Hi All,
It's been coincidentally EXACTLY 1 year since my previous post about Gametje. I've been busy creating some new games and re-designing all the main pages with the help of a UI/UX designer. I have posted a few updates in the weekly What programming/technical projects have you been working on? threads but I thought this milestone deserved its own post. I published the new site earlier this week and also migrated to a new backend server. Here's a refresher of what it is for those that may have missed my previous post a year ago. I also recently started working on it full-time last month after not really working on it much from January-June this year. You can read more in my recent blog post.

What is it?

It's a set of online games that can be played in person with a central screen (like a TV) or remotely via video chat. It's also available directly in Discord as an embedded activity. It is playable in 9 languages and doesn’t require any downloads. Most games revolve around creativity in some form. None of the games require fast reflexes and can be played by just about anyone.

Where can I try it?

https://gametje.com and directly on Discord

You can use the "quick play" option to launch directly into the game as a guest.

What's different from last year?

There are 2 new games (Sync Think and Hide & Peek) and the main pages have been redesigned. I also implemented a game room concept which allows you to bounce between games without having to recreate it each time. I also integrated with Discord, which means you can play directly in their interface and also use Discord as an Identity Provider when logging in. The games themselves need a bit more polish (especially the two new ones) but overall they should work.

What am I looking for?

I'm trying to gather some feedback about the games and the overall concept. Are the games fun? Is this something you'd try with your family? What could be improved? Is the site clear about what you can/should do? Should I add some gameplay videos to give you a quicker feel for the games?

I'm also open to game ideas, I have a few in the backlog already but need to focus more on the business side at the moment. Any advice on the games/marketing etc would be highly appreciated.

Side note: I'm probably going to rename the whole site soon since the name Gametje doesn't exactly roll off the tongue and has caused some debate with Dutch speakers. The branding for the new name isn't quite ready. I am considering calling it GameBuffet as my avatars are all food related and its more of a "all you can play" offering for any games added to the platform.

Thanks for reading.

One question you can ask yourself before you invest in a company: why do I think the value will increase and provide a good return on my investment?

One reason is because the company is poised to grow at a rate above the overall market. These are called growth stocks.

Another reason is because the company is valued lower than it should be right now based upon a fundamental analysis of its fair market value. These are called value stocks.

Growth

With a growth stock, the current price may already be high due to strong demand, because people think the stock will be worth much more in the future. That is the risk you are taking, because if the stock does not outperform the overall market, you are now behind.

Having a good knowledge of the market in which a growth stock company operates is very helpful. There may be market disruptions (AI anyone?) that lead to outsized expected growth. Look at Nvidia’s 5 year chart. Tell me when everybody figured out Nvidia’s chips were amazing for AI processing.

Or Amazon during the pandemic. Look at this chart and tell me when everybody figured out that if you can’t go to the store to buy things, you are going to need to order it online.

These companies were sitting in a market that, for whatever reason, had amazing growth potential. The companies were able to use their core strengths to jump ahead of the overall economy in terms of value creation speed.

Value

As mentioned, value stocks are those that, after lots of research into the company and market itself, you think the price of the stock should be higher than it is right now. And you expect that stock price to rise as everybody else realizes all the amazing things you already realized.

The stock could have been beaten down by some newsworthy event, which caused everybody to panic sell. These stocks are trading nowhere near their high marks. However, if you think the stock will get back up to that high water mark, you may have found a good value stock.

Now, determining which stocks that have suddenly dropped in value are actually value stocks takes research. You don’t want to “catch a falling knife” by the blade and end up bloody. You want to be able to catch the handle! Does the company have enough cash to weather any storm? Are creditors piling up? Is the photograph printing market shrinking incredibly fast and the company is not making the right decisions? Back to that fundamental analysis of the company itself - if you look at the financials and are impressed with the leadership's team ability to navigate that quick drop in stock value, then you found a winner!

Warren Buffet seems to think United Health is a value stock. As you can see, the stock is about half of its initial value. Buffet is in this for the long term and is hoping that his research is correct in terms of UnitedHealth potentially doubling back up to its previous value faster than the market as a whole would double. Either that, or he hopes his clout is enough to make it a value stock in that more people will invest just because he did.

Holy cow done

That about wraps up the difference between these two types of stocks. Many stocks are a blend of the two, also. But seeing the extremes helps with understanding this way to differentiate stocks. Yes, there are more specifics that I didn't fully get into. And yes I am trying to be as approachable as possible with the topic. Hopefully this helped you!

Can you find an example of a potential value stock out in the world currently? How about a potential growth stock?

I've been in the lengthy process of degoogling myself. Email is done, Calendars are done, drive is more or less done (but now at MS, so... yeah) - but a real sticking point is Google Photos.

I just love looking up places and faces and the occasional "This day one year ago" albums really lighten up my day.

Additionally, I am a bit of a hoarder, I never ever throw out photos, so I have right now 101 GB of pictures since 2012. This will be a pain to migrate so I only want to do it once.

I tried Immich, but could not make it work on my NUC with a very limited connection to the Internet and probably because of the vast number of images.

I came across ente.io, and it looks promising. While 4.99€ per Month for 200gb isn't exactly cheap, it feels still okay for hosting all of my visual memories.

But before committing, I would like to get some more feedback on this service, what is nice and what is not so nice and why you feel comfortable with entrusting them with your pictures.

Edit
After the very helpful answers in this thread, I signed up for a 200 GB plan, downloaded all my pictures from google and I'm currently in the process of uploading them to ente. This takes a bit longer than I thought, but then again, these are 45.000 pictures and live-pictures.
So far, this feels pretty slick. Thanks for the feedback here.

My party recently finished Descent into Avernus, which we played over Discord and FoundryVTT given how scattered across the country we all are. A regular party of the campaign was the DM poking and prodding players for "someone write up a recap of last session", helping keep us all in the loop, players who were absent in particular.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that this could be automated, and Scribble was born.

Scribble is just a bash script wrapper that will:

1. Take a .zip of FLAC files from the Craig discord bot, recordings of each player present for the session
2. Use the tool whisperx to transcribe those audio files to text
3. Compile a transcript of the session and send it off to Gemini to come up with the recap
4. Parse the recap and send it along to Discord via webhook

After some trial and errors and tweaking, I've got it in a pretty good place, it's working very well for our campaign. So I docker-ized it and published it to share with the world anyone else who might get use from it. I'm not sure where else I could put the word out about this for anyone who might want to use it, so here it is. If you might find this useful, please, enjoy!

https://github.com/goose-ws/scribble

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.