the void, onlytomorrow

​

about

here

you are currently reading the void, hosted on “onlytomorrow.net”.

posts are authored under the name “kirby”. you may know me as tyjubi, tyju, Calculator, karukureita, vfjekgd, Vincent, or whatever. blah blah the stuff from the homepage.

i’m one of those psychos that believe video games to be art, and game design and development is my passion. my top ten games are listed elsewhere on this site. for multiplayer games i like fighting games, tactical/milsim adjacent shooters and strategy games. ok for strategy games i just mean age of empires 2 but that’s really all you need. i’ve logged games i’ve played in recent memory on backloggd and retroachievements.

for music, i like hip hop, rock, pop, electronic and drone music. you can stalk the homepage of tyju.cc to see what i’ve been listening to. if you click the tiny “recently listened to” text it’ll take you to my last.fm profile.

“the mezzanine” (1988) by nicholson baker is probably my favourite novel. “the remains of the day” (1989) by ishiguro kazuo and “outline” (2014) by rachel cusk are the two runner-ups. my favourite tv show is “nathan for you” (2013-2018). “curb your enthusiasm” (2000-2024) is up there too; and at the moment my movie pick is “in bruges” (2008) by martin mcdonagh.

influence

(shoutout to luc.pw and ravereplica.com, now i wanna write this out too.)

web design

i was big into the whole neocities movement in 2015-2016, and that retro styled UX has always been my favourite. these days it’s especially information dense, clear grids, brutalist fonts, the whole deal that catch my eye. there’s a better blog post about this style. some cool sites:

also check out the games uplink (idlenet’s main visual design influence) and kittens game.

every small and niche tech adjacent blog ever

you don’t need a large audience or any sort of numbers-obsessed reason to start a blog. sometimes you wanna write and you just gotta start and the hardest part is getting started and all the other shit you’ve heard before from your english teacher.

the others

the mezzanine the novel (1988), by nicholson baker. i wrote a whole post about it. the prose is so freeform, it's very expressive, and makes a lot out of nothing. not much more i want to say about it, just read the novel goddamnit its like under 200 pages long.
meditations obviously the narrator of the mezzanine just had to be carrying marcus aurelius' meditations. let's just say i first read the collection not long after hitting a significantly low point many, many years ago, and it has changed a lot about how i think of things. it can be sappy and corny writing but sometimes its sentiments will stick with you. it sure beats reading some fuck ass self-help garbage that regurgitates the greeks while sprinkling in facebookcore anecdotes that could very well fit into a couple of blog posts.
george saunders there's something about his carefree yet sharp writing and semi-fantastical contemporary settings, mixed with the absurdity of someone like mark twain whilst largely keeping it brief makes me a fan of this guy's work. his short story collections, particularly "tenth of december" (2013), is really what got me into reading again when i first got my ereader, so i can't not name him or his works. i'll probably read one of his larger novels like "lincoln in the bardo" (2017) but for now i really like his short story collections. i like to imagine he has had some sort of influence in my writing voice at this point but the influences probably go deeper in that we stand on the shoulders of giants and all that.
city of glass the first novel (1985) in "the new york trilogy" (1987) by paul auster. a strange postmodern mystery novel that had an effect on me in the sense that it (at the time) deviated quite a bit from what i was used to reading (surface-level fiction following conventional structure) that i potentially read too deep into it than was necessarily required of me as a reader. anyways, the entire trilogy is a fun, brief read. (i totally didn't read it because of its influence on the initial iterations of metal gear solid 2 but i digress). i don't want to devolve into review-voice again, but the deconstruction of "character" and "plot" in its subversion of the typical mystery novel kept me hooked. im gonna bite its style like crazy for some of idlenet's "lore".
king crimson this one's a bit more recent but after exhausting myself of listening to math rock i decided to go "fuck it" and really get into crimson's post-Court output. and holy fuck was i missing out. these guys were metal decades before the greater rock industry went heavy and grunge and it's so obvious where TOOL got its roots from. they're like TOOL but less of the corny and faux-philosophical angsty lyricism/singing/imagery, only a few steps below it depending on what you listen to. for me, crimson's 70s run of records alone has music that suits any mood (i'll take larks, starless, and red over court any day of the week). their precision and uncompromised artistry has already had its influence on some of my stuff in a way i can't really explain.
outline the novel (2014) by rachel cusk, is so great (if you have read the mezzanine and enjoyed it, you should read it), that even though surface-level it reads to be like the loose thoughts and conversations of a writer looking for something to write about, there is a lot to unpack in what she writes about and how it's sequenced. basically if you have ever had trouble thinking of something to write, there'll be something in here for you. it's very stream-of-consciousness, really easing you in, if you keep your mind open to it. the narrator kinda takes a step back and there is this intriguing focus on just the conversations and recollections occurring in the novel, most of which don't really involve the narrator in the first place, in a way that reveals more about the narrator in return. (it's supposedly the first of a trilogy, but i hear that they kinda deviate from the style of outline so i'm not in a rush to read any more of her novels.)
xavier: renegade angel watch just one episode from the first season and you'll see what i mean. there is so much silly wordplay and layered jokes packed into a 10 minute episode it feels like i took 10 bong rips after having finished an episode. the shoddy 2000s 3d animation style that looks like it was just recorded in second life is also so good and fires my nostalgia receptors. when it's sharp, it's really sharp, and the humour will surprise you at times. it's not necessarily my favourite show nor is it the absolute funniest or best, but its unmatched, unique style is what keeps me coming back to watch it when i need a laugh.
video games are art let's get the obvious names out the way: dark souls (2011), shadow of the colossus (2005), portal (2007). i just love somewhat tragic, bittersweet and especially ambigious games (though not so much walking sims) where a narrative cannot really be fully executed without fine tuned gameplay; mechanics that serve the narrative in an essential way that other mediums can't really capture. their influence seeps into every piece of art i try creating whether i like it or not. kinda like how david lynch was always thinking about the wizard of oz. thats how i think of dark souls. there's also minecraft and persona 5, but for more superficial and "i love this game" type influence and less "this game and its writing and design will probably find its way into what i'm working on writing now". there's also the endless ocean of indie games, some of which have inspired me to follow my own development path and releasing my own shit. also kirby super star ultra (2008) has had an impact on me since i was a kid; it's probably obvious as far as stealing the name goes, but it also has great, bright spritework and cool music. i still play through the game every so often because it's just plain easy and fun.
MF DOOM ever wonder why i like to use so many aliases? ok so madvillainy is in my top five. mm.. food is not far either. even his king geedorah project is excellent. madvillainy's like redditor hiphophead's choice but even if you remotely enjoy the art form of rap and hip hop you will find some appreciation in this record. it's timeless, and also goated for having a cover that references madonna's debut. i listened to it as a young teenager and has opened my ears to all sorts of music ever since. "shadows of tomorrow" is one of the craziest quasimoto tracks of all time and "eye" is one of the best instrumentals with the whispers sample. it follows that earl sweatshirt is also one of my favourite rappers, the influence is too damn strong

this site

i don’t have a better place to put this: i figured i should give a short rundown on how this site is run. at the time of writing, the void, tyju.cc, and onlytomorrow.net are hosted on a remote server (as separate astro websites) that runs almalinux. i might make a more technical post about it when i’m happy with the whole setup for an extended period of time.

all of the sites are built with astro. some svelte components are used for dynamic components. i write all my shit in a text editor, use git (sourcehut, self-hosted gitea), then run a tiny script that remotely updates the containers that actually serve the sites. they are static-web-server podman quadlets, all run rootless and proxied through caddy. the void uses a server endpoint to grab the random subtitle, so its container just runs node with the site’s build output prerendered and the subtitle api thing be server-side. it’s a bit overkill but its clean af. tyju.cc works the same way but uses a route for the last.fm widget

posts in the void are organized with astro’s content collections with the markdown files in a src/content/posts directory and src/pages/[slug].astro builds a page from each post. read about that in astro’s docs and i’m not going to write a post about it because the astro conventions have already changed twice in the time since i implemented it on this site.

the light theme colours are based on gruvbox and the dark theme is adapted from tyju.cc.

you may have noticed the font of the site(s) change from time to time. it’s because i’m annoying and am really picky about a font. i want it to be serif because that’s what helps me read faster, but rarely does a serif font look decent on a screen that isn’t retina or high DPI. right now, the font is “piazzolla” at 16pt 300wght, but previously it was “IBM plex serif” at 14pt. onlytomorrow.net uses “faustina”, and tyju.cc (2023-2026) used “bitter”. the sans-serif option on this site and tyju.cc (2026) uses the great “atkinson hyperlegible”, finally a sans-serif body font that isn’t a helvetica-like grotesque that doesn’t make me want to rip my eyes out

if you want some easter egg tech, hover over a quote in the subtitle under the site name at the top of the page and you’ll see where it’s from. this dumb random quote feature is the only reason why this site isn’t 100% static. haha!

tools

TOOLS… I have to have my tools.

my main two computers are a laptop (all amd) with fedora KDE that i do some work and play video games on, and an m2 macbook air with tahoe that i do actual work on. for my servers:

(the naming scheme is largely arbitrary but are all named after songs i like)

glider hosts my personal jellyfin, navidrome, syncthing and a bunch of other random stuff. sometimes i use mullvad VPN and hook it up to qbittorrent with gluetun for occasional torrenting. the server is hooked up to a cheap old asustor NAS with 8TB of usable storage (16TB RAID1). works great for up to like three 1080p transcodes; it has a jasper lake intel CPU, so i can take advantage of QSV. everything’s been running smooth for almost three years now so i don’t really have many complaints that don’t involve my own incompetence.

newyou hosts a minecraft server and some other game servers i spin up from time to time, but right now i’m in the process of moving that and other heavier services from newyou to providence and ultimately getting rid of the former. mostly cuz its cheaper and the latter has a set up i’m more comfortable with in the sense that i can replicate it faster.

i don’t feel like getting into the proxmox/hypervisor rabbit hole any time soon, and my use case doesn’t really require it. docker/podman work just fine and i appreciate the bare metal performance for when i need to run game servers. as i keep refining my server setups, ansible gets more interesting to me and not just because it’s a U.K. le guin reference, so i may get into that..

software

on my computers, nothing exciting:

idlenet is a game made with love2d, so i can freely program it in whatever editor i like and just having a terminal window open for running $ love . makes my IDE needs far different from others. even for coding in html/css/astro and stuff like c/rust are sufficient for me in helix with the LSPs, so i don't really think about it much

kde plasma's default software for image viewers, video playback, gui text editors, etc work great so i hardly have to think about it anymore, unlike having to run those damn mega installers that install like 50 programs in one go to replace default windows functionality whenever i need to reinstall that OS.

(playing) games

outside of the two computers mentioned earlier i have another small computer: an lcd steam deck i got in 2022, for playing games. when i first got it i did swag it up with decky, but these days i just run it 90% vanilla so nothing explodes when steamOS updates. i do frequently use emudeck for playing old games; mostly ps2 games but i also played through about 60% of pokemon violet on it with decent results (i stopped playing because the game sucked, not because the emulation was borked). there's also my ps5 i call the "gran turismo 7 machine". i play simracing games on a logitech g29 with the stick shifter.

my other not-current-gen consoles all run homebrew:

i seriously plan on getting a ps vita and also dusting off my old slim ps3 to complete my sony collection. the homebrew opportunities on both are very enticing.

contact

read the footer for the email. idk what else to put here. if you know how to contact me outside of email (you know who you are) then do that instead obviously.

tyju stay down goth.zip helix chrome sux sears astro steam flashpoint fedora kde use firefox

onlytomorrow last.fm bob redbull scrob chj

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