Welcome, bonjour, and おはよう. My name is Mike, but I prefer the name Sarah these days (and am coming to terms with that). If you're here, you've found my little island in the vast sea that is the internet. I'm not sure how you've arrived here, but stay a while and listen. Feel free to head back out whenever you're ready.
I'm not really here to sell you anything and I'm not particularly interested in your I N F O R M A T I O N. I'd say that
I'm doing this for fun, but that doesn't feel like the right word. Maybe meditation? Contemplation? Just for the sake of
nostalgia?
I'm not great at this one, but here's what I'm about. I'm a software developer both professionally and as a hobby. For work, it's more boring, usual, business stuff. Hobby development for me ranges from toy emulators, to bare-metal operating systems, to tools for TTRPGs, and a bunch of other things when the itch strikes.
I'm also a partner to a wonderful wife and a parent of, soon to be, two boys. I'm 34 at the time of this writing, and got into the parent game kind of late, but it's been a nice refresher getting to see things with some new perspective. I go by Dada with the kids - that seems to sit well with me, even though other masc terms don't. Dunno what it is, maybe it'll change but I'm not fighting it.
I'm a musician and have released music under my legal name mikeastarb, as well as a psudonym, 44i or Th4t H4cker G(i)rl.
I've been playing music seriously since I was 10 or 11 when my band teacher was able to push me into things. I took some
theory in high school and college, and, lately just enjoy my guitar and playing around on the kid's instruments when I get
a chance to.
Last piece I'll say as an introduction is that I enjoy playing games of all shapes and sizes. Board games and TCGs (mostly Magic), TTRPGS (a lot of D&D5e recently, but I'm really itching to break out into more indie stuff), Video Games (NES era to modern releases) but mostly non-competitive stuff. Along those lines, I also keep up with some Professional Wrestling through a promotion called AEW.
I'm a fairly reserved person who won't get loud with opinions BUT, just to get it out of the way:
There's been a bit of a rediscovery of the "personal web" that's come up in my YouTube and reddits recently. A generation who grew up on just a handful of sites/apps learning that there used to be an internet where there weren't these humongous monoliths that dominated the space. I've got a good memory of finding fan-sites by the dozens for different things, and I remember creating a few of my own. The posts struck a chord with me.
I'm here, giving myself permission to create, and express, and all that without the pressure of it being perfect. The
equivalent of a home movie, or a meme video circa EBaum's World. Maybe I'll write something profound, or at least worthy of
some sharing, but that's not the point. I don't need to have a point, or do something profound, or novel. I can write
something dumb and give myself permission to leave it around, see later that it was dumb, but accept that it was something
that I had done and that it's O K A Y.
If you've made it this far - great. Thanks for reading and giving these words some temporary residence in your head. If it's me reading this back in the future - hi, hope things are well. Don't delete this; just let it sit as an artifact of how things were.
Dunno what I'll ramble about next time, but I'm going to go make sure this goes live, and then sleep.
Cheers.