My Hobbies

Gaming is still one of the easiest ways to explain how my brain works. I like games that give you a world, a set of rules, and enough freedom to create your own problems inside them. RuneScape was the first one that really pulled me in, but that same interest shows up in Escape from Tarkov, World of Warcraft, Total War, city builders, and the classic Battlefield and Call of Duty games. I tend to notice the systems underneath the fun: economies, progression, small automations, incentives, and the way a good loop can keep someone engaged for years.

Some of my favorite gaming now is much slower and more shared. My wife was not always a gamer, so playing two-player games together has been a fun shift. It gets me out of my usual habits, makes me appreciate games I might have skipped on my own, and reminds me how good couch co-op can feel when the point is not optimization, but just being in the same world together for a while.

I also like having a place to experiment without needing every idea to become a polished product. My home server runs Proxmox, and I spin up Ubuntu VMs for tools, experiments, and whatever technical rabbit hole I am in at the time. Projects like OpenClaw are fun because they let me learn by touching the whole stack: infrastructure, setup, debugging, and the weird little decisions that only show up once something is actually running.

A lot of my creative taste leans medieval. Knights, castles, old worlds, political drama, big maps, strange houses, and stories that feel like they existed before the camera showed up. That is probably why Game of Thrones hit me so hard. Even with the ending, I still love the scale of that world and the feeling that every place has history under it.

Zach at Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver, Colorado — Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver, Colorado. I took the stairs instead of parking higher up because I wanted the full experience. The area stuck with me for another reason too: it is a geological landmark tied to dinosaurs, and seeing full lines of fossilized footprints made the place feel much older than the venue itself.

I think that is why I keep circling back to the idea of making a game or a short film someday. Both are intimidating because the final result hides how many disciplines are underneath it: writing, design, programming, modeling, editing, sound, pacing, and a thousand small production choices. But that complexity is also what makes it exciting. I am very interested in how AI changes the scale of what one person can realistically make.

Becoming a parent has changed the center of gravity for all of this in the best way. My son is almost two, and being outside with him brings me back to the same kind of discovery I loved as a kid. Watching him notice the world makes ordinary places feel new again. He lights up my world.