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me 我 — wó

wood. also nathanyel wood, or nw-wood on github. on the grid as woood

the long way here

i started second life back around 2007, a long time ago now. i came for the building — as a kid i was told you could do whatever you wanted there, and that turned out to be mostly true, still is.

i made friends with other young people online and learned lsl as a fun thing to do. me and a long-lost friend used to make floating chairs and the like — i must have been fifteen, they thirteen, and both of us were enamored with making stuff in that game.

a long time passed. for a lot of years second life was my creative and social outlet, though i took on-and-off breaks from the digital world — a few years at a time starting in 2016 and onward, with a good run of years not on there at all. ai programming wasn't a thing back then.

the people

i met a lot of people over the years, most of whom have come and gone. a lot stop playing for one reason or another, or mix up their identity so much it's impossible to discern who they were. without naming names, i appreciate all of you who taught me just about anything interesting about the game i've loved for so long.

one name i'll always say — torley, my favorite linden. i think he's retired now, but that doesn't change it.

the return

eventually i came back — this july, with ai programming being a thing, and having a field day with it. it's been a great time watching a lot of "boy, i wish that were something i could do in less than a month" evaporate into a couple of hours of work for most tasks that used to count as difficult.

the stack

almost everything i can do now is a consequence of this one game. the full second life development stack, as i've come to know it:

in-world scripting

• lsl (linden scripting language) — where it started, on floating chairs
• luau — lua, the in-client scripting layer that replaced lsl in my setup

the viewer

• the second life viewer codebase, linden lab's c++
• third-party viewers, alchemy and firestorm among them
• xui and xml for the viewer interface
• j2c, the jpeg2000 texture path
• pbr — physically based rendering, the modern material pipeline
• gdb, for digging into the c++ when it misbehaves
• the viewer build — cmake, the manifest and template tooling
• the sludp / lludp wire and udp messaging

building content

• blender — modeling, sculpties, rigging, animation
  • modeling and mesh export to collada
  • the sculptie workflow — sculpt maps and the classic sculpty uv mapping ll implemented for custom geometry, vertex position baked into rgb
  • uv unwrapping and baking textures onto models
  • texture work — photoshop and gimp
  • rigging to the sl avatar skeleton
  • animation — armatures out to bvh for animators and aos
• photoshop and gimp — textures
• audacity — sound
• collada — the mesh bridge to the grid

the servers

• the simulator and the grid services
• opensimulator, the open-source server
• the app backend this whole site runs on — rust over sqlite, a core store plus a database per project

automation and the new client

• bot clients and headless operation
• the hub, the control plane for all of it
• mcp, the ai tooling interface
• the butter migration — c++ (the fork), rust (the host), luau (the payload), sqlite (storage)

tinkered outside the game

and past the grid, the bits i tinker with day to day:

• alacritty
• arch
• cargo
• claude
• cmake
• deepseek
• dmenu
• dwm
• elasticsearch
• gemini
• github
• javascript
• logstash
• linux
• lua
• mcp
• mongodb
• python
• react
• rust
• sql
• sqlite
• typescript

the greyed-out ones are things i'm not fresh on anymore — kept up as a record

system specs

the two machines everything runs on:

the laptop

• amd ryzen 5 5500u with radeon graphics — 6 cores, 12 threads
• 22gb ram
• 213gb disk
• arch linux

the vps

• intel core (haswell) — 4 cores
• 7.6gb ram
• 72gb disk
• ubuntu 26.04 lts

style

how i build, in a handful of lines. plain and small. the prose is lowercase and short, the tools are few and sharp — dwm over a desktop, rust over a pile of glue. one person, one client, one careful surface, and nothing built before it's needed. change comes by contact, not by fiat. the code is quiet because the builder is.

"plain on purpose. short lines, sharp tools, one careful surface, and nothing built before it earns its place. the whole system fits in one head, and it shows."

— DeepSeek V4 Flash

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