My interests

In typical ADHD nerd fashion, I'm into a lot of varied things. I'd love to chat your ear off about them if you've got the patience.

📚 Fantasy and Science Fiction Novels

🧙 Fantasy

Unsurprisingly, I'm a big Brandon Sanderson fan. Almost everyone into fantasy novels these days is too - and for good reason: The dude is a master of world building.

Other fantasy authors I am or have been into over the years include:

• Brian Staveley
• China Mieville
• Raymond E. Feist
• Robin Hobb
• Scott Lynch
• Terry Brooks
• Terry Goodkind (though his political views and treatment of women got...old)

You may note some glaring omissions. I simply haven't read enough of Neil Gaiman, Robert Jordan, Patrick Rothfuss etc. to have too much of an opinion.

👾 Science Fiction

I like a fair amount of science fiction too, though I am significantly pickier with it than fantasy.

Some authors I have enjoyed:

• Aldous Huxley
• Emily St. John Mandel (particularly Station Eleven - largely unfamiliar with her other works)
• Hannu Rajaniemi
• Kurt Vonnegut (though his position as a "sci-fi writer" is a bit tenuous)
• Neal Stephenson
• Orson Scott Card
• Phillip K. Dick
• Ray Bradbury

🎶 Music

In short: I like just about everything. I mean that. From country to death metal with a trip towards electronic and jazz thrown in, I like a LOT of music.

I think that what I enjoy isn't a genre, but tailored artistic expression. I don't care for much of the "unbridled" music. Not much into punk or noise - the "rawness" of it doesn't strike a chord for me (no pun intended). But the combination of emotion with strong theory foundations? I love that.

Artists I particularly I love:

• Cynic's brand of progressive metal-jazz
• Coltrane's late-career output
• Emancipator, general fuzz, burial
• Tyler Childers, Sturgill Simpson, Jason Isbell
• Allegaeon, Slugdge, Ulcerate
• Eidola, Royal Coda,
• Coheed and Cambria

⛺ Hiking & Camping

I do not do nearly enough of this these days, but I really enjoy overnighting.

I have not had an opportunity, but am very excited at the prospect of backcountry camping with long hike-ins and minimal gear.

Happy to chat about this, but I am not a gear nerd so discussions get wishy-washy rather quickly.

🖮 Keyboards

Like a lot of people now, I'm quite into mechanical keyboards. I'm quite into the idea of "ortholinear" keyboards, as well as small keyboards.

I own quite a few:

• Razer BlackWidow (with Cherry MX Blue switches)
• CM Storm QuickFire Rapid (Cherry MX Blues)
• Keeb.io Nyquist (Outemu Browns)
• OLKB Preonic v1 (Zealio v1 65G)
• Inland MK47 (with Huano Reds)

Currently in use are the Nyquist and MK47. The Nyquist is a great little split keyboard that I'm presently modifying a bit to suit me better, and the MK47 is a brilliant OLKB Planck clone with an absolutely horrific default layout.

⚙ Programming

Presently, my languages of choice for general applications are Rust and OCaml. Both have ways to bundle for the web and offer nearly unparalled type systems.

In addition, I am fluent in the following for application development:

• Python
• JavaScript
• Java & Scala
• PHP (but please don't make me)

And a lot of smaller things too, like bash/dash, but those hardly count in some ways.

I'm a huge fan of Nix as a platform for actually doing the programming. It allows hermetic and reproducible builds for projects and systems expressed in a cool little lanuage which could be described as "JSON + Lisp", maybe?

There's a lot of problems with the Nix ecosystem at present; The biggest one being documentation. There is both too much and too little documentation available. Too much of it focuses on the wrong things and there's simply too little at the end that means something to newcomers. There are some good resources though:

• Zero to Nix: For general introduction
• nix.dev: For much the same
• RyanTM's NixPkgs API documentation: For NixPkg built-in function reference

🎲 Gaming

🚧 This section under construction 🚧

Video, Game, Tabletop RPG, Card...