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Some Projects I'm Working On

2026-06-22

I feel that, in the past few years, I've entered the most creative period of my life so far. Arts & crafts, or at least, visual arts & crafts, have never been my forte. I'm one of those people who can "barely draw a stick figure". But as I've grown, I've discovered a wider variety of art existed than I ever conceived.

First, writing; I wrote about a hundred pages of a novel in fourth grade. It wasn't very good, butit did give me the username I still use on GitHub and many other sites to this day, theairdemon. Then, in middle school, I found a natural affinity for music, particularly the saxophone. Finally, in high school, I started learning Python, and I discovered the world of programming. This obviously set me up for my current career.

Writing, music, and code. I may not be a painter, sculptor, or any other form of visual artist, but these three domains are the canvas on which I do all of my creative work. And in recent months, I've found myself pulled evermore into the cycle of creating projects throughout these various domains.

Now, do I finish any of them? Almost never; I've been finding joy in the act of creation itself. Pushing for the next line of lyrics in a song, workshopping code structures and helper functions, I can almost feel my synapses firing in new directions, lighting up dormant parts of my brain.

Code

Music generation

I've taken a deep dive back into my longest-running side project, generating music programmatically. I'm on Version 4 of the project; to be honest, it's really Version 4.1. I've integrated Fluidsynth to automatically play my Python-generated MIDI files, and I have a GUI interface built in Godot for selecting various generation options.

My music generator might be a bit too complicated at the moment, if I'm being honest 😅. Here's the processes that get kicked off when a user selects "Play" from the Godot interface:

  1. Godot script takes the user's text selections as discrete integer values and passes them in as args to a shell script
  2. The shell script calls the Python script to generate MIDI files using 5 of the 8 args
  3. The shell script then builds and compiles the C file that contains the core Fluidsynth functionality
  4. The shell script then passes the MIDI files into the compiled Fluidsynth executable, plus the remaining 3 args for the soundfont instruments
  5. Music plays from the speakers!
  6. And when you want to "Pause", Godot engine kills the executing process entirely

So, lots of optimization left to do. My recent changes have been focused on adding some "prebuilt" chord progressions, e.g. Pachelbel's Canon, the standard "pop four chords" (I, V, iv, VI), and so on. I've also been trying to improve the melodic structure; particularly in minor songs, where the V chord is technically in a different key, I've been adding support for having both the major and minor version of a scale be accessible as the choices for the melody and chord structures. Some of the songs are coming out a little funky, but progress is progress, and it's always improving.

One of the eventual goals of this music generator is to use it as the soundtrack generator for a video. Which, speaking of making a video game...

Video Game - JARLS

JARLS, or "Just Another Real Life Simulator", has been worked on in random spurts of energy. Haven't done much in the past month or so, but since I did work on it for like two weeks straight, it's worth mentioning here.

Just about done with the Severance-style office worker job. I think my next work will probably focus on the interstitial components; I want to add more detail to the player's apartment, their commute to work, etc.

HackTheBox

Also haven't worked on this in the past week. Basically, I downloaded some "hacker" games from Steam, where you play as an Anonymous hacker and do various nefarious things. While playing these games, I noticed that they were using some tools I recognized, such as ffuf, a real web fuzzing tool for finding hidden URLs, POST calls, et cetera.

Given that I work full-time as a software engineer, I figured, hey, why am I playing a hacking game? I should just be learning how to hack. So I started diving back into the HackTheBox web penetration testing course, which has been very fun, especially since I'm using Linux Mint on my personal computer and can easily download + run the penetration testing tools. Very fun course, enjoying "breaking into" mock websites like that.

D&D

Where I've been brainstorming

I've usually run on the treadmill while watching Dimension 20 shows, or while watching some various YouTube channels I enjoy. Recently, I've only been listening to my "pop punk workout" playlist - certainly a misnomer, given the additions of Golden, Viva La Vida-but-epic, various Laufey songs, etc. Running for several miles with this music has been an absolute blast; tons and tons of brainstorming work on the treadmill, super helpful for project progress.

Writing

Two main focuses for writing in my long-running D&D campaign. First, I've been revamping the ship-to-ship combat system, attempting to optimize for having a lot of player characters (avg 7, max 9) and many NPCs on the crew. Second, I've been fleshing out more of the specific plot details for the completion of Act II. I have the overall plot structure still in place from when I wrote it about 3 years ago (damn, time flies); with the changes to the world and the flow of the story, a slight rewrite is good for fine-tuning the specifics.

And speaking of writing some new lore...

Music

I have made some really good progress on my musical for Admiral Verona Rogue. I've got her and her companions' stories fleshed out, and I've got the full idea for Venator Fortis, leader of the Emerald Imperium and Verona's great enemy, fully characterized and built. The main thing now is to define each song in the musical, then write the lyrics and music. Feeling great about this progress!

Conclusion

Idk, go create some cool stuff lol