My Now Page What's this?
Updated December 5th, 2025
There's snow on the ground! I'm still looking for work, but in the meantime, I'm getting excited about some things I'm building.
Dungeons and Dragons
For the uninitiated, "D&D" refers to the tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) called Dungeons and Dragons.
Our campaign is coming along great - this Sunday is session #38 and the PCs (Player Characters) recently resolved some plot threads that had been hanging for a long time, which resulted in some fantastic reveal moments (one of which I hadn't even planned!).
I'm also a player in a smaller campaign run by the player of our halfling monk. It's my first time playing a Warlock, and it's a blast so far. The other two PCs don't know about my abilities yet, but it's slowly coming out as we progress the main story.
Godot
I've been using the Godot game engine on and off since 2018, and while I've started many projects (some of them significant), I've only finished a few of them. I'm currently back into it and have been spending way too much time developing an experiment I'm tentatively calling "musical automata". I recently read about Brian Eno's work in generative music (not related to generative AI, which it predates by several decades) and that inspired me to start playing around with it myself. See this interactive explainer for an overview, and this transcript to read Eno talk about his work. This is what I've got so far!
The rest of this page is a rotating collection of rapid-fire lists of stuff I'm currently into or using a lot. Click the section headings to expand them and see the lists!
🎮 Games I'm playing
For the first time in years, I'm playing . . . nothing, really? I've turned on my Xbox a total of three or four times since September, which I think is by far the longest break I've taken since my freshman year of college when I didn't have access to a console. I didn't finish Dragon Age: The Veilguard, even though I still want to. I haven't sworn off games or anything, I guess I just got busy doing other things and stopped playing. The Game Pass subscription I share with my sister expired a few weeks ago and I barely noticed. I'm not complaining though; I've been doing loads of creative things I've been putting off or not devoting enough time to for years, and it's great. I'm sure I'll play more eventually, but for now, I'm good.
🎧 Music I'm listening to
- I got to see The Beths, one of my two favorite bands, in person last week! It was my first live non-classical concert in years, and I had a great time. Possibly more on this later.
- Sammy Rae and the Friends - My other favorite group. Great band, great vibes, great music. Sammy's voice is insane.
- Still playing a lot of Music League with my friends, so there's a whole bunch of cool stuff I wouldn't normally listen to being cycled in.
📺 Things I'm watching
- Everything and anything Dropout - A huge favorite. Some of the funniest stuff I've ever seen. Sometimes they miss, but when they hit, man do they hit.
- The Christmas movie rotation is about to start. The Santa Clause trilogy has been a staple for a long time in our family, and while it's starting to be phased out a bit, we'll be watching the first one tonight. Other than that, the mainstay is The Polar Express, which we always watch on Christmas Eve. Hawkeye has also been on the roster in recent years, and though I don't love placing a Marvel series in such an important position, it's still a good time. I don't see it sticking around as long as the first two, though.
🛠️ Tools I'm using
- Linux Mint - FOSS OS
- Obsidian - Free cross-platform note-taking/organizing application where you own your files and can do whatever you want with them. They're compatible with any other program that can read markdown.
- GrapheneOS - FOSS Android but it's more secure and has all the Google stripped out of it.
- Just vanilla Firefox now. Zen was great, but I realized that modern Firefox now actually has several of the features I liked in Zen, and there's something to be said for staying upstream where bugs and vulnerabilities are less likely to be introduced.
- Ente Photos - Private, open-source, E2EE, cloud-hosted (or self-hosted) photo storage/organization/sharing platform.
- Signal - Private, FOSS, E2EE personal messaging app. Not only is it secure, it's also just a great messaging app!
- Syncthing - FOSS synchronization tool for mirroring files between devices. Mainly using this with Obsidian vaults right now.
- Tuta - E2EE email, contacts, and calendar run by a company in Germany.
- Tasks.org - FOSS task management app for Android with reminders and a widget. Replaced Google Keep for me.
- Godot - FOSS game engine. Truly a joy to use (most of the time, all software has its frustrating moments) and has a vibrant community. This is the seventh or eighth year since I started learning it, and I'm still having a blast.