I’m a bit of a nerd about longboarding and also building Commander decks in Magic the Gathering.

I wouldn’t say I’m an expert in either case, but I’m really interested in trying different setups and also sewing people discuss their own experiences and builds.

My friends would all tell you how tired they are of hearing me go on and on about urban planning and infrastructure.

The ways in which our communities are built have such a large and profound impact on our lives, yet most people give little thought to it. IMO a great deal of the social woes we’re dealing with (at least in North America) are caused or made worse by our lack of sensible city-planning, from carbon emissions to social isolation.

There exists so many cool and interesting ways to build solid, sustainable communities! It’s really exciting! Sadly I have to live that excitement by researching other countries. The only form of city-planning that seems to exist here in Canada is “highway going through a parking lot interspaced with strip malls and encircled by single-family housing suburbs”.

I’m definitely the stereotypical nerd in a lot of ways. I’m hugely into Star Trek, D&D (and TTRPGs in general), Pokemon, and sci-fi/fantasy novels, especially Brandon Sanderson and Becky Chambers. I’m running a Pokemon TTRPG campaign.

I’m probably equally nerdy about alcohol though, which is fun, and can augment all the other hobbies. I like to make specialty cocktails for premiers, and events in general, as well as thematic drinks for TTRPG sessions. We don’t have a dining room at my house, we have a bar.

Phase 1 MCU, but specifically Civil War. I have and will write essays about my feelings on that whole deal and I still have resentment toward Tony stans who spent literal years cluttering up Ao3 with their dumb fics about how he never did anything wrong in his life. I think it mostly just got to me so much because what they were fundamentally defending is the existence of human registries for anyone meeting certain criteria, regardless of their actions (right as we had conservatives supporting Muslim registries in real life) and stuff like secret prisons with no trial (like an even worse Guantanamo), and it was really fucking concerning.

Oh, see, I’m doing it again.

Well, about the typical things. I write software. I play TTRPGs and video games and watch Star Trek and Star Wars. (Hell. I’ve been watching Red Dwarf lately and it’s amazing. There’s a niche thing for you.)

But aside from the more stereotypical nerd things, I’ve been really studying the fuck out of U.S. (because that’s where I live) intellectual property and contract law lately. I’ve been watching law school study aids kind of content and reading this book that’s basically just the text of tons of legal rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court and federal circuit courts on the subject of intellectual property.

The most interesting things to me in that space at the moment are:

• The history of the duration of copyright in the U.S., the 1998 “Sonny Bono” Copyright Term Extension Act and the case “Eldred v. Ashcroft” which (unsuccessfully 🙁) challendged its constitutionality.
• The case “Software Freedom Conservancy v. Vizio, Inc.” and how the courts are agreeing to interpret the GNU GPL not just as a copyright license but also as a contract and the strategic benefits that could offer for GPL-enforcement cases moving forward.

It’s got to be DnD- I don’t just play it, I don’t just DM it, I’ve actively studied how it’s designed and balanced in order to make content that is better than the official stuff. I’ve found and ironed out critical flaws in how the game is set up and I’ve made pieces of homebrew content that are larger than entire books.

This is a hell of a bold claim to make, but I believe that I have come to understand the game better than its own Dev Team.

I’m a nerd about translation, translation choices, and differences in cultures. I find it fascinating that the tiniest details in your language choice are capable of changing the meaning entirely. I also happen to be a Russian, so maybe this example for the Russian-English language pair would be interesting to you:

Given: комната = room мальчик = boy одна из = a (one of) эта/этот = the (that) в = in вошел = walked

В одну из комнат вошел мальчик. A boy walked in a room.

Этот мальчик вошел в эту комнату. The boy walked in the room.

В эту комнату вошел мальчик. A boy walked in the room.

Этот мальчик вошел в одну из комнат. The boy walked in a room.

English uses a/the to define what’s known/unknown, and Russian doesn’t have a similar tool but it can change word order and add some extra words for more precision. Russian also uses a lot of cases to define who does what and when, and English just doesn’t need that, the word order does it all.

Looking at all that makes me feel like I’m watching something beautiful. Like I find solace in the fact that there is more than one way to see things.

Comic Books