Robb Knight - omg.lol Interview Series 7

Robb Knight

OMG.LOL Interview Series

Find Robb on omglol: @Robb

Table of Contents

The Interview

Can you share a bit about yourself with us?

I’m a cat dad to a cat called Morpheus and a human dad to two girls. I’m a developer in my day job but I also work on my own projects and freelance outside of that and I also podcast.

I like to make fun web stuff like soundboards, mini games, and utilities. I also collect Lego, play video games, read comics, and most recently I got into pens, pencils and other stationery-related things.

What motivates you day to day?

My motivation to go to work is so my family can have a nice life and also so I can buy stupid stuff but mostly the former. I’m also motivated by Monster and crisps.

We are all different. Keeping in mind your context and mine (I’m a white cis-het American dude in his 40s) what is one thing you want me to know?

I too am a white dude, albeit British and a little bit younger than you, but one thing that has stuck with me since I first heard years ago it is this: you can’t account for why people enjoy things. There are essentially an infinite amount of hobbies and interests so don’t be annoyed or “confused” why someone likes something. Assuming it’s not hurting anyone else, just let people enjoy things.

What are three favorites? (It can be anything like food, books, media, etc; share a few sentences about each though and each one can be a different category, ie, a favorite food, a favorite book and a favorte album)

My favourite food is pizza and I have a theory that all pizza, within reason, is good pizza. There are of course varying degrees of what good means and I’d much rather have a handmade pizza from a stone oven than a frozen one from the supermarket but they’re all still good. They’re good pizzas Brent.

My favourite game of all time is Jak and Daxter on the PS2. It falls into the “perfect” category for me — “perfect” in the sense of it does exactly what it intends to do and delivers it well. It may not be the best game by some measures but as a 3D platformer it absolutely nails it.

I do find “perfect” to be a better way to frame favourites so with that in mind I’ll recommend one of my perfect albums: Palm Trees and Power Lines by Sugarcult.

You mention Jax and Dexter as a “perfect” game. It makes me wonder what your top 3 video game play throughs have been (and why)?

• Sunset Overdrive on Xbox One. This is a really weird, fun, story that I spent a solid two weeks playing more or less non-stop. 

• Red Dead Redemption (Xbox 360) was really special. The characters, the setting, it all just came together perfectly.

• Finally, The Last of Us is one of the best stories I’ve ever played - first on PS3, then PS4, and I’m in the process of playing it again on PS5 now.

What is one quote that you can’t get out of your head?

I don’t take much value from quotes in the traditional sense, which I believe is the intention of this question. Boiling down an idea or concept to a single sentence can be a useful technique for understanding but I think we lose a lot when we repeat the same handful of quotes about a topic instead of looking for a unique perspective themselves. I do enjoy a good shit post though, so here is one of my (sadly now deleted) favourite tweets I’ve saved:

love reading about men in history like “unfortunately, he never found a wife :( his elaborate scarf collection sold for $1.2M in 2011. he and his closest male friend, Chauncey, with whom he shared a bed, died within weeks of one another. they were known for their dinner parties.”

How did you find OMGLOL and what are your favorite parts of it?

I first heard it from Maique who had mentioned it a number of times when we were both using Micro.blog — if you check the omg.lol referral network I’m pretty sure Maique is the person with the most referrals there. I jumped in right before a price rise at the end of 2022.

I think my favourite part is social.lol. I want a Mastodon instance that I know is reliable and isn’t flooded with spam accounts. With omg.lol being a paid service, spam is basically non-existant on social.lol. I also make heavy use of paste.lol.

Promotion time: What do you want us to know about and check out?

I would be a terrible businessman if I didn’t mention my singular project that is paid: EchoFeed. It’s a cross posting tool that fetches RSS feeds and posts to various places including Mastodon and Bluesky. omg.lol members get a $5 discount and I think it’s pretty good.

I’m also getting a lot of use out of Lens, my metadata checker and I really like how Slash Pages turned out.

What is one thing you’ve discovered that someone else created that you’d like to promote?

This isn’t one thing, this is three, I’m going rogue:

• ArtFeed is a feed reader focused on photos which I’m really interested in
• Dan is doing wonderful font work at SimpleBits
• My friend Keenan is extraordinarily handsome and talented so you should go check out their writing, videos, and photography

Find Robb Online!

• My website has all the links to everything I do online: https://rknight.me