now

living

I’m living in Portland, OR. We had a belated housewarming BBQ at our new house recently and that was a blast. It feels great to have a nice outdoor space to entertain in instead of our old asphalt backyard.

I’ve been getting a bit into gardening lately. Trimming and pruning and weeding and mulching and irrigating. I still mostly have no idea what I’m doing and hoping I don’t kill anything, but it is nice to have some rewarding physical tasks to keep up on.

I bought a bike. Which feels long overdue after having lived here for around 9 years now. I am loving how much less driving I’ve needed to do!

reading

I’m currently reading Red Mars, The Timeless Way of Building, and Get Together.

A few favorite reads from last year are Winners Take All, Code, and A Desolation Called Peace. I really liked The Raven Scholar which I read this year.

I’m slowly trying to chip away at the Hugo Award Winners for best novel.

playing

I’m not playing too much right now. I’ve been watching some Age of Empires 2 tournaments recently started watching Warcraft 3.

I’ve been playing pickleball, ping pong, and bouldering for exercise lately. I just played some Spikeball for the first time in a while and I’d like to play more! It’s very good!

making

I finished organizing Portland Festival of Gaming (PFOG) earlier this year and I wrote A PFOG 2026 Retrospective with my thoughts afterward. Summary is – it went great! I want to do more!

I’ve been helping organize some more, smaller events around computers and games and play. Coffee chats and powerpoint parties and park days and barbecues. I think “community” is most of what I’m making right now.

I’ve been working on a few little game projects lately. I’m pretty distracted by how lovely it is outside at the moment… But I’ll keep chipping away at them. I need to get a landing page up at least for each of them on my “laboratory”. I haven’t updated that in a bit!

I’m trying to write about more honest things on this site. I’ve tended to publish more “safe” posts. I don’t think this gets me what I want to get from writing.