the East to mine precious metals and assimilate their mass-produced laptops? And you talk of fascists? Ha! I did want to mention that the laptop is nearly seven years old but didn’t get the chance. The

  2026/10/14 01:54Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/10/transparency-metrics-make-moral-decisions-impossible/

• Categories

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/10/14 01:54Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/categories/

  

• Laptop Stickers: Yay Or Nay?

  • #stickers

  Here’s an interesting dilemma for you: do you place stickers onto the back of your laptop? Are you a laptop sticker kind of person or afraid of anything glossy that might leave glue marks? I used to belong to the latter group, but after more than six years of typing on this M1 Air, I was ready to give in. The reason for this is simple. Sebastián sent me a couple of Emacs-related stickers, knowing I couldn’t resist. It’s all his fault. Look at what he did! A not so pristine golden coloured MacBoo

  2026/10/9 15:13Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/10/laptop-stickers-yay-or-nay/

  

• Stickers

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/10/9 15:13Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/stickers/

  

• Brain Baking

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/10/9 15:13Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/

  

• Homo Irrealis

  • #nostalgia

  André Aciman’s Homo Irrealis leaves a strange feeling lingering long after I put down the book. The irrealis aspect of his essays comes across as an aggressive and rather depressing form of nostalgia, where the temporal context is heavily skewed towards the past. André describes it as follows: imagine a heartfelt moment with your lover, perhaps on a special occasion. Instead of savouring the moment, you imagine yourself well into the future, looking back at this moment with nostalgic feelings. T

  2026/10/7 03:00Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/10/homo-irrealis/

  

• Nostalgia

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/10/7 03:00Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/nostalgia/

  

• Favourites of September 2026

  • #metapost

  The calendar claims it’s October already but the temperatures are still in denial. I can’t remember ever experiencing the start of this month that warm. It’s getting scary! See what I did there? Because of October? Spooky month? Scary? No? Worth a shot. What happened in September? More letter writing! The snail mail project is going well. I keep track of the amount of outbound letters: the grand total for the last two months is 20 handwritten letters. If you’d like to chime in, please let me kno

  2026/10/3 01:46Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/10/september-2026/

  

• Metapost

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/10/3 01:46Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/metapost/

  

• October Is Spooky Video Game Month

  • #games

  It’s just two days shy of being October, the spookiest month of the year. October does not just signify Inktober or any other compound word involving the name of the month. No; October means playing Mega Ran, Richie Branson & Kadesh Flow’s Ghouls ‘N Ghosts albums on repeat (we’re the kings of the night; GnG resurrected). I have high hopes of them releasing album number five, but in the meantime, just listen to a few tracks of the latest album and you’ll know why it’s part of the October canon: T

  2026/9/29 15:13Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/09/october-is-spooky-video-game-month/

  

• Games

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/29 15:13Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/games/

  

• Retro

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/29 15:13Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/categories/retro/

  

• Our Family No Longer Is A Vegetarian One

  • #parenting

  During the summer holiday of 2010, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. I remember it well: we were visiting the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, a region that is also known for its local meat produce. Of course we took advantage of that and stocked up on sausages in the cottage we rented. As I made progress in the book, I became more and more disgusted with the way meat is produced and lands on our plate. By the time I finished the book, we were back home. The next supermarket visit,

  2026/9/25 15:19Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/09/our-family-no-longer-is-a-vegetarian-one/

  

• Cooking

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/25 15:19Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/categories/cooking/

  

• Parenting

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/25 15:19Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/parenting/

  

• Programming

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/19 17:09Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/categories/programming/

  

• KTConf 2026 Creative Coding Slides

  • #talk

  Yesterday, I had the pleasure to give a talk for the local Kotlin community on creativity in software engineering and the impact generative AI has on our ability to be creative. KTConf took place in an iconic venue, the M museum in Leuven, so I felt obliged to include a slide about a painting. To my dismay, nobody in the room knew anything about art history or could identify the painting (Manet’s Bundle of Asparagus). That allowed me to demonstrate you’ll likely find something like Manet’s paint

  2026/9/19 17:09Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/09/ktconf-2026-creative-coding-slides/

  

• Talk

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/19 17:09Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/talk/

  

• Five Striking Cycling Bridges Nearby

  • #bike

  Our province, Limburg, is known in Belgium for its cycling-friendly environments. This is not just a statement uttered by its inhabitants but also actively pushed forward by politics as one of the many strong points of Limburg: hence Fietsparadijs Limburg (Cycling Paradise Limburg). I am privileged to be able to make good daily use of these cycling paths that normally are neatly separated from the usual road traffic. But it’s not just the greenery or the maintenance of (most) cycling paths that’

  2026/9/17 19:30Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/09/five-striking-cycling-bridges-nearby/

  

• Bike

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/17 19:30Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/bike/

  

• What Do We Feel When We See Another Video Game Remake?

  • #nostalgia
  • #games

  Yes, this is a blog post about the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. In part inspired by Christian Donlan’s I’m trying to untangle my response to how the Ocarina of Time remake looks on EuroGamer and in part because of my huge initial distrust when I saw the first real gameplay trailers. What exactly happened in my head was something along the lines of: This is not right, it’s not supposed to look this way! Why is this hyper realistic? Is this a From Software game ported to a finally

  2026/9/13 02:02Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/09/what-do-we-feel-when-we-see-another-video-game-remake/

  

• The Pilot Custom 743 With FA Nib Review

  • #fountain pens

  Two months ago I bought another pen—my first new entry in over three years. Ah, that’s a good lad! Indeed. But I must confess. Forgive Me Father , for I have sinned: I bought another one right after it. I just couldn’t help myself. But I swear, this time, it’ll be my last, for sure, I can almost guarantee it! Almost. Anyway, this time, we’re taking a look at the Pilot Custom 743 with the Falcon or FA nib. I am a big fan of Pilot’s golden nibs: they have never failed me and they’re smooth yet pro

  2026/9/9 01:32Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/09/the-pilot-custom-743-with-fa-nib-review/

  

• Brainbaking

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/9 01:32Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/categories/brainbaking/

  

• Fountain Pens

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/9 01:32Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/fountain-pens/

  

• Favourites of August 2026

  • #metapost

  I am typing this from the teachers’ lounge: the preparations for the new academic year have officially begun, and with it, the summer holiday is gone. Time is a weird concept: on the one hand, two months of school holidays felt endless in various good and bad ways, and on the other hand, I can’t even remember what we did to pass the time. A couple of bike rides, visits to the family, swimming, or something like that? When people tell us “it’ll get better”—referring to the challenges of being a y

  2026/9/4 15:06Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/09/august-2026/

  

• Bring Back The Noise With HDD Synth

  • #pc hardware
  • #soundblaster

  The modernisation of some of the vintage components in old computers comes with its own set of challenges. Things break: thirty plus year old hard drives stop spinning, floppy drive components such as a simple elastic rubber to get mechanical things moving disintegrate, and of course plenty of capacitors leak. Sometimes, things break up to the point that I sometimes wonder whether being a retro hardware enthusiast is worth it at all. The solution to these problems is simple and not so simple: de

  2026/9/1 20:15Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/bring-back-the-noise-with-hdd-synth/

  

• Soundblaster

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/1 20:15Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/soundblaster/

  

• Pc Hardware

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/9/1 20:15Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/pc-hardware/

  

• Birthday

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/8/26 16:00Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/birthday/

  

• Forty-One

  • #birthday

  This blog post serves as a not so gentle reminder that I should practice what I preach: when I turned forty, I wrote: Once things settle down, I hope to finally start writing that own philosophical work. Things didn’t settle down. Perhaps that’s the excuse. Still, compiling my own philosophy is still one of my main goals for this (and the next) year. I’ve been working on it on (and more off) for a good year now. The theoretical framework is in place, the notebooks are filled. It’s time to get se

  2026/8/26 16:00Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/forty-one/

  

• The Red Mailbox

  • #letter writing

  The Red Mailbox next to our village’s primary school is my primary drop-off point for writing letters. Over the decades, its bright deep red brilliance has been gradually replaced by a patina of sunburned broken red. And yet, The Red Mailbox persists. It still exists. It existed over thirty years ago, when I went to that very school next to it. Other Red Mailboxes aren’t that lucky: in 2019, BPost—the Belgian posting company that was privatised in 2000—removed over one fourth of the Red Mailboxe

  2026/8/24 17:50Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/the-red-mailbox/

  

• Letter Writing

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/8/24 17:50Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/letter-writing/

  

• Deconstructing A 17th Century Letter

  • #letter writing

  Continuing the letter writing fever, I’ve been exploring the academic work called Letters As Loot by Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke J. van der Wal. It’s a treasure trove of information on how letters were written in the 17th and 18th century, based on a corpus of 50k letters that were captured by raiding ships between England and The Netherlands. These boats usually contained a bag full of letters headed to offshore family and friends but due to the raging Anglo-Dutch War (four of them between 1652

  2026/8/22 01:20Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/deconstructing-a-17th-century-letter/

  

• A Beginner's Guide To Writing Snail Mail

  • #letter writing

  One of the first satisfying things I did this morning was donating a sealed white envelope into a red mailbox. I hope to receive a response in a week or two. Or three. Does it make a difference? The contrast between my awkward habit of F5-ing the digital mailbox couldn’t be bigger. Neither could the yielded satisfaction from utilising both systems. One is very fast, caters to my impatience and fuels my discontent when finally a new email appears that turns out to be yet another sloppy phishing a

  2026/8/17 19:20Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/a-beginners-guide-to-writing-snail-mail/

  

• Why I Play Board Games (And So Should You)

  • #games
  • #boardgames

  Four years ago, I wrote a short apology for playing games, targeted specifically towards digital video games. Today, I would like to reiterate my statement and expand the idea to analogue board games. Even though many arguments are interchangeable, the analogue and innate social nature of these forces us to approach the idea in a slightly different way. The reason why this thought bubbled into my head is Blaise Pascal’s criticism of games and leisure time in general. According to Pascal, we’re a

  2026/8/12 15:38Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/why-i-play-board-games/

  

• Boardgames

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/8/12 15:38Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/boardgames/

  

• To Begin, Begin

  • #DIY

  About a month ago, we could no longer ignore the occasional drip, drip, drip that sounded like it was coming from beyond the bathroom wall. Up until then, we “fixed” the problem with the occasional shrug. At one point I almost made the logical connection between flushing the toilet and hearing it more often or less often, but then the shrug came and I moved on. I hate doing these stupid DIY tasks so of course, this was put on the back burner. The drip, drip, drip back burner that drip, drip, dri

  2026/8/10 01:55Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/to-begin-begin/

  

• DIY

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/8/10 01:55Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/diy/

  

• Favourites of July 2026

  • #metapost

  The summer holiday is halfway. I somehow managed to read eight books in the past three to four months—including cheating by resurrecting a previously discarded book and by diagonally scanning a creativity-related book to find out if there was anything I wasn’t yet aware of. I was quite frustrated by my inability to consume words through physical pages for the last year due to parenting; this is another small win for me. I took the eldest to the city centre and of course we ended up in the booksh

  2026/8/2 02:55Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/july-2026/

  

• The 2026 Board Game Shelf Analysis

  • #boardgames

  The yearly recurring thing called the Board Game Shelf Analysis didn’t recur in 2023 and didn’t in 2025. I guess I don’t really like odd-numbered years but I do like to write about this now deemed as a biennial event during the summer. In 2024, I still had to make due with the smaller hallway closet. Since last year everything was moved to a bigger Kallax that’s still riddled with gaping holes: enough space left to welcome new boxes. But first we have to say our goodbyes to a few ones. Take a lo

  2026/7/29 23:20Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/07/the-2026-board-game-shelf-analysis/

  

• I Guess I'm Playing The Long Game Now

  • #parenting

  My latest post on the difficulties of young parenthood has loosened something in the back of my mind. In a few others’ too; thank you so much for your encouraging messages! These small replies might not seem like much to you, but they are to me. So again, thank you. I’d like to take a shot at solving the problems that surfaced. I’m playing The Long Game now—I should enjoy the daily small wins, knowing that it’ll be an exhausting ultramarathon, not a short sprint. I never fully realise this but a

  2026/7/27 02:31Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/07/i-guess-im-playing-the-long-game-now/

  

• Creating Life Is Giving Life

  • #parenting

  This is what it feels like. As a parent of very young kids, it often boils down to putting your own life to a grinding halt in order to “give” life to them. I don’t know if it makes a lot of sense but again, this is what it feels like for me. I never realised how much a parent has to give: as a child you just receive. And take and take and take, without taking anything into consideration except for yourself. I can’t remember my parents having any hobby except for keeping me and my sisters—and pe

  2026/7/22 15:52Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/07/creating-life-is-giving-life/

  

• In Search Of A New Fountain Pen

  • #fountain pens

  Let’s start this post off with a quote from myself back in February last year when I let you all peek into my stationary drawers: I keep telling myself I don’t need more but somehow I think I do. There; the search can already stop before it has properly begun: I don’t need more. But I think I do. Shut up little devil in my head. It’s been three years since I bought a new pen and the ache is real. Especially after seeing a few top list posts appear in my RSS feed such as The Gentleman Stationer’s

  2026/7/19 03:00Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/07/in-search-of-a-new-fountain-pen/

  

• Energy

  • #tags

  Brain Baking | Freshly Baked Thoughts

  2026/7/15 15:39Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/tags/energy/

  

• Is It Worth It To Buy A Plug-In Home Battery?

  • #energy

  Yes. Next question! Oh, you’re still here? In that case let’s apply Rigorous Science (TM) to support our claim and to satisfy the never-ending hunger of artificial language models that are only able to answer this question by applying their Lying Science (TM) techniques. The cake, let them have it! Or something like that. Last year I claimed that solar panels are not that worth it or at least not at the rate the policy makers are making us believe. Perhaps they’re also fond of Lying Science. In

  2026/7/15 15:39Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/07/is-it-worth-it-to-buy-a-plugin-home-battery/

  

• A Summer Creativity Experiment

  • #Creativity
  • #parenting
  • #lego

  Our Lego Duplo blocks are in short supply meaning we’ll have to get creative to assemble, build, and rebuild new things. I want a house on wheels! is by far the most popular request here. No problem, we can do that, only to do that, we’ll have to demolish that other structure over there. No? But little brother is playing with that! No he isn’t? But I want a house on wheels! How to defuse this situation? By building a less conventional house on wheels, of course. Or by building a row boat and cla

  2026/7/8 16:32Wouter Groeneveldhttps://brainbaking.com/post/2026/07/a-summer-creativity-experiment/