Had a hankering to get my dozen year old Lulzbot 3D printer running after 5 years of collecting dust. Diagnosed a loose USB connection as the reason it would disconnect mid print. Opened it up to resolder it and saw this work of art. The wiring is so tidy.

Played my first couple games of Radlands with my son (he beat me both times). Deceptively easy rules hide a lot of depth. Can see us playing this one a lot.

The Cloudflare outage is causing issues on Table Slayer. We use them for asset storage and resizing. Apologies if you had a game planned for this morning. www.cloudflarestatus.com

All set for the kids game today!

I'm currently running two games as a DM. First is an adult Kingmaker campaign in Pathfinder 2E. Second is a 5E Phandelver campaign for kids. They couldn't be more different in prep. I can do the kids game stuff the day of no problem. So much content (videos, maps... etc) out there to draw from.

Table Slayer... the physical product...? My touch screen works pretty well, now I just need to make the playfield support touch like the editor does. If you're interested in buying something like this let me know. I want to build a device that you plug in some power and it "just works".

Watched Lady in the Water with the kids tonight. They loved it. Outside of Night casting himself in a pretty pretentious role (which no kid would know) I have no problems with that flick and think it was unreasonably hated at release. Some movies you just need to enjoy the ride and go along with it.

The direction is upward!

Hadn't updated my website in awhile. Figured I'd put up an "I did it" blog post about Table Slayer. In a bit of cosmic timing, I got a Fedex notice that my large format touch screen will be delivered later this afternoon. It'll be fun to do something physical. www.davesnider.com/posts/tables...

Really enjoying Fate of the Fellowship.

Migrating a large music library to a new NAS and taking the opportunity to clean up all the directories, file names, and meta tags. Thought it would be easy, but then I remembered I'm married to @nopartofnothin.bsky.social and she loves single tracks and Bluegrass live albums.

Our travel trailer is winterized and cleaned out till next season. My family spent seven weeks in it this year, a new record! Next trip will likely be to colonial Williamsburg in the Spring. If anyone has any good spots to check out within three hours south of there lemme know.

Banjo sometimes likes to sneak up directly to my face while I'm sitting on the couch. Ears back stealth mode.

Canadians are adorable.

Oh god, what am I doing? I'm rewriting the Kingdom Rules for Pathfinder Kingmaker. The original source is EXTREMELY rules heavy and unfun. I want something lighter that gives purpose to Kingdom turns.

I'm not the best at painting minis, but did a quick sorcerer for my son.

More than a decade ago, I sat down with @marcmaron.bsky.social in his garage to tape something new called a podcast. This time, he came to me to record his last episode. We talked about the power of conviction, decency in an age of division, and the true story of America.

Played a bit of Age of Wonders 4 with my son today. That game keeps getting better and better. Wish more people checked it out instead of grumbling about Civ.

Taking my boy to see Tron: Ares in IMAX. Pretty much assuming Tron is more of an aesthetic and soundtrack than a franchise these days, and I'm totally cool with that. "Bio-digital jazz, man!"

Summary of a DnD session with 10 year olds. 1. The Druid decided not to introduce himself to the party, pretending to be a squirrel in the tavern, then became the horse pulling the cart. 2. The party immediately tried to parlay with goblins, then back-stabbed them after agreeing to terms.

Now seems like a particularly terrible time to be shipping large screen touch screens across the pacific.

Every time I prep for a session (this time for my son's friends tonight) I find things to improve or fix in Table Slayer. I need to find a way to play two games a week instead of two a month to better winnow remaining issues. Small one today: make it so tooltips go away when erasing / drawing.

Am I the only person left that prefers a web page to load in two seconds with everything rendered vs. in one second with a dozen loading spinners or skeletons for each piece of the app? I feel like the move to client side has just made developers lazy towards the UX of their apps.

For folks interested in self-hosting Table Slayer... would it be acceptable to have some limited dependencies (Turso for DB, Cloudflare for a media bucket and websockets)? Both services have ample free plans. Making those two optional would be difficult. Everything else I've been able to remove.

Without seeing her post I walked into my wife's office and said "Are those TWO thesauruses?" We were meant to be.

Was thinking about following the NHL this year. Watching the opening match and the animated ads on the boards are driving me nuts. Are all broadcasts like this?

Prepping a campaign for my son and his friends. Going with DnD: Phandelver and the Obelisk Below because it's relatively straight forward and has SO MANY free assets out there. I wanted something easy to run and fairly linear to contrast with my Pathfinder: Kingmaker regular game.

After watching One Battle to Another I've got Steely Dan's "Dirty Work" stuck in my head. Love that song, but was never a big Steely Dan fan. The move was great. PTA always delivers the goods.

Still not entirely sure how to shoot demo videos of some of these updates, but I improved the touch controls for Table Slayer. Took some inspiration from Procreate with meaty sliders for size and opacity. Really happy with how much you can do without a keyboard.

Someone forked Table Slayer and started work trying to make it easily self-hosted. That was basically all I needed to justify putting the time in to do that work myself. I suspect it'll be a mostly academic exercise, but it'll make me feel good about being a good steward.

“You can’t throw oranges on an escalator!“ - California Split. Love the wall of sound dialog in Altman movies.

Realizing that I'm going through a small form of grief knowing that I only have two weeks of Maron's WTF podcast left. It's hard to say goodbye to something that's been in your ear weekly for 15 years.

Taking a break from Marvel Champions to learn how to play Vantage. It's nice having a board game buddy in your fam that bugs you to play.

Is there anything funnier than watching Denzel Washington laugh like a little kid as Don Rickles runs the room? He (Denzel) seems genuinely star struck. www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE_B...

Whelp. I'm crazy. I'm doubling down on Table Slayer and have some prototype hardware being shipped. 43 inch display with touch screen support.

Being a little league coach means you are also an amateur weatherman with constant anxiety about making the wrong decision on game day.

Having Claude figure out some random hardware error in my Linux system every once in awhile is worth all the money I pay for it. So nice to just feed it some crash logs and have it figure out an issue. In my case I had memory config issues in my bios, that under heavy load would cause a crash.

Added some new grid tools to Table Slayer that will auto-align maps if you know their grid size. Short demo and explanation in the change log. tableslayer.com/changelog

I picked a hard problem to build - Real time sync and conflict resolution. - 3D in the browser (ironically to mimic a 2D view angle) - Real life physical constraints (How many inches can I draw on a 40" TV?) - Math, and also hand wavy game math (the second diagonal is 10ft) - Multi-touch controls

Sad to read about Robert Redford. Two of his movies, "The String" and "The Natural", made my favorite 25 movies of all time. Of his later work "All is Lost" is likely my favorite. His characters had a way of being optimistic and sincere that showed humans at our best. www.davesnider.com/posts/movies

Improved Table Slayer's marker system. Markers can now "pin" tooltips on the player map. A good use case: this allows the GM to create ephemeral signposts to mark points of interest on a busy overland map (like my Kingmaker campaign).

At every place I've ever worked there was always a focus on the upcoming new feature. There was hardly any time spent making what already existed better. The idea was that your product was missing things that stopped it from growing. In reality, you were already growing, you just weren't retaining.

Love when I learn new things (to me) that are actually really old things. I'm trying to find a way to store Table Slayer's fog of war and drawing layers (which are just image masks with an applied effect) in a more performant way at the DB level. TIL about RLE. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-len...

I really like making little doodles to go along with my maps. It gives a lot more context to players about where they are.

Added a quick product update log to Table Slayer that covers all major features since beta. I always like simple feature announcements rather than bloated, congratulatory blog posts. When evaluating products myself, I tend to just look for consistency over time. tableslayer.com/changelog

Prepping to run Dungeons and Dragons (in my case Pathfinder) sessions is the only thing I have in my adult life that brings back the panic of cramming for a test.

Just about ready to merge support for video files in Table Slayer. You can still add effects on top or recolor them with color grading.

Burned my thumb pretty bad last night. Enough to scar my thumb. Interesting that my Utec locks no longer work, but my pixel does.

Also Table Slayer related. I'm in the works building a prototype large form touchscreen display. We'll see how it goes, but it would be very cool to just draw away fog, or make a measurement without needing a laptop or separate device.

Hey folks. I just built a little promo system for Table Slayer to give away free lifetime accounts. This URL will work for TWO copies. You can either attach to an existing party, or create an account and it'll automatically be upgraded. If you claim one, let me know! tableslayer.com/promo/bluesky