This one ended up looking a bit goofy in my opinion. I spent most of my attention on the jacket, which was slightly inspired by one I saw on my way from work.

This is the first full-body image. I was (and am) still struggling with maintaining proper proportions and posing, which is part of why most of these images once again use front-facing perspective. Unlike most of these images, which use the PICO-8 palette, this one was an experiment with the Anb16 palette.

Was browsing through the community page of a game on Steam, happened to see someone’s profile pic of an elf-like character from some MMORPG with purplish gray hair, and it gave me a tiny bit of inspiration to draw something similar. I did make little pixel art portraits before, but these were usually in a front-facing perspective.

Okay, so last month (December of 2025), I saw a few screenshots of PC-98 games and went wondering: “in comparison, why do Western home computer games of the same era (the kind that you’d see on an Amiga or Atari ST) tend to be so ‘meh’-looking?”, in comparison to both console games of the same era and PC games that would come out shortly after games like DOOM would prove the PC was actually a viable mainstream gaming platform?".

A lot of the time, our preferences for what an OS user interface should look like come down, ultimately, to either nostalgia or past experiences. Someone gets annoyed at a UI change and their instinctive reaction is to assume that whatever “the old way” was, was inherently better.

This especially applies to people who use Linux (or any of the BSDs, but for purposes of this page, I’ll refer to any of the “free desktops” as Linux), since it is rarely ever their first operating system – usually they started off with either Windows or macOS, and picked up habits and assumptions from that.

I have recently developed a small library and command-line utility in Rust that opens and creates GXT files from older Grand Theft Auto games. GXT files (description of format) are binary-based lists of localizable text strings that are used both by the game’s executable and all the game/mission scripts. Since the games are meant to be released in different languages, using a separate format for storing strings makes sense.

The program supports, and was tested on, files from GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas, and should also work with the “Stories” games, which are based on Vice City’s engine.

I’ve decided to write a little script using JS that reads a Japanese notation for a move in shogi and tries to convert it into English.

After updating Alpine Linux on my VPS to version 3.14, I noticed that Midnight Commander (mc) crashed with a segmentation fault around 90% of the time, and at other times it ran, but refused to accept any input.

At first, I thought that it had to do with the OS update itself and something was wrong with the version of mc or some other package built in Alpine, so I tried building mc with ncurses instead of slang as it was before, but to no effect. To make matters worse, the bug disappeared when I tried to trace it in strace or valgrind.

Out of all PC games that have been around for decades, id Software’s DOOM is probably one with the largest longevity. People still make new levels for it, write new engines and modifications for it, and do speedruns for it under a variety of conditions, with new records still being broken every now and then. For almost every piece of hardware which can output graphics and run code, there have been attempts to port or clone DOOM, with “It runs Doom” becoming a popular internet meme.