Hello!

As in, why not Medium? Substack? Reddit? Why my own website?

Lots of reasons! Some of it is frustration with social platforms owned by big companies, that are designed to prevent meaningful interaction and create addiction. So, there are some "negative" reasons for me, to do with digital autonomy, ownership, and surveillance. For example:

• a silo can never provide digital autonomy to its users (Ariadne Conill)
• I'm leaving reddit for good (Karl Voit)

But it's not all about bad things that I want to avoid! Equally (or more) important are the good things that come of having your own public digital space. This mostly comes down to freedom, expression, and space for creativity. For example:

• focusing on positives: why I have my own website (Brett Slakin)
• why I have a website and you should too (Jamie Tanna)
• the indie web — why? (IndieWeb)

I think it's important to say that this website/blog is not meant as a counter-cultural middle finger to surveillance capitalism. I'm glad that its existence can be that, don't get me wrong. Still, I think creating and having a space for yourself like this one is for me is something everyone can and should do.

To sum it up, I spent years in web development taking and following directions, and I want to use those skills to create my own direction for once. I view this website mostly as a personal creative endeavour.

So, with all of that said, what am I going to write about?

My "day job"

Although I am pursuing a PhD in a CS department, I would mainly consider myself a mathematician, and that is indeed most of my academic background. For a long time my main career goal was to be a math professor—it may still be!

All of this to say, I love math, I love teaching it, and I love introducing it to people. Unlike something like the n-cat café, which features specialists writing about very high-level topics, I want to write about the basics in an interesting way. I am looking to get experimental about presenting math to a wide range of people in a web format.

In the interest of accountability, I'm going to commit here to the idea that I will do a series of posts where I dissect and discuss my master thesis. It may not be the first thing that I do, but I would really like to do it!

My day job

It's probably not entirely clear to a lot of people what Emacs exactly is, though many were introduced to it in an undergrad CS course as an anachronistic IDE by some dinosaur of a prof. Here is a succinct description I like.

Emacs is probably about half of the reason I made this website. It is the core around which all of my tasks are centered, and I have an obsession (whether it is healthy or not remains to be seen) with filtering any computer-adjacent task I have through it. That is, I sort of wanted a website; when I realised I could hack org-mode into building it for me, I got to work.

So, in particular, org-mode. People often refer org to as Emacs' "killer app", which is a characterisation that I believe is earned, though I don't necessarily agree with it.

For what it's worth, when I was first exposed to Emacs 5 years ago, it was a puzzling experience. But now I'm in this huge hole buried under parentheses and I have no real desire to get out.

A big category with a highly-descriptive name to match

I daily drive NixOS with Hyprland. Philosophically I really like the reproducability of Nix, and in fact I was already doing something similar beforehand with org-mode in a sort of hacked-together way. A lot of what I want to write amounts to personal knowledge-keeping in this space.

I also self-host a menagerie of apps: jellyfin, immich, radicale, syncthing, vaultwarden, and some others. Becoming self-sufficient for a lot of my day-to-day services has been a really great process, and it's something I will probably be shouting from the rooftops about quite a bit too.

There's also always a growing list of interesting programming books and articles accumulating for me, as well as a never-ending pile of cool programming projects only some of which I'll ever start, and even fewer of which I'll ever complete: I'm half-hoping writing about them here will get me a bit further towards the finish line.

As in, that D&D type stuff

I'm really into playing role-playing games (RPGs), typically in a game-master (GM) role. Most of my best games have lived in the Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark design spaces, and as of this moment I'm running a "bi-weekly" game of Stonetop over Discord.

A lot of what I want to write is about my learning process of GMing, and for the time being (October 2024) that means the context is Stonetop. I find that game-mastering is an endless hole where there's always more to learn, different strategies and approaches, new things to try. I hope to share some of what I learn, and my personal style, here!

Please don't let me influence your purchasing decisions

I listen to a lot of albums, watch a lot of movies, read a lot of books, play a lot of games, you get the idea. I'm not really in the business of being a serious critic, but I like thinking about the art that I consume and have always enjoyed writing about it. Consuming media is something I can very reliably count on myself to do, so hopefully even when I don't have much to write about here I can whip up a quick little write up on something cool I saw/listened to/played recently.

For a look at my personal essentials, check out my reading list.

That's all for now.