Hobbies: Art, Cooking, Gaming, and Music Side-Quests
Landing page for off-the-clock IT-Journey notes — art, cooking, gaming, and music side-quests that exist outside the technical curriculum.
Table of Contents
The technical curriculum covers what pays the bills and sharpens the mind. This section covers what makes the rest of it worth doing.
None of these pages are guides. They are working notes — the kind you take when you are learning something for the pleasure of learning it, without a deadline or a rubric. They exist here because the same note-taking infrastructure powers everything, and because the skills turn out to bleed together more than expected.
Art
Drawing and digital illustration. Notes on technique, tools (mostly Krita), and the slow process of training observation. The main lesson so far: looking carefully at a thing is a different skill from drawing it, and both need practice separately.
Current focus: gesture drawing and understanding proportion before worrying about detail.
Cooking
Recipe notes and technique breakdowns. Cooking rewards the same kind of systematic experimentation as debugging — change one variable, observe the result, update the mental model. The difference is you get to eat the experiment.
Notes here cover what worked, what didn’t, and why — not polished recipes, but the reasoning behind adjustments.
Current interests: bread fermentation timing, knife skills, and the Maillard reaction as a framework for understanding heat.
Gaming
Games as systems. Most of the games worth playing are worth playing because they model something real — resource constraints, information asymmetry, emergent complexity from simple rules.
Notes here cover game design observations, strategy breakdowns, and the occasional speedrun rabbit hole. The CTF and wargame notes live in Docs: Wargames because the line between gaming and security practice is thinner than it looks.
Current: finishing a Dwarf Fortress fortress that has lasted longer than expected. Notes on what keeps it stable pending.
Music
Music theory and practice notes. Started with “I want to understand how chords work” and ended up with a reasonable mental model of harmony, voice leading, and why certain progressions feel resolved.
Tools: mostly pencil and staff paper, occasionally MuseScore for notation. No instrument yet — the theory first approach is unusual but it’s working.
Current: working through intervals and building a reference sheet for common chord voicings.
These notes are drafts until they’re not. Quality varies. The point is to keep going.