Welcome to KR-77!

Hi! I'm Kyle Weems. I'm a software engineer for a living, who also enjoys expressing himself through a number of creative outlets including comics, cartoons, ambient music projects, and game design.

Like many of us in the past few years, I've grown weary of communicating my thoughts and feelings online via social media as corporations fine-tune the algorithm to turn our eyeballs into products to sell and fascists purchase and ruin sites we used to use to tell people we were eating avocado toast.

But in the process of disengaging largely from that form of media, I've found myself lacking a hub to centralize sharing my projects to others or discussing my ideas. So I've decided to do something really radical and create a blog.

Blogs are back now. Right? Or was I supposed to start a newsletter? 🤔

Some of you may know me from CSSquirrel, a squirrel-themed webcomic and blog I wrote during my junior engineer days when HTML5 and CSS3 were still freshly developing technologies with tons of standards bodies making contentious decisions (well, for those web developer nerds who had strong feelings about these things). Unfortunately poor stewardship on my part resulted in the loss of the original domain and I've only got a simpler archive of the comic strips available right now (Someday I'll work on restoring the posts themselves).

I'm not entirely proud of my content from that era. Like many folks early in their career, I was looking to get attention by scoring points, often by mocking others. Oof. I'm hoping I've left that behind.

Current projects I've been working on in the past year include Punch Wizard, a comedic sci-fantasy cartoon that parodies 80's cartoons like He-Man, and The Gloaming Diaries, a "tabletop RPG of modern fairy tales in small towns" that is the system underpinning a LARP I've been running at the local university for 18+ years now.

At KR-77 I'll talk about my creative projects, or my feels about the software industry, or whatever else is compelling me at the time. I'd like to start having a record again of how I feel or what I do, and this is going to be that.

Thanks for joining me for the journey.