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.
you can read about how this blog is run on the /now page,
but below is an exhaustive outline of the other shit i use to go about
my life looking at a screen.
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 shooters (like ready or not) and strategy
games. ok for strategy games i just mean age of empires 2 but that’s really all
you need. i’ve rated all the games i’ve played in recent memory on
backloggd.
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.
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. 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's the most sappy and corny writing at times 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,
so it really eases you in, if you keep your mind open to it. the narrator
takes a step back and there is this intriguing focus on just the conversations
occurring in the novel, inadvertently revealing more about the narrator in
return without having her tell you explicitly. (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 crazy 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
ambigious works, i guess. 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. also great boss fights
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. listen to those damn lyrics. it follows that earl
sweatshirt is also one of my favourite rappers, the influence is too damn
strong
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
misc services. 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 quicksync. 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.
image edits: gimp (unfortunately), aseprite for sprites
video edits: davinci resolve (on my mac), handbrake for transcoding
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 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.
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 (you know who you are) then you can do that instead obviously.
