A neon time capsule and personal home base. Part retro web shrine, part homelab log, part place for the things that matter: 80s nostalgia, projects, cooking, radio, and the good kind of late-night internet wandering.
There's a smell that only exists in one place on earth: bowling alley smoke, rental shoe rubber, lane oil, and the faint ghost of someone else's Gatorade. You walk in and the sound hits you first — the thunderous crash of pins, the mechanical whirl of the return, a dozen games playing simultaneously on automatic scorers nobody trusts.
The lights above the lanes are sodium orange. Everything in the building is some version of that color, reflected off wood and polymer and the slightly sticky surface of every table. Your shoes have no traction in the parking lot but somehow become precision instruments on the approach.
This is where Friday nights went when you were twelve and the world was twelve lanes wide with no end in sight. You never got the strike you practiced for. You didn't need to.
Short dispatches, posts, and updates from the underground.
Radio, mixtapes, soundtracks, and anything worth hearing twice.
Pixel memories, neon cabinets, and the machines that raised us.
A small corner for messages, notes, and footprints from visitors.
Every machine was a portal. You'd drop a quarter and the screen would become the most important thing in the universe for the next three minutes. Your initials went up there if you were good. The top of the screen belonged to people you'd never meet but somehow knew.
The room was dark and loud and every cabinet glowed like it was generating its own light. CRT scanlines, phosphor bloom, the slight screen curve at the edges of your vision. You'd play one game until you ran out of quarters, then stand behind someone better than you and study their technique.
This section remembers that room. Four cabinets, four games, waiting for another quarter. Use the keyboard to play.
Summer nights. Not the hot ones — the ones where the sun finally gave up and the air cooled off just enough to make you feel like you could ride forever. Handlebar streamers spinning. A backpack with no particular load in it. The mixtape playing through one earbud, the other ear open to the sound of your own wheels.
The streetlights on your route made the asphalt glow orange in sequence, each one a little checkpoint you'd hit and leave behind. You knew every crack in the pavement between your house and the place you were going, which was usually nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.
This section is about that specific kind of freedom. The kind that only exists on a bike at dusk with the day already finished but the night not quite ready to start yet.
Storage, backups, and reliable services that don't complain.
Comfort food, experiments, and the occasional perfect sear.
Old computers, old software, and the stories they still carry.
Keeping the good stuff reachable before it disappears.
C:\> darktimes.ca_
_Every house had one. The room that wasn't quite a living room and wasn't quite a workspace — the place where things accumulated without anyone meaning for them to. The desk with the good chair. The lamp that only worked if you angled it just right. The shelf with books you kept meaning to finish.
This version has servers in it. Four 2U Dell PowerEdge blades humming in a rack in the corner, drives spinning, services running. It's louder than a normal basement should be but quieter than any data center. It's home.
The basement is where the work happens: homelab maintenance, local AI models being fine-tuned, the never-ending project of making the infrastructure invisible so the life on top of it can be easy. It's where "it just works" gets built one late night at a time.
Articles, notes, and longer thoughts.
Leave a mark. Say hello. Add a footnote to the era.
For quick messages, ideas, and collaboration.
A bit more context on the person behind the machine.
Use the sections above as the front door, then wander into the archive pages.
More posts, more photos, more projects, and a better sense of what belongs here.