Monthly Update June 2025

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Hello! Welcome to my monthly update for June (happy pride :3)! This being the first of its kind, allow me to explain what exactly I plan to do with this series.

See, I’m always working on things. However, these things very rarely see the light of day, complete or otherwise, so to the outside observer, it appears that I am doing nothing, which is a shame! Further, publicly summarizing my activities and setting goals for the next month allows me to hold myself to some sort of standard and thus do more things. Planning and visualizing the future is also really good for me in terms of ADHD, and being accountable to the internet to do so is a great way to make sure it happens.

TLDR: It’s a summary of what I did this month and what I plan to do next month, tied up into a neat retrospective.

So, without further ado, let’s kick it off.

Star citizen survival post

I’m dropping this with a post I’ve had laying around for a bit on survival in star citizen. The reason I didn’t initially release it was that around the time I wrote it the whole blades debacle came up and I just got super depressed about the direction of the project and didn’t want to engage in it as much. These days things have generally improved ever so slightly so I figured what the fuck I might as well just release it. All it was really doing was collecting dust anyway.

Treehouse TTRPG

I spent a lot of June working on “The Treehouse” (learn more here), which is a new TTRPG that I was working on for the “Jam In Silence” Game Jam by possum creek games. I was not able to finish it on time and as such it’s sitting incomplete on my hard drive, but damn is it gonna be good when it’s done! Imagine a modern setting but focused on the PCs in a treehouse where each characters’ troubles, flaws and vices are represented as “classes”. Feature-wise it’s mostly there, with a few additions and tweaks here and there, but content-wise, it’s a barren wasteland, which is somewhat terrifying. Definitely gonna return to this soon though, as I’d love to playtest this one with friends.

Vacation

My first half of june was claimed by a trip to spain, which was a breath of fresh air compared to the ins and outs of life over here. Functional public transport was really nice and the spanish siesta was truly iconic. The sun also goes down around 10 in the afternoon, which does wonders for my sleep schedule, and surprisingly everything is open past 7:15. Wild.

Open source contributions

I also started going down the open source rabbit hole. I did some work on the godot project (nothing major, just regression testing), and generally went out of my way to open tickets, do testing, and work with smarter developers to contribute to any number of random FOSS projects. The highlight reel consists of the embedded game window over wayland in godot, a bug in the xwayland-satellite project, and some work on the niri WM.

Niri

Welp it took me this long to realize that the hyprland maintainer is a bigot. Neat. Time to find a new WM. Enter niri! Niri is awesome! It’s still a bit rough around the edges (It doesn’t support release keybinds yet and scratchpads are sorely missing), however I love it. It took me about a week of literally nothing else, but it’s all set up, and now I can do any single productive thing (please). I’m tracking a lot of issues on its github, and I can’t wait for it to get better.

Nike’s house

It’s still happening! I promise! Treehouse really put a wrench in my progress here, as I wanted to make a TTRPG, and that jam seemed like a great opportunity, however I’ve since sidelined treehouse and I’m back working on nike’s. I’m hoping to get it done by august time, but no promises. There’s a lot more to it than I had hoped but I’ve made some steady progress.

I added an event tracker so the game can keep track of what you’ve said and which paths you’ve gone down, as well as a few api tweaks so that when I sit back down to do more writing I can make more tweaks to the gameplay from within the dialogue. I also cooked on a bit of dialogue and plot structure stuff but I’m not locked into anything specifically so I won’t drop anything specific here in case I happen to change my mind haha.

Disco elysium

In less productive news, I have played disco elysium to completion! My goodness that was good. I will be referencing it on a regular basis going forward. Long live tequila sunset.

In all seriousness it really gave me a deeper appreciation for the writing that goes into games, especially branching ones where people cannot ever be expected to experience every line of dialogue that the designers sweat over. It’s really a beautiful thing to bash your head in weaving a web of narrative that leads to a conclusion that can be experienced from all angles. Some things may be done out of order, others might not be done at all, and as a designer you have to account for all of it and still make sure the story remains coherent. You also have to provide multiple ways of going from point A to point B and make it all flow which is a mind boggling amount of work to do. It’s genuinely awe inspiring. The game is beautiful, and I’d urge you to give it a play (though maybe obtain it though alternative means as the game and related IP has been regrettably stolen from its original creators). Also, ironically, some of the most nuanced political discussion I’ve ever seen online (which isn’t saying a lot) has come from the disco elysium community, which is hilarious to me.

Social media death

I killed all my social media too. I’ve kept youtube around in a limited capacity (30 minute daily cap, and I’ve limited it to just the subscriptions page), but everything else is dead, discord included. RSS feeds are so goated. Here’s a neat rule you can use to determine if you’re in too deep though: If you’re checking your phone like it’s a skinner box that dispenses dopamine at irregular intervals, it’s time to stop and re-evaluate your relationship with the thing.

It’s horrifying to think that I got in too deep despite knowing and working against a lot of the psychological tricks that social media companies use to cultivate addictive patterns. If I got sucked in that far, what about joe schmoe who just uses instagram or tik tok, or any alternative on a daily basis. How many hours are lost to just watching noise that will be forgotten in a matter of minutes. Staring into the static just to emerge on the other end no better than when you started, just more exhausted. It’s a depressing image.

I don’t want people reading this and thinking I hate all social media. I don’t. I think it has the capacity to do a lot of good. It’s just run by evil people and also mark zuckerberg (who is also evil but definitely not a person), and is handcrafted to turn your time and attention into profit through manufactured addiction.

I personally don’t have the capacity to make sure I’m using everything mindfully so I’ve cut it all off. Youtube is on thin ice, but youtube revanced (which i heavily recommend), an application timer, and the unhook browser plugin have made it manageable. I’d also urge everyone reading to look at your own use and make sure it’s done with your own consent. In other words, would you benefit from this time more if you sat down and watched a video, scrolled a feed, etc…, or rather got up and called a friend, climbed a tree, did some creative work, played some music, or anything else. It’s a really good practice to ask yourself that every time you whip out your phone to scroll and if you can’t then maybe consider deleting some apps.

Anyway I’m not your parent; I’ll get down off this soap box and get back to the meat and potatoes.

Plans

Alright, what are we doing in july?

Well, I’m planning a few updates on the website, as well as some extra content here, as it’s been awhile since I gave fireye.coffee some love. That integrated todo list looks really good, as I keep my todolist on github issues constantly up to date, so I’d love to figure out some sort of backend that translates that into raw HTML, and can natively display it for people here.

Further, I’m of course going to be working more on nike’s house. I should probably stop with the tools work and just get to writing, as I could work on tools forever (I love tool (the band too)). Expect an update on that sometime this month. If you don’t see one, email me yelling about it.

I’m also messing around with self hosting stuff and fucking christ I’ve tried to set up this openvpn server at least 5 times now and it still doesn’t work. It’s a distinct skill issue and even if I do set it up I reckon I’ll be hacked almost immediately due to further skill issues, but we’ll take those battles as they come. I just love the idea of homelabbing so much, so I’ll bang my head on this as much as I need to to get it working.

I also have a summer class starting up soonish so I might be a bit more cooked on time than I have been recently which sucks, but eh que sera sera. I’ll live.

Conclusion

Alright that’s all I got for y’all. This was already a couple days late, so sorry about that. I’ll try to keep these up though as they keep me accountable and help me track my actual goals, and if anyone happens to care then hooray! Regardless, I hope you have a great day, and thanks for reading. vaya con queso!