Introduction

2025-12-05

Hello!

You found my blog. Here’s a little bit about me.

(Contrary to this next paragraph, I’m a pretty optimistic person)

I’m an anxious over-thinker from a shitty, conservative nowhere-town (not the quaint kind, although it had its spots). I’ve since moved to a slightly less shitty, slightly less conservative town that’s closer to places with things to do. My job is meaningless and unrelated from what I went to school for, but it pays just enough to make it difficult to quit. Outside of work I read, write, make music, listen to music, fuck about with programming, and periodically pick up and put down a plethora of other hobbies. This blog is mainly for centralizing that stuff, improving my writing, and for expression in general.

I started abandoning social media in 2016, finally leaving the last remaining platform earlier this year. I don’t miss most of it (I hadn’t opened the last platform for about a year before I finally left it) but I have found myself craving a place to share all my hobbies and fixations. Things feel more real when you share them and it’s hard to feel growth or improvement in solitary pursuits; you don’t really think to record milestones for yourself. At least with a blog there’s a theoretical someone who’s looking at it all. The possibility of that theoretical someone looking at what I post encourages me to more thoughtfully engage with the things that I love a bit more deeply so that I have something worth saying about them. By myself, I might subconsciously slip into more passive consumption and halfhearted efforts.

I’m not a particularly articulate person in the meatspace, so writing affords me the best opportunity possible to express myself clearly. I’m not a good writer yet though, so I stand to gain a lot from blogging. If I can stick with it and improve, maybe I can think with more lucidity and develop a voice of my own. That’s the goal, anyway.

As a quick introduction, here is a little about some of my main interests:

Music

A more articulate person could provide a cohesive description of their musical taste. Instead of that, here is a randomly-ordered list of some of the artists I’ve been listening to lately, as well as some of those that I listen to the most:

• Crying
• Smiling Broadly (fka Twinkle Park)
• Nobonoko
• A series of DnB mixes on YouTube entitled “Ya Like Jazz”
• Aphex Twin
• Axolotes Mexicanos
• Kero Kero Bonito
• The Cure (you don’t need a link for The Cure lol)
• Elliot Smith (same for Elliot Smith)
• Men I Trust
• Sufjan Stevens
• Weyes Blood

I try to always be seeking out new-to-me music so if you stick around, this list will be pretty different in a few months.

Linux

I am a Linux enjoyer and have been daily driving it for about 6 years. I first got into it in middle school when my older brother’s friend Chauncey, the local enthusiast, helped my dad out by slapping Ubuntu onto some bottom-of-the-line, outdated PCs that he had laying around (sense memory: the crunch of old hard drives working in overdrive). I was blown away by it. Not for any interesting technical reason, but because I had never used a computer that wasn’t running Windows. It was a genuine novelty to see things like a taskbar on the side of the screen or different looking icons, and I was enchanted by the simplicity of installing programs with a command line instead of a downloaded installer. I was prettily easily impressed. Later, he stayed up with me until like 2 in the morning, walking me through an Arch install (in retrospect, I don’t know why he thought I was ready for Arch at that point). It’s a really fond memory, though only a couple weeks later I would put Windows right back on my PC because I couldn’t get FL Studio to run well via Wine.

I continued to dabble here and there with VMs but without ever sticking with it for lack of a “why”. Then, a few years back I found a “why” in learning web development so I took the plunge and installed PopOs! as a dual boot with Windows. One day, It dawned on me that I hadn’t booted into Windows in months. So when I finally decided to crawl back to Arch in 2021, I wiped the whole drive and left the Windows boot out.¹

There might be some occasional Linux posts because it is a never-ending rabbit-hole, but you can skip them if that’s not your bag. If you are into Linux, check out a Linux YouTuber I’ve been really digging lately, Bread on Penguins. Her videos are straight to the point and her channel is very human.

Programming

For more than a year I was diligently learning web dev with the intent to make a career change (so, apparently, was everyone else). Then I had the opportunity to pursue a programming-adjacent project at my day job for about a year, so I switched gears to focusing on that. It unfortunately never panned out. In that time though, the tech industry shat itself, and its sole frontier became AI, which killed a lot of the joy of technology for me. I soured on the idea of programming for a living because of the idea that I’d have to at least use AI if not outright contribute to an AI product, despite it being explicitly hostile to the working class. For a long while I didn’t continue learning or programming at all. My former excitement was pretty much extinguished.

Eventually, I remembered that no one is stopping me from just building shit without AI, even if it’s just for fun. After all, it wasn’t just a career goal; I genuinely loved doing it. And that’s sorta where I’m at now. I might still make it my career one day if I can find a way to ethically do it somewhere that will have me, but I’m happy just making stuff for myself for the time being. Programming again has been like reclaiming some of that joy that had been taken away. I may end up posting about my projects from time to time. Hopefully, I’ll even find a good open source project to contribute to.

My current pet project is a little app that helps create language learning flashcards for anki. The idea is that you give it a word or phrase in your target language and it will fetch images, pronunciations, and translations that you can choose from to assemble your ideal flashcard. Then you can export your cards and add them to an anki deck. I’ve got image fetching and the GUI built but that’s about it so far.

Reading

I’ve always been a reader, but my consistency is all over the place. Sometimes I tear through several books in a short period of time. Sometimes I go through long dry spells without reading because I’m just not in the mood for whatever book I have going. Because of this, the way I’ve been approaching reading lately is to allow myself to read whatever I want at any time so long as I write about it. Reading just one thing at a time can be really hard; I’m trying to just stop resisting the urge to pick up something else. After all, reading is better than not reading. My hope is that writing about my reading as I go will help me process it better and make it easier to return to each book when I next pick it up. I’ve been semi-successful with this, however I have been slipping a bit lately with the writing part. But I mostly blame that on holiday travel.

My current reads are:

• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien
  • almost done; loving it albeit not as much as The Two Towers
• Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
  • like halfway; sometimes I have to put this one down for a while when I’m struggling with anxiety
• Mindshift by Barbara Oakley
  • considering dropping this one tbh; I enjoyed her Learning How To Learn course years ago and got a lot from it, but this books reads like she’s trying to sell me something and that bums me out
• Wage Labour and Capital by Karl Marx
  • finished; might post thoughts on this later
• Existentialism is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre
  • Got a lot out of this. Will definitely be posting about this one. Felt like a great introduction to the ideas of existentialism with a little reassurance that existentialist philosophy is not just about hopelessly wallowing in the meaningless misery of existence, which is how I had imagined it. I actually found it to be a quite optimistic read.
• and a few others that I’ve back-burnered for longer periods of time

Writing

I write fiction extremely sporadically and probably won’t put anything on this website until I really force myself to make it all the way through writing something, editing it, and learning not to hate it. I have three stories in the works, though I haven’t touched them in a while. Still, I hope to put at least one of them up eventually.

As for nonfiction writing, I’ve kept a journal for almost 10 years now. I haven’t written in it everyday—far from it—but I’ve written out my thoughts enough to where the first drafts are no longer completely unintelligible rambling. This blog will kinda be a cleaned up version of that, minus all the boring or embarrassing stuff (most of it, anyway). The goal is to share with you genuine slices of my life without boring you to tears.

So thanks for reading all that! I have no delusions that very many people will see this blog but I’ll be as honest about myself as possible, and in a more articulate way than I could ever manage in person.

I have a mix of excitement and timidity about starting a blog. Excitement because it’s new, personal, a place to process my life as it happens, and I’m drawn to the idea of pouring what humanity I have to offer into my corner of the internet. Timidity because ADHD makes it very difficult for me to stick to things for long stretches of time (something you may also be familiar with). Yet, I am determined to not self-defeat before I’ve really gotten started. So if this feels like something you’d like to read, I’d love for you to check in every once in a while, friend.

Thanks!

footnotes