Interests

the craft side of things. tolerances, failure modes, why the cheap part broke and the overbuilt one didn't. i like reading accident reports the way other people read mystery novels.

top rope and bouldering, mostly. top rope when there's a partner and a tall wall, and bouldering when there isn't. bouldering is just short, hard problems a few feet off a crash pad, no rope needed.

it's problem-solving you do with your whole body. you fall, you stare at the wall, you try a different sequence. very compatible with the engineering brain.

the rotation right now is rainbow six siege, war thunder, overwatch, brawlhalla, and some roblox. no, i will not elaborate on the roblox.

war thunder counts as aviation research and i will not be taking questions at this time.

anyone else procrastinate changing strings? just me? high E is broke on my les paul, which means i haven't been playing as much as i would like to. been using my acoustic a decent amount though.

other guitars i have are a prs se ce, a washburn 332, and a bc rich warlock bass. for amps it's a krank krankenstein+ or a marshall jcm900 into a 4x12 with g12-70s when i want it loud, and a roland jc120 when i want it clean. the jc120 is kind of a cheat code for that post-hardcore clean tone.

been seeing a lot of media on refurbished thinkpads, homelabbing, etc. looks cool. very tempted to grab an old thinkpad, refurbish it, and run an egpu setup into it with a 4060 or something of the likes. tempted to try linux as well.

update: not theoretical anymore, i've actually started. see laptop.dat and homelab.dat.

one thinkpad so far, an x220. it's running kali linux right now, and the plan is to flash libreboot and install arch. working on learning linux properly, making a clean rice setup, and just working on the laptop in general.

on the hardware side i'm planning to replace the proprietary charger port with a usb-c one, replace the display, maybe the battery, and add a stick of ram. the x220 is old enough that every one of these is its own little rabbit hole, which i honestly kind of like.

wanting to break into server hardware and software, as well as server architecture. interested in running stuff like pihole, jellyfin, immich, and whatever else it takes to make a server actually viable.

also want to build my own router out of some old minipc or something, probably with openwrt or some similar software handling the config. all of this is to maximize security, increase privacy, and mostly just let me have control over my own digital utilities instead of renting them.

looking to break more into electronics work and refine my soldering ability. want to revisit some old projects too, like an old marantz turntable i need to fix (it needs a soldering job).

got inspired after a trip to microcenter and seeing all the cool soldering and electronics parts, breadboards and all the components and everything. walked in for one thing and left wanting to build stuff.

got a canon ae-1 for my birthday. something funny about being 19 now and already shooting a camera from the 70s... already messed up one roll of iso 400, and it's probably septuple exposed at this point. but it's finally working and i'm excited to start taking pictures.

mostly focused on architecture and building stills, maybe some nature too, as opposed to people photography or anything like that. and i want to break into double exposure art at some point (on purpose next time).

finished reading the climber and i loved it. now reading berserk, i'm roughly 260-270 chapters in and also loving it. guts is such a tragic character and the story is so brutal. it's amazing how someone can write something so devastating and pair it with such beautiful art.

(the heavy borders and screentones on this site are not a coincidence.)