Balancing D&D, WoW, AI Projects, and DevOps Adventures

Alright, so yeah, it’s been a little while since I made a post, but for good reason. I’ve been pretty tied up with my D&D campaign. The last few sessions needed way more prep than I expected, so a lot of my free time went there. On top of that, I dipped back into World of Warcraft with some friends because of the new season. That’s been a fun little side thing.

I’ve also been tinkering a lot with a new site for my Final Fantasy XI link shell. I’ll drop the link below this post. I’m building it in kind of the same way I’ve been doing this blog-riffing with AI, tweaking things, and repeating until I land on something I like, then doing the custom polish at the end. Still running with the GitHub + Vercel + Neon DB workflow, which I’m liking overall. Only snag so far is Neon doesn’t auto-clean old branches, so I probably need to set up a GitHub action to clear out anything that’s not main. That’ll be my next little fix-it project.

On the D&D side, I’ve been messing around with AI image generation for concept art, which has been awesome for giving my players more of a visual hook into the world. For this post’s cover art, I’ll probably use a piece I made of Zoe Waters—she’s this scrappy little artificer who looks up to one of my players’ characters.

Outside of that, I’ve been trying to figure out what “next project” I want to dive into. Something tangible. I keep circling back to the idea of making a short visual novel—like 1–2 hours of gameplay. It’d be a nerdy little isekai story. I already have someone lined up to voice the main character, which is pretty sweet, so I just need three more voices and then decide on an engine. I’m leaning toward Godot since I’ve used it before.

Work-wise, we’ve been doing a ton of automation. Most of it’s in GitHub since we’ve got a deal that gives us a ton of runner hours each month. Right now, we’re building out full pipelines to push from dev into our two new data centers. It’s been cool seeing the whole stack—firewall, NetApp storage, compute—spin up through infrastructure as code. We’re running compute on Apache CloudStack (solid open-source KVM management), and it’s been going really smoothly. Easily one of the most fun projects I’ve gotten to work on, and it’s always a blast demoing progress for different teams.

So yeah, a little personal, a little work. Same as always.

Later days.

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