You should blame Chris Burnell for this page. I created mine after reading his blog post. You might find creating one worthwhile, too.
I first encountered a UNIX system in 1996, and it was a revelation. Everything DOS could do, UNIX could do even better, and once I got my bearings I just had to have my own system. GNU, Linux, and the BSDs made that practical for a broke college kid long before buying secondhand Sun and SGI workstations became practical.
I still want my BSD, but I’m still partial to Slackware when I need to run GNU/Linux on x86/AMD64 gear that isn’t quite BSD-friendly. It’s been rock-solid for me for years. I just wouldn’t recommend it to a beginner unless I was there to help them, because Slackware assumes you know what you’re doing and are comfortable with the shell.
It’s not just me LARPing as an elite hacker, either. I’ll never be a 31337 h@x0r. I’m OK with that. But I still enjoy the power that even my modest skill confers.
It should be obvious that personal websites are a thing of mine. I’ve written at least three manifestos, and I didn’t post them on Medium or Substack. I posted them right here on a site I built hosted on space I rent behind a domain I’ve leased. You can do a lot with HTML5 and CSS3, including stuff that used to require JavaScript because earlier versions of HTML and CSS weren’t quite as functional.
Lots of people will use JavaScript just to build a static website, using frameworks like Eleventy and Astro. I don’t blame them; if you already know JavaScript then why not use a familiar tool?
But being a UNIX fan, I wanted to do something different, mainly to see if I could. I wanted to see if I could make the operating system itself, along with its basic utilities, a static site generator. I wanted to see how far I could get using I’m mainly a long-haired metalhead, but I grew up listening to a lot of my dad’s stuff and a lot of it was pretty far out. I also played in school orchestras and my high school jazz band, so my tastes are just a bit broader than mere rock and metal.
You’re welcome to check out my Last.FM profile and Bandcamp collection, too. Maybe you’ll find something new, or an old favorite.
I’ve been a lifelong fan of this sort of fiction, though not active in fandom. Why else would I write it myself?
My favorite authors include Michael Moorcock, Clive Barker, Stephen King, Glen Cook, Jacqueline Carey, C. L. Moore, M. John Harrison, C. J. Cherryh, C. S. Friedman, Andrew Rowe, Anne Rice, Scott Lynch, Roger Zelazny, Madeline Miller, Mary Shelley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Natalie Haynes, Robert Heinlein, Anne Leckie, Brian Lumley, David Gemmell, Tamsyn Muir, Mary Gentle, Robert E. Howard, Sally Wiener Grotta, and Esther Friesner.
I am particularly fond of science fantasy, that bastard hybrid of sf and fantasy, where one might find space wizards, laser swords, and sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. I also like moral ambiguity in my sf and fantasy.
I am not particularly fond of J. R. R. Tolkien or his style of fantasy. I’ve read him, of course. I’ve also read Robert Jordan, Stephen R. Donaldson, and even Terry Goodkind — though I am being unfair to the others by mentioning Goodkind alongside them; he writes more like the love child of John Norman and Ayn Rand.
I am also being unfair to Donaldson. His Gap sequence is not a comfort read, and neither are the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever; in the latter it soon becomes apparent the author expects us to sympathize with a rapist who initially justifies his crime by insisting that the Land in which he found himself after getting hit by a truck is not real, but a dream. (I might call Stephen R. Donaldson the father of isekai fiction, but I’d say that the likes of Michael Moorcock (in The Eternal Champion), Edgar Rice Burroughs (beginning with A Princess of Mars), L. Frank Baum (beginning with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), and even Mark Twain (in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) pioneered portal fantasy and its Japanese counterpart, isekai.)
And, in fairness to Donaldson, I had first encountered Thomas Covenant as a very young man whose idealism had not yet been thoroughly tempered by the sort of cynicism that can only come through age and experience. Nowadays, Thomas Covenant’s assault on Lena in Lord Foul’s Bane still makes him an asshole, but not nearly as egregious an asshole as the narrator and protagonist of Michael Moorcock’s Colonel Pyat novels (beginning with Byzantium Endures), who is not merely a rapist but an anti-Semite, a murderer, and an incorrigible bullshit artist.
Nevertheless, I tend to dislike the moral certitude evident in most Tolkienian fantasy. For the most part, you know who the good guys are, and who the bad guys are. The good are good because they are good. The evil are evil for similar reasons. And the Dark Lord is always a distant threat, safely offstage even when one simply walks into Mordor, and we never get his side of the story.
If the Tolkienian tradition has a 21st century heir, I would suggest that his successor is Brandon Sanderson. I do not intend this as a compliment. As Tolkien himself observed in his fiction, successors rarely live up to their predecessors. Though Sanderson tries to be subtle about it, the sense of moral certitude I dislike in Tolkien is still apparent in Sanderson.
Then there’s the matter of Sanderson’s prose. I won’t say he writes badly. His fame and popularity suggest he’s doing something right. He is certainly a better writer than Terry Goodkind. Nevertheless, when I read his first Mistborn trilogy — The Final Empire, The Well of Ascension, and The Hero of Ages — it felt like I was eating stale, unsalted, and unbuttered popcorn that had been strung up as a cheap Christmas garland because I was broke and there was nothing else handy.
It’s not Sanderson’s fault. If my initial exposure to fantasy fiction had been the likes of Mistborn I would almost certainly feel differently. However, to somebody who had already grown up reading authors with richer writing styles — many of them writers' writers — Sanderson’s writing feels like a step down from Moorcock (who admits to being a bad writer with big ideas), let alone Clive Barker, Roger Zelazny, C. L. Moore, Usula K. Le Guin, or even J. R. R. Tolkien).
Nevertheless, I would not presume to say that Sanderson’s work is bad. It is simply not to my taste. He has his fandom, which he richly deserves as he is by all accounts a kinder and friendlier person than I am, and I am simply not part of it.
Tech
UNIX
Personal Websites
make, bash, sed, awk, m4, and a few other basic tools. Turns out I got pretty far, as you can see for yourself.
Music
SF, Fantasy, and Science Fantasy
On Tolkienian Fantasy
On Brandon Sanderson
Food & Drink
interests
stuff I’m into, listed in no particular order and subject to change
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