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.

update: since the semester started it's really just been brawlhalla, overwatch, and geometry dash. my pc isn't with me and my time is stretched thin, so gaming has been a pretty low priority.

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.

i'm an audio engineer at wmuc, umd's student radio station, 90.5 fm. the title is fancier than the job. if something in the studio breaks or needs to be moved, that's us. it's mostly the manual labor, and it's still cool.

the projects on my list lean musical. fixing up the station's guitars and basses, cable management in the live room and the recording studio, and cable management plus equipment repair and maintenance at the fm dj station.

two shows lately. beabadoobee, and 9million fest at the ottobar, which i went to for polarview's last show.

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, running libreboot that i flashed myself and, as of 2026.10.14, arch with an i3 gruvbox rice. kali finally came off once i noticed i wasn't opening it during the semester. now it's my focused work machine, code, latex, and homelab admin, and not much else.

the other half is a yoga book 9i, which i've been breaking in and it's been great for all my note taking. the x220 still wants a ram stick, a wifi card with bluetooth, and a repaste, which i'm saving for one trip inside the case. build log in notes.

this one stopped being an interest and turned into infrastructure i actually live on. an hp 280 g1 i pulled out of an office, running debian and about ten containers, doing pi-hole, jellyfin, immich, nextcloud, a minecraft server, and uptime kuma keeping an eye on all of it. tailscale ties it together, so i can reach any of it from anywhere without opening the box up to the internet.

i built my own router too, though not the way i planned it. instead of a minipc with openwrt it's an r7000 nighthawk my dad gave me, flashed off netgear's firmware onto freshtomato, since the r7000 is broadcom and openwrt can't properly drive broadcom wireless. 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. build log in notes.

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. finished berserk too, so i'm all caught up now. 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.)