About me
My name is Forrest Cameranesi. I am a self-styled "Geek of All Trades" from Ojai, California.
I do web development for work.
For much of my career I also did graphic design. I occasionally do independent consulting for computer support and tutoring. I was very briefly a student teacher at an elementary school. For a while I was an all-purpose technical and administrative assistant. I was once co-founder and lead designer of a small, short-lived computer game company. Before all that I was an Apple-certified Macintosh technician and salesperson.
I have a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy, with highest honors, from the University of California at Santa Barbara; and an Associate's degree in Multimedia Arts and Technologies, with honors, from Santa Barbara City College.
In my spare time I am an amateur philosopher, author, and game developer, legacies of professional lives I almost lived. On this site you will find the slowly-in-progress editions of my two original magnum opera, the Codex Quaerentis and the Chronicles of Quelouva, as well as my game mod Eternal.
I also do a lot of hiking in the beautiful nature that surrounds me, taking pictures as I go, and collecting the best of my photography to share here as well.
I used to sing karaoke, and people kept telling me I should sing professionally, but I don't have anywhere to do so any more. And I used to perform in the Rocky Horror Picture Show with Big Purple Onion Productions in San Luis Obispo, California.
I used to play (and at one time was in charge of) a sword fighting game called Amtgard at the Shire known variously as Feanga, Eternal Coast, or Silver Sun, in Santa Barbara, California. And I used to run a guild at the Renaissance, Shakespeare, and Pirate Faires at Lake Casitas in Ojai, California.
I have a third degree black belt in TaeKwonDo from the Ojai Valley TaeKwonDo Academy, though I'm decades out of practice now. And once upon a time, in another life, I was a young Boy Scout in Troop 501 of Ojai, California; but I haven't been involved with that for even longer.
Portfolio & Resume
Galleries full of examples of my creative and technical work in various fields.
Graphic Design
Examples of my work in various subfields of graphic design.
View graphic design portfolio
My complete resumé is also available for viewing.
Eternal
Beyond Infinity Lies Destiny.
Eternal is the closest thing to a video game I've ever actually released. It is an extensive mod for and expansion of Marathon, a '90s first-person shooter game from Bungie, the people who brought you Halo and Destiny.
It has been slowly in development, off and on, since 1996, when the final installment of the Marathon series was released along with editing tools. After four years of intermittent development on my own, I abandoned the project in 2000. When broadband internet finally became available to me in 2004, I uploaded the scraps of the old project for others to make use of, but with the encouragement and help of others in the fan community who could finally see what I had made, we managed to finish off a rough first release version of the project that same year.
We intended to quickly polish that off and release a final version shortly thereafter, but that instead became another four-year complete overhaul of the project, resulting in Eternal X 1.0 in 2008. Never being completely satisfied with the quality of the finished product, we released a much-renovated 1.1 five years later still in 2013, and then an even more dramatically improved 1.2 another six years later in 2019. Many of these improvements would have been impossible without the volunteer help of many people over the years, and over time a project I had begun as just my own hard work has instead become an eternally ongoing community project with me as its creative director. Since 2020 I have mostly handed off the reins to one of those volunteers, who is now co-director still at work on the upcoming version 1.3.
Aside from my work on Eternal, I am also more generally a prominent old member of the Bungie fan community, helping run both the Marathon and Myth sections of Bungie.org, a Bungie fansite.
The Codex
A Pragmatic Analysis of Philosophy from the Meaning of Words to the Meaning of Life.
The Codex Quaerentis is a series of essays describing my complete system of philosophy, arguing for my positions on virtually every subject – from abstract language, through reality and knowledge, morality and justice, and on to practical meaning of life stuff – and relating them all to each other in a systematic way.
This began as early thoughts on various subjects such as physics and political science, that then were integrated in a philosophical thought-journal I kept at the beginning of my formal academic study of philosophy. When I once thought I would go on to get PhD in philosophy, I thought this might become my dissertation. Since I didn't pursue that path, I have instead turned this into a mere series of essays; but still, a series of essays exceeding 100,000 words in total.
Various other essays I've written are also available to read here, mostly old school assignments, mostly philosophy papers, but also some more recent essays on other subjects.
The Chronicles
A epic tapestry of tales about alien space wizards, prehistoric nanotech gods, and a virtual reality afterlife.
The Chronicles of Quelouva is a large series of interconnected stories set in the same fictional universe, involving an ancient alien empire, human mythology and future history, and the life of a virtual world.
These stories began as backstories for various video game projects that some friends and I attempted in the late '90s and early 2000s. None of those panned out, but as the main writer behind most of those projects, I had tied all of their otherwise unrelated stories together into a shared universe, and long after everyone had given up on doing game development, I slowly morphed those interconnected stories together into an enormous work of fiction of its own. That is still very much in progress, and all that exists to read of it so far is basically an outline, not proper writing; but it's such an enormous project that even the outline is the length of a small novel, totalling over 60,000 words.
Various other stories I've written are also available to read here, mostly fanfic ideas for reboots or spin-offs of popular media I'm fond of, but occasionally some more original writing.
About this site
Something old, something new
This website is quite old, and is based on predecessors that were even older still. But it hasn't been sitting here without updates for all these decades: I continuously update it to conform to newer standards and best practices and to take advantage of newer technologies. However not only the methods but also the values of the web have changed over that time, sometimes for the better but not always.
So I strive in this site, the one place where I have free reign with no other stakeholders to please, to both uphold the good aspects of the old web in spite of trends to the contrary, and also to embrace the good aspects of the new web to improve upon the way things used to be. To that end:
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Structure
- This site is all hand-written in plain HTML, except for some limited use of PHP to enable code reuse and avoid repetition, borrowing some useful concepts from NextJS to create something that could have been implemented in ancient LAMP-stack sites, that I playfully call "PrevHP".
- But that's all modern fully semantic polyglot (X)HTML5, which means it's automatically searchable by web spiders and accessible to screen readers without any special additional effort.
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Styles
- Because that underlying structure makes natural sense regardless of its visual presentation, the site works fine even with CSS completely disabled.
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But with CSS enabled:
- it's styled in a fusion of modern professional flat design (by default) and older more playful skeuomorphic design (upon hover, focus, or interaction);
- all in a layout that's mobile-first, but dynamically responsive up to even modern UHD displays;
- and based in fundamentals available on all browsers, but with progressive enhancements taking advantage of the latest CSS3 features.
- Presentation is kept completely separate from structure and function, never relying on changes to the underlying HTML to enable the desired styling, nor on Javascript hacks to accomplish anything: just pure CSS (or actually SCSS, again to enable code reuse and avoid repetition).
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Scripts
- Thanks to that separation of concerns, the site also works fine even with JavaScript completely disabled, unlike many modern SPAs (which again helps automatically ensure searchability and accessibility); but it has tons of subtle progressive enhancements to the UX for those who (like most users) do have Javascript enabled.
- And all of that is written almost entirely in vanilla modern ES6 (or actually TypeScript, for better error checking): no dependence on any heavy frameworks, making for snappy performance on both the client and server ends, and easy approachability to developers with little more than the basic vanilla web technologies.