I hate being the guy that points out that time continues to exist, because it makes me feel old, which I suppose is irony. This year really has flown by though, and I just wanted to write up a post outlining things I've done so far that I'm proud of and what I'm looking forward to in the latter half of the year. Honestly, it's still strange that we're in 2025 at all. I remember that being a year people would joke about even just a few years ago, using it as a "futuristic" sounding year. One of my favorite game franchises, Call of Duty, had a game released in 2012 that had its story set in the year 2025, and while they tried to predict what it would be like and got a lot wrong, they go a few things right. But everyone always thought technology, art, and design would progress a lot faster globally than it did. People thought hovercars would be around by now, robots would be used in households, with AI assistants helping us with our homework. It's crazy how even just one of those things actually happened and is changing the world, and nobody is sure if it's for the better or not yet.
Back to me though. If you know me, you know I have too many projects going on right now. Just looking at my website feed where I post things I create or release will show you that. I just wanted to showcase some of those things here to give an update on what I've been doing and what I plan to do soon.
Galaxy Bound // a Star Wars Podcast
Again, if you know me and follow me you know I started this Star Wars podcast with my brothers in late 2024, and it's been a blast. Pretty much all of my free time as been focused on getting this planned, launched, and improved in some way. We've already made changes and improvements throughout and learning as we go in terms of making a good podcast. It's a lot of work, especially with just a 1-person production crew: me. I enjoy it a lot though, even when it's stressful, and I'm really hoping it continues to grow and succeed as time goes on.
Skeleton Crew
We had a busy first half of 2025, because we had the live action series Skeleton Crew still airing, carrying over from the end of 2024, and we did reviews for every episode each week as they aired. The show was a lot of fun to watch together and discuss. Below is a link to the playlist for all of those episode reviews, starting with the first.
Star Wars Celebration coverage
A couple months after that, we rolled right into Star Wars Celebration, which is an official convention put on by Lucasfilm. This year it was in Japan, so we did not physically attend, but they always stream all of the announcements and stage shows, so we covered a ton of news that broke during that weekend.
Revenge of the Sith 20th Anniversary Retropective
Shortly after that was the 20th anniversary of Episode III Revenge of the Sith, which is in all three of our favorite movies. We did a dedicated retrospective of the movie, which ended up being 3 hours long. We also went to the theater re-release as a group, which was a ton of fun. That movie is so special to us, and talking through what makes it great probably could have been even longer than three hours.
Andor
In that same month, season two of the Andor series started as well, and we did weekly reviews of the three-episode arcs that came out each week. It's one of the best parts of doing a podcast is doing those reviews, and Andor was a masterpiece. We had a couple guests join us for it too, which was fun. Sadly it was the last season of the series and the last new content we're getting for Star Wars for the rest of the year.
After Andor finished, we went back to the normal format of the podcast with specific topics, news, and occasionally a game. We recently did a tier ranking of the Star Wars movies, and the rest of the year will see some more deep dives and retrospectives.
Grey Harbor • my music
Since Galaxy Bound has been taking up a ton of my free time lately, my music has taken a back seat. However, I do have a couple songs in the works, and in the meantime I ended up re-editing a previous song from my first album, I'm Left Here Sinking. I remixed it completely from scratch and added a few new guitars and instrumentals to fill it out a bit. It's one of my favorite songs I've written, but I felt like it needed a bit of a polish run and deserved to be released on its own. I wrote a blog post about the release on the band's website, but here's the part about the song from that post:
I'm Left Here Sinking was the last song I wrote for my first album, Summer Rain, and it quickly became my favorite. It further explored the concept of heartbreak that was so prevalent to that album and my life at the time, when it felt like I wasn't managing to stay afloat in my grief and acceptance. I find that feeling never quite goes away, even 10 years later.
Listening back to it gave me some ideas to improve it and so I decided to re-release it and give it more attention. To some people it may not sound different but it has some added guitars and production touches that makes it sounds like something I can be even more proud of. I learned a bit from my time making Haunted, and I hope some of those techniques shine through this new mix.
Among the Noise Podcast
Yes, I have two podcasts. This was the original, and is about more generic topics like gaming, movies, tv. We recently launched in season 2 earlier this year with my co-host David taking on a guest role rather than co-host, due to his busy schedule. I still try to schedule when he is able to join, however I am workshopping some ideas of my own to take the podcast in different directions. We'll see how it goes, but for now it's just fun to sit down and catch up with my good friends and talk about stuff we'd talk about off-camera anyway. Here's the latest episode talking about some gaming news that happened earlier this summer.
JKHub
This is listed lower on this post, but I've spent more time on this in the last couple of months than anything. If you aren't aware, JKHub (or Jedi Knight Hub) is a website I administrate that is dedicated to all things related to the old Star Wars Jedi Knight games, Jedi Outcast (2002) and Jedi Academy (2003). Our main focus is hosting mods that people in the community create and share. And if you aren't familiar with mods, they are files that modify aspects of the game either by adding to (like new characters, weapons, maps, etc.) or changes or even bug fixes or improvements; all unoffical and completely done by the fans of the game. I got into that community over 20 years ago as a kid, and long story short I was handed over the reigns of this website. However, as the games age, the community shrinks and people are less likely to use it. Don't get me wrong, we still have thousands of users. However the cost of running the site has outpaced the donations that people send in and the willingness I have to keep spending my own money on it.
A year ago I begun work on creating my own version of the website's software, completely from scratch. Right now it runs on a CMS called Invision Community and they recently raised their prices to absurd levels. My goal has been to create a new site that has all of the core functions we need, dropping the ones we don't, and all being mostly free. However, I'm not a professional web developer. I've dabbled in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and tad bit of PHP over the years, especially right out of college when I briefly freelanced as a web designer, but creating a full CMS from scratch is for sure out of my wheelhouse. With the advent of AI and ChatGPT though, it works really well as a coding companion and if you already know basics and can catch its own mistakes and work with it, it is an insanely powerful tool to help with doing things you couldn't before, and learning along the way. They now call this "vibe coding" apparently. So over the last year I have been doing that, and it has been going very well. I actually used the code base to launch a similar website called DeltaStyles, and that has been a great testing ground for the website. I've made a ton of progress on the new JKHub though, and port the changes over to DeltaStyles and sometimes vice versa. It's been a ton of fun and very satisfying. That dopamine rush when I have an idea and implement it exactly the way I envisioned it in my head is so satisfying. I'm hoping to get JKHub transferred over to the new site sometime next year, but maybe end of this year depending on how things go. There's still a lot to do!
It's been busy
All of this has been on top of my day job as well, which is going well. However, all of these hobbies and sideprojects are my true passions and I am so thankful I get to do them all. I haven't been this busy in any other period of my life, honestly, and it's been a good and healthy amount of busy.
The year of 2025 has marked a very interesting new stage of my life, and the month of July has been a very key part of that. That's why I wanted to make this post now, rather than wait until December 31st to do my post-mortem post, because so much as already been going on, and I can already tell the rest of the year is going to be much different than the first, in a good way.
Thanks to anyone who read this far, it means a lot, and huge shoutout to anyone who checks out any of what I put out there. When people ask my what I've been up to or what I do, I almost feel like I should just send them this post!