Hello.

I'm Sam. Welcome to my little site. It's about as simple as a site here on Neocities can get, but I like it. Sure, it's mostly because I'm lazy, but I always enjoy simplicity in things.
This site is mostly just a blog where I'll write about whatever - music, photography, life, gaming, computers, whatever I'm hyperfocused on at the time - but it's fleeting, ephemeral. Posts are not saved here in an archive, and not even on my computer. This is my space to shout into the void, and if someone (you!) happens to come here, you'll get a glimpse of whatever ramblings are up at the time. I'm numbering every post, along with the exact date and time it goes up, so you can see how long I've been at it, but that's it. Maybe I'll add more later, like a gallery of my photography, but this is it for now.

I'm a musician from Rochester, NY who makes a variety of stuff, from black metal to ambient to doom metal to shoegaze. I also more recently have been focusing on my label, Solemn Oak Records, to expand it past just my music on Bandcamp to creating CDs, for both my music and other artists'. I love black metal (specifically depressive suicidal black metal) and avant-garde metal the most, but also love goth, shoegaze, emo, skramz, jazz, chamber, ambient, punk, hardcore, some pop, and lots more. My other creative outlet is photography, which I post on Instagram. I started out taking photos of cemeteries, nature, etc, but as of 2025 have been focusing more on concert photography. Most of my concert photography experience comes from shows from Damián Antón Ojeda's main three projects Sadness, life, and Trhä, along with a few other shows here and there (four Kayo Dot shows as well). Damián's music and Toby Driver's music (Kayo Dot, maudlin of the Well) are my absolute favorites, as evident by my show counts for both (five Kayo Dot shows, and ten Damián sets (five Sadness, three life, two Trhä (nine shows total as the west coast tour was Sadness/life)). I will yap about both on this site, and probably a lot.

Besides creative stuff like music and photography, I love gaming. I spend probably a bit too much time playing games. I like a ton of stuff, including Elite Dangerous, Destiny (well, hopefully again in the future; I haven't played in a year after thousands of hours across its first decade), Marathon, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft, The Elder Scrolls, Dishonored, Bioshock, and many, many more. I mostly do single player or co-op games these days, but Marathon brought me back to PvP for the first time in about three years.

Related to gaming, I also love computers. I have a desktop that I built in March 2024 (14700K, 5070 Ti, 32 GB DDR5) and now run Arch Linux (KDE) on. I also have a few laptops, my main one being a Framework 12 also running Arch Linux (Gnome), along with one for Windows and my old, old 2015 laptop where I first experimented with Linux (yes, Arch as well). I have two home servers, one as a NAS mainly running Plex for movies, TV, and music, along with backups of music and photography, and another as a Minecraft server. The NAS runs HexOS (TrueNAS) and the Minecraft server runs Ubuntu Server.

All my interests will be explored here eventually, so check back every now and then and maybe you'll get to read my thoughts on a band that tells you to kill yourself, or perhaps a story about how Linux literally told me it's bailing out and that I'm on my own to fix it, or maybe just a little gallery of some recent photos. You never know what you'll see in the void.

Be sure to visit the Guest Book to leave your mark on the site and say hello!