About
Still trying to figure out what to put here, so for now I'll do a ramble.
To start off, here's my physical manifestation on this plane:
I'm only not smiling because I haven't practiced enough smiling for cameras and I think I look awkward as hell.
My IRL details are that my name is Kenny, I was born in Southern California and lived there my entire life (except one year in Santa Cruz, CA) until I was in my mid-twenties and moved to Manchester with my girlfriend* who was going to grad school. I'd just been laid off and she got accepted and it seemed like the perfect time to go wild. Now I've lived here for 12 years, and have British citizenship and am trying not to let it affect my accent. But I've been told it has... oops.
This website is sort of an effort to break away away from the codification of the internet into social media spaces where you are stuck with expressing yourself the way they allow you. Unfortunately they also have all the audience so I am very sure that most of what I do here goes into the aether unread, but anyway I'm having fun.
There's not much more interesting to tell about me that isn't oversharing so I'll just do a list of things I like:
The Grateful Dead, Baseball, Cricket (I got into this since moving here and have fallen hard), Music (Lots but there's no way to list that isn't boring), mostly old video games, but some new video games especially ones that are influenced by old video games, reading (I read 80 books in 2018, 70 in 2019, 6 in 2020 (the pandemic killed my ability to read for this year and the next), 12 in 2021 and now as of May 2022 I'm BACK and I've read 18 books so far), buying books, libraries, looking for books to buy, downloading ebooks, Jack Vance, travelling, I used to get into craft beer but I think the interest is waning, I mean I still like a good beer but I'm not going to pay £8 for a can of beer anymore, podcasts (The Legacy Music Hour, The VGM Jukebox (RIP), RPGFan podcasts, Sonic The Comic The Podcast, Retronauts, Axe of the Bloodgod, Backlisted (I've read too many books inspired by this podcast), Pocketoid, Retro Game Club, In Our Time, Roguelike Radio, Tom Rhodes Smart Camp, Tailenders, Slightly Foxed), Dizzy the video game character, the ZX Spectrum in a parasocial nostalgia since I never used it but something about it is so AESTHETIC, buying music on vinyl and cd, downloading music from Soulseek, watching bad or cheese or just at least fun movies over "good ones", John Waters, Blade Runner, Blood In Blood Out, Kids in the Hall, Northern Exposure, PG Wodehouse, Rose Macaulay, Virginia Woolf (I visited her house one time between jobs), the Evercade, the Nintendo Switch (holy hell I love it), thinking socialism more emotionally than the details, trying not to get upset about politics (I lean very left, both economically and socially) especially online, religiously searching (I always say I'm an agnostic who wishes he wasn't), I'm more of an Anglophile than I want to admit because I get embarassed by American Anglophiles, I guess it's that thing where you hate something that reminds you of yourself, huh? I love looking up things on wikipedia and ending up having 20 tabs open and learning about new stuff and hopefully learning them from better sources than wikipedia, allmusic.com, raves and rave music, having 2 pints and excitedly talking to people on a subject we are both into, picking random places in the UK and going to them. I miss Southern California and wish I could live there without it being in the United States, buying magnets as tchotchkes from places I've visited instead of almost any other souvenir. That's enough for now.
*How do you phrase this. If you say partner and you're in a hetero relationship people think you might be appropriating (I'm thinking too hard) but she's not my wife. As of writing this (2022) we've been together 16 years so she's not just my gf, she's my partner.