I once met this girl who let me touch her boobs and do other fun stuff. In order to make that more convenient, we rented an apartment together. Which meant I needed a job to pay rent. Eventually we wanted a nicer place, so we bought a townhouse, which meant I needed to make more money and get a better job. Then we wanted kids, which meant a bigger house, car, etc etc. So needed a promotion to keep up with growing bills and spending.

Now I’m in my 40s, have a bunch of kids, work too much. And all I wanted was to touch some boobs and stuff.

I play the sims sometimes. A few years ago I realized that I only really enjoy it when I have a fully fleshed out story of every sim in the game, their relationships to each other, their personalities, etc. So I began the extensively tedious task of making a save like that. I have an excel file with hundreds of lines of text and several sheets detailing every personality trait, every relationship, their hopes and dreams, their ages so I can age them all up appropriately, and more. I also use it to make sure that I have a balanced amount of traits/goals, since the NPCs as EA made them are almost all identical with very small differences (~60% of them had the “family oriented” trait, and if they had that there was a very high likelihood they had the cheerful trait). I will work on it obsessively for a few weeks at a time then stop for months, repeat 1-3 times a year.

A coworker once said I sounded a little flat on Teams, so I bought a USB Audio Interface, boom arm, shock mount, shotgun mic. Couldn’t stop there, of course. Bought two studio monitors, foam pads for the speakers, and audio foam for my bare walls. A little over board, but now my coworker can hear me apply chapstick like I’m two inches from their ears.

I learned just enough coding and firefox framework to compile my own version of firefox with middle mouse closing tabs disabled

This may not be at the top of my “excessive” list, but it’s the most recent. I bought a pair of ex-enterprise HP servers and a 32RU rack to hold them, so I could cancel my Netflix subscription.

I wanted to do a small tray icon plugin showing me weather alerts but the European weather alert system (whatever it’s called) was using shitty API that would only return all alerts at the same time which was quite heavy. So I wrote a small server that would pull those twice a day, save in a DB and expose API with location param. Then I wrote lua plugin in awesome WM to get this and display info. After couple of months they changed the API and allowed filtering alerts by location…

When I was 19 I tried an IRC Vampire the Requiem game. I got banned after arguing with the admins about the rules (in retrospect I was right about how things worked but they’d already house ruled it and I should’ve just gone with it). In response I wrote a whole website for managing character sheets, and a connected IRC bot to handle dice rolls, and pull things from character sheets.

I did all of that, and then proceeded to run a terrible vampire game on IRC for a couple months. The code was all in PHPNuke so it’s useless now. But it taught me a lot about coding for the web. During that time I showed my work at a job interview as a software dev, and I got a job while still in college. But as part of the coding questions, I learned that you can use sql to join tables. I went home and started rewriting a lot of stuff, but the game died before I was finished.

I’ve been working on a video detailing a video game I’m making and for one of the sections in the video I talk about Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. For those parts I tried downloading some footage for it but it always came out blurry and low quality so I decided to record my own footage. I kinda regret that decision because I forgot how long that game is. So now I’m playing through this 30 hour game to get a few seconds footage from different chapters in the game.

I wanted physical books out of something that was only available as PDFs. So instead of going the sensible route I bought a color laser printer, learnt how to bind books, bought tools and materials, made a simple book binding press and made my own books.

I ended a relationship to prove I was right.
Worth it.

During COVID I couldn’t find any distilled water to make cocktail pods (which are already pretty extra in their own right), so I bought an alembic still and learned how to use it to distill water, which led me to figure out how to rig it up with a hot plate, food grade tubes, fish tank pump, and igloo cooler so I could run it in an out of the way spot in my house. It takes days to make a few gallons…but the cocktail pods came out great and now I’m slightly closer to being a survivalist! (My smartass friends: Why didn’t you just make Jell-O shots?)

Purchasing a self-hosted server to avoid having to pay a truckload of money in storage space. Well, not only did I have to rent a smaller VPS anyways to bypass my ISP restrictions on incoming traffic (curse you CG-NAT!) but I also managed to brick two $100-ish microservers in two different attempts to patch them against BIOS vulnerabilities. If I ever manage to get the circuitry to save those devices though, they might work as a nice TV box each

I once decommissioned a hard drive with shotgun slugs. Yes, this was in Texas.

It’s not unspeakably excessive but I bought a laser printer just to print out the „manual“ of Shenzhen I/O. Played the game for a week or so.

I do use the printer about once every two months though.

When I was a coop a fellow coop found a second gen ryzen CPU (top of the line for the time) loose in a box that got shook around, pretty much every pin was bent. We were going to ewaste it but the coop asked our boss if he could keep it if he fixed it. Took him months of fiddling with it with pliers, and I think he broke off and replaced a couple pins but he eventually got it to work