about
welcome to my about me section. here i'll tell you a little bit about my motivation behind creating this website. i've had multiple youtube channels and blog websites, as well as writing for other blogs over the years so a website like this isn't totally new to me. however this time i'm attempting to do it all myself. that is, rather than go the wordpress managed hosting this time where you can fall back on a nice dashboard and admin panel to manage your site, this one is hosted on a vps (virtual private server). that basically means everything you read here has been written in html/css and javascript, and the box that this site is living on is configured entirely by me (including all of the firewall and anti-bot/security settings, which i'll probably get more into in a blog post). it's much easier to do it via wordpress, even to the point that you can just add blog posts by writing and clicking publish, where something like that isn't possible (not easily at least) when self hosting, so i've been reading about json injection and alternative methods to deliver blog posts. ultimately as i'm starting out it's likely to be a fairly manual process, but eventually as i learn more javascript i'll hopefully be able to automate a bit. that was the motivation behind self-hosting too, for the past 3 or 4 years i've dreamt of becoming a software developer, or programmer, but i've never had a project or passion to drive towards, and studying programming without an end goal or something to reach for is a pretty thankless task. the hope for this site is that i can learn while i go and pick up just enough html, css and javascript to become a web developer without really realising it, just simply because i'm doing work on this site in a way that is more of a hobby where the code becomes secondary and somewhat passive... we'll see how that works out i suppose.
as for what i intend to write on this site, i have a very very broad range of hobbies, but i am well aware that if i touch on all of them, i will not go nearly deep enough into my main passions, which are gaming and tech. i haven't been much of a gamer for the past few years, and in fact since i made the switch to linux properly within the last 2 years, i haven't gamed much at all. however the one relative mainstay in my catalogue since 2022 is old school runescape. i was an mmo nomad desperately searching for a home for a while and i had tried world of warcraft, final fantasy xiv, elder scrolls online, guild wars 2, and basically every other mmorpg on the market, and found the only one that was really doing what i wanted an mmo to do was osrs. that will likely become somewhat of a mainstay on this website in the gaming blog section, but i'm not sure what i'd cover on that specifically. the only other real gaming passion i have is trading card games. i started playing magic the gathering in early 2024 and fell in love with collecting and playing, although it's pretty hard to get a game of magic that isn't commander near where i am in the uk. eventually i fell off of magic, although i recently bought a foundations beginner box just as a sort of "board game" that i can get out if i have guests over, and didn't touch tcgs for a little while. then in the summer of 2025, my brother and i decided to start collecting pokemon. what a disaster. the state of pokemon currently is pretty awful. scalpers are the biggest issue as they make product more difficult than i could ultimately stomach, but i ended up leaving pokemon collecting a couple of months ago for myriad other reasons. currently i collect and play lorcana. when i discuss why i prefer lorcana over the 2 previous tcgs i always give the following list: product is reasonably priced, and easy to stumble across, the gameplay is excellent, the characters strike a chord with me more than mtg or pokemon, my 3 year old son loves the disney characters, and my partner likes playing the game, to the point that she and i regularly open packs and play together... i have no interest in other tcgs for this reason currently, though that might change.
another one of my lifelong hobbies has been everything technology. i have regularly used computers (probably too regularly, if i'm honest with myself) for over 25 years since i was 3 years old. ever since then i've built my own gaming pcs, and been interesting in all aspects of software and hardware, culminating in my desire to create this site from scratch, really. i'll talk about my interest in homelabbing too, as although i don't really see a solid path to forge in terms of anything that interests me specifically with a homelab, the idea of it generally is very appealing. finally, for now at least, i want to talk about digital minimalism from the perspective of the future of the internet and cyber security, as well as the difficulties i've had, and i'm sure many others relate too, with putting down the phone, reducing not just screentime but the way in which we consume when on those screens. for perspective, i have never really struggled with anything like tiktok or snapchat, but my issues are with reddit doomscrolling (even if what i'm reading about such as global news, tech news, programming seem positive/okay) and youtube/podcasts (specifically my consumption of long form content just for background noise). i'll dive more into those topics in blogs, but that's the long and short of what you'll find here.
aside from the blogs, i do want to dip my toes into web dev, so web apps may appear on the site from time to time, but nothing concrete planned as yet.