💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~oldernow › about.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 12:09:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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About the alleged person underlying "oldernow"

Attempting to describe oneself seems a recipe for mistaking description for ineffable reality.

The previous collection of words of caution said (nothing implied by the following ordering):

Male
Grew up in the so-called "midwest" of the United States of America
Married
Musician
Loves typing
Experienced pre-"Eternal September" online times, loved USENET therein
Favorite bands along the way: The Beatles, The Moody Blues, The Doors, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran. For all other music, it's been an album here, a song there. Rather enjoyed much music of the 1990s, generally to the consternation/judgement of others roughly his age.
Has been considered a "boomer" by whoever decided the year-based cutoffs for such (as well as by those who just plain don't like people older than themselves), but was born enough on the younger side of that artificial year range to have experienced not having been nearly as privileged as those who genuinely made said cut: for example, with next to no income compared to others firmly within said artificial grouping, the price of gasoline roughly *doubled* from something like 30 cents/gallon to over 60 cents/gallon within a week of coming of age to drive.
Has had an insatiable desire to understand how All This - aka "Reality" - works ever since he can remember, which has tended to cause a certain "running amok" of the greater homo sapien collective, and therein has been generally faced with either fitting in by pretending to believe the same ridiculous bullshit as most others, or be shown The Door. The social consequences notwithstanding, favorite authors and/or "gurus" and/or works along those lines has included (in roughly discovery order): P.D. Ouspensky, G.I. Gurdjieff, "Wei Wu Wei", Sri Ramana Maharshi, The Lankavatara Sutra, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, Jim Newman. (NOTE: Considers much of "The Bible" as saying similar things, albeit in ways that have come to be considered silly by The Masses)
Had a work career mostly involving software development (primarily C/C++, a fair amount of Perl, MVS/TSO CLIST/JCL and ISPF/PDF menus, VM/CMS EXEC/REXX, smatterings of HTML/CSS/JS), but in times when that didn't mean nearly what it does now. Said another way, he's incredibly in awe of the skills of modern software developers, but is as frustrated with modern web page/site design as most who wind up in Gemini spaces.
Tends to want to write prose in a style implying invisible curly brace nesting.
Chose Lua to be his go to scripting language.

oldernow