I am literally just a guy who started hanging out on the internet as a kid and ever since has read a bunch of stuff and books. I have spent most of my time either working to have money or following my random interests with, 99% of the time, no overarching goal (outside of maybe some faint sense of aesthetic that it is “what someone like me should be interested in”), going through tons of loosely or completely disconnected arcs. Lately, I think all these arcs share some structure and they are starting to connect (one might say a lot of my arcs are equivalent up to isomorphism).

I am mostly kind of dumb and somewhat jagged in my skills (which are few and far between). I had no specific math interest at a young age. Whether that is due to a lack of exposure or a matter of the fabric of my soul, I am not sure. I also didn’t especially have any natural talent at programming or computers either.

I have mostly always been driven by stories and the characters in them, which is what mostly drove my interest in computers and everything else. I was very early on learning to speak and being funny, and started reading early too. Maybe I am a wordcel who got the wrong sense of aesthetics and has tried to be a shape rotator all along? Or maybe that is kind of dumb and it doesn’t really matter.

I have never learned to work really hard without having lots of pressure on me. Or rather, I started learning this only in the last few years. I never studied for anything, I quit school before it got interesting, I never really had to study anything for work either nor did I have to “learn” programming. I just did things in the stupidest ways and slowly RL’d myself to be able to mimic what someone with actual skills could do, often with none of the actual underlying understanding someone that has put in the work would have.

I have periods of very low productivity and periods of very bursty, manic energy and high productivity. In my “low productive periods,” I rarely even get to recharge properly as I basically just consume technical things and don’t digest them, which rarely leads to actual skills and arguably only a loose capacity to pattern-match when encountering new things. Sometimes I think I’ve forgotten how to have fun. Still, I find many ways to waste my time by dissociating and not being able to enjoy the present.

I am not a computer scientist or a researcher or any of the titles you get by formally studying any of the things I had “arcs” on, or anything like that. I have zero formal credentials. That used to make me feel bad, I think. That’s why I have always been fairly adversarial and why I always felt (and still do!) like I had to compensate somehow. What I have is some years of experience in some field, with some expertise in some subset of it, and then I have a lot of facts and some bits of knowledge that I think I kinda know, because I feel like I can speak about them to other people or think about them.

I don’t have that much money, I have enough and a bit more, which is enough for me. I think I will always have enough money and if I decided I wanted more, I could just get more.

I have lots of issues I’ve never dealt with or come to terms with, that mostly come from some severe PTSD. I used to think it was just the way I had to build myself to survive and then live, and in some ways it is true. There are also things I became that I don’t really like and have become more and more tired of over the years. I have become more and more interested in addressing these and trying to work on them recently. Mostly because I think one of the big conclusions I have drawn from the first 30 years of my life is that there doesn’t seem to be much that matters more than how I feel inside, according to all the (shifting) moral and aesthetic values I have.

Part of why I am writing this is for myself, and also because it is scary and bothering that people have some vision of me because of the way I have (consciously or unconsciously) portrayed myself on the Internet.