now

living

I’m living in Portland, OR.

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 earlier this year. It has been a blast this summer!

My main “project” this year has been Being a Guy Who Does things in 2026. It’s going really well. I’ve been having BBQs, hanging with friends, doing things outside, grabbing coffee. This has been a real healthy shift in my perspective from wishing to have community to making it happen.

reading

I’m currently reading Some Desperate Glory.

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 earlier this year. I also enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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

playing

Mina the Hollower is the first game I’ve meaningfully gotten into this year, it has been pretty fun. I’ve been watching Soccer with the World Cup going on and spectating some Age of Empires 2 tournaments.

I’ve been playing pickleball, ping pong, and bouldering for exercise lately. I have been playing some Spikeball this summer and I think it might be cruising for a spot in my top games this year.

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. That’s all going on here and it has been really rewarding.

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.