Digressing

Dear Tim,

I’ve taken a break from Kalmany for a bit even though I’m close. I guess I just need a break from it for a little while as it doesn’t have any new ideas in it right now, it’s just clean-up and making things work. Instead, I started looking at some other things.

Next.js is an interesting framework and I’ve used it for my actual occupation – it does make things easier in combining the API and the frontend, but I don’t think I’ll use that in Kalmany. At the moment, it’s easier to handle that in a separate area so I can manage it more effectively. But the various other features are helpful – bootstrap for example works great for collecting functions. However, that would require a bit of redesign.

Whenever I get into CSS, I start off with some built up bit of work and then try to fiddle it to fit my methods. Bulma is a great example of that as it was built to be mobile friendly, yet all of Kalmany has ended up prominently non-mobile friendly (you can definitely see it from trying to access Kalmany on your phone). Maybe I’ll come back to that, but I suppose its because I don’t see Kalmany as a phone exercise – with so much data it feels impossible to fit it onto a phone’s screen. But there are likely ways, and unfortunately, I feel like it would benefit more to have a whole separate frontend for it.

That’d be a pain.

Anyway, I spent some time working on a project for work using Next.js and that went well. I also started musing on a major voerhaul of Kalmany’s systems – the Location Update. There are a lot of aspects of Kalmany I’ve trivialised and abstracted to create the simulation and so there are a few things I can expand on in the future and create a more living/breathing simulation:

• The Time Update – track events in time. Plan out a whole citizen’s day. Have citizen’s age. Then, citizens can die. And then citizens can also be born. And therefore, citizens must have relationships. So there’s a lot to build out there – I’d have to write functions to determine relationships, deaths, cause of deaths, citizen births, citizen day-to-day activites; definitely their Status will become an important variable. And then, when it comes to voting, the votes will come in when the citizens have time in their day. Makes it very mobile.
• The Money Update – tracking capitalism at work. Taxes taken from citizens. VAT applied on goods and services. Industries, paying workers. Income calculated for companies. Accounts managed for each citizen. Effectively tracking the flow of moeny and being able to describe Kalmany’s economy. It could lead to even having a Stock Market that might make interacting with Kalmany even more interesting. This again would be big and I’d have to track each citizen’s current account, where they spend it, how they spend it, who receives it. This could come before the time update, or after.
• And then the Location Update – tracking locations. At the moment, I track each constituency as a conglomerate, but I could go into much more detail – tracking smaller areas, who lives there, where people move, the cities, the towns, the environment, and where certain objects are. Track when citizens go to work. Build out roads. I’d like to also build weather into this and have a page on the weather report – that could give a lot of colour.

There are smaller things I could look at too off the back of these three things, but they’re the major ones. I don’t know which I’ll do first but I did dabble in creating the backend for the locations. I started creating a larger hexgrid, and off the back of it came me creating a map. I like maps. Working with hexagons is curious, especially with rendering. Having such a map may make Kalmany much more interactive in the future.

But I’m only meddling, I don’t want to break Kalmany with major changes yet before it’s fully live. First things first, fix the voting system so logged in citizens can vote – that’s the final hurdle. And once that’s done, the site can go out into the world and accept people.

I may have to change up some logic before then. Kalmany has almost privatised every single sector apart from Education, Business & Industry and the Pensions sector. So it looks like the last time I tried to fix that, it wasn’t actually fixed and the citizens just like privatisation. I can’t blame them, some things are pretty bad (Isle of Blu still has 0% in Healthcare, their people are at a loss for looking after the ill and sick).

As I say, I’ve taken a break for now. I was pumping away at Kalmany for weeks and now I think my motivation is drying up a bit. Which is fine, I knew it would eventually. But it still keeps running, it’s running right now, the citizens are doing their thing. I expect, when they do privatise everything, it will begin to break. They’ll keep proposing to Nationalise, and it will always get rejected. We’ll see. It’s curious.

Anyway, I heard you were sighted in Hong Kong. Hope that everything sorted itself out – there were reports of bad weather in Berlin and I think that was down to you. I received the barometer and I’ve kept it safe for now in a box, in a well, on an uninhabited island. No one will find it unless they’re meant to. Stick to the streets, we both know what the shadows hide.

Yours,
Stan