I’m usually known as “Chemist”, even though I’m not a chemist IRL. A 24 year old nobody. Former content creator and streamer. He/him.

I have no real coding experience as I never had the time to do it, and I wasn’t accepted into CS back in college. I have an environmental health degree, which is part of public health, though I currently have a boring desk job that doesn’t really make use of what I learned in college all that much. It’s a good thing though, as I struggle to interact with people, and my current job avoids that kind of interaction. And in hindsight, not taking the CS path was probably for better, as the job market for software engineering is terrible in here.

I used to be more present on social media but realized that this isn’t worth the hassle. If you need to contact me, join the Floral Federation discord here and send me a DM with the message “I found your Discord from your blog and would like to ask you something”. I don’t usually respond to strangers due to increasing amounts of DM spam, so please do this if you’d like to reach out. You need to join the server as I don’t accept friend requests from strangers, and Discord doesn’t allow you to interact with people not on your friends list who don’t share mutual servers.

Discord: @chemistzombie (may not respond immediately)

Hardware spec sheet

New rig in the apartment

This is a new rig that finally replaced my ancient Xeon build. I was finally able to move my setup into my apartment, as I’ve pretty much started over with this, only carrying over my existing drives.

The 7500F is effectively just a 7600 with disabled iGPU and 100MHz lower clocks, and it was actually supposed to be an OEM-only part (you weren’t supposed to be able to buy them on retail) but it’s got such a good value that PC stores in here that also happen to be SIs are selling them separately, and in my case, it’s got 1 year store warranty (as it’s not a boxed product, so no 3 year manufacturer warranty).

The PA248QV is a professional monitor for content creation, not gaming, but it’s the most gamer-y 16:10 monitor I could find, as it’s the only one that has a higher than 60Hz refresh rate (75Hz), adaptive sync (G-sync compatible), and good color accuracy (it’s a pro monitor after all). It also supports VESA mount, has 4 USB ports, and the built-in stand can tilt, swivel, and rotate, unlike most lower-end monitors, which are nice additions.

I wanted 16:10 as it offers more vertical space while not being so tall it cuts the FOV while gaming. Most games use Hor+ for their FOV scaling, so having a taller aspect ratio would reduce your FOV even if 1920x1200 has more pixels than 1080p.

Thinkpad T480 - current daily driver in my apartment

After using the eGPU for almost 2 years, I came to the conclusion that the adapter is a POS after seeing it crash unexpectedly even when idle. This often leads to a black screen where recovery is impossible and power cycling the laptop is required. It seems to be way too sensitive to signal integrity.

Also, you shouldn’t play demanding games with a 15W TDP processor, or you’re gonna have a bad time.

Peripherals

These are budget peripherals that are usable enough to pass as gaming and production hardware. In the case of the keyboard, it’s the cheapest one I could find that does NOT use Outemu switches as their boards are proprietary and would not support most switches from other brands without clipping the pins.

Former hardware

PC in my parents’ house (retired)

I’ve had a ton of headaches with this PC as it kept giving me weird stability issues likely due to its age (the X58 board is over 15 years old by now). Recently, it seems that either the motherboard or the graphics card has bad solder joints as the display would crash after using it for a few minutes, but would stabilize when the PC is left to heat up.

Also, I accidentally smashed my side panel when I was cleaning my PC. Lesson learned: NEVER reattach your side panel on ceramic tiles. Use your bed to cushion the side panel while doing it if you don’t have a big enough desk to work with.

As of September 2025, this PC has been retired and will no longer be used for anything. I’m not planning to sell it as it wouldn’t make sense to sell a PC with failing parts like this.

2016 build (sold)

This build was really ass because I didn’t really know the best PC parts at the time, nor would my parents let me buy anything too expensive. The GPU was pretty much DOA because the 1050 Ti was already released by then, but they were out of stock and me being an impatient guy, I impulsively bought an RX 460 instead of the much better value RX 470. The case was a no-name, garbage-tier case with poor airflow, no cable management, poor build quality, and a power button that broke after I tried to take out the front panel for maintenance. I can’t even find any documentation for it anymore, because news flash, no one cares about these cheap cases nine years later.

I initially wanted to buy a Xeon E3-1231 v3 which was bsaically just an i7 without the iGPU, but it too was out of stock, and I impulsively bought an i5 just because I didn’t wanna wait any longer to play GTA V back then.

Needless to say, it wasn’t a great experience. The RX 460 struggled in GTA V at 1080p max settings, but I still insisted on playing it at those settings anyway because I wanted to play the game with the best possible settings, FPS be damned. I’ve been waiting for years to play the game at that point, and I wanted to max it out so I’m not stuck with potato quality. ENB tanked the performance badly and that’s where the cracks were starting to show. Minecraft absolutely crapped out when I tried to install demanding shaders like Sildur’s Extreme or SEUS. Also, the i5, while adequate for its time, wasn’t the best value option (that would go to the Xeon), and for software rendering on PCSX2 (required for compatibility with specific games), I think I could’ve gotten better results with even more rendering threads had I gotten the Xeon instead.

ThinkCentre M58e (broken)

My father tricked me with this one. He told me that this was the “best in class” PC. Yeah, “best in class” my ass. This was 2014, and that CPU had been around since 2008, not to mention that it’s got the dreaded GT 210 (which is more accurately referred to as the GeForce 210). The RAM was faulty and actively corrupting the data stored on anything attached to the PC, and somehow the local computer repair shop didn’t notice this, so they just went with the reinstall path which solved nothing. It wasn’t until the corruption was so severe that they finally replaced the RAM.

2008 netbook (broken)

A POS netbook that came with Xandros Linux preinstalled, but was reinstalled and replaced by Windows XP. Painfully slow. Got a nasty case of malware infection back in 2012 (Sality + Ramnit + Slugin). Couldn’t even run most games as they would simply crash due to the underpowered GMA iGPU, and if they did run, the performance would be so terrible it’s actually worse than even a very old GPU like the Radeon 9700 Pro.

Wishlist

New laptop: At least a ThinkPad P52 with Xeon and Quadro P2000. Thinkpad T15g or P1 (if prices come down, preferably with Xeon instead of i7).

These days, I prefer mobile workstations to gaming laptops, as they offer better performance than non-gaming laptops while having the durability of business laptops. I prefer Xeons over i7s just because they sound cool (Xeon just screams “serious business” as they’re typically used in servers), even though my main use cases will be gaming, music production, and boring office tasks. Sure, they don’t offer as much performance as gaming laptops at the same price point, but I’ll be buying these used anyway, and I really only play less demanding games like Genshit these days.

I care more about durability and reliability over raw performance as I need a laptop that can withstand some abuse, as I’ll be constantly bringing it to work, and I often just carelessly toss my laptop into my backpack. I’ve been bummed by consumer-grade laptops as the plastic tends to become very brittle after a few years, as was the case with my Acer Swift 3 from 2018 that had its hinges broken after 4 years, and the plastic on the bezels and bottom chassis was already falling apart long before that. Meanwhile, my T480, while used and being as old as my Acer, is still in pretty good shape, aside from minor blemishes.

New peripherals

I mainly produce DnB, so these open-back headphones will roll off the subs quite hard, which sounds less than ideal at first, but this is a hidden strength, because 90% of consumer audio equipments won’t be able to reproduce subs anyway, and that’s what I should be mixing for. On the flip side, these headphones are known for their neutral sound, which makes them perfect for mixing compared to something like the ATH-M50x which has better bass and a lower price but is less neutral.

Phones I’ve owned

  1. Xperia L (2013 - 2016). First ever Android phone I’ve owned. Upgraded to 4.4.4 and then 6.0 with a custom ROM as it only received a single version update throughout its life from 4.1.2 to 4.2.2. Its modem became faulty in 2015 or so, frequently throwing “Sorry, the phone crashed!” errors, with the log indicating that the modem crashed. The phone eventually became unusable in 2016, after the screen went purple sometime during a lunch break back in high school.
  2. Galaxy J1 (2016 - 2017). Handed down from my parents. Sold in exchange for a Oneplus One.
  3. Oneplus One (2017 - 2018). Was once dubbed the “flagship killer” due to Oneplus selling it at a low price with flagship-grade hardware. Upgraded to Android 8 when the stock ROM is stuck on Android 6. Suffers from ghost touch issues like many other OPOs. Accidentally dropped it during college orientation, which shattered the screen and rendered the touchscreen unusable, due to it using a touch-on-lens screen assembly.
  4. Redmi Note 4 (2018 - 2021). Another hand-me-down device. The phone became very slow over time likely due to the internal storage wearing out.
  5. Galaxy Note FE (2021 - 2023). Bought this phone due to it having Android 9 despite technically being part of the same generation as the S7, which only received updates up to Android 8 (it is in fact just a Note 7 with a less explosive battery) as it was released in 2017 like the S8 and Note8. Because of this, it has One UI 1.0 which was also used on the S10 lineup at launch.
  6. Galaxy S10+ (2023 - present). I initially wanted the S10e due to its compact size, but realized that battery life might be an issue due to it approaching 4 years old. The last good Samsung flagship because it still has a 3.5mm jack and micro SD slot. Currently using this as a secondary device as I now daily drive an iPhone 15, but I still miss those two features and YouTube Revanced.
  7. Galaxy Note 4 (2025 - present). Despite being over 10 years old at this point, I bought this phone to fulfill my broken childhood dream of owning a Galaxy Note 4 from a state-owned mobile carrier sweepstakes campaign. This sounds stupid, but it means a lot to me that it probably deserves its own post. I’m using this alongside the iPhone 15 and the S10+ as a secondary device as the Indonesian model is 3G only, and 3G has been phased out in here since 2022, effectively making it 2G-only.
  8. iPhone 15 (2025 - present). This is my first ever phone that I bought brand new in box. I decided to jump ship to iOS after almost 12 years of using Android because I got sick of app developers and Google mistreating users with modded devices by preventing their apps from running and patching the methods to circumvent the restriction, which caused Android to lose the only thing that made it unique.
    Meanwhile, app developers tend to prioritize iOS to the point where new apps and updates are usually delivered there first and there’s a lot of iOS-exclusive apps I can’t get on Android, which made me feel like I was being treated as a second-class citizen. I should probably make a detailed post about this later. I was initially planning to get the 16e, but after reading the reviews, its poor low-light video performance is a dealbreaker for me, so I ended up getting this instead.