Hi, I'm broke and in college studying Computer Science. Ideally I'd like to get paid to do it at some point but hey the economy has other plans I guess. My minors are Creative Writing and Immersive Media Design, my favorite color is turquoise, I have very long, curly hair, and I'm easily intimidated by people who come off as more talented than me.
da part where millian talks about their hobbies:
If you haven't picked up on it from the fact that I have a personal website and also do programming and digital art yes I am a computer nerd. That having been said I do a lot outdoors. Things I enjoy are
HEMA, thrifting, upcycling (they're different I swear), camping, backpacking, mountainbiking,
plinking, and archery. I really do love nature and am lways trying to wrangle my friends into going on group outings. I make the best camp ramen stew you've never had and actually go through the trouble of carring a big ol' saucepan on my hikes for cooking up soup.
Pursuits I enjoy on the interwebs are private Garry's mod sessions with my friends, watching
Tomato streams, work on my million billion projects, tell myself I'll do classwork and then not, read webcomics, and write. I'm going to be so real with you I have a massive complex about literally everyone telling me I'm incredibly talented while also never reading what I make. It's an entire ordeal. Like it's not even that I'm bad and people are lying to be nice, I've gotten real, constructive criticism alongside the massive heaps of praise on the two occasions someone's actually been assed to read my writing, it's just that nobody gives a shit, which is somehow worse. Anyway traumadump over.
Other things I like to do online are making Music, (WHICH I SHOULD EMBED A LINK TO WHEN I MAKE THE PAGE), 3D models, conventional digital pixel and collage art, and the game I'm currently developing,
SlyphStream. Which you can track the progress of on my
Bluesky. I've also made two other games (WHICH I SHOULD ALSO EMBED LINKS TO) that you can download and play right now this very instant.
A considerable majority of the coding I've done is for Space Station 13 in the proprietary, object-oriented and inheritance-based language
Dream Maker, because I'm masochistic, but I don't do as much of that anymore. Most of what I do is now in GDscript, which is basically just funny python that is also Csharp. Other languages I've touched are normal Python, Rust, the entire C family, IA-32 Assembly, OCaml, LUA, JSON, Java, Prolog, and of course, the HTML/CSS/Javascript triumvirate.
Tell us more about your programming, Millian!
Wow, I'm so glad you asked, header3 text! You can see the stuff I've actually made on my github account which is linked somewhere on this page, so instead of talking about my projects I figure I'll share a little about the why and what. Programming is something that's always been intrinsically rewarding to me. I like how you're solving a bunch of micro-puzzles while doing it. I'm probably going to be hospitalized at an early age due to sheer high blood pressure caused by the act of coding but hey love hurts sometimes. The two fields I'm most captivated by are Game Development and Maching learning.
-ᗘ I really really really like the way game dev brings art into the tech field.
I don't think we as a society pay enough credence to ways computers can be used as an interactive media. A lot of people think STEM and arts are two polar enemies but honestly I think math and art are one and the same, and the "natural" sciences (chemistry, biology, geology) are polar to them more than anything. That having been said, game dev isn't easy. A budding painter only has to know the basics of form, color, and paint. Abudding sculptor only has to know the basics of form, color, and their medium. A budding knitter might have to do row arithmetic and space their designs, but it's still mostly form, color, and yarn. Game dev? To even start Game dev is different. You have to know form, color, UI design, kinematics, game theory, database design, algoritm design, artificial intelligence design, polymorphic structure design, computer graphics, the 3D rendering pipeline, modelling, CAD, writing, interpolation, vector math, AND 3D animation. There is no God in game dev. Only you and the engine API.
That's not to say I don't love game development, but there's definitely an immense amount of effort that goes into it. Still, if you're someone who already wears a million creative hats (like me), it's extremely freeing when it isn't terrifyingly standalone. I mentioned my three games but I've also pitched my hand into a number of smaller fragmentary projects, which you can see in my arts directory page linked at the top and also bottom of this one.
-ᗘ I also think machine learning is neato.
Hear me out before you burn me at the stake for this one because I do not in fact think Large Language Models are some kind of magic infalliable genie. I have however been following ML since the ancient days of Alexnet/Cleverbot, and I still think it's a nifty, fascinatingly simple, shamefully misunderstood field of Computer Science in the Year of Our Bungus 2026. What I do think is really really nifty is the potential of deep learning in the direction of behavioral emulation, evolution, and the way a neural network literally creates a higher-dimensional topological map of the knowledge it's trained to learn. Putting a sentence into an LLM and then moving in the "gender" direction will literally change the pronouns of the processed text. We can hate chatgpt together but you can't tell me that's not cool.
A big project I've wanted to do for a long, long time that meshes these two fields that I mentioned is Sylphstream, which remains in active, slow development. It's a source-inspired game where you face off against machine learning agents who learn and adapt against the player based off different network models and reinforcement algorithms. It's still in the budding phases of development, and progress is slow, since I'm also a student, but you can check it out
right here through this very link.