Find me on Twitter

why Twitter?

Simply put, I've found Twitter to be a nice site for receiving ~~insight porn~~ food for thought, replenishing my motivation supply, tracking general events and patterns of thought in people-I-aspire-to-be-like's lives and their communities, and at times sharing one-off semi-interesting thoughts that don't really deserve to be posted anywhere else.

b-but isn't social media evil?

My experience has been pretty much the reverse of what people usually say about Twitter; I'm predicting it's because people are not so good at curating their own feed and unfollowing/disengaging from what pointlessly hurts them and throws them into an "outrage" state, are not aware of it, and blame it on the platform instead of their own faults. But what do I know - I may be now caught in a trap of the "algorithms" and enjoying it; anyhow, I have not noticed any signs of addiction or other things typically said to be caused by social media usage.

Welcome to kassy.neocities.org. This is the main page.

Hello.

Note: I have revived my old Telegram channel. The @ username is the same as it was before deletion.

a photo I took some time ago

About me

My name is Kassy (although I go by a plethora of aliases on the World Wide Web) and this is my personal place on the internet.

On this website, I intend to catalog my findings on the internet and outside of it, and also express my thoughts, ideas, and opinions on various topics, with hopes of improving my skills of putting them into writing.

To give you a quick overview of subjects this site features now, or will feature in the future, here's a list of things I am interested in:

mathematics;
GNU/Linux (update: *BSD is cool too) and free/libre/open-source software;
functional programming (usually lisp; but sometimes I play with Haskell) and programming in general;
the art of rationality
(old|retro|obscure) internet culture;
music (mostly listening; but I play guitar sometimes);
anime and manga;
photography;
philosophy (am still very much below the desired level; I'm working on improving myself though)

a cellular automata rule I like

More about me

My goals

Rationality/"intellectual" goals:
1. Improving my beliefs to match reality better; not falling prey to adopting new, possibly inaccurate, beliefs about the world just because these beliefs give off a pleasant, comforting aesthetic, provide a sense of belonging, or validate/"confirm" other convictions of these types;
2. Maintaining the motivation to move in the direction of my other goals, and resisting the desire to cheat or cut corners when doing things needed to achieve the goal;
Technical/mathematical/scientific goals:
1. Watching through the differential geometry online course
2. ...Or, perhaps, first going through "A Taste of Topology" by Volker Runde
3. (attempting to) Read "Probability & Measure Theory" by Robert B. Ash
Social/internet goals:
1. Improving and refining this list of goals
2. Figuring out what kind of website attracts people I'm most interested in talking to, and how to ~~make them~~ encourage them to contact me (my contact details below!!)
3. Generally, "putting myself out there" more, but in a way that would not interfere with my other goals (that is: not extremely time-consuming or addicting)
And more to come...

And even more about me...

My Big Five score

Here's what some random test on the internet says about me:

Agreeableness	7^th percentile
Conscientiousness	42^nd percentile
Extraversion	7^th percentile
Neuroticism	50^th percentile
Openness	69^th percentile

Site stats

I do not track my visitors (with help of Google Analytics or such) out of principle: it feels like an invasion of privacy. Nonetheless, here are some statistics which I think are harmless enough, with the only tools needed to collect them being my brain, my inbox, and my XMPP contact list.

As of April 27th, over less than a year of maintaining this website, I have been contacted by 23 people. Out of those, 10 people reached out to me over email and 13 - over XMPP.

Out of all those, I had multiple meaningful conversations with 11 people (3 over email, and 8 over XMPP).

An interesting observation is that at least 2 people have admitted to finding me through a search engine, and specifically through my attempt at explaining XMPP. It is surprising because I have never used any SEO techniques, and generally I cannot find my own website on Google or DuckDuckGo unless I search using site:kassy.neocities.org or just input parts of my site name into the query.

Additionally, during some mindless internet surfing, I have so far encountered 4 sites that have imitated/copied my layouts, site structure, scripts, or parts of my writing on this website. For the record, I don't mind it at all, in fact, I am happy to have accidentally given something useful to other webmasters, which they can remix and mold to suit their own ends.

I think these are not bad numbers for a personal, non-commercial website, which I've never tried to promote (except for membership in the Lainchan webring, and posting my website on some "personal website directory"), although it's not like I have any "control" data to compare: webmasters don't usually publish such information on their sites. From some public complaints about nobody emailing the webmasters anymore, I have gathered that the situation could be worse.

As you could infer from above, I'm interested in chatting with new people. I also like arguing, so if you disagree with me on something meaningful (preferably where there should, probably, be a right answer, and it's not just a matter of opinion or feeling), that's even better.

So, here are my...

Contact details (email and XMPP)

My email address, which also doubles as my XMPP/Jabber JID, is iwakura.tomoko@disroot.org.

Here's my PGP key (for email), my OMEMO fingerprint (for XMPP) (which are you unlikely to need, though, as modern XMPP clients can usually fetch the fingerprint automatically). Encrypting your messages is strongly encouraged.

Email is preferred for slower (1 email per week or so, typically), non-instant communication with more substance, and XMPP is for shorter messages or daily conversation.

Languages I consider myself fluent in include English, Ukrainian, and Russian. You can also write in German or Japanese, but then you'll get lots of broken grammar from me: I'm just learning those and am not very successful at it (yet).

You can also find me on the Neocities' "social network" part of site.

Site info

This site is forever under construction, but a couple of pages already work as intended.

There's no javascript on this website, and it should work in any browser (including old and text ones) as I tried to make the design as minimal and basic as possible (while not sacrificing style). Of course, the layout looks way better on a computer, with the browser window's width being equal or greater than 800px. It works slightly worse on phones, and may work worse on Chromium-based browsers (it's a work-in-process issue).

This website is a successor to a little-known now-long-gone Telegram channel, and everyone seeking to have a "Telegram experience" of this website should subscribe to the site's RSS feed, which includes any and all sufficiently major changes to the site.

On that note, じゃね.