Blake Ridgway

Hard Problems. Long Rides. Open Code.

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

I'm an engineer, not a politician.

[Oliver Tree @Olivertree]

Oliver Nickell

June 29th, 1993 – June 14th, 2026

Oliver Tree Nickell, beloved son, brother, grandson, nephew, cousin, and friend, passed away in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on Sunday, June 14, 2026, in a tragic accident at the age of 32. Known as Oliver Tree, he was an artist, storyteller, singer, songwriter, producer, director, editor, actor, filmmaker, entertainer, traveler and creative force; he had just performed in São Paulo as part of his 7-continent world tour.

Oliver was born in Santa Cruz, California. From the beginning, Oliver always had the most astonishing and relentless creative drive. He began producing skits, music, and drawings as early as 5 years old. He spent ten years racing BMX, cycle cross, cross country, mountain biking, downhill racing and free-style dirt jumping. Oliver was a DJ in his teenage years and started performing shows under the name "Kryph", where he opened up for big artists in the dance scene. At 17, he signed with R&S Records, under the moniker "Tree", where he put out his first official body of work "Splitting Branches”. During this period, he attended San Francisco State University and later graduated from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2017. At CalArts, Oliver created the “Oliver Tree” project, which included producing, directing, acting, touring, film-making, and song-writing.

In 2016, “Turbo” was born, a character he developed for the internet, who was loud, colorful, bright and hilarious. That same year, he released his first single on all platforms as Oliver Tree, in collaboration with Whethan titled "When I'm Down". The song became a huge success and went gold. In 2017, Oliver signed with Atlantic Records and shortly after released his first viral hit song “Alien Boy” which was produced with his childhood friend Casey Mattson, as well as frequent collaborator Imad Royal. It was a song that truly encapsulated the Oliver Tree brand. Oliver then went on to release his debut album “Ugly Is Beautiful”, which hit the top 15 of Billboard 200 and reached number 1 on Billboard‘s Top Rock Albums and Alternative Albums charts. Oliver also released a deluxe version of the album which included the song "Life Goes On", a track that was produced with long-time friend and collaborator Getter. This song propelled Oliver into a global audience and was a commercial hit. Followed by the success of Oliver’s song "Miss You”, with Robin Schulz, which became a worldwide hit and was nominated for Best International Song (The BRIT Awards) in 2024.

Oliver never stopped reinventing himself. Each album featured a distinct character in the Oliver Tree universe: Turbo for “Ugly is Beautiful” in 2020, Shawney Bravo for “Cowboy Tears" in 2022, Cornelius Cummings for “Alone in A Crowd" in 2023 up until "Love You Madly Hate You Badly” in 2026, where he removed the fake personas and decided to show the world his true self for his final album which was 100% written and produced by Oliver.

Oliver had a deep curiosity about the world and wanted to experience every country and culture. Over the past two years, Oliver was a global citizen, visiting over 100 countries: eating local cuisine; connecting with locals of all kinds; participating in ceremonies; giving concerts; and recording music on his laptop. He went to the Middle East, sailed in Antarctica and became an honorary Maasai tribal chief in Tanzania.

Oliver was more than a musician; he was a true artist in every sense of the
word, seeing the world as a stage for his performance art. He pushed boundaries in every form of media and life. Oliver was on a mission to bring the world together through art and inspiring other artists to create. Being a forward thinker, Oliver created a non-profit entitled "Dr. Oliver Tree's Extremely Epic Art Grant for Baby Geniuses”. He wanted all of his money to go into funding other aspiring artists in all facets: music, film, installation and performance art projects.

Oliver cared so deeply about spreading art, joy, laughter and love into the world. He blended his characters seamlessly with his authentic self, which left the audience often wondering what is real or a prank. He found beauty in the ordinary and would constantly preach his "Ugly Is Beautiful" mantra on and off stage. He wanted everyone to feel like they had a place to be themselves. Under all the absurdist humor and outlandish stunts, he wanted to create an inclusive environment where everyone belonged and could realize their true potential.

Oliver was a creative force of nature, a true “Alien Boy” among human beings. His imagination was boundless, his laugh was contagious and his creativity and ideas were prolific.

Oliver is survived by his parents, Jesse & Christine Nickell of Santa Cruz, brother Jessup (Zoe), Grandmothers Ann Begin & Lorraine Nickell, Aunts Cynthia Begin, Mia Begin (Bill Schroeder), Uncle Dan Begin (Melissa), Aunts Sheree Kouffeld (Dave Christopher) and Jan Lamascus (Marvin), many beloved cousins, Beth, Breanna, Kaitlin, Kimmy, Maggie, Meadow and Nicolas; and numerous friends worldwide. He considered his team and colleagues his family: Dan Awad, Paul Donatelli; his bandmates: Casey Mattson, Amir Oosman, Jake Jamieson, Jmsey; his creative collaborators: Ethan Snoreck aka Whethan; Ryan Farber; Steve Zilberman; Jacob Dennis; Sebastian Hackett; his love Fiona Chernavskaya, as well as many others who touched his project and helped him execute his vision, who are too innumerable to be named.

We’ll leave you with a quote which Oliver said at almost every show he performed at, his mantra to the world: “No matter how strange you think you look, no matter how ugly you feel, you are beautiful.”

A celebration of his life / memorial service will be held at the UCSC Quarry Amphitheater on July 25th. Due to limited space for family and friends, this event will also be streamed live.

Donations: The family requests donations be made to “Dr. Oliver Tree's Extremely Epic Art Grant for Baby Geniuses”. Oliver’s vision is to support and encourage young artists to follow their dreams. See more at https://t.co/XY1lQhixpQ

[Guild Wars Reforged @GuildWars]

⚔️ Are you maximizing your damage, boosting your survivability, or creating the perfect hybrid build? In Guild Wars Reforged, your attributes can make all the difference.

How do you usually spend your attribute points? 👇
#MMORPG #GuildWarsReforged #GuildWars #mmorpggames

[Guild Wars Reforged @GuildWars]

Good news! Guild Wars Reforged officially launches worldwide on mobile June 24. The wait is almost over - get ready to jump in and play anywhere. ⚔️📱

[ARC Raiders Alerts @ArcRaiderAlerts]

ARC Raiders master cheat sheet by u/pRoDeeD:

- What do keep or sell
- What to recycle or upgrade
- Attachments guide

[Falco Girgis @falco_girgis]

jnmartin has been putting the finishing touches on his Star Fox 64 port to the Sega Dreamcast! To hype up its upcoming release, here's a direct hardware capture of the intro scene!

Notice how crisp and sharp the textures look now? ...can you spot the blasphemous texture swap?🤣

[Falco Girgis @falco_girgis]

Sooo... now that we've established that I do horrible, terrible, evil things with the C programming language (on my Sega Dreamcast), that make the purist, minimalist C programmers want to puke, lets take another deep-dive into the dark side of C...

Today we're looking at my GblStringView API, which is my own equivalent of C++'s std::string_view, with several notable exceptions:

First of goddamn all, stop telling me std::string_view is always "zero overhead for strings" when any time you have to pass one to a function taking a C string as a const char*, you are FORCED to copy it into a temporary buffer, which you must then ensure is NULL-terminated, before forwarding it on as a const char* to a function.

Rather than dealing with that bullshit, I reserve one bit from the size field (declared using my own GBL_BIT_FIELDS() meta macro, which ensures endian-independence), so that I know that I can elide such a temporary copy when needing to use my string view with a C API.

Next, you'll notice I have taken the liberty of stealing the very few useful functions provided by C++'s std::string_view and have augmented them by continuing on to steal every useful method that operates on constant strings from Java, C#, Python, and even Perl's chomp() (for the lulz), making searching, tokenizing, comparing, returning substrings, and working with string views not a total pain in the ass!

Moving right along to the next great sin against C's purity, you'll notice something strange about many of my function declarations... I have taken the liberty of including values within parentheses for the final argument(s) of many of them...

...WTF? Well, after several rewrites, whittling down 999 different variants of the same routine depending on the number of arguments that it received (or always having to unnecessarily pass extra args I don't care about), I have settled upon a new kind of blasphemy for many of my APIs: default arguments in plain C17...

Yes, it's evil, unnatural, and horrible. No, I don't care. It's glorious to use and is sooo much more ergonomic! Sorry, not sorry!

So how does it work? Well, for any public API which features default function arguments, if you scroll down to the bottom of the header file (where I hide my evil misdeeds to not scare off the grug-minded and pure), you will immediately notice that each function with default arguments has a corresponding macro WITH THE SAME NAME that actually "overrides" and hides the C function, propagating a variadic argument list through a series of proxy macros which append default arguments onto it before finally invoking the actual function itself with them...

This is a practice which has drastically improved the ergonomics of many of my APIs... You'll get raised eyebrows, you'll be called a bad person, and you might be ostracized from your social circles, but don't knock it until you try it!

Stay tuned for more unholy C practices, as we continue our journey into the dark side!

https://t.co/y4V3GBiYgt

[Troy Davis @GPFTroy]

Well, I missed Halloween by 1 day, fell asleep, and couldn't record my Dreamcast simulation of the Hypseus Singe API and my Dreamcast-FMV encoder/player code to convert to my custom .dcmv format.

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

I changed my phone number and forgot to update it on my @GuildWars2 account. Well I changed my ISP a week or so ago...now I'm being asked to use my SMS auth to access my account. I can't do that because new phone #...can't create a support ticket because I can't log in @ArenaNet

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

@DobsonFiber Is that why I'm still waiting after a week to hear back from your customer service? :)

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

Maybe 2026 is the year I can get my job to move to @NetgateUSA firewalls. 🙏🙏🙏

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

Well we've made it to week one of @DobsonFiber not responding to a inquiry I made of their services.

Bets on how long it will take to get a response? All I asked as a potential new customer if it was possible to pay a monthly fee to get a static IP as a residental user. :))))))

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

@iFightForKids I know this looked familiar when I was browsing Facebook and EPD posted his mugshot lol

[SpaceshipStatus @SpaceshipStatus]

⚒️ Upcoming maintenance

On February 19, our infrastructure will undergo scheduled maintenance.

⏰ Duration (2 hours):

7:00 AM - 9:00 AM UTC
2:00 AM - 4:00 AM EST

During this period, Spacemail, Free Email Forwarding, Domain Privacy, and our email support system will be affected, meaning that incoming emails will be queued and delivered once the maintenance is complete.

We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. In the meantime, our support team will still be able to assist you in chats. You can find the chat widget at the bottom right corner of this page: https://t.co/8oVMSHTMke

Thanks for your understanding!

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

@OWGotStung @system76 Nice!

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

It is here! I am excited to welcome the Darter Pro to my collection of @system76 devices!

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

@OWGotStung @system76 Nice! I'm comtemplating on upgrading my Darter Pro to 32GB of RAM and a 1TB Crucial P3 Plus.

But I just bought the Darter Pro and a new car, so money spending is going to have to be very careful. Haha

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

@OWGotStung @system76 I have a Thelio, Lemur Pro 9, had a Gazelle, now I have my new Darter Pro! I'm excited to expand my System76 devices :D

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

@miller_grt02 @system76 Retails for $1,299!

https://t.co/IIHanhoZdb

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

@ZanussiZaandam @system76 My desktop is Skywalker, Lemur Pro 9 is Kenobi, Darter Pro is Chewbacca haha

[Blake Ridgway @cipher_vance]

@OptiplexPrime @system76