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Pixel Renaissance Dad

I’m a thirty-something husband and father of two, writing anonymously from somewhere in the middle of too many obsessions and not enough evenings. I lift, I track protein, I self-host everything on Linux, and I’m slowly — embarrassingly slowly — making a top-down pixel art game in Godot. I have no artistic talent and I refuse to make music for it. We’ll see how that goes.

I also tinker with DeFi and crypto, fight migraines, and spend too much time thinking about what it means to be a decent man, husband, and father in a world that seems increasingly determined to make all three harder than they should be.

This blog is where I think out loud. No agenda, no brand, no slick content strategy — just honest notes from the work in progress.

I am not a crypto expert. I just can't stop finding it interesting.

I can't stop finding crypto interesting, even now. The charts crowd, the fundamentals debate, the mechanics underneath — and yes, the scams are fascinating too.

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Heroes: Olden Era — they finally did it

24 years after Heroes III, Olden Era arrived and it's everything I didn't dare hope for — from a kid who was always bad at strategy games.

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I named the VM. This is what passes for commitment around here.

Eleven months since the last commit. I spun up a fresh VM, named it, and couldn't quite bring myself to walk away again. A Papniskin devlog.

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I did a 3-day water fast. My body had thoughts.

A dad with chronic migraines seizes a rare prepared window to try a 72-hour water fast and sees what his body actually does when left to its own devices.

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I'm not mad at Valve for the Steam Deck price hike

Valve raised Steam Deck prices and the internet is loud about it. I don't think it's a Valve story — it's a memory market story, and cheap tech is ending.

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Making a game is not like building software. I know this now.

I'm a developer. I thought that would help. Six things about solo game dev that turn out to be genuinely hard, even when you know how to code.

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I don't even know how to start writing about this game

Six years of notes, and it finally has a design document. Two extinct civilizations, a hybrid creature, a soul-devouring false god — this is Papniskin.

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Setting up a home server: the rough guide

The key commands and decisions in the order you'd actually need them. Debian, SSH hardening, Samba, Jellyfin, Tailscale — a skeleton, not a manual.

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Six weeks, zero pixels

A follow-up to the post where I swore I'd finally get back to Papniskin. Six weeks later: nothing. And I'm strangely fine with that.

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Slow weight loss sucks – and I keep falling for the quick fix anyway

The biology is working against you, the quick fix is a lie, and I know all of this — yet here I am on attempt five. Why slow fat loss is so hard.

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The accidental reader

I was never a bookworm — too much energy, not enough stillness. Then two kids arrived, gaming got complicated, and my wife's bookshelves happened to be right there.

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At some point, gaming to relax became something I had to learn

Gaming to relax sounds automatic. It isn't — and it took me embarrassingly long to figure out why I kept standing up feeling worse than before.

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The quiet flatness — something I keep noticing in men who used to love their hobbies

A pattern I keep seeing in regular guys in their thirties and forties: the hobbies they used to love have gone silent. Here's what I think is actually going on.

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The Steam Deck as a dad purchase, not a gamer purchase

Parenting didn't kill gaming — it made the old way structurally impossible. The Steam Deck didn't fix the schedule. It fixed the structure.

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Turtle WoW's last days, and my own quiet server

Turtle WoW — the most ambitious vanilla WoW project ever built — shuts down in nine days. It's also the reason I need to get back into my own server project.

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Nobody reads blogs anymore. So I started one.

A blog in 2026, of all years. An anonymous dad in his 30s with too many obsessions and not enough evenings — and an honest answer to why.

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What's running on my home server

Samba, Jellyfin, Nextcloud, Vaultwarden, Tailscale, Ollama — all running quietly at home, keeping the family's data where it belongs.

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Why I built a home server

Subscription fatigue, a cheap mini PC, and a weekend with Debian. How I stopped renting my digital life and started owning it again.

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