Wouter Groeneveld
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Hello? Where Is Everybody?
The shopping centre we find ourselves in also has an IKEA nearby. My daughter & I pop in to walk through the isles that house the teddy bears. She picks out a giraffe that now lives by the name Giraffa or just Raffa. For once, we don’t really need anything else in this lovely Swedish store so we head…
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A Huge Pile Called The Ongoing Gaming Backlog
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…
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What Is A Man? (Laptop Stickers Part Deux)
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…
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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…
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Laptop Stickers: Yay Or Nay?
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…
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Homo Irrealis
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…
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Favourites of September 2026
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…
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October Is Spooky Video Game Month
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…
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Our Family No Longer Is A Vegetarian One
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.…
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KTConf 2026 Creative Coding Slides
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…
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Five Striking Cycling Bridges Nearby
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…
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What Do We Feel When We See Another Video Game Remake?
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…
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The Pilot Custom 743 With FA Nib Review
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…
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Favourites of August 2026
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…
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Bring Back The Noise With HDD Synth
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…
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Forty-One
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…
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The Red Mailbox
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…
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Deconstructing A 17th Century Letter
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…
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A Beginner's Guide To Writing Snail Mail
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…
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Why I Play Board Games (And So Should You)
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…
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To Begin, Begin
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…
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Favourites of July 2026
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…
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The 2026 Board Game Shelf Analysis
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…
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I Guess I'm Playing The Long Game Now
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…
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Creating Life Is Giving Life
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…
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In Search Of A New Fountain Pen
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…
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Is It Worth It To Buy A Plug-In Home Battery?
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…
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A Summer Creativity Experiment
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…
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Favourites of June 2026
The beginning of this month marks the official end of my own company. After just two years of establishing and owning Brain Baking BV, the notary ended it. There have been no professional activities related to the company since I switched back to education in December so for me it made little sense to…
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Postcard Teas: A Few Impressions
For almost ten years now, we’ve sworn by Mariage Frères when it comes to shopping for high quality loose tea leaves. The nearest shop, however, is in Lille, which is almost three hours away. Their webshop is crude and doesn’t allow for a taste session before buying hence we did buy our fair amount of…
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