Pocket Monster Brainworms
17 May 2026
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been programming non-stop for a good few weeks now, and one of my new friends has spurred me into a development frenzy that I’ve come full circle on. Let’s talk about it.
Where are the Dice?!
To put it bluntly, I’m not happy with them.
I’ve been through the wringer with my resins, between making and remaking molds, baking clay inserts, pouring out dozens of failures, and struggling to solve one small yet crippling problem after another. The most painful of these issues in the long term have been raised dice faces, which occur when resin gets between the mold halves and keeps the lid from completely and smoothly compressing. I’ve sanded off more than a few one-faces trying to get rid of some of the most glaring of these problem dice, and pretty much every d20 I’ve pulled has been a failure as a result. And even when the face comes out decent, the polish on the face just doesn’t come out right after working it. It’s either hazed, visibly scratched, just uneven enough to be irritating to look at, or all of the above.
That’s not to say I haven’t had any success. I’ve gone out of my way to experiment with mylar flakes in my first forays into the hobby, and they came out absolutely beautiful in the glory shots I took for them.
Running up against stubborn faces for so long despite all of my attempts to fix them has definitely worn me out, though. I have a table full of unsanded dice that are probably some of the best d6s I’ve pulled so far, along with a single full set of dice that doesn’t have raised face issues immediately apparent thanks to a new method of resin pouring I’m trying. It involved drilling holes into my best mold with a dremel until the room stank of scorched silicone! The catharsis alone was worth the trouble of opening all the windows and blowing the room out afterwords.
I’ll come back to dice at some point, without a doubt; I’ve invested too much in the hobby not to come back around to it in the near future. It’s just gonna be a bit longer until I can force myself to hit the grindstone again.
Broader Pastures in Keysmashing Space
Setting aside the fact that I haven’t posted here in well over half a year, I’ve found my muse with programming again, after losing it again, and getting it back again. And this time the rollercoaster of hobby-juggling hate has taken me on a path I didn’t see myself necessarily going down: Webapp development! Getting to this point wasn’t a one-week endeavor, either. Back in November, I did a deep dive on website development beyond the sparse toolings that Jekyll provides for static site generation, which is what I’m using for the majority of this site. I hammered away at building my own website to sell my dice on, completely re-inventing the wheel when I very well could’ve set up a Shopify page and been done with it. From backend database management of shop items and shipments to a full order processing pipeline down to Stripe payments, I did it all. I even drew a happy deer boye for it. What webstore can say they have a happy deer boye who dances for you when you place an order?
It was about the end of the third month that I realized how little I was actually getting done in the grand scheme of things, despite how much of the website I’ve put together and gotten working. Combined with my falling out with dice, and I just couldn’t work on it anymore. If and when I do get back to it, I’ll likely be tearing down webstore features and just redirecting to actual platforms for hosting business.
That didn’t change the fact that I’d spent multiple months on a project that didn’t actually get anywhere, both technically and visually speaking. I wasn’t impressed with the frontend features I’d coded up, and felt that there aught to be something more I could do to expand on user experiences.
So what was I to do but invest further into this sunk cost fallacy? If I was going to work so hard on picking up backend development skills, I might as well round it out with a frontend skillset. As is usual for new hobby dives, I kicked off a weeklong excursion through tutorial hell - this time to build a project with the React framework.
To say I didn’t know what the hell I was doing would be an understatement. There are all sorts of topics with webdev that you don’t pick up in the kind of application development a younger me was much more comfortable with. Stateful variables, references, effects, hooks, clientside and serverside rendering, Youtube tutorials that go through building a big project just expect you to follow along with programming these things in, but none of them actually explain what these things do or how they work. It took going back to the bare basics and tip-toeing along with a four hour Bro Code course to get a basic handle on things.
It was worth it in the end though. I’ve been trailblazing in Electron app development ever since I got through that four hour introduction, and I’m very excited for what the future holds. What I’ll say at this point is that I’ve once again been spending multiple weeks hacking together a project with questionable direction, but the goal is concrete and the app itself is very much functional in its current state. With any luck I’ll have an update on that particular endeavor in the near future.
Dreams Really Do Come True
Tangental to my recent Electron app development, I’ve recently been invited to participate in a Mystery Dungeon campaign, and it was thanks to a conversation with someone else in the server we’ll be playing in that I found the drive to do something I’ve been trying, failing, and wanting to do since I first got my hands on Java over a decade ago: I built a fully functional Mystery Dungeon map generator! Building something like this has been something I’ve wanted to do since I first began coding in high school, and I’d all but given up on it because of my lacking skillset with GUI development. Java just didn’t seem to fit the bill, and Python was just too esoteric for me at the time to really follow through. And gods forbid I tried anything of the sort in C++. All it took was four days of non-stop coding, and I now suddenly have a fully functional and complete application.
An actually completed project. The first I’ve ever actually put up on the internet. It feels weird, saying that I’ve actually finished something. For so long, I’ve worked on chatbots, tools, and small programs that didn’t really have a defined end goal. Every time, I would either lose interest partway through working on it, or deem it ‘good enough’ to … Also lose interest in continuing the project in question. This is the first thing I’ve actually closed the book on and labeled as a proper 1.0 release. I’m getting a bit teary eyed just thinking about it!
That’s not to say I’m done with it, though. There are over 100 maps combined between the GBA and DS era Mystery Dungeon entries, and the tools I’ve put into the project will go a long way in helping build sprite atlases that can be used as presets in the app itself. I’ll probably hack away at it here and there as I find the energy to do it. If and when I eventually give up partway through working on it, at least the tools for re-arranging and using the common format of sprite sheet are in there, so anyone else who wants to have a go at it can get their own tile sets going. Theoretically, people can make their own tile sets as well, if they want to.
I also need to figure out how to get animated tiles working. I’m not at all excited about it. I mean, look at that garbage!
The Marathon Continues
My current work in Electron app development will take the majority of my free time again, now that I’ve finished this excursion into personal interests. My current struggles involve figuring out networking between clients, servers, and a backend database to ensure that everything is up to date between server and client when it needs to be. Suffice to say I have my work cut out for me - Here’s hoping I survive the ordeal so I can make a follow-up post that’s just as cheery as this one! (And, just maybe, I’ll find the energy to polish up some dice, too.)
~ sophont ~