Now

Last Updated: 2025-09-22

This is a now page, more about them at nownownow.com↗️.

I’m keeping things intentionally somewhat vague for the sake of my privacy.

Education

Currently in my first year of pursuing a PhD in astronomy. Not much else to say just yet.

Hobbies

Desktop Ricing

I used to be on Hyprland, but since the release of XLibre, I’ve switched back to X and am currently using dwm↗️. I’m really enjoying having the flexibility that X provides again. Wayland, almost by design, makes it difficult to rice stuff properly.

Zoom works perfectly on X, even in the browser. I could never get that working quite right on Wayland…

I’ve also adopted many other programs in the suckless softwork suite, include st, slock, and dmenu. Now that I am more familiar with C than I was when I last tried to use them, the experience has been much more enjoyable and I cannot see myself switching back.

Also, in response to the recent unacceptable behavior on the part of RedHat, freedesktop.org, and GNOME, I have decided to purge their software from my system as much as conceivably possible. I have also started trying to remove other sucky software from my computer. Currently, my system is completely free of the following:

• gtk
• wayland
• pam
• polkit
• elogind
• plymouth

I used to also have no dbus on my system, but I now need to use bluetooth, which has a hard dependency on dbus on Linux.

Health

Currently not going to the gym regularly since I moved due to school, but have plans to start soon. I used to do an upper-lower split, but I’ve been researching other alternative routines to try to be more time efficient. I’ve discovered that calisthenics can give great results in an extremely small amount of time if done correctly. I was interested in giving it a try and recently ordered some equipment.

Now that I’ve moved to my new PhD program, which has a lot of great hiking opportunities nearby, I have started hiking on Saturdays. Several of the other students in my cohort also enjoy hiking, so I have been doing it with them as well on occasion.

Plans

Here are some of my plans for my life in the moderate future (next few years), for me to come back an look at to stay grounded in the bigger picture of my life.

Things I have started:

• Hit the ground running at graduate school.
  • After learning to use snippets, I can take in-class notes in LaTeX using vim, and can keep up with the professor even during math-heavy lectures. (I highly recommend checking out this blog post↗️.)
  • I set up calcurse and taskwarrior to sync properly. I am also running a caldav server on this VPS that I use to sync tasks and calendar events between calcurse, taskwarrior, and a couple apps on my phone.
• Finish my desktop rice.
  • I have settled on dwm+xlibre for my desktop. I wrote a tool called morph↗️ to generate an xresources color scheme from my wallpaper, so I can dynamically color my terminal and stuff from my wallpaper.
  • There are only a few minor loose ends to tie up.

Things I have not started yet:

• Consistently practice painting digitally with Krita
• Start making music again
• Practice a second language (considering Latin and/or Japanese)
• Read more (say an hour a day)
• Polyphasic sleep (tried but fell apart quickly, unsure if I’ll try again)