so basically i build stuff when i'm bored, which is like… all the time T.T i'm probably a tad too arrogant and definitely too weird for polite company, but i've made my peace with that. be cringe, be free >w<

i don't really do "the accepted way" of doing things. if a convention stands between me and the thing i actually want, i will politely walk around it, through it, or occasionally reimplement it from scratch just to prove i can. perfection isn't a feature request, it's a vibe, and i chase it way too hard for someone who started every one of these projects out of pure boredom :P

i run my own authoritative nameservers for a couple of my domains, and the things those names point at are self-hosted too, on hardware sitting in a rack in my apartment, because why would i let someone else hold the keys ( ˘ ³˘) currently grinding through an HF Cloud-Native Engineer program, which is a fancy way of saying i get graded on things i was going to overbuild anyway ehe.

okay so this is the big one. crimsonhaven is a full distributed streaming framework i built basically because i was bored one evening and it just… never stopped >.< it's not one repo, it's a whole ecosystem of eight, and the architecture is genuinely the thing i'm proudest of because it does something clever:

the whole trick: move the scraping, the resolving, and the video bytes off the backend and into the viewer's own browser, so hosting cost scales with your library size, not your watch-hours. bandwidth is expensive and hard to scale, so… i just refused to pay for it. ( • ̀ω•́ )✧

every source is routed down a four-rung ladder to the cheapest environment that can actually run it: E3 the companion extension (real Chrome, on the viewer's own residential IP), E2 a signed edge proxy, E1 a plain fetch wherever CORS allows it, and E0 the backend as the floor, so anything the client can't run simply falls back and nothing ever regresses.

one instance now serves six media surfaces under one roof: anime (with AniSkip windows, so the opening never outstays its welcome), movies and shows, manga (discovery server-side, pages resolved in the visitor's own browser, true to the doctrine), live TV at around 10,000 free-to-air channels, your own local library read straight off disk, and the Vault, which is favorites, named watchlists and per-episode progress that follows you between devices.

come look: crimsonhaven.org is the "what even is this" page, demo.crimsonhaven.to is a live demo you can actually click around, and github.com/crimsonhaven-to is all the code.

yes there's a recurring vampire-queen OC named Luminas Crimsonveil ("Lumi") narrating half of it. no i will not be explaining myself. ( ^ . ^ )

the thing i'm quietest about and proudest of. all of the above runs on hardware i own, and the whole design collapses into one sentence: no inbound ports open on the home router. ever. not "closed by default", not "well, just the one for minecraft". zero. nothing dials in; everything dials out.

• two VPS in the cloud. one is the primary authoritative nameserver. the other is the relay: it holds the public IPv4, runs the WireGuard hub, and serves secondary DNS. raw TCP/UDP (ssh, game servers) arrives there and gets DNAT'd down a tunnel that the house opened, outbound, from the inside.
• web apps never touch the relay. those ride a Cloudflare Tunnel, which is also just an outbound connection from a swarm node. two ingress paths, kept deliberately on separate machines so neither can take the other down with it.
• about a dozen physical servers in a rack at home: a Docker Swarm running the crimson stack, a synchronously-replicated Postgres cluster behind it, game hosts, an ssh jumphost, DNS and DHCP.
• a Cisco Catalyst L3 switch (IP Lite) does VLAN segmentation and inter-VLAN routing, with a containment ACL that encodes the actual policy: the DMZ answers, the DMZ never calls. IP Lite has no stateful firewall, so the "answers" half is built out of TCP established bit matching, which is a deeply cursed sentence i am nonetheless fond of.
• one gateway box is the entire network's egress. nftables masquerades the whole DMZ out through it, which means the ISP router never learns the DMZ exists and therefore can't break it, which it had previously managed to do by the simple act of being replaced. there is now exactly one WAN decision in the building, with an LTE fallback behind it for when the fiber sulks.
• and because i cannot leave anything alone, a small Go web GUI drives the port map, the failover override and the per-WAN byte counters, over a forced-command ssh key, behind Cloudflare Access.

it's documented to a degree that is frankly unwell: numbered design docs, an ADR for every single place the deployment diverges from the plan, and an as-built sweep that exists purely because i wanted the documentation to be checkable rather than merely confident. ( ˶ˆ ꒳ˆ˵ )

AbyssC is a performance-first, modular compression engine written entirely in Rust. eight codecs, four containers, one CLI, one GUI, same core underneath both. and then, because i apparently hate free time:

• my own from-scratch entropy coder (ans.rs), a block-based rANS that owes nothing to any external crate. four interleaved states per block, reciprocal-multiply encoding, single-lookup decode, folded across every core >w<
• sealed .abyss archives: Argon2id into ChaCha20-Poly1305 STREAM, authenticated end to end. "the surface cannot read what it cannot open"
• streaming by nature, so a 100 GB file costs the same RAM as a 100 KB one
• reads the surface's forms too (.7z, .rar, .iso, the whole zip family), and can pull a single member out without unfolding the whole archive, even though it refuses to create any of them, because taste

adding a codec touches exactly one file and one detection table. the rest of the engine does not stir. i think about that sentence a normal amount. ( ˶ˆ ꒳ˆ˵ )

• Aino · an autonomous AI VTuber platform: persona-driven, plays games, speaks, drives a VTube Studio avatar, with LLM/vision/TTS inference load-balanced across a fleet of local GPU boxes
• unix-patcher · tiered, HA-aware OS patching for the whole estate. the Postgres cluster gets a sync-aware, health-gated serial rollout ending in a controlled switchover; the swarm gets drain, patch, rejoin, wait for convergence. it replaced a nightly bash loop and i have never been happier
• dashboard · a dark-neon browser homepage with bookmarks, a command palette and an inline AI assistant, deployed entirely on the Cloudflare free tier
• SUAVE · the deliberately dumb one: a fullscreen dashboard for the PC wired to the home cinema. clock, weather, a wall of streaming links, no backend at all
• countdown-bot · a Discord bot that parses natural-language reminders ("tomorrow at 5pm", "in 3 hours") into SQLite-backed countdowns
• lumi-welcome-bot · yes, Lumi has her own welcomer bot with full vampire-queen personality
• Auto-News · pulls RSS, "refines" it through AI APIs, publishes to a site, hands-off
• columbina-uk / genshin-dps-calc · honestly i don't fully know what these are either, i just wanted something to point one of my own DNS records at :P
• AbyssEngine · a from-scratch push-to-deploy PaaS (webhook, build, deploy, run), my (would-be) cloud-native semester project

i like the low levels (writing an entropy coder, injecting forbidden headers, minting signed edge links, arguing with an ACL at 2am) and i like the high levels (making a UI that a mortal can actually use). the middle is where conventions live, and the middle is negotiable ehe~