flexibeast.space
About me
i have a bachelor's degree in Women's Studies (think ‘gender studies’), but my interests include (amongst other things):
History
Roughly the last two millenia of Eurasian history (with particular interest in the British Isles, Germany, the subcontinent, and China), and the 20th century CE globally.
Languages and linguistics
i did a number of linguistics units at university, speak/write some Spanish and German, have been learning Hebrew vocabulary and script, and have been trying to learn to read Devanagari script (which i find gorgeous).
Ecology
Mainly urban ecology (as part of reconciliation ecology), systems ecology (reflecting a more general interest in systems theory), and ecosystem ecology (particularly riparian ecology).
Wikipedia: ‘Reconciliation ecology’
Philosophy, metaphysics and spirituality
i'm particularly interested in the philosophy of mathematics and the philosophy of science. In terms of the former, i'm a mathematical relativist, in the sense described by Andrej Bauer in his post "Am I a constructive mathematician?"
“Am I a constructive mathematician?”
More generally, i'm interested in process thought.
Wikipedia: ‘Process philosophy’
Metaphysically, i'm fundamentally agnostic, not in the sense of asserting that the existence of the divine is inherently unknowable, but in the sense that its existence is not currently known (though might be in the future). Within that context, my basic beliefs are closest to a process-thought panentheism:
Wikipedia: ‘Process philosophy’
and a geometrodynamics like that described in Freya Mathews' book “The Ecological Self”:
Goodreads: “The Ecological Self”
and (though i'm not actually Hindu), the philosophy of Vishishtadvaita:
More generally, Terry Pratchett's representation of witchcraft on the Disc resonates with me:
Non-commercial music radio
i'm a member of local community radio station 3PBS:
Shows from the current lineup that i enjoy listening to include:
At the moment, i'm particularly partial to “Soak", “Passing Notes”, “Dry Run”, and “Bleeding Black Hearts Revue”.
Cricket
i really enjoy following / watching / listening to the sport of cricket, regardless of who's playing. i definitely prefer the red-ball game, both international and domestic, but can certainly enjoy the white-ball games. T20 is not really my thing, but i do think it is a form of cricket, and is good for cricket overall.
Software documentation and programming
i'm fairly fluent in Perl and Emacs Lisp, but have some basic familiarity with a number of other languages, including C, Haskell, and Ada, and am actively following the development of Zig. i also enjoy writing LaTeX and mdoc(7) markup.
Documentation
i'm the porter and maintainer of mdoc(7) ports of the documentation for various parts of the s6 ecosystem:
i'm the maintainer of a collection of ICT guides for FOSS *n*x-ish systems, most of which i've authored:
In recent times, i've been contributing to the Gentoo Linux wiki:
My Gentoo wiki user page includes a number of links to resources for using s6/66:
In the past, i've made a number of contributions to the documentation for Void Linux:
My Void Linux documentation contributions
Software
i'm the primary author of several Emacs packages, including:
Ebuku: an Emacs UI for the buku Web bookmark manager
pulseaudio-control: an Emacs UI to control PulseAudio volumes
More recently, i've been creating POSIX shell scripts:
qemu-start: a simple interactive script to facilitate launching QEMU VMs
epub-create: create a minimal EPUB from a small collection of files
Unix-y OSes
In particular, Linux and OpenBSD.
i run Gentoo on my personal laptop, and OpenBSD on my private servers. As i spend much of my time in Emacs - for example, i use mu4e as my MUA, and ERC as my IRC client - it will come as no surprise that i use the excellent elpher gemini/gopher client, for which i've submitted a couple of patches.
Mathematics
Mainly category theory and categorial/algebraic logic. i find topos theory and non-classical logics fascinating.
Roguelikes
Mostly HyperRogue nowadays, but i also enjoy Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup (and its ‘bcrawl’ variant), Shattered Pixel Dungeon, and Infra Arcana.
Contact
You can contact me at alexis [at] flexibeast.space.
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