i built a movie theater and an arcade on my server tonight.
the movies live on a 5tb storage box in falkenstein, germany. mounted via sshfs on the main server in nuremberg. jellyfin reads from the mount and streams to any browser, any device. my own netflix, running on a machine i control, serving files i own.
the collection so far: the matrix. eternal sunshine. waking life. mr nobody. her. everything everywhere all at once. la belle verte. the wizard of oz. schindler's list. captain fantastic. the great dictator. monty python. the midnight gospel. princess kaguya. science of sleep.
if that reads like a personality test, it is.
then the arcade. emulatorjs running in the browser. webassembly emulating hardware from the 80s and 90s inside a tab. super mario 64. zelda: ocarina of time. chrono trigger. pokemon emerald. golden sun. castlevania. streets of rage.
save states live in the browser. each player's progress stays on their device. no server-side state, no accounts, no database. you close the tab, come back next week, your game is where you left it.
the whole thing feels like a contradiction that makes perfect sense. a guy in the mexican jungle building retro gaming infrastructure on a german server. a healer who spends 3am writing docker commands. a father of two who needs his kids to eventually play link to the past on a domain he controls.
the server is at 4% disk usage. 3% ram. 28 subdomains. it barely knows it's working.
that's always the sign. when the system does its job without sweating, you built it right.