adastra

16 February 2023

The World of Horizon Zero Dawn and Forbidden West

About a year and a half ago, I first discovered the world of Horizon in the video game Horizon: Zero Dawn. I was absolutely enamored with this world. It’s so strange and primordial, yet it’s so familiar that it makes you feel like a stranger on your own planet. Horizon is the world about 1000 years into the future, in which an apocalypse has caused humanity to be reverted to tribes of hunter-gatherers. And discovering that world was an absolutely fascinating experience, which went hand in hand with the story of this game. In this game, you play as Aloy, […]

9 February 2023

Unpopular Opinion: Harry Potter is not that great

Due to the release of the video game Hogwarts Legacy, there’s currently quite a bit of controversy about Harry Potter and its creator, who now spends her days spewing hate speech against transwomen instead of writing magical children’s stories. I would like to add my two cents to this discussion. As a millennial, I grew up with Harry Potter. I started reading these books when I was around 14 years old, and they played a significant role in me acquiring the English language, as they were some of the first books I read in English. I read every new book […]

6 February 2023

Experiencing nausea when gaming

Last week I wrote about my issues in gaming with dark mode, which seems to be the standard for video games. In this post, I would like to address another issue that stops me from playing a lot of games: dealing with nausea with gaming due to first person perspective, enclosed spaces, camera shake and related issues. Some time in the past 10 years, I have lost my ability to play first person perspective video games. While I was still able to play Skyrim in early 2012 without any issues (on the XBOX), I have since not been able to […]

31 January 2023

Dark mode as a commonly overlooked user experience issue in gaming

I’ve been a video gamer for over 20 years, starting out with classics such as Diablo I, Diablo II, Grim Fandango and Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption. While I did not always game as much, I’ve been getting back into gaming for the past couple of years with games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Valheim, Wasteland 3, etc. However, I noticed that I’m not as young as I used to be. 20 years ago, I didn’t really have issues playing video games, but these days, the number of games that I can actually play has become […]

29 January 2023

My PhD experience and #LeavingAcademia

If you follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn, you might already know that, since last week, I am officially a doctor (PhD)! And with that, my academic career comes to a close after almost 12 years at university. A good opportunity to reminisce about my experience in academia, and my reasons to not stay there. Bachelor’s and Master’s I started studying in 2011, after previously having worked as a web developer. Why did I leave my career as a web developer in the first place? Well, I wanted a new challenge, and since back then I used my lunch breaks […]

26 January 2023

The pros and cons of AI generated images

Since its release of v4, I’ve been an avid user of Midjourney, one of the currently most popular image generation tools aside from DALL-E and wombo.art. The current popularity of AI image generation tools has created quite an uproar among artist community, who fear for their livelihood. Personally, I think AI is a fantastic tool, that can help artists generate new ideas and improve existing art. Midjourney can create fantastic images, especially in the context of fantasy settings, and I’ve been using it primarily to create images for our Dungeons & Dragons campaign, such as images of the player characters […]

20 January 2023

Blog layouts through the ages

Welcome to adulthood, chaosworks.org! This domain name has now been in my possession for 18 years, and this year, in 2023, it has finally found a new purpose after having been a mere splash screen for over a decade. If you’ve followed my internet presence in the past, you probably know that I’ve always had some sort of website or blog. I have already mentioned some of these in my post Delving into the past of this blog from a few months ago. Now with chaosworks.org as the latest incarnation of my personal internet presence, as well as with a […]

16 January 2023

Data Science with Doctor Who (2005)

As a long time fan of Doctor Who (2005), I hit a wall watching the show around 2020. I really wanted to like the new (Thirteenth) Doctor, but somehow the show just wasn’t as magical anymore as it used to be in the old days. After I suffered through Orphan 55, I glanced over the IMDb Ratings of the show, and realized that I did not seem to be alone. The ratings had gone down significantly, and I wondered why this might be. So I created a spreadsheet and plotted the data of the ratings. I considered more advanced methods […]

5 December 2022

What makes a great teacher?

I recently had cause to reminisce about my experience in #teaching undergraduate classes at university, and especially about what makes a great teacher. My background in this is that I taught tutorials starting in 2015 and undergraduate seminars starting in 2018, I attended plenty of ‘train the trainer’ courses, and worked closely with a wonderful team of academic teachers for years. Aside from my teaching experience, I have obviously also experienced a vast variety of academic teachers as a student. Here’s my humble opinion on what makes a great teacher: Show enthusiasm for the topic. If you’re truly passionate about […]