#introduction

After alienating a few people with follow requests while having 0 posts, I guess it's high time I introduce myself.

Hello all o/, I'm Varstahl, a #SoftwareEngineer #RemoteWorker, but more of a Jack of all Trades in reality. #SystemAdministrator and #TechLead are also titles I worked under for my clients.

I'm a hobbyist #artist who had the pleasure of having a song broadcast live on #radio, and a #demoscener at heart. Growing up nerdy was quite difficult, it's not common to find 12 to 14 years old boys or girls studying Assembly manuals in non-native languages, just to get more insights on how computers work. Let's just say that in hindsight, yeah, I was probably the odd one out studying college level books just to foster my passion. But the search for kin ended when I attended my first #demoparty in Fallingbostel (Hamburg, Germany).

I’m driven from Hamburg to the apparent middle of nowhere in Fallingbostel, I remember fields all around and a single industrial building, with someone selling the tickets. It’s almost pitch black, and I think to myself “what have I gotten myself into, but then again I already made a 1400 km travel, I might as well bite the bullet and see where it leads”. I take 2 literal steps in, I look around, and I immediately think “these are my people”. For the first time I feel a huge sense of belonging with a whole bunch of (temporarily) strangers, and the sheer amount of hardware and interesting people in there still fills my vivid dreams: #Commodore64, #Amiga, #Vic20, #PC of all shapes and sizes, teams of a couple persons working on a real time raytracing of Stonehenge (this was 2002!), people that brought carpets from their home to decorate the hallways, guys and girls from all across Europe sharing their #technology passion in the friendliest community I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of… #MekkaAndSymposium2002 changed my life forever.

As a #demoscener I made lots of friends and I participated in and won several competitions: #StreamedMusic, #4ch #TrackedMusic, #ANSI, #ASCII, and I also had the pleasure on working on compression and packing #tools that helped a friend of mine win a #4kIntro competition at the young age of 17. I also made a few #cracktro and #intro, but those were never released so they don’t count!

Let’s see, what else:

• I still love #IRC
• I listen to (and make, sometimes) a ton of music, ranging from #chiptune to #BlackMetal, from #ClassicalMusic to #jazz;
• in the past I published some #tech and #gaming videos on my YouTube channels;
• I stream #games, #tech and #dnd campaigns on my Twitch channel (although rarely as of late);
• I’m an #OpenSource contributor and I maintain (sparsely nowadays) some modules for #Kodi that support Amazon Prime Video;
• I’m waiting for my friend @Dubmood to spin up a #mastodon named EFnet (short for Elon-Free network, @macaw.social you lost a great opportunity there);
• … and I guess that’s it for the moment.

How was that for an #introduction?