Me

If you aren’t a bird
be careful not to camp
above an abyss

– Nietzche

I typically go by the name rayes online. It’s not my actual name, just a pseudonym. I’m a FOSS supporter, Linux enthusiast, musician, and hobbyist writer. I am fascinated particularly by the brain, psychology, specifically practical applications of these, as well as how they tie into media and culture. On the academic side of things, I am currently doing undergrad degrees in statistics and microbiology. My current professional research work involves applying design research methods to analyze both quantitative and qualitative data.

Hobbies

I have a fair amount of hobbies that I try to consistently do. They are fairly niche and a lot of them are uncommon, but I enjoy spending time on them, otherwise I would have dropped them already.

Music

I like to play and make music. I was classically trained as a pianist when I was in junior high. However, I consider myself self-taught as I feel I improved dramatically more as a result of my own practice compared to studying with a teacher. Age and maturity was probably a large factor for this, as well as the fact that when I had a teacher, I was too young to really appreciate music.

I have experience teaching students (mostly elementary aged children) piano and theory. I have taught students up to RCM level 8.

I create electronic music (mainly lofi hip hop) occasionally for fun, and to test out Linux capabilities in the professional audio scene. You may have seen me active in unfa’s Discord server, or seen my tracks featured on the Zrythm website.

Badminton

I play competitive badminton for fun and exercise. I used to compete actively and even participated in a few national level tournaments. Previously, I was really serious about getting better, but I don’t really think that way so much anymore, preferring instead to have fun promoting and playing a great sport. I am an coach at my club and have a fair amount of experience coaching elementary and junior high aged children. I have my NCCP coaching certification.

I also do other forms of exercise regularly. These include road biking (I try to do at least 45 km/week, a very measly amount compared to what some others do), rollerblading, and more recently, skateboarding (still trying to get better, I can currently only ollie and do some other very basic tricks).

Writing

Nowadays, nobody really cares about text based blogging anymore. Nonetheless, I sometimes like to write on this blog. The content on this site is composed of thoughts and research on the broad array of niche topics I’m interested in. In particular, psychology, neuroscience, statistics, machine learning, biotech, sound design, and anime/manga, or some weird combination of these. Not for profit, self-promotion, I don’t really care how many readers I get either. It’s mainly a dump for my thoughts and ideas that would otherwise just be wasted sitting in my head.

Back when I started high school, I’ve tried writing fiction in the form of a webnovel titled anemoia, which I eventually stopped updating because there aren’t enough hours in a day. It was an enjoyable experience though, and I would love to pick it up again sometime in the future. Note that I haven’t really edited it and only did the first couple chapters on a whim, and I consider it a very rough draft.

My writings should probably be taken with a grain of salt. They are sometimes heavily opinionated, and though I do read a fairly large number of papers, articles, and books (or at least, I like to think I do), I often don’t have formal education in any of the fields I write about.

Coding and Linux

I occasionally code as a hobby. Not too seriously, it’s mainly just for fun. I am particularly interested in data processing, ML and AI, and UI development. I’ve contributed to various open source projects in small amounts, good examples include Emacs and XMonad, and I write scripts on a near daily basis. I’m also a Linux enthusiast. You’ll sometimes see me active in various Linux communities if you look hard enough.

Languages/skills I consider myself proficient with:

• Scientific computing: R, GNU Octave/Matlab, GNUPlot
• Rust, Python, Scheme (Chicken, Racket), Bash and POSIX shell script
• Front-end web development: HTML5, CSS, JS
• All major operating systems, especially Red Hat-based Linux distributions
• Others: Elisp

Media

I read a fair share of fiction. Some of my favourites include Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince.

A good portion of the media I consume is Japanese anime and manga, as well as their Chinese and Korean equivalents. I am reasonably fluent in Chinese because I speak it with my parents (though not at the level of a native speaker yet), and am currently learning Japanese. I hope to move on the Korean when I am more versed in these two.

I don’t game very often, in fact hardly at all nowadays. Games never piqued my interest, at least not long term. I occasionally read visual novels sometimes, if you want to count them as games.

I have a regularly updated list of thoughts and reviews on books and films I have finished.

Misc

Speedcubing

I speedcube. I used to go to competitions, but I don’t compete much anymore. Speedcubing is definitely a niche hobby and does require you to spend a decent chunk of time practising and memorizing algorithms. It is incredibly rewarding hitting a solve with a personal best on the timer though.

Gardening

Gardening is a massive stress-relieving pastime, though it takes a large amount of dedication and effort if you want to do it well. My parents own a greenhouse (which my dad and I built), as well as some outdoor plants which I take care of. Sometimes it feels like a waste of effort, but I suppose there are much worse ways I could be using my time. And of course, the subsequent payoff of beautiful plants and organic food makes it feel worth it.

Things I use

• Pen and paper:

  • Fountain pens: Pilot Prera with fine nib. Inked with J. Herbin Poussiere de Lune.
  • Journals: Midori MD blanks. I mainly write, sometimes doodle.

• Hardware:

  • Main laptop/workstation: Thinkpad P1 Gen 3, upgraded RAM, 2 SSD’s, pasted with liquid metal thermal compound
  • Keyboard: Custom handwired 60% layout with trackpoint I took from an old Thinkpad, OLED screen, and a rotary encoder. Hako Violet switches. Running QMK firmware on WeAct Studio’s Black Pill MCU.
  • Mouse: Razer Orochi V2, controlled from Linux with OpenRazer. Gripped with badminton tape.

• Software:

  • OS: Fedora Linux. Latest stable release.
  • Window manager: XMonad
  • Text editor: Emacs (built from master branch using --with-json --with-native-compilation --with-x-toolkit=lucid --with-xinput2) with default bindings.
  • Note-taking: Org mode
  • Planner: Org agenda
  • Terminal and shell commands: I’ve been spending less and less time in the shell as most shell commands are more easily run by Emacs components in my workflow. For example, I basically never use file management commands of the likes of mv, cp, ls anymore outside of scripting, instead replacing them with dired. I don’t even have a terminal emulator installed anymore (though I previously used rxvt-unicode). Emacs shell-command and async-shell-command probably covers ~90% of shell commands I need to run. If I need an interactive shell, I use eshell. If in the very rare case that I need full fledged terminal capabilities, I use vterm. I always have an instance of emacs running because I run the emacs daemon through a systemd service set to restart on failure. In the case where none of these work, such as where there is a very big bug in my config, or my emacs build is very broken, I temporarily switch to a TTY to fix the problem.
  • Browser: Tor Browser with JS and cookies blocked for casual browsing, Ungoogled-chromium for school and professional related browsing. I also use Nyxt for certain subset of websites such as online forums and similar due to it’s scriptability. I find the Webkit renderer too slow for my liking to use it more widely.
  • PDF’s: Zathura
  • Ebooks (epubs, mobis, djvu, cbz, etc.): I transfer them to my jailbroken Kindle PW and read them there with KOReader
  • Video player (mostly youtube, sometimes anime): mpv, with a various scripts to search youtube and play local anime easier.
  • Other applications I use daily: Anki (spaced repetition flashcards), Calibre (ebook library)

Contact

• Email - mailj2@protonmail.com
• Matrix - Available on request. This is my current preferred way to communicate.
• Fediverse - Available on request.
• Discord - Available on request. (I try to limit my use of proprietary services, so I would prefer you contact me with one of the above first)

This Site

Contents

The content on this site will vary from post to post. I don’t consider my posts traditional blog posts, most of them are lengthy and are I intend to edit them over the long term. Calling them essays probably makes more sense. Unless otherwise noted, all content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. You can look at the categories page for the main subject areas. There’s also a tags page that contains smaller subtopics. For each post, I will sort it into one category that represents the primary focus topic, and add an assortment of tags for other subjects referenced. I will also almost always modify posts after I initially publish them, sometimes small edits like adding a piece of support or referencing a cool source I find, or sometimes adding whole paragraphs or refactoring the post entirely.

Technicalities

The posts on this site are written in Emacs and compiled from Org mode → Markdown using ox-hugo, then from Markdown → HTML using Hugo. You may question why I don’t just…

• Write in Markdown and build the site with Hugo directly in one step, compared to generating BlackFriday markdown first from Org mode? Firstly, I much prefer Org syntax. Secondly, managing everything on this site in Markdown with single files would be a pain. Hugo forces the site structure to match your directory structure. With ox-hugo, I only have a couple Org files which generate this entire site, that I can place however I wish. Using headers makes more sense to me than creating whole new files. Thirdly, I use Emacs for various other things outside of this blog. This allows me to integrate my activities outside of the blog with updates to the blog files (for example, I can use Org capture to quickly capture a blog idea, I can see my book list or tea journal in Org agenda, etc.).
• Ditch Hugo entirely and write in Org mode and export directly to HTML? It would mean basically writing a whole new Org backend that generates decent quality HTML in the structure I want. Not that I’m opposed to the idea, just that I don’t have the time or energy to undertake a project like that as of now. I’ve also yet to come across a static site generator with as powerful a templating system as Hugo (hate me or love me for it). It also needs to be lightweight enough to build long content quickly and ideally good for running on CI. Hugo ticks these boxes.

The design of this site is based on a variety of sources. CSS libraries like Tufte CSS and LaTeX.css played a predominant role. The theme is written in HTML and SCSS only (no JS). This is mainly because this site is primarily text-based and I didn’t want to focus too much on the theme. Plus a lot of privacy centric users have JS disabled most of the time anyway. The font used is ET-Book, a very nice bembo-style font by Edward Tufte, which will be used for most things if your browser is configured to allow remote fonts.

rendering is done without JS by using static SVG images created using dvisvgm. The most prominent advantage to this is I am not limited by the feature set supported by eg, MathJax or . In particular, I can generate images using any TeX package installed on my system, and of course it doesn’t require JS. The disadvantages are that we lose responsiveness (which shouldn’t be too much of an issue, I don’t have long paragraphs of math anyways), some browsers don’t support or disable SVG rendering for security reasons (Tor Browser is a notable example), and SVGs look bad on Firefox for a multitude of reasons (at least currently).

Some possible features I would like to implement in the future, while still being usable without JS:

• Sidenotes instead of footnotes would make references and extra content easy to view. Maybe something like this.

Post Metadata

• An explanation of the metadata at the top of each post:
  • 1st field: Main category of the page.
  • Created: Date the page was created.
  • Modified: The last modified date. This is automatically created by looking at either the Git revision log or the Hugo front matter in the file.
  • Status: The status of the post indicating how complete I feel it currently is. The following keywords are used:
    • ‘inprogress’ - An incomplete post that is still being actively added to.
    • ‘draft’ - A post that has most large sections and ideas laid out, but I am still working on some details.
    • ‘completed’ - A post I am mostly done with. There may be a few small changes like grammer and wording and such, but I most likely won’t make any large changes.
  • 2nd line: List of tags. This is a list of topics which are referenced by the post, or which the post loosely falls into.