Now

Last Updated: 2025-08-31

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 starting, but have plans to start soon. I used to do an upper-lower split, but after reading about fuckarounditis↗️, I have designed a good minimalist routine that will not only take less time than my old routine, but will help me focus on the import compound lifts and hopefully build strength faster.

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.

Polyphasic Sleep

I have just started adapting to an E2 sleep schedule↗️, I am keeping a log of my experiences with it. I will probably make a blog post in a few weeks with a summary of my log.

I chose E2 due to its balance of sleep reduction, minimal impact on nightlife, moderately easy adaptation, and decent support for strenuous exercise. After adaptation, I should have a TST (total sleep time per day) of 5 hours and 10 minutes.

This isn’t my first experience with polyphasic sleep, and I consider my past experiments with it to have been quite positive. I will talk more about this more in my future blog post on it.

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 started using the perl script when↗️ to manage my calendar and appointments. I wrote a zsh alias to display my daily schedule and upcoming assignments due and bound it to the command w, so I can quickly see upcoming events and due dates.
• 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.
• Get back into polyphasic sleep in the fall.
  • I just started with this. See the above section on this page.

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).