Hello World!

It always starts with “Hello World” doesn’t it? Trite, cliche, but it works. Anyway, on to the good stuff! I’m Noah, aka. “Ninja Monkey”, “monkeyninja”, and various combinations of that over the years. Once upon a time I was “wanderyng1” on LiveJournal but I hardly ever use that handle anymore. I’m a Gen X geek…I could probably leave it at that but if you’re here then you’re probably trying to read a little bit about me I assume. I’m a dad, DevOps Engineer turned SRE Manager, and an amateur chef. So a lot of the content here is going to be tech-related or food-related. I also dabble in pottery, woodworking, and several other pursuits so you might occasionally see posts about that here. I’ve been a TTRPG gamer most of my life, starting with the D&D red box in the seventies as a gift from a next-door neighbor and going from there. I primarily played D&D but I also love the Palladium system (Rifts and Robotech mainly), Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Mage: The Ascension, and a handful of others.

Why Ninja Monkey and why “Monkey Guild?”

In my younger days, before chronic pain became a constant issue, I was actually pretty active. I used to jump out of windows, climb trees, teach myself to do backflips, you name it. Some kids at camp told me I climbed like a spider monkey and some other kids at camp said I moved like a ninja. So when I needed an online handle, that’s where I landed. “Monkey Guild” was largely an extension of that honestly, though with the first iteration of my site I had visions of a website that other Ninja Monkeys might use, hence the “Guild” component. That never did end up coming together though, but the URL was mine and I liked it so it’s here.

Who is “The Zergling?”

That’s my kiddo. I want them to be able to choose to what extent their life is online and I want them to be able to decide who they are, so that’s all you’ll get of them when they’re discussed. No gender, no name, no pictures. Whenever I talk about them it’s about things I’m doing or things I’m enjoying/learning about being a parent. Their details remain theirs to build and if they choose to share them some day online then I’ll be more than happy to link to their content and let you get to know them on their own terms. But in the meantime you get a StarCraft reference and they get to keep their secrets.

We should hang out!

Agreed! The only social media I’m actually active on is Mastodon. In fact I run my own instance, 10base2.dev. If you want to follow me over there so we can interact a bit, by all means let’s chat! Quite predictably, I’m @monkeyninja

What Jekyll Theme Did You Use?

This is effectively a fork of the Chirpy theme that Cotes Chung built and then reworked to use the Nord color theme. I’ve never really been certain at what point in picking up someone else’s code and then making changes to it that it starts to become yours though as I’ve definitely made additional modifications to the code base, the Gems used, etc. So it’s not exactly Chirpy anymore but it doesn’t deviate from it so far that I’d release my own public Jekyll theme. If it weren’t for the fact that the README for the theme specifically tells you to fork it and then add your name to it, I’d feel like putting my name in the footer would be stealing. Anyway, long way of saying exactly what I started with, this is Chirpy with some tweaks. I don’t think I need to go full “Ship of Theseus” to at some point say I’ve made it my own, but until then, credit should absolutely go to Cotes for the hard work put into making that terrific theme.