My name is Anthony, and I am currently the steward for this community’s platforms. I say “steward”, because I want our community to act more as a public service than as a private entity. While our forum is acting more as a communication and networking tool to connect individuals, our wiki will hopefully act as a hub for projects to grow and document progress. If our platform and community grow, I don’t want all of that project progress to rely on a single individual. or a single server - If something were to happen to me and/or the server, my hope is that someone else in the community is able to reboot the project with all of the data intact. To help solve this issue, an XML dump of the wiki contents are pushed to a public codeberg repository daily (https://codeberg.org/UnfinishedProjects/WikiBackups), and full/true backups (Cloudron “one-click” encrypted backups) are shared between myself and two other trusted admins (@www-gem and @alectronic). While I would love for their to be a way to share these publicly, I cannot due to sensitive information stored like the encrypted passwords and emails. However, between the 3 of - that leaves 2 other individuals who can reboot these platforms almost instantly to a new server and domain if needed, with all the data saved.

But enough about the UnfinishedProject platform, and a bit more about me, since this is supposed to be an introduction after all

Interests: While I have always admired those who are able to stick with something and become truly great at it, that just isn’t who I am - and I have long since come to terms with that. I often find new things that pique my interest, and a new project to work on - thinking about it every waking moment and hyper-fixating on the said project until the eventual burnout and abandonment of the project. So in short, I like to start projects - but I rarely finish them ¯_ (ツ)_/¯ - hence the motivation behind the name “UnfinishedProjects”.

Not to go back to speaking about the platform again, but my hope is that this platform will be perfect for people like me who love to dive headfirst into projects, even if they aren’t always able to see the project all the way through to the end. I hope that people can jump between projects and contribute their skills in small chunks without the requirement to commit long term.

With that said, my interests are always changing and I love to learn new thing - although sometimes the time to do so is a limiting factor. In the past I have pursued some of the following hobbies to various degrees of success:
Blender (3d modeling/sculpting), Stop-motion animation, Programming, Game Development (Godot mostly, but also Unity), Clay Sculpting, Tabletop/Board Game Design, Graphic Design (Inkscape mostly), Sociology, Linux, Reading (not as much as I would like), and whatever else my squirrel brain decides to go down the rabbit whole researching (⌐■_■).

Current Projects:

1. Amalgam: My main project is one that I have been working on for more than 10 years. I usually get myself super invested working on the project, abandon it - only to pick it back up in a couple of years. The project is Amalgam (this is a link to our wiki, and I have not yet fleshed this out - but will work on filling this in soon), a 2 player abstract board game. The rules are still getting tweaked here and there as more playtesting reveals overpowered strategies.
   The game can be tested here - but be warned that this is pretty much a “vibe coded” demo of the project to get all the rules working, and an attempt to try and get a bot to play against…spoiler: the bot is terrible and can hardly play the game. The Repository is here, and the README has links to the rules document, a video tutorial, and etc.
2. Chinese Mandarin Vocabulary App: This is sort of just a little side project that I have mostly abandoned for now, but may come back to in the future. Easier than explaining it, is to just go try it out in the browser here - but essentially it just lists through the HSDK 3.0 vocabulary words and tries to gamify the flashcards - allowing you to change fonts, simplified/traditional, hear the pronounciation, and actually write the hanzi characters. The “dream” for this app is to get other people on board to help turn it into a vocabulary app for many languages, and make it more fun and gamified. (side tangent: too many learning apps that are “gamified” are not actually fun - I think we should try to make a learning tool that is actually fun and you want to play). Disclaimer: this app is also a bunch of AI “slop”, and was originally just an app I was throwing together for myself to try and get myself to study Chinese vocabulary.

I am hoping to try and get myself away from typical social media platforms, and hopefully this platform will become my main place to post updates and such (other than my piefed/mastodon accounts for this platform), however I have been using Patreon as my way to post updates on my various projects for some time, as it allows me to upload files and such. It is essentially acting as my personal blog.
Patreon: My Patreon - note: I am not looking for donations, this account is just to share my projects

Sorry, I know my writing can get a bit off track and verbose, but if you actually made it through the whole post, thanks for reading and welcome to our community! I am genuinely excited to see what we can grow this platform into. I am hoping that we can make some genuine connections and help build up each other’s projects ( ◡̀_◡́)ᕤ

• Anthony

#introduction #FOSS #boardgame #hobby #about