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10 pointless facts about me

2025-10-24 09:33:00


10 pointless facts about me

Saw posts from Manu and Kev, originally started by Dave and figured I would throw my hat in too, this seems fun!

Do you floss your teeth?

Not nearly as much as my dentist would prefer, that's for sure. Although I've been getting better about it.

Tea, coffee, or water?

In the mornings, definitely coffee. While it was on the pricier side, my Ember mug is honestly one of the best things I've done for my mornings in awhile. Keeps my coffee at the perfect temperature as long as I need it to. Definitely a splurge. For the rest of the day, water. Every once in awhile I'll make a soda from our Sodastream.

Footwear preference?

Being in Florida, feels like sandals are kind of a requirement sometimes. If I'm working outside or going somewhere though, the good old New Balance shoes are super comfy and my preferred choice.

Favorite dessert?

I love a great chocolate cake.

The first thing you do when you wake up?

Terrible habit, but first thing I do is check my emails briefly, then I let our dog outside and feed all of our pets.

Age you'd like to stick at?

At the time of this writing (2025-10-24), I'm 34 years old. I think I'd stick around my age. I've really grown to like who I am now, but I still have a lot I'd like to work on.

How many hats do you own?

Two, one for generally being outside but not during physical activity and then another for proper yard work to keep the sun of my face and neck. Florida sun is brutal.

Describe the last photo you took?

It was a picture of our dog, Lily. She was laying in a cat bed and looked super cute.

Worst TV show?

I honestly have a really low bar for TV shows. I'll answer this in terms of worst TV shows because of a terrible cliffhanger plus being cancelled - Flash Forward. I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT AND WE NEVER WILL.

As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?

I used to love to draw, particularly buildings and always thought that I'd go into architecture. I guess I did in a sense seeing as my title is Solutions Architect!

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New Keyboard

2025-10-19 09:55:00


New Keyboard

I got myself a new keyboard yesterday! If you are interested in seeing what it looks likes on their website, you can find that here. I've been using split keyboards for a number of years now but never anything like this. As I type this, I'm using the new keyboard. For right now, it's kind of painful; not in the physical sense but more on the fact that I am basically having to completely retrain how I type. It's not going to be an overnight thing after typing on fairly regular QWERTY keyboards for a little over 2 decades. My overall accuracy is obviously way down right now because things are in a different layout (particularly, the columnar layout is throwing me off at the moment) and my overall speed is WAY down by comparison. I'm going to keep this post fairly short but will update in a couple weeks once I've had a chance to properly give this a fair chance.

I know the price is likely going to put a lot of people off of it too, which is fair. It's certainly not cheap by any stretch of the imagination. It does feel really nice though and once I get used to the layout and my typing speed and accuracy return, I think this will be a great improvement over what I had previously. The biggest thing for me right now is to focus on building up the new muscle memory with this one and working my way back. Considering I spend a good chunk of my day typing, my hope is that won't take too long.

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Homelab

2025-10-13 23:00:00


Homelab Setup

In a direct contradiction to my last post, I figured I would write a post about what I use in my current homelab setup. This is inspired by a post I saw by Ian O'Byrne about why he setup his own, and why you should set yours up too! Definitely worth a read, so give that a look - don't worry, I'll still be here!

Back? Excellent! Let's get into it :)

Some context first

Before I get into what I run my homelab on and what I have on it, I thought I'd detail *why* I set this up in the first place. I've been in the tech field for over a decade now and have always had a fascination with the web. That's shifted some in recent years, moving to more intentional uses of my time online, using services that I find ethically and morally more appropriate. Some of that is related to privacy, some of it is related to usability. Where possible though, I've tried to shift away from the big tech giants and more to either my own services that I host locally or services that I pay for that have more of an interest in maintaining usability and privacy, while allowing for my own dataa agency where possible.

I use this homelab for many things, but one of the nice things is that it gives me the ability to test things out in, well, a lab. I use this for work a lot too - I can quickly spin up a web server, configure it how I need to, and test things out super quickly. I can spin up new services that I want to experiment with, or just poke around with existing things that I've got. The best part is, it's all stored at home on my network. I keep important things backed up (as you should too), but the nice thing is that I have full control over what does and doesn't go on the server.

Anyway, on to what this post is really about!

Homelab Hardware

There's quite a bit going into my homelab for something that only has one server haha! Most of it is supporting it, but I also wanted to briefly talk about the networking setup that I use. I switched my home network over to the Ubiquiti Gateway Ultra for router and firewall. We have fiber service through AT&T (just their 500 mbps plan, which typically gets us 620 mbps most days since they overprovision). For most of my use cases, we don't more than that and it's priced pretty well for us. Downstream for that, I have a PoE switch that is hooked up to a myriad of devices. We have network drops in a few places in the house, such as the living room for consoles, bedrooms, and my home office. I was using a Ubiquiti PoE switch too but a lightning strike hit the street right in front of our house and burned it out, even through the UPS/surge protector.

For wifi, we have two Ubiquiti U6 Lites on either end of the house configured to allow for rapid handoffs rather than meshing. Both are PoE and hooked directly to the switch. We've had no issues so far with connectivity while using these on our mobile devices, they've been pretty great!

Server Hardware

The server I run at home is mostly composed of old PC parts from a previous gaming build. It's nothing crazy by todays standards but it handles the limited workloads we have very well. It's running in a 4U Rosewill chassis - nothing flashy but I don't dig inside the internals of the server much. The components for the server are as follows:

The server runs Unraid, which allows you to setup a slightly fancier JBOD array, using one or more drives as the parity drive, and everything else being setup as data drives. This is of course simplifying things quite a bit, but that's at least how I think of it. The one key consideration is the parity drive should be the largest drive in the array. Any drive that you add as a data drive should be no larger than the parity, otherwise you'll lose out on available space. With a single parity drive, you can lose any one drive and still recover. Losing two drives, and you'll have data loss (so don't do what I do and only use one parity drive). None of the data that I have (that at least isn't backed up in multiple locations) matters *that* much so I'm not too concerned with it.

The interesting bit are the two SSDs. Unraid has a concept of cache storage, which is effectively just where files are put to start with. I have these configured in a RAID 1 setup so if I lose one SSD, I don't lose everything on them. You can configure your shares so that some drives write directly to the HDDs while others write first to the SSDs for speedier reads and writes initially, and then over time they are moved to the HDDs. You can also configure the shares to only exist on the cache storage, allowing faster read and write access permanently at the expense of lower available storage. Trade offs for all of your use cases. With the falling prices and increasing capacities of SSDs though, I'm *real* tempted to replace some of the HDDs with SSDs entirely.

This server sits inside a 12U server rack in my home office. It also houses my brother-in-law's backup server for important files, as well as our Unifi Protect NVR, which stores the videos from our home security cameras. Overall, not much there other than it being nice to keep things locked away in small unit that our pets can't find their way into.

Server Software

As I mentioned above, this server runs Unraid as the operating system. It's very handy for quickly configuring users, shared storage, and a ton of other things. One of its really cool features though is the ability to run just about whatever Docker containers you would like through the Community Applications plugin that's available. While it doesn't feature support for setting up containers using dockerfiles or anything like that, it does provide a GUI setup for creating containers from community-created images. It's not perfect, but there's a lot of cool stuff available and the community is always adding new things to it. The below are some of the highlights of what I'm running.

I won't go into the nitty gritty details for all of these (that's probably worth another post) but here are some quick highlights for the main services.

TubeArchivist is one of many flavors of YouTube media archiving tools. I use this to save local copies of YouTube videos that I find interesting.

Paperless is a document storage and indexing tool with really great OCR capabilities. I've been using it this year to keep digital copies of important documents that allows them to be searchable whenever we need them. Very handy, but also something to protect really well too.

Mealie is a recipe storage tool that allows you to paste a link to a recipe you found online and it will convert the page into a locally stored recipe that you can reference later. We have a ton of recipe links from years ago that just don't work anymore and it would have been so nice to have this running then.

Change Detection is a tool that lets you monitor URLs. I use it for a couple things at work, such as tracking changes to commonly used packages that have change logs posted online, IP lists that are posted online that update periodically, etc. It also has the ability to check product pages for availability and notify you if it detects an item is available. Hit or miss given the prevalence of bot mitigation tools now though.

Nginx Proxy Manager is the reverse proxy I use to maintain friendly URLs on the local network. I also run a VPN directly on my router that gives me access to these services at home. No direct access allowed for any of these, it must be either accessed on the local network or from the VPN, nothing else.

Nextcloud is a replacement for things like Google Drive or OneDrive. For a long time it's been pretty great but I've been running into gremlins with it lately, particularly with mobile device syncing. I've been trying out Syncthing instead, which I think of as kind of like a mesh-style syncing platform where you connect your devices together and when they are able to connect, can quickly sync content on available folders that you define. I'm still trying this one out but so far it's been incredibly nice with my Obsidian notes. I want to start expanding this further.

FreshRSS is my RSS platform of choice. I've been running this for a couple years now and let it update my feeds twice a day. I hook it up with Readrops on my Android phone for syncing feeds or adding new feeds that I find when I'm out and about.

Kavita is my ebook reader that I use periodically. I haven't been reading many ebooks here lately but I have a lot of them from Humble Bundle deals I've picked up over the years. The interface can be kind of confusing at first but once you have your library setup, it's not too bad. I use it through a browser while connected on VPN on my phone and put it in full screen mode, works really well.

Pihole is a DNS-level ad and telemetry blocking tool. Honestly, I don't think I'll *ever* run a home network without this. It's insane how many ads and tracking scripts are out there that this blocks.

Redlib is a Reddit frontend that doesn't let you comment or interact with Reddit much, but it lets you browse and "subscribe" to subreddits locally without having an account. It's much snappier than Reddit itself is and doesn't have any of the other crappy stuff. And since you can't comment or anything, you also aren't as likely to get drawn into online fights lol.

That's about it

I'm sure there are some things I'm missing, but that should about cover most of it. I love reading about what other people use their homelabs for. I admittedly don't use mine for much other than a media streaming tool and file storage, but it does help me get away from the bigger services and put myself in control of my data. Do you have any suggestions for what I should setup next? Want to share your own setups? Shoot me a message, my inbox is open any time :)

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Abandoning Tech

2025-10-06 20:30:00


Abandoning Tech

Well, maybe that title isn't quite right.

Changing how I use tech

There, that's better!

This year has been a tough one for me, both personally and professionally. I've spent way more time than I would really like to admit working, particularly at the beginning of the year and during the holiday season last year. Lots of really big projects, a recent promotion, basically a never ending stream of work being done and added to the pile. And what would I do to unwind?

Click the button on my KVM, swap to my gaming PC, and continue using the computer.

Needless to say, I think I'm about having enough.

Being more thoughtful

As I've talked about in a recent post, I've been getting more into reading, particularly on physical books (and you should check out my reading list too!). It's been a great way for me to focus on something other than my computer and immersing myself in a different world for a little bit. I admit it is nice to have the tiny bit of escape effect it has, but in all honesty, I think the biggest thing for me is I'm starting to slowly lose interest in some of my long term hobbies from over-indulging. And I don't like.

I've been taking some steps to try to lower my overall tech usage. For starters, I recently bought myself a basic Casio watch to replace my Garmin smartwatch. I thought that tracking my workouts and other health stats would be neat but they did the opposite for me - it just caused me anxiety by constantly monitoring those numbers and wondering why they weren't moving as fast as I wanted them to. I've started taking notes in a physical notebook again too. I DO eventually move them into Obsidian so that I can back them up for long-term safety (especially for my work notes, which is where this practice really shines to solidify thoughts), but pen and paper is so much easier for quickly jotting things down for me. I've also started to set some sane timers for the top apps on my phone. I've even added a widget to the home screen that shows me the top apps by screen time so it's in my face.

Building better habits

There have been some stumbles along the way this year - I've definitely fallen off the lifting wagon that I was pretty successful with this year, and I've been in a bit of a funk the last few weeks. I need to remind myself that it's all about the incremental progress that gets you to your goal. Nothing is going to happen overnight, and the same can be said with forming good habits and getting rid of old habits. I know a lot of people like to wait until the new year to start their habits but for me, I think that's just pushing the deadline later and giving yourself a reason to delay improvement for another time. The time to improve is now, and that's what I'm going to try to do. Some of my immediate habits and improvements I want to work on are:

You may look at some of these and go "those are easy why do you need to track this?" Well, it may be easy for some, but habits can be tough to break. I'm starting small on a lot of these because I know that if I set a crazy goal - say, lowering my daily screen time from 3 hours to 15 minutes - I WILL fail and end up worse off for it. These realistic goals are far easier to track and are more realistic to maintain. Maybe I oughta to get some sticky notes to put on my monitor for these!

If you have any tips or good habits that you've recently started trying to implement in your daily routines, I'd love to hear about them!

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Do it for fun

2025-09-23 23:45:00


Do it for fun

It's easy to get caught up in the daily grind. Do you have a hobby that people keep telling you that you should monetize? Here's a novel idea - just keep doing it for fun. Hobbies don't have to be all about earning money. It's enough if you just enjoy the time spent doing the thing, whatever that is.

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been getting back into reading physical books, but I also really like playing video games, and building Lego sets. I've also been enjoying the process of building PlainFeeder, not there's much there yet (although I do have it at least capable of ingesting RSS feeds now, so that's nice!). I don't do any of these things with the goal of earning money off of them. Honestly - and this applies doubly so for the Lego sets - most of them cost me money to do them. I do them anyway because I get enjoyment out of them. I don't need another job to keep track of on top of my daily work. That's stressful enough as it is.

Be bad at things

This is also going to sound a little counterproductive, but you should also try to be bad at things. I know that sounds weird but hear me out. No one is an expert just starting out - everything takes practice and learning to build up experience to get better at it. When I say be bad at things, I'm saying try new things, look at them from different angles, experiment. I get the most enjoyment out of projects when I run into new obstacles to work through. The feeling of accomplishment and knowing that I just learned something new that I can use in the future is honestly kind of satisfying. You also don't even have to get good at things to enjoy them. For example, I recently went bowling with some friends of mine - I'm absolutely terrible at it. I like it anyway because to me, it's a more about spending time with my friends and doing something together. I don't ever intend to get better at it, and honestly? That's part of the charm to me.

I mean heck, I'm pretty miserable at web development. I'm much more adept at the server-side of things, setting up routing, handling performance, delivery, and security, that sort of thing. Actually making things? That's a trial if I've ever seen one. Still, I do it for fun and to keep learning something new. That's part of the reason why I pretty much do everything on this site by hand. I used to have a static site generator do it for me, but there's been a cool charm about writing these posts in basic HTML. Sure there are more efficient ways of doing it, but that isn't the point for me. I like being able to see something that I directly wrote turn into something online. It may not be flashy or styled at all, but it's something I've created for the fun of it, and that's all that matters to me.

Teach others

Another great way to spend your time with hobbies is to teach others just starting out too. And this doesn't even have to be anything super formal! Spending time in your community teaching others, getting to know people with similar interests, it's a great experience. Even something as simple as a mini book club or just checking in to see how someone is doing with their art or writing is enough to keep the hobby flame alive. People want others to take in interest in their favorite activities - it's great seeing them light up when they can talk about it.

For me, I'm going to keep plugging away at PlainFeeder. I'm also nearly done with Golden Son, the second book in the Red Rising series. I find it hard putting it down, it's so good, and the third book is in the mail now!

Let me know your hobbies

I'd love to hear what you do for fun. Do you build model planes? Have a miniature train set? Woodworking? Poetry? I love seeing what other people can imagine and create. If you want, send me an email at the link below!

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Reading

2025-09-21 20:00:00


Reading

Over the last year or so, I've read more books than I have in quite a long time. To be clear, none of these books are Earth-shatterig masterpieces, but all the same, they let my mind wander and explore new worlds. I've been trying to keep this spark alive and have found that moving back to physical books has been wonderful so far. I'm planning on making a new page on my website that has a listing of the books I've read and if I feel like it, even reviews of them (likely short, but still fun).

What do you like to read?

There are endless possibilities with books for just about anything you could ever want. I've read a few self-help books and other nonfiction, but I most definitely prefer reading fiction when given a choice. There's something about being able to completely immerse myself in a new world and see the characters through their own points of view that is exciting to me, esepcially if I really get involved in the book. My favorite genres are science fiction and thrillers. I'm a particular fan of Stephen King (but I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I've not yet read most of his books). I also quite like military thrillers, think Tom Clancy and Stephen Coonts. The Hunt for Red October is an incredible book (and the movie was really well done too), as is Flight of the Intruders. I don't have much of a requirement on a specific length of book either - if the premise sounds interesting enough to me, I'll read it!

I've got a long list of books that I need to read still for sure. My bookshelf is definitely packed with books that I've yet to read compared to books that I've completed. I'm a bit of a hoarder/collector in that point of view - I tend to buy new books that I think will be interesting well before I even have a chance to consider putting them into rotation. I'm trying to make a concerted effort to finish more books on my shelf though, but I also want to be mindful that there's no contest. Reading more books than others doesn't matter - what matters is enjoying the worldbuilding, the characters, the "what ifs" that you ask yourself while thinking where the story will go next. Letting your imagination get into the world and feel as if the characters are right there with you is what I really enjoy. Good books for me make me want to keep turning the page. I don't feel bad putting a book down if I'm not enjoying it. No sense in continuing it if I don't have an interest, although I honestly can't even remember the last time I stopped reading a book because I wasn't getting into it.

Why physical books over an ereader?

I mentioned earlier that I've been enjoying physical books more than my ebooks lately. To me, there's something about the physical nature of them, being able to feel the book and turn the physical pages. It's cozy and helps me disconnect a bit more. Modern ereaders are definitely superior to what they used to be and you can hold entire libraries in their digital storage, but I definitely prefer the paper books myself. Part of it feels like it's more intentional for me too, which is something else that I've been trying to strive for this year. I don't know how to describe it, but I just feel better reading a physical copy of a book.

There's also the concept of ownership. Once purchased, the physical book is mine. I can do what I want with it, no one can take it from me, alter it, anything. I can lend it to friends and family, store it in a safe place, tear it apart, you name it. Not so with most ebooks. I'm talking mostly about ebooks purchased on places like Amazon with their Kindle readers - you are purchasing a license for the book, which can be revoked at any time in the future. You don't own that book, you own a license to read the book. If the Kindle service were to go away, all of the books you purchased (of which I also have a fair number) would go away too - assuming they don't have a fallback disaster plan to release them from DRM.

Be cozy

There's something idyllic about a warm drink, a comfy chair, and a nice book. One of my recent favorites that is about the coziest book I've ever read is A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. This was a very quick read about a Monk who sets off to build a new life to find their purpose, set in a world where robots gained self-awareness and stopped their work to build their own lives, separate from humans. Summarizing this book into this singular sentence feels a bit disingenuous, but take it from - this book is a treat and will get you thinking about your own purpose and what it means to be yourself. From the cover art to the descriptions of the characters and sets around the world, there is a quaint yet vast world to uncover in this short novel - which has a sequel available that I need to read too!

That brings me to where I'll leave you, with one last thought. I've been recently purchasing my books from ThiftBooks, an online bookstore that allows users to sell their used books for credit on the website. It has a wide collection of books, both new and used, that are generally cheaper than other equivalent online services that I've already named here. I left the link to their website plain, although they do have a referral program. If you are interested in signing up for an account and would like to use my referral link, feel free to email me and I'll share it with you - I don't quite like sharing referral links as if they were the actual link since they feel spammy to me. Other excellent places to find books would be your local library - seriously they need you and offer so much more than just books to check out - as well as local used book stores.

I'd love to hear your book recommendations and what you like to read. Send me an email with the link below if you'd like to chat!

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New Project: PlainFeeder

2025-09-15 23:55:00


New Project: PlainFeeder

A plain text RSS Feed Reader, now a work in progress.

Oh boy, just what we needed. ANOTHER RSS feed reader. What can I say, I'm a glutton for punishment I guess. Anyway, I've started work on a new project that I'm affectionately calling PlainFeeder. This is more of a personal project than anything that I plan to do commercially (nor do I think it'll be worth it for anyone to pay for it anyway with how many other amazing RSS readers there are out there). It's more of a fun project for me to work on and (hopefully) not abandon like I usually do. I eventually plan to make it so that people can sign up for it as a free service (and maybe accept donations if I feel it's worthy of it), but it's more for me to explore and expand my own knowledge.

Why plain text?

In case you haven't noticed, this website doesn't really have much in the way of themeing. I mean heck, the current CSS file is measured in bytes, specifically 245 bytes at the time of this writing (Sep 15, 2025). I've come to appreciate the semantic nature of plain HTML with minimal styling. It's accessible, it loads insanely quickly just about everywhere, and best of all, it's highly readable on just about any device because for the most part, it's responsive by nature. Websites are too big nowadays - between the various libraries that are referenced, unoptimized images, or just plain laziness, the bloat is real.

I aim to do something different with PlainFeeder.

What's the goal?

Realistically, the goal is to have fun making something that I think is cool. If even just one person likes it, that'll be enough for me. My overall plan for it is this though:

I have a basic framework for how I want things to work figured out in an outline in my Obsidian notes, but now I just need to put pen to paper. Er... fingers to keyboard? Yeah, that one. I do have some key requirements for myself on this one though:

Overall, the plan is to write this in PHP. I know it's not a flashy language and there are newer, fancier things available, but I sorta know PHP, at least a little bit. No frameworks for me though, just stuff that I plan on writing myself to achieve this goal. We'll see how far I get along.

How can I stay aware of what's going on?

I don't have any email sign ups or anything for notifications, especially since I don't have any plans right now to accept user sign ups. You can, however, bookmark PlainFeeder in your favorite bookmark folder and give it a look. There's pretty much... nothing there right now except a handful of pages describing what the service will eventually be, but that's about it. There's no ability to add feeds, refresh feeds, read them, etc - that's still a work in progress. I hope in a future post I get to explore this a bit more and show off some updates about it!


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Learning Vim

2025-09-06 21:00:00


Learning Vim

For the longest time, I've used your typical text/code editors. Think things like Atom (fare thee well), VS Code, vscodium, Sublime, Notepad++. If you can name it, I've probably considered it or tried it in some form. They're very easy to use, have a ton of features (most of which I've never even bothered to learn), and are fairly easy to get started with and customize out of the box. But I've been yearning for something... different.

Oh yeah, Vim is a bit different.

But it's more same-y than you'd think

Everyone jokes that once you enter vim, you can't leave (and mostly because no one knows what :q does). Honestly, I've been using it exclusively for the last week and I can see why. When you first start out, it seems daunting and completely alien. "Wait, I can't just... type? I have to press i first to enter text? That doesn't make any sense!" Wait until you find out that Vim also has it's own concept of windows and tabs!

I was inspired by this post to give this a try. I figured I'd try it out for a couple of hours, get annoyed, and then move on with my life. What I instead came out with was a renewed appreciation for how powerful this editor is. It's not going to win any UI awards (can you even consider it as having a UI in a traditional sense?) and I don't know if I'd call it intuitive, but once you learn how things work, to me it makes sense.

Digging in

Obviously, only being a week into it, I've got a lot to learn about it. I've picked up some of the big things by using the :vimtutor tutorial. This was honestly an incredible thing that I wish I knew about years ago. It takes roughly 30 minutes and is a built-in, step-by-step tutorial on how to use some of the most common features and teaches you how to move forward with the help docs, among other things. And yes, the first thing it teaches you is how to exit the editor. But really, some of the commands it taught me were really cool and helped to break down what seemed like complex commands into what they really are: a grammar language.

Now I have to learn grammar again?!?

It's closer than you'd think, but there's not much to it, at least for what will get you most of the way through. I don't think it's really feasible to learn everything in a short period of time, and you really need to practice at it to get it right, but here are some of highlights for me:

There are also a bunch of other movement commands, commands to copy (or rather, yank), paste, and even the ability to run shell commands directly in vim. The possibilities are really endless.

Where to from here?

I am by no means an expert - or even an amateur for that matter - when it comes to Vim. I still strongly consider myself to be a complete novice, but I can see the power behind it for real. There are a bunch of things I'd like to look at with my .vimrc file (which is really just a personal config file for how I'd like my Vim experience to be). I know the more I use it, the more I'll become comfortable and expand my own knowledge of the built-in commands too. There are even plugins that I've yet to explore - I'd like to get to know the base program better first before I dip my feet in there.

Recommend Resources

I've also found a few resources that have helped me along the way. I've already mentioned :vimtutor, but there are some others that I'd like to share below too:

If you have any useful resources or tips that you'd like to give me, feel free to shoot me an email (found on my Contact page).



Review: Split Fiction

2025-09-04 12:30:00


Review: Split Fiction

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Recently, my wife and I bought Split Fiction for the Xbox (yes I know I linked the Steam page, fight me). We were huge fans of It Takes Two, which was made by the same developer (Hazelight Studios), so we had high hopes going into this game.

Let's just say, what a game.

I'll try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, but will be sharing some details from the opening of the game to set the stage.

Basic Premise

As with It Takes Two, Split Fiction is another forced co-op title that relies on you and your partner working together to solve all sorts of puzzles and challenges to continue the story. This time, you play as Mio and Zoe, who are both new authors looking to get published for the first time. They are both on their way to what they think is a pitch meeting to try to sell their work, but instead are put into a unique situation where they are entering their own works.

I won't go too much further into this, other than to say the world building in this game is top notch. You can really tell the developers poured their full imaginations into the various worlds that they crafted. As the name implies (as does the cover of the game), you jump between different worlds, some leaning to sci-fi, others in fantasy, and some get.... weird (in the most hilarious ways). We laughed so much while playing this game, but it also was a great experience just figuring out the puzzles.

There was only one puzzle that we felt wasn't quite intuitive throughout the entire game, but everything else was something that can be worked through by putting your heads together and coming to a solution. The game controls are very fluid and the dynamic contexts that appear on screen work well. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the characters apart if the screen zoomed out a lot but they did try to split things by color fairly well.

We played the game on an Xbox Series X console and it ran like a dream in split screen co-op mode. It was very well optimized and the scenery in the various worlds looks amazing. This title would be very easy for someone that doesn't play games a lot to pick up and play too - it doesn't have a crazy, in-your-face interface, the controls are very intuitive, and the styles and interactions within the worlds were well researched and developed.

Nitpicks

I do have a few nitpicks with the game, but most of them don't detract from our enjoyment. At the beginning, we did think that some of the character dialogue was a bit... much. Not that there was a lot of it, but they just didn't really seem all that realistic. The character dynamics smooth out a lot as the game progresses but it was a bit of a rocky start. I also wish there were a couple puzzles that had some alternate solutions. It felt very linear at times, but honestly I feel that's made up for by the game having some very interesting puzzles that are well thought out - they are definitely worthy of the praise they receive.

Honorable Mention: Couch Co-op

One of the great things about this title is that it is definitely built around the couch co-op mindset. The screen seamlessly would shift from full split screen to a blended screen as needed depending on the perspective. This next bit is absolutely a spoiler, so expand if you dare:

Spoiler Near the end of the game, there is a moment where the worlds sort of shift and one player is in a sci-fi world while the other is in a mirrored fantasy world. This was an incredible experience and we were awestruck at how well this worked. It was incredibly trippy but we loved every moment of it.

Final Words

This game took us about 11.5 hours to complete from start to finish. I would rate this as a 4 star title, and would probably bump this up if you like co-op titles (which, you HAVE to play this with someone, you cannot play this game in single player). Some of the character interactions and dialogue in the first hour or so of the game felt a little forced, but like I mentioned, this is smoothed over as you get to know the characters better. A really nice thing about this game though is that only one person has to buy a copy of the game - the friend version is a free download and allows you to play with someone else without both people having to own a copy of it. This is a great way to handle this in my opinion.



Simplify

2025-08-31 11:00:00


Over the past year or so, I’ve been making an intentional effort to simplify things in my life. Not all of it has been successful, but as with most things in life, it’s a journey. There are ups and downs, but what matters is whether forward progress is being made to reach those goals.

A lot of the things I’ve been trying to simplify revolve around the way that I use tech. The key thing to keep in mind with all of this though is that - just like with most things in life - it’s a marathon, not a sprint. None of these things will change overnight, nor would I recommend it. The best way in my experience to effect change on oneself is to dip your toes in slowly and gradually. Just like with any habit, it takes commitment and intentional action over an extended period of time to adjust. We're creatures of habit after all.

A contradiction

And while saying that.... I'm also part hypocrite. One of the things that I am working on changing is using vim for more text editing and less bespoke code editors. I made a switch from VS Code to vscodium a few weeks back and figured I would instead take the plunge into learning the inner workings of vim more. Especially after reading this post by Simon Späti, it really inspired me to give it a whirl. I've used it for basic things and know of *some* commands (like, saving, moving the cursor, and most importantly, exiting vim).

To really get into the flow of it and force myself to learn it, I'm rewriting this entire website using vim exclusively. That might sound daunting to some but I'm enjoying the challenge and realizing that there are a LOT of cool features about vim.

Simple is good

As part of this website redesign, I'm also shifting away even further from some of the tools I was using previously. When I first wrote this website, I was using WordPress. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just a lot. It's never been simpler to start a WordPress website though, and it's only getting easier. The issue I had was it's not as straightforward to migrate to different sites, it requires a lot of features to be installed, and self-hosting it can be a little bit of a pain - not in a difficult kind of way but more of an "ugh I really don't want to do this" kind of way.

So then I moved toward Hugo. Hugo is a Static Site Generator written in Go that allows you to write your content in Markdown and it converts everything into plain HTML and CSS, which can then be uploaded to any host in the world. This was cool to learn, and I really enjoyed working with it. I can't place my finger on it, but I wanted something different.

In going with the theme of simplifying, I'm now in the process of rewriting the site (while still using vim exclusively) using just your basic HTML and some minimal CSS. I don't plan on incorporating JavaScript at all (this is a fairly vanilla blog at the end of the day). You'll even notice I'm not even minifying content - if you see something you like or want to see the inner workings of the pages in your browser, go ahead and right-click and hit View Source. I'll wait.

But why do this

A big part of this is to be intentional with tech, like I've said before. Here lately, I've had a feeling that nothing about tech nowadays is good enough. It always has to advance something.

Data collection.

Money.

Squashing competitors.

There always has to be something more. Nothing can ever just be. I used to be all-in on the internet-connected everything. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. Then devices would go end-of-life and conveniently, the only way to restore that functionality would be to buy the new model.

The same can be seen with the yearly release and upgrade pushing that smartphone manufacturers do, at least as an example. There's nothing inherently wrong with the annual release cycle per-se. The issue I take with it is the promotion of constantly trading in your old device to get a new one. I fell into this trap before. I'd see the new shiny, would want the new shiny, and would buy the new shiny and discard the old one. Especially with the advancements in hardware today, most year-to-year changes are minimal at best.

I also REALLY don't like the constant push for more and more AI tech in my phones.

So to the why. Really, it just has to do with my general feeling of losing interest in tech. Getting back in touch with the physical world has been wonderful. I've been enjoying my walks outdoors more (at least, when it's not a million degrees outside), I've been finding much more joy in reading physical books over my Kindle, and writing with a pen and paper has been wonderful, even for things as simple as jotting something down quickly in a meeting. I still use tech*, I'm just more intentional about it now.

* I stay away from using AI for the most part. Sure, it probably has its uses and I'll probably get left behind eventually, but I have no qualms not using it.

You went and rambled again, Chris

Yeah I'm good at that. This turned out a little differently than I had in my head (and also compared to my first draft..... which was in vim..... which I lost lol). I've got a lot of work to do to really get things down to more simpler terms. I could write all sorts of posts (and probably will) chronically my journey on this. For example, I'm trying to get back on good terms with cooking (recent months has seen that failing but the attempt is what matters), and in doing so, getting to better foods and overall kitchen utensils that will better serve me in the long run. There's a whole subject matter on this topic that I can get into, but I'll save that for another time.

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