15 february 2026
pickin' up old skills 2026-02-15
ah! the refreshing feeling of getting back into an old, lapsed hobby and/or skill.
recently, i've taken to dabbling in one of my old passions. a long time ago, before i decided
on game development as my career, i was thinking about going into cybersecurity. i had a knack
for burrowing into filesystems and finding gaps in protections early on in my dalliances with computers.
for example, i remember clearly a time when i was enjoying some shareware creative software on a cd from the
front cover of Computer Buyer magazine, and i realised that the 30-day lockout was entirely part of the software,
since i didn't have an internet connection on the PC i was using at the time - so it obviously had no way of
phoning home to a server or anything. so i did what any enterprising young 10 year old would do and messed with the
date/time settings on the PC to use the software whenever i wanted. later, i found that it stored the install date
in a registry key, so i set it years in the future and found to my delight the software displayed a negative "days left"
counter in the About window.
that was the first taste of what would become a hobby of setting up little puzzles for myself and cracking them, especially once i started learning some programming skills. eventually this progressed to experimenting with networking and particularly once i got into using Linux for the first time in high school, using my laptop to break into my aging desktop PC through various means. my first ever paid job was a couple months at a (2-hour-away) local it management and cybersecurity company, writing perl scripts on some crusty laptop running Slackware to locate lost emails that some rogue spam filter had obliterated accidentally. figuring out how to get the spam filter to not reject them a second time by messing with the email post IDs on the backend felt very natural at that point! but, i found myself craving creativity, and had already set my sights on game development at this point.
so, fast-forward to now; reminiscing about those days after playing a little bit of hackmud (and feeling a little underwhelmed by it once i got through the initial tutorials), i started messing with VMs! turns out, there are entire sites full of vulnerable-by-design toy VMs you can spin up and break into. they're kind of like virtual escape rooms, except you're not really escaping the room so much as intruding into it. intrusion rooms!
it's a lot of fun. some people really make an effort to build plausible real-world looking VMs, with little user accounts with their own stories and internal communications (e.g, a sysadmin berating another user for having a bad password, only to be backing up ssh keys in an unsecured storage location). it's really, really cute, and i love that kind of narrative design meeting practical security teaching. i've even thought myself about building some crackable VMs with maybe a larger story focus. could be fun to do, and sorta blend my interest in narrative game design with the cybersecurity stuff!
it's also an interesting thing to do to remind myself of the various vulnerabilities computers and servers can have, and how important it is to follow best-practice guides when it comes to server hosting and things like that - especially important NOT to start fiddling with settings unless you really know the full ramifications of what they can do!