#gameDev #videoGames #workStuff #bsky #homelab #transRightsAreHumanRights

It's that time again where i feel like i need to write something on my blog lest it fall even deeper into obscurity. Here's what i've been up to since the last post (which was in October, wow. time.).

Orange Elephant In the Room

The bad orange man is at it again. i don't talk about this stuff too much online but i do often IRL especially with my partner. i am not convinced there is any democracy left and those who think we just need to stick it out for 4 years and then elect some less-bad option are going to be in for a rude awakening, if they haven't woken up already. And honestly if you can't see that Musk is the actual new president and will likely be so until some sort of violent evacuation of power, idk. i hope i'm just a loony.

i don't have much to say other than that. Take care of yourself and your community. Find your family and support them. i wish i could say i had this myself but i have lost touch with many of my friends. i am thankful for the ones i do still keep in touch with even if it is infrequent. i never thought i would be in a country that has gone so far down the fash hole but here we are. As much as i'd like to leave, i do still have some family here that i wouldn't want to abandon, but i am still keeping my options open.

Homelab Updates

i recently spun up a Jellyfin server. Actually i spun it up first on my Windows machine via my Debian install via WSL2 but something wasn't quite right with the reverse proxy, so i moved it to a "gaming" laptop i have which has a 1050ti gpu in it. i didn't end up setting up the hardware acceleration because it started taking off whenever i wanted to watch something, and i use the laptop for other things sometimes so i couldn't shove it in the back of the basement where i wouldn't hear it. So i remembered i had all the pieces for a PC due to upgrading my windows machine over the years. i had a motherboard with an intel i5 cpu, an nvidia 1050ti, and a 730w PSU just lying around doing nothing. So i popped to microcenter, picked up a case for $50 and a heatsink for $26 and rebuilt my old computer into a fancy RGB blasting box that now sits in my basement. The case is actually really nice for $50 (i think it was the cheapest they had). The cable management isn't the best but it is so much easier to work with than the case i have my current PC in (which is like 12+ yrs old heh).

So now jellyfin is working with the hardware acceleration, but not after fighting with the nvidia-drivers on Debian. They seem to be working but when i tried installing them and using a monitor via the HDMI port of the GPU, it wouldn't work. i guess that doesn't actually matter tho cuz i'm just using the machine as a server and SSHing in as needed.

The other new service i'm running is a Bluesky PDS. You can find me at @pear.pleasant.rest but i still prefer the fediverse. i set this one up on a librecomputer (raspberry pi clone) but i forgot that it doesn't have proper storage so i may move it to the rgbox (that's the name of the new machine. cuz it has RGB fans and i don't know how to turn the leds off 😅)

i started poking at obsidian-diy-sync (which powers this very blog!) again, as i left off last trying to containerize the application so that i could start self-hosting it in my k3s cluster instead of paying $7/mo to render.com like a rube. Nothing against render.com, just that now i have all this infra, i should be using it In doing so i thought i should also update the dependencies. This was probably a mistake as it led me down a bit of a side-quest of removing the prisma ORM with better-sqlite3. i regret choosing prisma for a few reasons. It probably woudn't have been a big deal to upgrade it but the laptop i've been using for dev stuff is on NixOS (i should probably write another post on that journey...) and prisma doesn't provide binaries for NixOS so shit just doesn't work. i managed to find a shell.nix which did seem to kinda work? But only kinda and in the end i just ripped it out. ORMs be damned. i use drizzle on a different project but honestly i probably should just avoid ORMs at the end of the day. Dependencies = bad.

So hopefully i'll have a patch up for obsidian-diy-sync soon and then i would like to finally add media support, which hopefully won't be too terrible to implement.

Game Dev

Over the winter break, i learned how to use Godot and started making a game. You can check out my progress on my game dev thread. i am making an autobattler with some diabo/poe inspiration. So far i have the main game loop working but there is a lot to think about and balance as far as the way items are going to work, as well as the map.

i will be participating in my first game jam this weekend and i am pretty excited. It also happens to be my birthday this weekend but i don't care so much about that. Hopefully i will won't pull any all-nighters as i am on-call immediately following the weekend.

Work stuff

At my job i have been on a new team for a few months now. i am finally doing backend stuff which is what i've been wanting to do all along! No more react for me :) Instead i have been learning golang and wrapping my head around all kinds of architecture. i can't say much more but i am happy that i was able to transition to this new team and it seems i am a valued member. i always tell myself i'm a quick learner and sometimes i think i'm lying but i believe i have proved it to myself again that i can get onboarded to a project and be effective fairly quickly.

While my personal work journey is going ok i have still been entertaining the idea of a new job. Ideally i could find a gamedev job but i'm not holding out for that. The market is shit and i have 0 real experience doing that, although again i think i could get up to speed pretty quickly in a gamedev shop. So if you happen to know someone looking for a newb gamedev who can code and has good design sense, please hit me up.

Video games

On the gaming front i haven't actually been playing much of anything. The Bazzar is a bit disappointing on a few different fronts. The main one being that i watched an interview with the game's creator, Reynad, and he said some absolutely horrid shit about Women that i won't repeat here. i realize the game is not made just by this one person, but it's hard to want to play it anymore knowing such misogynists are running the place.

The other game i have been playing a bit of is Path of Exile 2. i really enjoy the changes from 1, especially to the way skill gems work. However i just don't have 1000 hours to spend on a game. i got my first character up to level 63 or so, not quite to the endgame but close, but the amount of time needed to get the gear to a proper state so you can actually run the content is just too much and i don't find that part very fun. Maybe if i understood the mechanics better and how to actually craft stuff i would be having a better time, but i am kind of sick of spending time in games on just learning intricate systems. Before you suggest Diablo 4, i have similar issues with that game. Also running the dungeons over and over literally makes me fall asleep. So maybe i'm just not a gamer, that is fine.

That is all for today. Thanks for reading, catch you on the fedi (or bsky i guess).