Who are you, and what do you do? What do you like to do outside of work?

I’m Bodie! I’m a psychology student looking to find a specific path within that field, it being a longtime interest of mine. My work doesn’t fall in line with that interest yet though, as currently to tide myself over I have a part-time job at our local surgery as a dispensary assistant, though that’s not to imply I don’t enjoy it! There’s no shortage of friendly faces there, and it’s nice helping people in that small way.

Beyond that I love art, reading, cooking, baking, annoyingly obscure music (though I don’t have the brain to make it myself), and gaming; chiefly of which I spend far too much time with Ultrakill (cyber grind mostly). I’m sure if you spend much time in the game’s Discord, you’ll find me clip dumping.

Cooking-wise I love basically anything Eastern. Don’t get me wrong, I love some good Italian just as much as the next person, but I far more enjoy the “throw everything in a pot with herbs and spices” approach to meals. Sticky chilli beef, despite taking like five hours, is my favourite of my own dishes to make. As for baking, loaves are my tried-and-true format. Cinnamon swirl, lemon drizzle, chocolate chip banana bread, anything I can put in a tin and have rise.

For reading I love existential-focused pieces. Some of my favourites include Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human, C.M. Kösemen’s All Tomorrows and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Music is a similar rabbit hole as well; stranger projects like Patricia Taxxon’s TECHDOG come to mind (I seriously recommend it if you have 12 hours to spare), though generally I enjoy a lot of experimental electronic music in the realm of speed/splittercore.

As for art, it’s easiest to show. I’m no professional, but I do love it for a hobby. Below is probably my favourite drawing as of now.

What hardware do you use?

Too much if I’m honest, but living out in the sticks there’s not much to spend on in terms of experiences, so I have fewer barriers to putting it all into expensive interests. My PC holds an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB of RAM, and 10TB of storage split between a 6TB hard drive and two 2TB M.2 Samsung SSDs—which is far more than I’ll ever need—and an RTX 3060. To top it off I recently got my hands on a TV I’ve hooked up to my desktop to really fill out my little loft space, some sort of LG thing.

For peripherals, I have two 27-inch 144hz MSI 27-inch 144Hz MSI G271ss, a random old Philips monitor I was given by a friend, and an XP-Pen Innovator 16 for my drawing tablet, a nice bite-sized thing. A set of Edifier R1280DB bookshelf speakers fill out my audio and make my hours of digging for music a lot more enjoyable, and for my mouse I have a Logitech G502 that has served me incredibly well so far, besides me pushing the scroll wheel side buttons a bit too hard. Now for the most interesting part, my keyboard. Apologies for the open-heart surgery on the ErgoDox, I ripped the switches off of that for my Moonlander and haven’t gotten around to replacing them.

I’ve recently come to settle on the Moonlander for my primary board after testing the waters with an ErgoDox about a year ago now, a board I absolutely loved and one that single-handedly got me into the keyboard enthusiast scene, but the tenting options of the Moonlander platform with its better wrist rests ended up being too tempting, leading to its recent replacement. Only shortly after buying my ErgoDox, though, did I feel the cold-water shock of going back to normal keyboards for laptop work in school, and so I also have a Voyager under my belt for travelling work! The full ZSA collection at this point, bar the Planck. I love all of them, the amount of usability I’ve crammed into these things has entirely changed my computer experience, and their ergonomics have been huge for helping with my arm problems. Not sure entirely what’s wrong, but it was enough to make handwriting nonviable for schoolwork, so these have been game changers for me. If only I could find a vertical mouse as similarly decked out with extra buttons as my G502.

And what software?

Software is quite up in the air right now, as I’ve recently moved to Linux—Fedora 40’s KDE spin to be exact. Never had any experience with the OS beforehand, but Windows was seriously starting to get on my nerves. My hardware was clunky, there was so much stuff I didn’t want getting in the way, and god forbid I open file explorer, as for whatever reason that thing was a coin flip on if it would work for more than 30 seconds or not. Linux being so trimmed-down and minimalist is refreshing. It actually feels like I’m using what I paid for, and as I have too much time on my hands, I don’t mind the more tedious parts of it.

Discord is a mainstay for me of course, always pulled up in some form or another. Firefox is my go-to browser, no particular reason other than it’s just not Google. As mentioned previously, KDE is my desktop environment. I like the extensive yet more classic customisation it offers, as I’ve never been one for Apple-like UI.

Kdenlive is my current video editor, as obviously Adobe is a no-go this side of the fence. Not its biggest fan, and I do want to start using DaVinci soon, but something about how I record my videos doesn’t agree with it. For art, Clip Studio is my baby, very familiar and incredibly versatile. I haven’t gotten it fully up and running just yet—the program itself isn’t recognising my pen pressure as it refuses to come out of WinTAB mode—but every other aspect of it works 100% so I’m very excited for when I get that hurdle figured out. I spent a lot of time making that Art layout for it.

Other than that, my only other big workhorse is Steam, which is home to basically my entire library, though with the amount of modding I do R2, HedgeMod, and Modrinth are almost always accompanying it. A fairly scant list, but I’m still exploring a lot of programs, being fresh into the Linux world. Besides, I’m no programmer so specifics like Vim or project management apps fly right over my head.

What’s your keyboard setup like? Do you use a custom layout or custom keycaps?

My keyboard layout is one that grew on the ErgoDox that I have just kind of ported over to my other two boards. I’m still on QWERTY; I’ve considered switching but I haven’t found the time to rewrite all my muscle memory as of yet. I’ve mapped some extra keys that are near to the middle split like G’s and T’s, as I’m so used to typing those with whichever hand comes naturally at the time that I wanted to keep them as options for either. Similarly, I can’t get behind curling my hands to hit the bottom numbers in the numpad layer, so I just opted to mirror it on either side with the right being upside-down so I can type whatever number I want with whichever hand is more comfortable.

Besides that, my general philosophy is keeping my most general functions as close to wasd (and subsequently ijkl on the right half) as I can, as that’s where my hands are always resting. I stole the idea for some punctuation macros off of one Oryx layout tour I came across when I first got my ErgoDox—sadly I forget who it was, but it’s a fantastic idea: one key-press types openings and closings for things like quotes or brackets and then puts your cursor in the middle, ready to type away.

Also, having a dedicated Ultrakill layout that makes media control as easy as possible has been a huge QOL feature for those long cyber grind stints. You can’t afford any break without either dying or ruining your frame of mind, so controlling my music as seamlessly as possible has saved me countless runs. That media control made its way over to my art layer as well, as I am basically never sitting in silence, so being able to control volume and which video is playing quickly and easily is a big focus of my layouts.

I’m finding that tenting for me is most comfortable basically bang on halfway—sometimes I go higher, but it really depends what I’m doing—though I’m adoring having something as flexible as the platform as part of my setup now. As for keycaps, just a nice mix of black and white PBT’s. I’m a sucker for greyscale and so I’m thinking about buying some kind of gradient set sometime down the line and maybe a special artisan or two if I find anything I like.

I’m also very much a tactile kinda person when it comes to switches. After trying out some Kailh Box Blacks, classic Cherry Browns and Cherry Reds, I’ve come to love the MX Ergo Clears on my main board right now. Though I’m still curious about trying out a set of Zealio 67g switches switches someday, I’m very content with my typing experience on these. My Voyager switches are similarly tactile. I absolutely adore the Choc Sunsets I bought a while ago, haven’t looked back since fitting those.

What would be your dream setup?

I’m in no position to want more than my current setup, it’s absolute heaven, but selfishly I do have a few things on the list for the future.

At the top of that: more monitors. Another two 27-inch screens to be exact, one to replace that old Philips screen I’m currently running and another to add onto the left, both angled vertically, leaving me with two portrait screens flanking either side of my main landscape one. Considering how I always have at least two screens taken up by Discord and YouTube, the extra and more varied real estate would get good use.

Other than that, a GPU upgrade would be nice. The 3060 is a fantastic card, but I do stretch it thin sometimes (Distant Horizons mod for Minecraft is a primary offender). And a similarly nice set of speakers for my TV would be great, as the built-in ones are rather tinny when compared to my desktop experience. Beyond that, I don’t think there’s anything more I could even think to ask for—I pretty much have my dream right now. A cat would be great though. Maybe someday.