About Me

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft will always hold a special place in my heart, as it was the first 'proper' game I played on a PC. It's gone downhill in recent years, but the story it tells is so vast that I can still get lost in the lore aspect of it for hours at a time.

I'm definitely not a competitive player, I just play it to have fun. In case anyone is interested, I main a Frost DK, and I'm 'currently' levelling a Ret Pally and a Frost Mage.

Halo

I believe Halo: Combat Evolved was the first Xbox game I ever played. I used to go to my friend's house across the road and play it with him to kill time. Since then, I've played every mainstream one that's come out, and also the two Halo Wars games that have released.

Like World of Warcraft, I love Halo in spite of all its shortcomings, because the lore and the story being told are so detailed (I recently rediscovered the mystery of Sandtrap). Currently I've completed my playthrough of Halo: Infinite, and I'm now going back through the campaign to try and acquire all the collectibles scattered throughout.

(Very recently I found out that the woman singing in the background of 'Under Cover Of Night', and presumably the same voice in 'Halo', is actually Martin O'Donnell with a pitch shifted voice, which was unexpected. Source)

Satisfactory

Open world, logistics, and lizard doggos. Satisfactory has all the makings of an amazing game. Somehow I've racked up over 400 hours of gameplay, and I only really played it when Covid first hit the UK and we went into lockdown. It's a game I enjoy playing so much, that I had to force myself to uninstall it before starting back at uni because I wanted to prioritise my work.

It is by far one of my favourite early-access games, if not my overall favourite, of all time.

The Hunger Games Trilogy, The Maze Runner Trilogy, & The Divergent Trilogy

I was gonna give each of these trilogies their own section. But I like them all for basically the same reasons. The dystopian future sci-fi settings, with all hope of a normal life resting on the shoulders of a few teens. Something about them just got me hooked and now they're probably my most replayed films of all time.

Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit Trilogies

I remember being in primary school, probably around eight years old, and my dad would have me and my sister watching Lord of the Rings before school. He split the whole trilogy up into like 20 minute chunks, and we got through the whole thing. It was a long process, but I was loving it.

Years later, the Hobbit series came out and we watched them in the cinema as they came out. Just recently I've inflicted both trilogies onto my girlfriend, who seemed to enjoy them, so maybe my childhood dream of having a Hobbit-hole for a house isn't entirely crushed.

Star Wars Series

There are too many films in this series for me to talk about them all as much as they deserve. I grew up with the prequel trilogy being released, and so I actually don't hate them, unlike a large portion of the fanbase. I think the original trilogy is definitely better story-wise, but I find the prequel trilogy feels much nicer to rewatch, although that's quite probably due to the higher video quality that they come in.

The sequel trilogy is a different story entirely though. They're pretty bad in my eyes, but I wouldn't be surprised if the sequels are currently hated as much as the prequels used to be. And by that logic, in another decade when another trilogy may be released, perhaps the sequels will be less hated and the next trilogy will take it's place as the most hated.

Star Trek Reboot

I never really got into Star Trek as a whole, not for lack of trying on my mum's part mind you. But one day I saw the 2009 J. J. Abrams film, and since then, the reboot has become one of my favourite film series.

Warcraft & Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn

I'm not gonna go into too much detail with these ones because they're just continuations of Halo and World of Warcraft, which I've already spoken about in my games section.

Both of them are great films in my eyes. Forward Unto Dawn sets up the Reclaimer Saga really well. And Warcraft shows a lot of what happened before World of Warcraft takes place. I just wish Warcraft had continued on to become the trilogy it was meant to be.

The 100

The 100 was a random series that my dad threw on one day after school. This was at a time when my dad would record all TV shows that he thought we might like, so nothing was too special about this one so far. We watched up to the end of season 4 over the next couple of years and then, for some reason, we didn't watch it any further than that, but both of us really enjoyed it.

Fast forward to my first year at university and I discovered that it was free on Amazon Prime, so I watched all of it again, and then watched season 5 as well (I was suffering from freshers flu, so I watched it all in about two weeks). Then in second year I watched it all again, including season 6 which I bought on Prime to watch it. My girlfriend became interested in it, but I may have binge watched almost a whole season while she was at work so she didn't keep up with it.

Finally, in third year, season 7 released on Now TV, and I watched it day by day as it came out. I then encouraged one of my housemates to watch it with my girlfriend and I, but unfortunately we all stopped watching it so we could focus on our studies instead

This show has to be my all time favourite. At the time of writing this, I can't think of anything that can beat it.

Doctor Who

I was somewhat indoctrinated into liking Doctor Who when I was a kid. Whilst eating breakfast before going to primary school, my dad would put on Classic Who, and we slowly got through every episode he had from 1963 onwards. Over the years, I fell in love with it, and we watched it every week when it aired.

As with a lot of things, I made my uni work my priority, and so I stopped keeping up with the newer episodes. As of right now I haven't watched any of the most recent season, but I do plan to catch up again when I get more time.

NerdCubed

I've been watching NerdCubed for over 10 years now. I've not been able to watch as consistently now that I've gotten older. But watching someone play games, and often breaking games, is still a great way for me to wind down after doing a load of work.

Sebastian Lague

Sebastian is an amazingly charismatic creator who shines a light on all the fun parts of programming in Unity. I look out for every video he uploads and watch as he explains relatively complex algorithms and systems with ease.

I began watching his videos when he was working on his procedural terrain generation series due to my small obsession with noise functions at the time, and more recently he took it to the next level and ran a series on procedurally generated planets. I find his videos particularly insightful and they never fail to teach me something new.

I even used his video on boids to help me with my 3D Graphics and Animation module at university.

3Blue1Brown

3Blue1Brown's Grant Sanderson makes amazing content that helps explain various topics of mathematics. I've been loosely following his work since 2016 when he released his Space filling curves video.

Since then I've been constantly coming back to his content to either increase my understanding of a topic, or to learn a bit about a topic I've never heard of before. My favourite series of his is his short neural networks series which brings to life the idea of a neural network, and makes the calculus of backpropagation feel like a simple process.