Welcome to my home page!
Hi. I am Steven. This is my personal site, and it is deliberately built like it is 1999, because the modern web is exhausting and I wanted one page that was just fun.
No tracking, no newsletter, no popup asking for my email address, nothing to sign up for. Just a page.
What is actually on this page
- A real MIDI jukebox. Those are genuine
.midfiles, parsed and synthesised in your browser. - A real hit counter, backed by a real database. It counts one visit per person per day, not per refresh.
- A tiled starfield, a custom cursor, sparkles, and a marquee. Obviously.
My Work
Tell me what you do want here and I will build it out as cards. If you would rather not have a work section on a personal page at all, say so and I will drop it from the menu entirely.
Hobbies
The homelab
I run my own infrastructure instead of renting it. A couple of hypervisors with ZFS underneath, a separate backup server, my own routing, and a VPN so I can get at all of it from anywhere. Everything that matters is backed up twice and the backups are actually restore tested, which is the part most people skip.
| Layer | What runs there |
|---|---|
| Hypervisor | Proxmox VE, ZFS mirrors |
| Backups | Proxmox Backup Server, offsite copy |
| Network | pfSense, WireGuard, AdGuard |
| Edge | Cloudflare |
Everything else
Gaming
I have been playing games since before I could read the error messages they threw at me. What follows is roughly the order it happened in, and most of it is still under my desk.
The DOS years
Flight Simulator · Treasure Cove
Before you played anything you negotiated with the machine.
Boot disks. Editing autoexec.bat and
config.sys to claw back enough conventional memory.
Guessing at an IRQ until the sound card admitted it existed.
Half the hobby was getting to the title screen.
Windows 95 and 98
The Sims · Need for Speed · Age of Empires
Games stopped fighting the operating system and started fighting for my evenings instead. This is the era where an afternoon disappeared into a village that started with four villagers, and where a house I built kept catching fire.
My first build, Windows XP
World of Warcraft · Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy · The Sims 2
The first machine that was mine because I put it together. Parts chosen on purpose, thermal paste applied badly, the specific silence of pressing the power button for the first time and waiting to find out. It posted. Everything after this point follows from that.
And ever since
Vista · 7 · and onward
I never stopped building them. New parts, other people's machines, upgrades nobody asked for. It stopped being a means to an end a long time ago. Picking parts and putting them together is the hobby now, and the games are a bonus.
The consoles
It started with a PlayStation 1 and my dad coming home with Jampacks. Those demo discs were an entire afternoon each. You played twelve games badly instead of one game well, and you had opinions about all of them by dinner.
The shelf now runs PlayStation 1, PlayStation 2, Xbox, Nintendo 64 and GameCube. All of them modified, all of them loaded, all of them actually plugged in. The PS1 runs an xStation, so the disc drive finally gets to retire.
They feed a restored Sony KV-32XBR90, a Trinitron XBR2. It is the correct way to look at any of this. A 240p signal on a modern flat panel is a compromise; on an aperture grille tube it is exactly what the artists were drawing for.
The magazines
Over a thousand of them. PC Gamer, official PlayStation magazines, Game Informer, and a lot of things that folded before broadband did.
They are better than any wiki because they were written before anyone knew how the story ended. A preview of a game that never shipped. A review scored against expectations nobody remembers having. Adverts for hardware that cost a fortune and would lose to a phone today. It is a straight run of what people actually thought at the time, month by month, and none of it was edited afterwards to look correct.
source-art/
and tell me: the Trinitron, the console shelf, the magazine wall,
a build in progress. Yours are worth more here than any screenshot,
and I can lay them out properly with captions.
Links & Contact
Get in touch
The best way to reach me is email: me@stevensilva.com
Around the web
✉ THANKS FOR VISITING ✉