Welcome to my blog

Hi, I’m Tyler. I’m 23 years old, I’m from Houston originally and live in NYC currently, and I make software.

I like live music, reading, video games, a good beer, and going to the park. So, unsurprisingly, in the summer I love to lounge in the park, either with friends or a good book, and sip a beer. Or, in Houston, I like to do that any time besides the summer. :-) Lately I’m reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, which is great but of course quite the commitment. After taking about a month each to read the first three books I’ve been stalled out on the fourth one since July. I think the jump from 600-something to 1,000 pages scared me off a little bit, but my commitment isn’t shaken that easily. I also love putzing around on the computer, which makes it fun for me to do stuff like making this blog. For how terrible the Internet can be, I still find brewing a cup of coffee and going on the computer to be such a simple joy.

I graduated from Tufts in May 2022, as you can see on my résumé on this site, with a BA in Computer Science and English. Since graduating, and moving to New York right after, I’ve been:

  • Figuring out how to live like a normal human being who’s not staring down at least one impossible deadline at any given time. College is great for all the opportunities it presents a person with, but I was maybe a little too voracious in taking them on, so it’s been good to slow down since graduating. I’ve learned how much joy a good night’s sleep can bring me, and waking up on a Saturday with no idea how I’ll be spending my day.
  • Learning more about the world of Linux, FOSS, etc.
  • Attending Quaker meetings. I was raised WASPy, which is to say, not very religious, and had been wanting to start going to church again but nothing was really clicking. Shortly after I graduated, my girlfriend and I discovered we’d both been wanting to try attending a Quaker meeting for years, so we found one near me and did. It clicked! I’ve been attending fairly consistently for the almost 1.5 years since then and it’s become an important community for me.
  • Getting involved with jail and prison support through Black + Pink NYC. I’ve believed in abolition for a while now – the Quakers’ history of abolition was a big part of what made me feel that I was with trustworthy and like-minded people early on – but only in the past few months have I actually started to get involved.
  • Reading the kinds of books that an English major doesn’t get much time for. I loved my English degree but post-grad I’ve really enjoyed rereading a couple of books from my childhood, and then going through a long Agatha Christie phase, and now, finally dedicating myself to Wheel of Time.
  • Spending time with my girlfriend and my friends who live in the city. My girlfriend, Epiphany, and I met in college, when I was still living in Boston. It’s been great to not be dealing with distance and to have my first grown-up relationship. She’s a year younger, so my first year here was her senior year of college, and now she is a new grad, still living in the city. I also know several people who moved here after graduating college so I’ve been enjoying getting to know other Tufts alumni who were only acquaintances or friends-of-friends before.

Why this blog?

Besides that I’ve been wanting to put my Digital Ocean and domain name rentals to better use, I’ve become disillusioned with the idea of contributing my thoughts to social media sites for free. I’d like to think that my thoughts have value, and Reddit’s actions leading up to the big blackout this summer were a great example of how pointless it is to give that value away to tech CEOs who don’t know anything about anything. Then, with those thoughts already kicking around in my brain, my favorite social media site of all time, Twitter, became the toxic wasteland now known as X. I was embarrassingly addicted to Twitter for most of high school and all of college, and then for a while after college, but besides Musk turning the site into a haven for the alt-right and a testing ground for bad business decisions, the new Twitter is just not fun like it used to be. So, about a month ago, I finally deactivated my account.

I’m on Mastodon, and I learn a lot of neat things there, but it’s certainly not a drop-in replacement for Twitter in that none of my friends from real life are on there and it doesn’t offer the same brainless, funny entertainment, like junk food for the mind, that a corporate social media site does. Instagram is where I begrudgingly do much of my scrolling now when I need to turn my brain off but it’s never been that fun and actually posting there is as miserable as it’s always been.

All of this is to say that in the past year or so, the decision to own my own “content” (ew, I hate that word too, sorry) rather than giving it away to tech billionaires has suddenly become a pretty easy one. Though I’m still not sure what this blog will be, the tech nerds on Mastodon have convinced me that moving my brainpower to my own site is a worthwhile effort… with the subtext there being, “whether anyone reads it or not,” because so far I don’t actually see myself letting the people in my life know that this blog even exists. Regardless, it feels good to build out my own little corner of the web here, independent from the walled gardens of X or Meta or Substack. Welcome!